Page 71 of Badlands

“You were in Kutz Canyon, walking toward a badland formation—a prehistoric lighthouse. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Nothing.

“That’s where you were going—right, Elodie?”

Corrie waited, keeping her breathing even. All right: step two. “I’m going to contact your parents and let them know what happened. I expect they’ll come here and see you. I hope you’ll share with them what you’re not willing to share with me.”

Nada.

It was hard to look at, even harder to comprehend. This woman just sat in her bed, as rigid as a stone, saying nothing, reacting to nothing. She was like a catatonic, or someone who’d been brainwashed.Like a member of a cult. And it was a cult,

Corrie was sure of it now, with Oskarbi as its leader, controlling his disciples with sexual coercion, drugs, and bogus religious twaddle. She wondered how Nora was doing in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, whether she’d tracked down Oskarbi. It might be worth the FBI issuing an extradition request to get him back here and make him explain what was going on. But Nora would be back in a day or two, and then she would know a lot more.

But Oskarbi had gone back to Mexico a dozen years ago. Was he running the cult from afar? And why were these suicides happening only now? Or had there been others, as yet undiscovered? It made no sense.

In a final attempt to get a reaction, Corrie reached into her briefcase and brought out the green lightning stones. She held them toward Bastien. “You were carrying these. What do they signify?”

Elodie Bastien turned and looked at them for a brief moment, with a flicker—finally—of something like emotion passing across her face. But then her face set into a mask once again, and she turned her gaze back to the dead television set.

41

SKIP EMERGED FROMa groggy stupor in the pitch dark. He must have dozed off, helped along by what was probably a concussion. But how much time had passed? A day? Two? It seemed like he’d been there forever. The fear—and the cloud of pain in his head—was distorting his perception of time. He had a vague recollection of someone giving him water. But no food—and he was ravenously hungry. He’d stopped calling out: it was a stupid exercise in futility. Attention, right now, might be the last thing he wanted. He took a mental inventory of his aching, battered body: nothing seemed to be broken, just a lot of painful bruises and cuts, and his lip was as swollen as a kumquat.

“Edison?” he ventured into the dark. “Are you there?”

Silence.

“Edison, God damn it!”

Was he dead? Skip tried to banish the out-of-control fantasies of torture, rape, and death that were crowding into his head. Who were these people? Crazy survivalists? Satanists?

His rampant speculations were interrupted by a noise from above, and the rectangle of light reappeared as the coveringwas slid back. A beam of sunlight came in, illuminating drifting motes of dust. It was daylight, of another day, he assumed. Skip glanced over to where Edison had been tied up before, but he was now gone.

A ladder was lowered, then a figure began to climb down. As the person became illuminated by sunlight, Skip could see him more clearly. But what the hell was this? He was naked, smeared head to toe with a thick layer of red clay, wearing a mask of smoothly carved wood, also painted red. A hairpiece of woven grass stuck up from the mask like some outlandish hairdo. He carried a wooden baton in his left hand, the fist-sized sphere at one end carved with a grotesque face.

The man reached the bottom of the ladder and straightened up. Skip could see the gleam of the man’s eyes through holes in the mask. The figure moved toward him. There was something odd about the way he walked, a sort of shuffle, as if his feet were too heavy to lift much above the ground. Was he blind? Drunk? High?

Skip stared, fear surging again. “Who are you?” he demanded.

The figure bent down and fumbled with the leather straps holding Skip’s ankles together. He loosened the straps, then lengthened and retied them—creating a pair of hobbles that allowed limited movement of the feet.

“Stand up.”

The voice was flat and neutral. Skip staggered up, hands still tied behind his back, fighting a momentary dizziness. The man took out a long cord made of leather with a slip knot at one end and wrapped it around his neck, tightening it until it functioned as a collar. The man stepped back, looping the leash around his left wrist.

The man gave the rope a savage jerk, which tightened the cord around Skip’s neck until he coughed and choked.

After a second or two, the figure loosened it. “Message received, thief?”

Skip was surprised by the normal, even educated, sound of the voice.

The man jerked the leash. “Respond.”

Skip nodded.

The man now untied his wrists. “Climb.”

Skip shuffled over to the ladder. The hobbles made climbing difficult, but the ceiling of the kiva was low and it was only moments before he emerged into the sunlight. He blinked in the dazzling light as his handler once again tied his arms behind his back.

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