Free Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation by A.W. Hill Page A

hubcap-deep in runoff by the time he left the Kingdom Hall. There
had been another downpour, only now abating. Even the hard rain, however, felt
gentler than the steeliness inside the church. Of all six men, only Sam Brown
had given off a scent he recognized as anything like his own.
         And Amos
Leach—something wrong with that picture.
        
    The call did come, late that afternoon. Despite
Sam Brown’s help with names, addresses, and some background, Raszer was a long
way from having what he needed to begin a proper investigation. He needed the
families’ help, and he would not live fully in the world of the case until he’d
seen through the eyes of the eyewitness, whose name was Emmett Parrish. Still
more essential was the perspective of perhaps the most important participant:
Ruthie Endicott. Finding her would take some legwork.
         Each
case had its own landscape of mayhem, and that was where he needed to locate
himself, because until Raszer had fashioned a living narrative of the events
leading up to the night of the rave, his intuition would not boot up. At his
best, he was capable of thought pictures that neared the clarity of lucid
dreaming, or even so-called remote viewing. It wasn’t like the psychic radar of
those who could lay a missing girl’s angora sweater against their cheek and
conjure a sense of her whereabouts. It was both eerier and more methodical than
that. All stories had a fractal nature. They were made of the same tiles, only
the design of the mosaic had been changed. Every possible outcome was like a
different world; Raszer’s trick was to figure out which world this case
occupied.
         He
wanted to get up into the mountains, to the site of Katy’s abduction, before
the rains closed San Gabriel Canyon Road. He couldn’t even begin serious work
until he’d stood at the crime scene, but before that, he needed to make a visit
to the Azusa Police Department and the detective who had handled the case.
Among other things, there was a set of snapshots he very much needed to see: those
taken on the morning after Katy Endicott’s crew had despoiled the Kingdom Hall.
             

FIVE
        
    “JOHNNY HORN,” said detective Jaime Aquino, laying
open a third file folder on his formerly pristine desk. “Also known as Johnny
Jihad . . . after he came back from the war, that is.” He looked up at Raszer,
more as a young father than as a cop, and stubbed his index finger into the
morgue photo of a young man of twenty-two: close-cropped blond hair, wide, sensuous
mouth, neck broken at the brainstem. “Some boys go to war and never get to know
the enemy. Never get close enough to smell him. They go back to their families,
their little towns, the farm or the coalmine—maybe have a few bad dreams, but
they shake it off. Johnny Horn came back as the enemy. From what we know, he came back sure that everything he’d ever been
taught was wrong.”
         Raszer
lifted his eyes from the photo. “He had a bad ride over there?”
         “I don’t
know about that,” said Aquino. “His unit was in Karbala, not Baghdad. He wasn’t
wounded. His military records don’t say much.”
         “So, how
do you account for his change?”
         “I think
it started before he left,” said Aquino. “Trouble in the family, some minor
run-ins. Then him and his buddy—this guy . . . ” The detective dropped his
finger onto a second morgue shot, one of a mannish boy with a yellow crest of
spiked hair, a lip ring, and a dagger tattooed on his left breast, with the
inscription “She Made Me Do It.”“Henry
Lee is— was —his name. The two of them
enlisted, and the shit came down on them. Johnny was tossed out of his church,
tossed out by his family, and then he’s in fucking Iraq for two years. He had
nothing to come home to, but he came home anyway. Him and Henry. They shipped
out together, they came home together.”
         “And
moved into the trailer,”