The Shimmer

Marsh and Halliday broke right like a pair of pulling guards and went flying into the forest after her. People were popping out of their houses, standing on porches, on lawns. Redding shouted at them, warning them off, gave a go sign to Karras, and she moved in, her gun up and trained on the passenger-side doors of the Suburban. The windows were closed, dark as black ice.

The truck engine was running hot and loud, the rain hammering on its roof. Water was running down Julie’s face and she blinked it away, wishing she had put on her Stetson.

Redding was going left, and he came to a stop about ten feet off the left rear wheel, his gun up. Karras had taken the same position on the right rear side. They could smell scorched rubber and overheated metal steaming in the rain.

The driver’s door hung wide-open, the seat belt dangling. From the interior of the truck, someone crying, a woman’s voice.

“In the truck,” said Redding in a voice of brass, “show me your hands. Do it now!”

Faint, from deep inside the truck, a shaky female voice, young. “Don’t shoot us. Please.”

Karras moved up a yard, reached for the rear door. Redding told her to stop. He stepped up to the left-side rear door, leveled his gun and jerked the rear door open.

Two teenage girls were lying on the rear bench seat. They were cord cuffed to the front-seat floor struts. They were crying, beyond hysterical.

“Help us,” said one of them, dark haired, possibly the older one.

“Please. She’s crazy. She kidnapped us.”

Karras popped the other rear door, put her gun on them, wary, tense, her finger almost inside the trigger guard. Both girls were in jeans and boots, T-shirts, hair every which way, eyes red from crying, faces flushed and frightened.

In shock, scared to death.

“Who are you?” he asked, in a softer tone.

“I’m Rebecca Walker. This is my sister Karen. Help us please? That woman kidnapped us!”

Redding looked at Karras. She looked back, and they both did a quick check of the interior. Luggage scattered around. Remnants of a Happy Meal, candy wrappers, water bottles. No one else. Just the girls, cuffed to the floor.

Redding lowered his weapon and after a moment Karras did the same.

“I’m gonna go after the runner. Can you take care of these two?”

Karras said she would, lips so tight they were blue.

“You go, Sergeant. I’ll get EMT in here.”

“Search them first, Julie. Before you cut them loose. You never know.”

“I will. Go get her.”

Redding took one last look at the girls, showed them his teeth, a quick smile that was supposed to be comforting and wasn’t even close.

Redding turned away and raced down into the trees, a big lean rangy guy who could move like a linebacker when he had to. He pulled out his portable.

“LQ, I’m coming in.”

“Roger that, Jack.”

Redding jogged into the trees, ducking under the dripping branches, feeling the mossy ground squelch under his boots. He had his Glock out, down by his side, and every nerve on redline.

The stand of scrub trees was dense, maybe a hundred feet deep. When he came out from under them after a paranoid two-minute jog-trot during which he checked out every treetop he passed under, he could see Marsh walking the shoreline, gun out but down at his side, his back to Redding. He was facing out across the swamps and reed beds toward the Intracoastal, head turning back and forth. Halliday was down the shore about fifty yards.

Marsh heard Redding sloshing through the seagrass, even with this rain lashing down and the wind ripping through the trees.

“Jack.”

“LQ. Got anything?”

“She left a trail all the way down,” he said, his face slick as patent leather in the rain, a puzzled expression in his eyes.

“You can see it over there, that silver streak in the grass. Comes right down to the shore here, stops dead.”

Redding looked out over the swamp, sort of a mini Everglades, clumps and islands of sawgrass and reeds and cattails, all of it bending down under the rain. The sky was shredding, wisps of lighter gray showing through the cover. The wind was backing off but it was still raining hard.

Halliday walked up the shoreline toward them, staring down into the shallow murky water that ran in curving channels under and around a thousand little islands of seagrass. He was a big blond Panhandle kid who had played two years as a starting DB for the Gators. He did a 180 to check the tree line one more time, and then came back to them, his face as blank and confused as Marsh’s.

“Sure she’s not back in the woods?” Redding asked. Halliday and Marsh shook their heads in unison.

