Smoke (20 page)

“Sure,” she said. “Where and when?”

T
he New Day achieved tax-exempt status in 1997. They claim to have over two hundred and fifty thousand members worldwide, growing steadily since their origination in 1977,” Matt told Lydia over strong coffee and a scratched Formica table at a Greek restaurant in midtown. It was bustling with the dinner crowd, loud voices, clinking silverware, and the occasional cry of “Opa!” as a waiter lit the
saganaki
on fire. The place itself was a dive, looking more like your average New York diner than anything else, but it had the best Greek food outside of his mother’s kitchen and he had a craving for
pastitso
that would not be denied.

“So The New Day is a religion?” she said, sounding skeptical, tracing the rim of her coffee cup with a delicate finger.

“Yeah, I guess that’s what they call themselves,” he said. Matt was not of the belief that you could just start a religion in the same way that you could start a company. It seemed a little backwards to him and he was suspicious of any so-called religion that had just popped up in the last twenty or thirty or even fifty years. Some backwoods bumpkin or science fiction writer declares himself a prophet, gets a few weak-willed souls to agree, and all of a sudden he’s talking to God. Maybe he was just being picky but frankly he would need some parting of the seas, water into wine, or something along those lines to be convinced.

“What are their precepts? I mean are we talking a Heaven’s Gate kind of thing … hitch a ride to God on the Hale Bopp Comet? Or what?”

“Well, from what I can determine, there aren’t any deities involved. They claim to be compatible with any religious belief, kind of a direct line to whatever God you believe in. Their whole concept is that through a kind of spiritual cleansing they can help people overcome addictions, reach their full potential as human beings and in so doing get closer to God.”

“And what do they get from their members in return?”

“The members of The New Day turn over everything to the church when they join. It’s not that they
give
it to The New Day, though. My understanding is that The New Day creates an account for the member and manages all his or her money and assets. They get an allowance or a dividend from their invested money to meet living expenses. Supposedly, the member can cash out that account and leave whenever he or she wants.”

She nodded thoughtfully and he wondered if she was thinking what he had when he heard that. He’d thought about Lily Samuels cashing out all of her accounts while someone waited for her in a black SUV.

“What if you want to join The New Day and you don’t have any money?” said Lydia.

“I don’t know,” he said. He only had limited information.

After he and Jesamyn met with the other detectives working on the Rosario Mendez case, and Jesamyn had left for the evening, Matt had called a friend of his, a guy he went to high school with out in Queens who was now an agent with the FBI. Special Agent John Starks was part of a unit whose task it was to track and observe the activities of domestic groups, such as the Michigan Militia or the Branch Davidians, with political or religious agendas that might pose a threat to homeland security. To Matt’s surprise, his friend, Starkey to everyone from the neighborhood, knew a lot about The New Day.

“Basically, when you sign up, it’s like going to rehab,” Starkey had told him. “They separate you from your life and your family. You can have no other club affiliations, like not even a gym membership. And you have to quit your job. Apparently, there’s a period they call
‘cleansing’ which can last from six months to a year. After this time, you’re allowed to return to your life if you want, while remaining a member of The New Day the way you would belong to any church. Or you can go to work for the church.”

Lydia had pulled a notepad from her pocket and was scribbling notes.

“I’m just taking some notes,” she said when she saw him watching her. Then, “How did the FBI learn about The New Day?”

“They’ve been investigated by federal agencies three times in the last twenty-five years.”

“What for?” she asked. Her phone beeped in her jacket and he waited while she fished it out, glanced at the screen, and returned it to her pocket. She smiled briefly, thoughtfully, and turned back to Matt. He continued.

“They started calling attention to themselves when they bought up a whole bunch of property in this small town in Florida. It was this kind of sleepy beach town with lots of undeveloped land and struggling businesses. They bought up some historic buildings and started renovating, really giving the area a face-lift. They brought a bunch of members in and helped them buy small businesses. But people were suspicious of them and wanted to know what they were doing there. The FBI investigated but they weren’t doing anything illegal and nothing came of it. That was back in 1980. They continued to grow their presence in that community and now they own more than fifty percent of the commercial property.”

