Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (32 page)

“Just give me a couple of days, that’s all. Something stinks here. I’d like to see if I can find out what it is without Ford knowing I’m out there digging in his garbage.”

“You know,” Lonnie said, “if this guy Ford stuck to driving Fords instead of Rolls-Royces, he might not be in this shape now.”

I stood back up. “Lonnie, you’re a good ol’ boy. I don’t care what anybody else says about you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he sputtered.

I opened the door of the trailer and stepped through. “Nothing pal, I didn’t pay any attention to those rumors about you and that goat.”

I shut the door just as his empty beer can sailed through the air and slammed metallically into the glass. Something told me that sleep tonight wasn’t going to come as easily as I’d hoped.

The squeaking and swaying of the metal staircase up to my attic apartment almost woke me up enough to realize I was home. I unlocked my door, staggered in, and barely recognized the place. Not that anything had happened; it just felt like a year since I’d been there.

First things first: no messages on the answering machine, no interesting mail. I stripped off my clothes and got into the shower, letting the hot water rip over me so hard it left red streaks. I dried off, a little more alert now.

Why, I asked myself, hasn’t Marsha called? Even though I didn’t have any notion of what to say to her, I wanted to hear her voice. If it was just for five seconds, that was fine. I only wanted to know she was okay.

Then it occurred to me that the phone works both ways. I made a cup of Sleepytime tea, threw in a slug of brandy for good measure, and settled back into bed. It was almost eleven-thirty when I took a chance and punched in her number.

The number chirped six times before she came on the line.

“Yes,” she said abruptly. Her voice was sharp, tight.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

“Have you seen the news?” she demanded.

“No, I’ve been working all eve—”

“Turn on
Nightline,”
she snapped. Then the click of a cellular phone being disconnected.

I sat there dumbfounded for a second before panic set in. What in heaven’s name could have happened that would—No matter, put the phone up and turn the damn television on.

The TV took a few seconds to warm up, but the sound came through quickly. A rerun of
The Cosby Show
was just ending, which meant there’d be at least three minutes of commercials before anything important happened.

As the color sharpened and the picture came into focus, a middle-aged white lady with a pained expression on her face began speaking earnestly into the camera.

“Painful bloating. Stomach upset. It got so bad I finally went to my doctor.” Then she smiled. “Thank
God, it was only gas. My doctor recommended Mylanta.…”

“Christ Almighty, lady!” I yelled. “You go to the doctor to find out you need to fart?”

I forced myself to shut up, then remembered that Mrs. Hawkins couldn’t hear me anyway. To hell with it; I hit the mute button.

Finally the pitches were over and the
Nightline
logo appeared. I hit the mute button just as the theme music started, then slugged down the last of the tea and brandy as they went through the preliminaries.

“Siege in Music City,” the narrator said. Then Ted Koppel’s face appeared.

“What began as a bizarre, almost comical situation in Nashville, Tennessee, took a darker turn today as the founder of a fundamentalist religious sect that calls itself the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians demanded that the body of his wife be turned over to cult members within forty-eight hours. If the corpse—which is now being held for a legally required autopsy in the Nashville morgue—is not released, cult founder Woodrow Tyberious Hogg has sworn that he will invoke what he calls the Enochian Apocalypse. Local officials interpret the Enochian Apocalypse this way: Heavily armed cult followers—who at present are surrounding the Nashville morgue—will begin their assault to retrieve the body of Evangeline Lee Hogg on Sunday morning, one full week after the siege began. In a moment we’ll speak with the mayor and chief of police in Nashville and a Vanderbilt University professor who’s an expert on cult behavior. But first, a little background from
Nightline
correspondent Dave Maresh.”

I pulled the covers up to my neck and settled into the pillow, my eyes wide-open, my neck muscles tensed. All I could think of was Marsha sitting with all those other people huddled in the darkness around Dr. Henry’s little battery-powered pocket TV.