“Not back there, Jack,” said Marsh. “We were close, we could see her going through the forest—”

“She ran like a fucking gazelle,” said Halliday.

“Yeah, she could move real good,” said Marsh. “Faster than us. We lost her in the rain here, and the branches were in our faces like whips. By the time we cleared the trees all we could see was that.”

He tilted his head toward the silver track in the tall grass.

“Ending at the water,” Halliday finished. “Broad just flat-out vanished. Fucking weird, Jack. Like into thin air. Too fucking weird. We walked the shore up and down, looking for a ripple where she coulda gone in. Mud bottom kicked up. Nothing.”

“That’s right, Jack. Vanished.”

All three of them turned back to the swamp.

It was about two hundred yards wide at this point, running for about a mile along the shore. On the far side of the marsh was the Intracoastal. The Intracoastal was like a marine version of I-95. In the summer it was as crowded as an interstate, although the squall had driven everyone except a few crazies into the marinas.

“How deep do you figure this is?” Redding asked, meaning the swamp.

Marsh, who was a bass boater, shook his head.

“No more’n two maybe three feet. But the bottom is thick muck, just like quicksand. You think she had a boat waiting? Why she came down this way?”

“You see one?” Redding asked.

They both shook their heads, water running off the brims of their Stetsons. Redding looked back at the muddy water and the reeds bending in the rain.

“What do you figure lives in there?” he asked of no one in particular.

Marsh laughed.

“Nothing you’d want to take home to the wife.”

Marsh immediately regretted that comment, considering what had happened to Redding’s wife and their little girl last Christmas Eve, but it couldn’t be unsaid, and Redding didn’t react. So Marsh went on.

“Snakes. River rats. Leeches. Every kind of biting, stinging, itching bug you can think of. I’ve seen gators around here, but not real big ones.”

Redding smiled at him.

“Define ‘not real big.’”

Marsh just grinned back at him.

“Could even be monitor lizards,” said Halliday, trying to be helpful. “They been finding huge ones—two, three feet long—down in West Palm. People had them as pets till they got too damn big. Let them go into the rivers. Monitors. Smart as dogs too. They got these monster mouths full of huge backward-curved fangs, sharp as needles. But huge.”

“And don’t forget the giant anacondas,” added Marsh, just to complete the picture.

Neither man had any intention of letting Sergeant Redding order either of them into the swamp to start searching. If Redding did, Marsh had already decided he was going to push Halliday into the water instead and say he stumbled into him. Which Halliday was already braced for, because he knew Marsh only too well, and he wasn’t going in there either.

Redding, aware of all this, and thankful that they hadn’t thrown in mutant vampire unicorns, looked up at the sky. The storm was starting to break up. The rain was coming down hard.

“Can the dogs follow a trail in this weather?” Halliday was asking, mainly to distract Redding from the whole “into the swamp, boys” idea. Redding had run a K-9 car for a couple of years.

“A light rain will freshen up a scent, but heavy rain and wind, that’s a lot more difficult.”

“Been done,” said Marsh. “Remember that case last year, prisoner goes into the Glades, in a hurricane, but the dogs found him anyway?”

“Because he was half eaten by a gator,” said Halliday, “and he’d started to stink. My mom coulda found him.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Redding. “Worth a shot. Let’s get the dog cars down here. And I want some Marine units out there. And let the Flagler County deputies know what’s going on too. I want a tight perimeter—lady could sure as hell motor—”

“Damn straight,” said Halliday. “She was going away so fast I thought I had stopped to pee.”

“So where the hell is she?” Redding said, a rhetorical question.

“Gotta be here somewhere,” said Marsh.

“LQ’s right, she’s still around. Have Flagler County set up a cordon around these blocks.”

“All this for an F thirty-seven?” said Marsh.

“I know. A lot of overtime. I just...”

“Got a feeling she’s worth chasing?”

“Yeah. I do,” he said, thinking about the expression on her face, cool, defiant, not frightened at all. And he knew her from...somewhere. “She got my attention.”

Marsh was reaching for his portable to make the calls when they heard two sharp flat cracks close together, a brief pause and then one more.