The waitress brought Matt’s
pastitso
, a kind of meat, cheese, and noodle dish that resembled lasagna. Lydia, who claimed she wasn’t hungry, had ordered
baklava
. The serving of the sweet pastry dish was bigger than Lydia’s head and she dug right in, apparently unconcerned with caloric content. He liked that about her, too.

“In 2000,” he went on, “a man named George Benchly claimed that he had ‘escaped’ The New Day. He said that at a very low point in his life, he had been laid off from his job at a dot com and his wife had left him, he had attended an open meeting, having heard about the organization from a friend. He turned over his assets and signed on for
a cleansing. They told him that he could leave at any point. But when, about three weeks into it, he decided it wasn’t for him, they wouldn’t let him go. He managed to escape and went to the authorities. When confronted, a New Day official claimed that it was their policy to ‘discourage’ people from leaving a cleansing, much in the way someone who wanted to leave a drug or alcohol treatment center would be discouraged. They returned Mr. Benchly’s assets to his control, claiming that he had a serious substance abuse problem and needed help. Three weeks later, Mr. Benchly was found dead in a motel room. He’d shot himself in the head. Tox reports showed crack cocaine. The thing was, prior to his joining The New Day, Mr. Benchly had never had a substance abuse problem at all, at least not according to his ex-wife, former employers, and friends.

“This incident caused the FBI to investigate The New Day again. But again, they found nothing illegal in their activities.”

“But they were taking people’s money and holding them against their will.”

“Well, no. Those people were willingly signing over their assets to be managed by accountants who were also New Day members. And in the contract people sign when they are accepted for a cleansing, it states clearly that they will be ‘discouraged’ from leaving before the cleansing is complete.”

“You have to wonder,” said Lydia, taking a sip from her coffee. “Where do you have to be in your life to turn over your autonomy like that? Your assets, your freedom.”

She shuddered slightly as if she couldn’t imagine anything worse.

“Maybe you just have to be really desperate,” said Matt, finishing off his food and thinking about another order. “Or clinically depressed or hopeless, vulnerable to anyone who promises to make you feel better.”

Lydia looked at him then and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She had a very still face, beautiful in the way that precious metals were beautiful, cool, and distant. The gray of her eyes was impenetrable; there was no way to know what was going on behind them unless she told you.

“Did you sense that Lily was that kind of person?” she asked.

“No,” he said without hesitation. “I didn’t.”

“But her brother might have been.”

“Did Tim Samuels tell you that?”

“Yeah. He said Mickey had been depressed on and off most of his life.”

Matt was starting to see where she might be going with this. Lily’s mother had told him early on in the investigation that where Mickey went, Lily followed. She was hysterical at the time and he thought she was communicating her fear that Lily had also killed herself and that it was a corpse for which they were searching. He told Lydia what he was thinking and she just nodded as if it didn’t surprise her.

When she didn’t say anything, he went on with what Starkey had told him.

“The most recent investigation was back in 2002,” he said, “conducted by the ATF. Another New Day escapee, Rusty Klautz, claimed that they were stockpiling weapons. Supposedly there’s a farm called New Day Produce out in Florida near the Gulf Coast. They grow organic fruit and vegetables, raise free range chickens, hormone- and antibiotic-free dairy, make fresh juices and then sell it all at farmers’ markets in the area. The escapee claimed that this farm, nearly a hundred acres in the middle of nowhere, is actually a front. He said that there were weapons everywhere, buried in bunkers beneath the ground, hidden in barns. But aerial photographs showed nothing suspect. There was no intelligence to confirm that the types of weapons Klautz claimed were there had been bought or sold here. And Klautz had a history of being a conspiracy theorist, even had a newsletter back in the seventies. He was a Vietnam vet with a history of mental illness.”

“Let me guess,” said Lydia.

“Wrapped his Harley around a tree,” said Matt.

Lydia just nodded, looked down at her empty coffee cup.