“This is insane,” I muttered as Dave Maresh’s
rugged, jovial face filled the screen of my own television.

“The Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians are an eccentric bunch, Ted, even by today’s standards. Members pride themselves on being the buckle of the Bible Belt. We’ve done some research into the beliefs of the Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians, and what we’re discovering is that this is a group so far afield they make David Koresh’s Branch Davidians look like High-Church Episcopalians.”

Cut to a videotape of Reverend Woody in a white polyester suit, thumping his Bible on his knee, covered in sweat with Maresh’s voice-over continuing:

“The group draws a direct connection between Enoch of the Old Testament, who was the seventh generation from Adam, with the seven angels of the sixteenth chapter of Revelations, who pour out the wrath of God upon the earth.”

“ ‘And the first angel went,’ ” Reverend Woody screamed, “ ‘and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men, which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.’ ”

Back to Maresh now: “The Pentecostal Evangelical Enochians believe that the skin lesions associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma are that ‘grievous sore which had the mark of the beast.’ AIDS, they say, is the biblically predicted precursor of Judgment Day. The Enochians also saw the 1994 bloody genocidal massacres in Rwanda, in which bodies floated down rivers so thick they became a cholera hazard, as further evidence of the seven angels and the impending apocalypse.”

“ ‘And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood!’ ” Hogg was in a frenzy now.

“And in a videotaped sermon last year,” Maresh continued, “which has only recently been made available to the press by a disgruntled ex-cult member, Hogg even
drew an apocalyptic revelation from the career of Madonna.”

My jaw dropped as they cut to Hogg, an open Bible in his hand, at a podium inside a church that looked to me more like a bingo hall.

“My children, she is here! The Bible predicted her, and she has taken the name of the blessed mother of our blessed Savior! In Revelations 17, God tells us: ‘And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy!’

“She is here, my children! And her lies and fornication foretell of us the end of the world! The Great Whore who has stolen the blessed virgin’s name is upon us now in these last days of the world!”

He seemed to be in a trance, possessed of the spirit, or something dangerously close to it.

“This is absolutely fucking insane,” I said out loud to a television that, once again, didn’t bother to respond. Maresh continued his report, then wrapped it up with a quick summary of the week’s events. Ted Koppel segued to a commercial, then came back and introduced his guests. I recognized the mayor and the chief of police, sitting nervously in front of two separate cameras as Koppel slipped them the tough questions in his own iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove style.

“Chief Gleaves, you and the mayor both insist that you’re not going to call in either the National Guard or federal agents. Yet isn’t it true that if we are to believe the Enochians and their claims about weapons, they have you outgunned?”

Harold Gleaves shifted nervously in his chair, then
gave his tie a Rodney Dangerfield tug. “Well, Mr. Koppel, I don’t want to get into speculating what kinds of weapons they may or may not have down there, and I certainly don’t want to disclose what we’ve got on our side of the fence. I’d like to emphasize that the important thing for us is to keep the dialogue open. We’ve got a top-notch hostage negotiating team down there. We care very much about finding a peaceful resolution to all this. We’re willing to talk. We want to talk. I only hope that the other side will remain open to that as well.”

“Good job, Harold,” I said.

“Mr. Mayor,” Koppel asked, “at what point would you be willing to request the governor to call out the National Guard?”

The mayor was a former entrepreneur who’d made a fortune in the car-parts business. Right now he looked like he wished he’d stayed in the private sector, where the only hostile takeovers he had to worry about were on paper.

“I’ve speaken—spoken—with the governor,” he said, stumbling over his words. “I’ve kept him apprised of the situation. We feel like we’re a long way away from having to call out the National Guard or seek federal intervention.”

“Good dodge, Mr. Mayor,” I said.

Then Ted turned to Professor Barbara Hatfield, whom Ted had introduced as a Vanderbilt University sociologist who’d made a study of religious cults in the Deep South.

