“Sure did. Found one all on his own one night, and made like I wanted to bum a smoke, just to see if I could get him talking. He was all spacy, like he was hopped up on something, but I’d never seen any of them smoking grass or taking pills, nothing like that. Said he didn’t have any cigarettes, but that he had something better that he could share with me. The truth. Damned fool started preaching at me like a Jehovah’s Witness at your front door, jabbering about opening yourself up to wisdom from above, letting the light of the hidden universe into your soul, that kind of nonsense. But the first sign I showed that I wasn’t interested in any of that self-help guff, he clammed up tight and walked away. Like it was bait on a hook, and if I didn’t bite he was going to go off and find another spot to fish.”
He chuckled ruefully.
“I braced a few more of them in the nights that followed, and I got the same sales pitch from every one of them. I figured they were all part of the same church or cult or whatever, and I got to thinking that’s what they were doing out on the street in the first place, looking for other lost souls that they could bring into the fold. I didn’t know for sure whether any of them even knew what they were carrying around in their heads, but it stood to reason that whoever had made them all Ridden was behind that self-help nonsense. It was round about that time that I heard from my lady friend in the Records Division. Seems that the calls she’d made about the runaways had gotten back to the families who had filed the missing persons reports in the first place. The RPD brass had told the families that they didn’t have the manpower to go chasing after a handful of kids, and that unless there was some evidence of criminal activity that they were on their own. So the families were looking to hire a private investigator to find their kids for them, and my lady friend put them in touch.”
“This was the families of Muriel Tomlinson and Eric Fulton, then?” Izzie asked.
“Yeah, their families and the parents of a couple of other kids, too,” Jett answered. “Now, I didn’t have a California private investigator’s license yet—I ended up taking the exam and making it official when this mess was all over—but the families didn’t seem to mind. And the fact that I wasn’t asking for one thin dime up front probably didn’t hurt matters any. I told them that they could pay me if I managed to get their kids back to them, and otherwise they could keep their money.”
The old man kneaded his hands together, and glanced up briefly at the sky overhead. It was still a few hours until sunset, but it seemed to Izzie as though he was checking to make sure that the sun was still up.
“I had pictures of the kids I was after, yearbook photos and family portraits, that kind of thing. Four kids in all, ranging from their late teens to mid-twenties. I’d seen each of them at least once out on the street at night, fishing for new recruits, but damned if they weren’t anywhere to be found as soon as I went looking for them in particular. There were others, of course, so I figured my best bet would be to tail them, and see if they led me to the kids I was after. It took a few days before any one of them went anywhere but the rattraps they squatted in or whatever fleabag hotel they were living in, but then one night I trailed one of the Ridden through Hyde Park, and spotted a few more approaching from the other direction. And then a couple more came down a side street. I hung back, watching as six of them stood there together on a corner, like they were waiting for a bus. Then a panel van came along, they all climbed in, and it drove away. I managed to flag down a cab quick enough to follow them, but when the van continued on past Northside and turned onto a winding road heading up into the hills outside of town, the cab driver refused to take me any further. I had my suspicions where they were headed, though, and when my lady friend ran the license plate number I’d taken down, they were confirmed.” “The Eschaton Center,” Izzie said.
“Got it in one.” The old man sighed. “There wasn’t much else up in those hills except coyotes and boarded-up mines, so it stood to reason. But once I started looking into Jeremiah Standfast Parrish’s self-help gospel, it sounded an awful lot like what those Ridden were pushing on the street. Now, I’d heard about the Eschaton Center already, of course, but as far as I knew it was just another place that mostly catered to rich white folks who wanted to feel better about themselves, willing to pay through the nose so that somebody would tell them that they were special and deserved every nice thing that happened to them. So what were they doing busing in a bunch of kids to go beating the bushes in the city looking to recruit people who probably didn’t have two dimes to rub together? And how did the Ridden factor into it? Anyway, the next morning I bought a junker from a used car dealership in my neighborhood, enough food and sodas at the corner market to last me a day or two, and cleaned up, oiled, and loaded Freeman’s old 1911 Colt .45.”
“You were going in to shoot up the place?” Joyce sounded alarmed.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” the old man said, equivocating, “but I wasn’t ruling out the