Matt shrugged, slaked down his last bit of coffee. “The FBI keeps tabs on them now, supposedly. The New Day is definitely on their radar.”

“Did they ever go in to see if Klautz’s claims were true? Are they currently under surveillance?”

“Starkey wouldn’t say. But that would be my guess. At least they’re monitoring chatter. Three allegations in thirty years are not really
that
many. Hell, the Catholic church probably has more allegations against them than that.”

“It’s enough to interest the Feds.”

“The Feds are paranoid about stuff like this these days for obvious reasons.” He nodded in the general direction of the altered skyline. “Any organizing group with a political or religious agenda is interesting to them.”

Lydia leaned back in her chair and looked beyond him out the window. She let out a long sigh. “So what’s the hierarchy like?”

“Since the late nineties, the head of The New Day is a guy named Trevor Rhames. Starkey says they know amazingly little about him and what they do know, he wouldn’t tell me. As for the rest of the structure of the organization, again, he wouldn’t say.”

“What about a member list? Names of people who belong to The New Day.”

Matt shook his head. “If the FBI has one, they’re not sharing. At least not with me.”

“Well,” she said with a sigh. She leaned away from the table and cracked the tension out of her neck. “We’ve had trainees working on those transcripts and the list of vehicles. So far they haven’t found anything that warrants following up. Other than, of course, the link to Mickey’s girlfriend, which led us to The New Day. So from here—” she said and then stopped herself. “Maybe you don’t want to know.”

He looked at her and felt the full weight of his conflict. Of course he wanted to know, wanted to be a part of finding Lily Samuels. But he couldn’t do that without risking his job. He stayed silent, looked down at the check, took his wallet from his jacket. Lydia snagged the bill from him.

“It’s on me, Detective,” she said. “Please.”

She took some cash from her bag and placed it with the check under the sugar container.

“She’s clean,” he said, wanting to offer something. “Michele LaForge. Other than those parking tickets, she has no criminal record. None of the other drivers have criminal records either. I’ve been following up after hours. If I had the time, I’d be visiting each of those people. You know, just to see. You never know.”

That was the real bones of detective work, slowly looking at every possibility. Quietly visiting, observing, asking careful questions, sometimes the same question over and over. The old dogs, the guys that had fifteen, twenty years on them said they used to be able to do their jobs like that. Today, it was all political, high tech. Get the DNA, the fingerprint, run it through the system, find your man. Clear the case; bring the crime stats down so the mayor looks good. Fast was key. Careful was not so important. In the Missing Persons Division, the first thirty-six hours was the panic, the rush when all resources were available to you. After that, they figured you were looking for a corpse. The bosses started to get impatient for you to clear or move on. But Lily never got her thirty-six hours; they were long past before anyone realized she was gone. He felt that crush in his chest again.

They were out on the street before either of them spoke again.

“Thank you, Detective,” she said. “I know this isn’t easy or comfortable for you.”

He nodded. “I want you to find her. I’ll check my ego and break a few rules to help you to do that,” he said.

She looked at him thoughtfully.

“You know my husband left the FBI because he felt like the politics and policies, the rules and procedures put the Bureau before the victims. He left so that he could be a better investigator.”

Matt nodded. He knew what she was getting at. But he was a cop; it was the only thing he had ever wanted to be.

“Anyway, all I’m saying is call me if you decide the same thing about the NYPD. There’s something to be said for the private sector.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said with a smile as she slid into her Mercedes. He stood and watched her as she pulled into traffic and sped off with a gunning of the engine.

A
t the first traffic light, Lydia checked her cell phone. She’d had the ringer off in the restaurant but it had still signaled her when messages came in; she’d felt it vibrating in her pocket. Jeff had called and Dax, too, within a minute of each other. While she’d still been with the detective, she’d received a text message from Jeffrey. “With DS?” it read.
“Mt @ D’s 2100. 5683U. J.” His shorthand translated to: “Are you with Detective Stenopolis? Meet me at Dax’s at 9 p.m. Love you, Jeff.”