“Professor Hatfield, how serious are they? They must know that no matter how heavily armed they are, ultimately they’ll suffer the same fate as Koresh’s group did in Waco if they push the issue too far. Do you think they’re willing to do that? Is this a suicidal group of martyrs at work here?”

Professor Hatfield, in her midthirties, a bespectacled, seriously academic lady, took her time and chose her
words carefully: “That’s what causes me the most fear, Ted. Clearly, as our experience in Waco showed, there are levels of obsession at work here that make suicidal martyrdom a distinct possibility. The five innocent people trapped inside the morgue right now are the ones for whom I fear the most.”

My gut knotted up.

“At the very least,” she continued, “we must take their threats of armed confrontation seriously. From Jim Jones to David Koresh, we’ve seen that these threats can be realized. The one departure here from recent events like this—and I’m not sure what the ultimate importance of this will be—is that their leader is not behind the barricades with them. If apocalypse comes to Nashville, Tennessee, we apparently won’t see the Reverend Woodrow Tyberious Hogg go up in flames with his flock.”

“Good point, Professor Hatfield,” Ted said. “Exactly how much control do you think Reverend Hogg is exerting over his followers? He claims to be only their inspirational and spiritual leader, and he insists that the criminal acts they’ve committed in the group’s name were not ordered by him.”

“Well …” She hesitated for a moment. “I think I have to speak with some sensitivity here because we are still involved in active crisis management. But I am very dubious of Reverend Hogg’s claims in this area. I think he has substantial control over his group. He may not be controlling their every action, but …”

“You think if he ordered them to stand down, they’d do it,” Ted interjected.

Professor Hatfield nodded. “Absolutely.”

Ted turned back to Chief Gleaves. “With that in mind, Chief Gleaves, have you made attempts to speak with Reverend Hogg?”

“We’ve certainly made attempts,” Gleaves answered. “But we haven’t had much success with opening a dialogue with him. As you said, he insists he’s just their
spiritual leader, and he claims that what they’re doing is biblically sound and morally justified. We, of course, don’t agree.”

“That’s the understatement of the year,” I said.

“What about this business of giving the body of Reverend Hogg’s wife back to the group? Is that in the realm of possibility? Can this be done without the government seeming to have caved in on the issue?”

Again, Chief Gleaves spoke up. “What we’re trying to do right now is reach an agreement with the group that will avoid bloodshed, and yet still allow us to fulfill our constitutional obligation to uphold the law. One avenue we’re exploring is that while state law requires us to perform an autopsy in this case, it doesn’t specify in medical terms what an autopsy actually consists of. So if we can reach an agreement whereby we perform the tests necessary to determine the cause of death, but do it in such a way that the religious strictures of the group aren’t violated, then we may be able to settle this peaceably.”

Harold Gleaves was coming off very well. By tomorrow morning, the mayor would hate him.

“Even then,” Ted Koppel asked, “the group would still face charges. Would they be serious charges?”

Gleaves hesitated a moment. “My feeling is that we’re probably looking at some weapons charges, trespassing, maybe a few others. Given the circumstances, nothing all that serious.”

“What about kidnapping?”

“Well, that would, of course, be up to a grand jury and the District Attorney’s Office. My feeling at this point in time is the charges that are ultimately leveled will be in direct relation to the cooperation we receive from the group, and to the outcome of this situation.”

I whistled. “Goddamn brilliant, Harold,” I said. If those people down there had any brains at all, they’d understand that Harold Gleaves had just given them an easy way out. Now if they’d only take it.

The conversation continued along those lines for another fifteen minutes or so, then Ted signed off with a teaser that tomorrow night’s
20/20
would feature Baba Wawa interviewing a woman who claimed to be yet another bimbo who’s claimed to have slept with Bill Clinton. Amazingly, he pulled it off with a straight face.

I punched in the cellular number and she answered on the second ring.

“Yes.”

“We have
got
to get you out of there,” I said.