“Gunfire,” said Halliday, but Redding and Marsh were already running back toward the trees.

seventeen days ago

By the time Gerald Jeffrey Walker and his family arrived at their vacation condo at Amelia Island on Florida’s Atlantic coast—after thirteen hours on the road from St. Louis—the feeling inside the family’s GMC Suburban was sharply split on the issue of the Harwoods.

The Harwoods—Marietta, pronounced Mayretta, and her husband, Ellison—were Christian Evangelicals and they ran a very large and very rewarding ministry—financially rewarding at any rate—called the New Covenant Celestial Ministry, and one of their many income streams came from the sale of their Evangelical Christian audiobooks.

Walker—sometimes known as “Jerry Jeff” after the blues guy—was a forensic archaeologist working for a unit of the US Army Corps of Engineers based in St. Louis. His team was called in whenever artifacts or bones were unearthed at a construction site, sometimes in remote corners of the world.

He considered this calling a sacred duty, since it involved an effort to determine exactly where these artifacts or bones came from, and what sort of spiritual beliefs had once been attached to them. This information was hard to come by.

It required bone and DNA analysis, the assessment of causes of death, including weapons that might have been used if there were indications of murder or human sacrifice, as well as a grip on local cultural history and a great deal of spiritual imagination.

Perhaps because of his work and the moral challenges it presented—bringing peace to the spirits of the dead—in his off-hours Walker served as a Worship Leader at the Glad Day Assembly, an Evangelical Christian megachurch in their hometown of Florissant, Missouri.

Walker and his wife, Marilyn, who ran the childcare center at the Glad Day Assembly, tried very hard to believe that they had a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ, a difficult exercise in faith that met with varying degrees of success, particularly for a man with a PhD in forensic archaeology and a woman with a master’s degree in education.

In an effort to bridge this gap they had invested in the Marietta and Ellison Harwood Collection of inspirational Christian audiobooks.

They did this because Walker’s work had brought him face-to-face with mass graves, with human sacrifices, with the residue of every kind of violent evil, and the only protection from the fallen world, both ancient and modern, seemed to be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

So they decided to take advantage of the drive down from Florissant to share the Harwood Ministry’s latest releases—Ellison’s The Power of Love and his wife Marietta’s My Celestial Heart Sings—with their three daughters, admittedly a captive audience.

The Suburban seated seven, but divisive forces relating to the Harwood Ministry had affected the family dynamic on the way down Interstate 75.

This had resulted in the front bucket seats being occupied by Walker and his wife, Marilyn, of course, since they shared the driving, and the bench seat immediately behind them had become the private domain of the youngest Walker daughter, six-year-old Alyssa.

Alyssa had set up housekeeping across the entire bench seat, surrounded by her Hello Kitty and Littlest Pet Shop collections.

Jerry and Marilyn and Alyssa composed what had become the pro-Harwood faction. Since the trip from St. Louis covered just under a thousand miles their time on the road lasted several hours, which is a long time to be in a car listening to inspirational evangelical audiotapes; it was longer for some than for others.

Which brings us to the anti-Harwood faction, the two older Walker daughters: Rebecca, seventeen, and Karen, sixteen, both very beautiful in that Midwestern corn-fed style, and both of them in many ways typical American teenage girls. And, as it turned out, in other ways, not at all typical.

Rebecca and Karen were sitting at the very back of the truck, in the two fold-down seats, pressed up tight against the luggage stacks that crowded the rear deck, isolating themselves as much as they could from the pro-Harwood faction up front, because, after a few hundred miles, they were both totally sick unto eye-rolling, please-kill-me-now death of Ellison and Marietta Harwood.

So it won’t come as a surprise to hear that, upon finally reaching their condo, a four-bedroom Italian-themed palazzo with a terrace overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Rebecca and Karen had thrown their luggage onto the king-size bed in their shared bedroom, torn off their clothes, slipped into their strictly forbidden Tommy Bahama bikinis, censored by Ralph Lauren hoodies and baggy shorts, and bolted for the beach at a dead run.

