Джеффри Дивер - The Goodbye Man

As soon as Shaw had retrieved his phone, he’d called Tom Pepper, who gave him Slay’s number. They’d spoken, as the agent and his teams sped to the camp. Shaw had warned that Sheriff Calhoun was almost certainly going to let Eli and Hugh go. He’d shared with the agent some thoughts on finding the two men. It had been unsuccessful so far — as he’d just learned from Slay.

Shaw asked, “How’d Calhoun do it? An escape?”

“Just let ’em go. Said there was no probable cause. Released all the evidence too.”

Victoria scoffed.

Shaw pointed into the woods, east, near Great Bear Notch. “There’re four perps tied up there. They’ll need some medical attention.”

Victoria: “Oh. Forgot about them.”

“They might stonewall but they’re not members of the cult. They’re hired help. I think they’ll turn, you give ’em the right deal.”

“Charges?”

“Assault. Attempted murder.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“I’m the complaining witness.”

Slay frowned at this. “And you took down four of them?”

Shaw said, “Had some help.”

“What the hell is this place? David Ellis isn’t in ViCAP or any of our files. Neither’s the Osiris Foundation.”

Shaw explained briefly.

“Immortality,” the agent mused. Once again he scanned the Companions, most of whom were standing about aimlessly, wrestling with the death of the dream of living forever. And with the idea that they’d just been swindled. Slay said, “I guess if you’re going to do stupid, why not do stupid big?”

Slay pulled out a digital recorder and pen and pad. He lifted a you ready? eyebrow.

Shaw and Victoria gave nods.

They got down to the debriefing. Both gave detailed explanations of their experiences. While not as long as a bloated nineteenth-century novel, their words contained plenty of information to form the basis of multiple counts to lodge against Eli and other Companions — sex trafficking, underage sexual assault, insider trading, possible money laundering, assault, battery, murder, kidnapping.

“How many people you think’ve gone through here?” Slay asked.

“Been going on for four years,” Shaw told him. “There’ll be a lot of members. Eli got away with plenty of files but there might be a list in Administration. Or in Eli’s residence.”

“We’ll check them out. Some of them must’ve seen something indictable.”

Shaw told him too about the Selects.

At this news Slay paused. “They’re like suicide bombers. We’ll have to track them down too. After this” — waving his hand, meaning the destruction of the Foundation — “they might be, I don’t know, programmed to eliminate witnesses.”

“And we have this.” Shaw handed over the video camera that they’d hidden in Building 14, when he and Victoria broke in to swap out the poison for sugar. Shaw had lifted it from the office beside the Study Room. It caught AUs doctoring the wine.

One of them was Hugh. On the tape he could be heard barking to a colleague, “Fuck, get the mask on. This shit’ll kill you.”

“It’s poison. It’s supposed to.”

“Looks like sugar to me.”

“Try some. Let me know how sweet it is.”

Slay called over an evidence technician, who bagged the camera and took Shaw’s name for the chain of custody documents.

The agent slipped away his digital recorder. “Just curious, what the hell’re you two doing here? You don’t seem like cult fodder to me.”

Shaw said, “Just something...”

Victoria finished it: “Personal.”

“Well, there’s a story behind that,” Slay said, in a tone that meant he didn’t really need to hear it.

Steve approached. He had scrubbed most of the blood off his hands, though the shirt was ruined. Shaw noted that the red of the blood and the blue of the cloth combined to make purple.

“Anja?” Shaw asked.

“They can’t say.”

Shaw introduced the assistant to the agent. The young man, eyes red and swollen from recent tears, explained his job. Shaw told Slay about the notebook, which contained all things Eli.

“I hid it behind the residence. I’ll get it for you.”

Shaw had told Slay that SFPD Detective Etoile had reopened the investigation into Yang’s death, which had undoubtedly been ordered by Eli because the reporter was looking into improprieties at the Foundation.

The agent now asked, “That notebook? Is there anything in it about a meeting between Eli and Edwards?”

“Yessir. He wanted me to arrange it.”

Shaw asked, “When?”

“About two months ago.”

Shaw told the agent, “Right around the time Edwards killed Yang.”

Steve sighed. “Master Eli.” He was staring out over the camp. There seemed to be no words he could find to express what he was feeling. “I did everything for him. Anything he needed. Anytime. Ever.” Staring at his cuticles, still stained black from Anja’s blood, he licked the corner of his mouth and said, “I’ll get that notebook for you, Agent Slay.” He walked toward the residence.

A stocky woman in a skirt and bulky sweater approached Shaw. She was in her fifties, maybe, her gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Like a number of the Companions, she’d discarded her uniform. She still wore her amulet. It was red.

“I’m Sue Bascomb.”

Not “Apprentice Bascomb.” The spell had been broken.

Shaw and Victoria introduced themselves.

“Are you all right?” she asked, frowning.

The blood.

“I’m good.”

“I wanted to say thank you. I was having doubts after the first few days but I couldn’t quite figure out what didn’t seem right. You in law enforcement, either of you?”

They told her no.

“Well, he would’ve gotten away with it if you hadn’t stepped up. Those people on stage would’ve died.” Bascomb shook her head. “I thought I was pretty savvy. But when I lost Peter, I went a bit crazy.” She glanced around the camp. “I said, just give it a shot. See what this place can do. Stupid of me. Should’ve just muscled through the grief with friends and family. You lose someone, there’s no easy fix. Anyway, appreciate what you did.”

A nod. Colter Shaw did not wear gratitude well.

“I want to propose something to you,” the woman said. “I was thinking about writing about my experience, about the Foundation and Master Eli... I mean about David Ellis, the con man. If I did, could I interview you?”

“Unnamed source, sure.”

Her eyes on the residence, Bascomb said, “Preying on the lonely, the depressed... I think the world needs to know about Eli.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you. I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”

Bascomb walked off, removing her amulet and tossing it into the wastebasket by the Assistance Unit. Shaw watched her pause and jot a few words in her notebook — using it now to record the story of her life in a cult, not nonsense about past-life memories.

Looking away from Bascomb, Shaw happened to notice another woman, sitting on the bench outside the Administration building.

It was Journeyman Adelle, his Intake specialist. She was slumped and her palms were placed flat beside her. Her eyeliner had run from tears. She’d be confronting what Shaw had told the Companions. She didn’t want to believe him, though she was surely realizing that it was true: the Process was a sham. Her baby was gone. There would be no reuniting in the Tomorrow. It was hard to see her like this.

He turned to Victoria and waved toward his Foundation uniform. “I’m losing the costume too.”

Both wearing blue jeans and shirts — his gray, hers black — Shaw and Victoria sat on the bench where they’d met the day of Eli’s Discourses.