Where, around sunset, strolling north through the crystalline water toward Fernandina Beach, the surf rolling and booming and sparkling all around them, the echoes of Ellison Harwood’s well-oiled baritone gradually fading from memory, they saw a woman walking south toward them.

She was alone. She was barefoot and tanned and wearing a one-piece suit in creamy white under a gauzy tourmaline beach wrap. She moved as if she were inside music, something rhythmic and Caribbean.

Her face was partially hidden by a broad-brimmed white straw hat, secured around her neck with a scarlet ribbon. Her eyes were cast down, as if she were lost in thought. She was less than twenty feet away before she seemed to sense rather than see them, and then she stopped and lifted her face up and considered them, as if she knew them, as if she had been looking for them.

Which, of course, she had.

They stopped to talk, then walked and talked and found themselves gradually...enchanted. How old she was—thirty, forty, even fifty—it was impossible to tell, and, after a short while in her effervescent company, it didn’t seem to matter.

Later, sitting by the palm-tree-shaded pool, sharing sips of her margarita with the girls when the waiter wasn’t looking, she told them her name was Diana Bowman, that she was a dealer in antique jewelry based in Palm Beach, that she was here on a much-needed vacation from her wealthy and demanding clientele, and that she loved meeting young people like Rebecca and Karen.

They each felt that galvanic spark of instant rapport that is not an uncommon event when people go on vacation, and by the second round of margarita sharing they decided that they should be newfound friends together and have such great fun while they were all here at this beautiful resort.

By now, thanks to the margarita factor, the girls had relaxed enough around their new friend that they had begun to open up to her about their trip down from St. Louis, and the Harwood-inflicted grinding hell it had managed to become.

Diana Bowman was cautiously sympathetic.

“Well, yes, I confess I do find certain types of religious practice to be, how to put it, so spiritually confining...but I sometimes feel that it is as much a sin to ignore the sensual pleasures that God has given us as it is to, what to say, overindulge in them?”

Rebecca and Karen agreed, or thought they did, although her reference to sensual pleasures definitely touched them on a more primal than theoretical level. But Diana seemed to feel she had said too much.

“You know, I have no doubt that your parents—they are here with you, yes?—oh, how nice—Jerry and Marilyn? And Alyssa, the youngest? That they are doing this out of love. I’m sure they just want you to be...happy and safe.”

“Too safe,” said Karen, with some heat. “They never want us to have any fun—”

“You’d think we were in jail,” Rebecca finished, caught up with the injustice of it all.

Diana listened with every sign of sympathetic understanding as the girls raved on for a while about the unbearable oppression of patriarchal fascism disguised as parental kindness.

Eventually they ran the subject down, realizing from Diana’s sleepy-eyed attention that perhaps they were boring their new friend. But what she said next surprised them.

“I’m a Roman Catholic myself, on my mother’s side, and I do feel that the effect Jesus had on the world was, on the whole, a good one. You need only to look at the world these days to see how important His teachings were to Western Civilization.”

Rebecca, the historian, brought up the Crusades and Diana, sipping at her margarita, agreed that the Crusades were simply awful, but that they had happened nine hundred years ago, and what Jesus had brought into the world, long before the Crusades, could be seen in the artifacts connected to Him.

“Oh God,” said Karen, “don’t tell us about artifacts.”

“Really?” said Diana.

It turned out that Rebecca and Karen knew all about artifacts and relics, since Daddy never shut up about them—he had even brought a lockbox full of them along to classify or decipher or something—but by now their heads were dizzy with the surging sea and the margarita sipping so they missed the sudden sharpening of Diana Bowman’s attention.

“So your father works with these artifacts?”

“God yes. He brought them along, these...”

“Artifacts,” Rebecca repeated with careful precision, feeling the tequila. “He lays them out on the dining room table and studies them for, like, hours. He has a microscope and all kinds of tools.”

Diana was intrigued.

“Truly? He sounds very dedicated. What sort of artifacts are they?”

Rebecca made a hand-waving gesture of dismissal.

“Creepy old dead stuff. From wherever Daddy has to work. All over the world. From New Orleans, this bunch anyway. They were moving graves after that stupid storm?”

“Katrina?”

“Yeah. That. It was like years ago, but now they’re doing something about flood protection, so the graveyards have to be built up. You know the way they bury people in New Orleans? In those concrete churchy-looking little stone houses?”

“Crypts,” said Diana. “They have to be aboveground because the water table is so high.”

“Daddy says they just stuff new bodies into the crypt and shove the old ones to the back of the...whatever...the...?”

“The vault.”

“Yeah, the vault, so that whoever was buried there a hundred years ago gets all crammed up with the new people and it’s all mixed up in a jumble.”

“So your father is trying to sort out who was who, now that the bodies have to be moved?”

“Yeah, although it’s only temporary, ’cause they’re putting them back when the work is through, but he has to figure out which bits belong where, and then there’s all the jewelry.”

“You mean, like gold bracelets and rings and that kind of thing?”

“And lockets and brooches and stuff,” said Karen, not really interested in whatever her daddy was up to. They both felt a spreading warmth moving through their bodies as the tensions of the trip receded and Diana’s silky voice seemed to pull them into a conspiratorial circle. They were too young to notice the voltage that the word locket had sent pulsing through the woman’s body.

“Well, it sounds as if your father is doing the Lord’s work,” Diana said, changing the subject. “You should be proud of him.”

“Oh, we are,” said Rebecca, feeling that they were sounding disloyal. “I mean they’re good people and all that. It’s just this whole Christ thing. Christ this and Jesus that, all the way down from Florissant. It was all, like, so...lame.”

Diana gently disagreed.

“But there’s a true power there, girls. In Jesus. Do you know about the Shroud of Turin?”

This was something important to Diana. They could both feel her...chemistry...change. In spite of their reflexive dislike of the subject, what she was saying—or rather how she was saying it—got their attention.

She was talking about the Shroud of Turin, the moment of Christ’s Resurrection, when His Spirit had flashed out, shimmering so brightly inside that darkened sepulchre...

“A shimmer so powerful that it actually burned itself into the burial cloth he was wrapped up in,” said Diana, leaning in close and placing a soft warm hand on Rebecca’s knee.

“Can you imagine what that must have been like? And Jesus teaches us that that very same Shimmer is inside each of us. That divine spark shines inside us all, waiting to be...released. How beautiful.”

Rebecca found she liked the feel of Diana’s hand on her knee, but the subject of Jesus Christ’s Light Bulb Moment was not nearly as interesting to her, at this twilight hour, as the particular hazel-and-gold colors in Diana Bowman’s eyes and the spicy scent that was coming off her body. From the look on her sister’s face, she was feeling the same sort of sensual pull.

Rebecca felt a warmth rising on the skin of her belly and flooding up to her breasts, her throat, her cheeks. She’s gay, Rebecca was thinking. And she likes us. Both of us.

Diana drew back, smiled at them.

“But it’s getting dark, and you two need to be going back to your room, don’t you? Your parents will be worried, no?”

Rebecca looked at her cell phone.

There were three text messages, all in the last few minutes. She had felt the phone buzzing but ignored it, knowing what they were about but feeling that, where Mommy and Daddy were concerned, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Mommy: We’re going out to get something to eat. Coming?

Mommy: Leaving in five?

Daddy: Girls?

After a moment’s thought, as Diana watched her with some amusement, Rebecca texted back.

Becca: We’re at the Chapel for Eventide. So pretty here. Can we stay?

A pause. The resort was fenced and gated, studded with security cameras and patrolled by armed guards. And it did have a little chapel beside the tennis courts.

Daddy: Okay. But home by midnight. Pinky swear.

Becca: Pinky swear. Hugs.

Daddy: Karen got her puffer with her?

Rebecca tipped the phone to Karen, who read the message, fumbled in her pocket and came up with a small silver canister with a little plastic mask attached—her rechargeable puffer. Karen had asthma, usually caused by stress.

Becca: Yes, Daddy, we just checked.

Daddy: Okay be good love you both.

Rebecca put the phone away, looking up to catch a strange, almost hungry expression on Diana’s face, a kind of pale yellow light in her green eyes.