Trial by Fire Read online

  An alarm blared in Jake’s chest. She was asking him to be involved this time, to kidnap some kid and beat him to death or shoot him, to throw him into a fire and let him burn to death. She was asking him to get his own hands dirty, not to just stand back on the perimeter while somebody else did the dirty work.

  He began to sweat as the silence in the room lingered. What if she chose him, as Cruz had chosen the ones who’d helped him with Ben Ford?

  “Cruz ain’t made disciples of cowards, has he?” she asked. “No, he’s chosen only the best. The loyal ones. And when he comes into his kingdom, those of you he’s counted on will reign with him.”

  Jake hadn’t been with the group long enough to understand all of the things they believed about Cruz. This “coming into his kingdom” stuff still baffled him, but he knew there was something different about this genius who could memorize the Bible and build a compound and plan the security to protect it. He wasn’t an ordinary man. Whether he was some kind of higher being, Jake wasn’t sure, but he supposed he had more belief in Cruz than he had in God. He just wasn’t ready to gamble his life on him.

  When his best friend, Pete Benton, got to his feet, Jake froze.

  “I’ll do it,” Benton said with a half-grin. Jake knew he didn’t fully understand what he was volunteering for. His bulb had always been a tad dim. Jake thought he just had bad genes, since his father was an unemployed construction worker who only got a job when he ran out of drinking money. His mother supported them fixing hair twelve hours a day.

  Jennifer’s face blossomed into that charismatic Cruz smile, and she gave Benton a my-hero look and slid her arms around his neck. As she raised up to press a kiss on his lips, Jake felt a stab of jealousy that almost made him volunteer. But even the thought of Jennifer’s attention wasn’t enough to make him volunteer for murder.

  But it was enough for Roy Decareaux, who was next to volunteer. Jennifer laughed with delight, as if he’d just asked her to the prom. Then Jack LaSalle, rumored to have a coveted relationship with Jennifer already, offered himself.

  Jake was flooded with relief.

  Jennifer turned all three around to face the group. “I always knew these three were chosen, that one day I’d need them, and that I could count on them. Now, here’s the plan. The band plays at the Viper Pit tonight. I’ll talk to Butch and set it up. We’re all there, making a lot of noise. Meanwhile, our three heroes find another victim, take care of him, start another church fire, then rush back to the Pit, where we’ll swear you’ve been all along.”

  She pulled her hair back from her face, and let it slip back down. “Of course, the cops will come looking for us first thing, but we’ll have all been there. They won’t have no choice but to start looking for some other group. With Cruz in jail and us at the Pit, how could we have done what they say? And then they got no choice but to move on and look for somebody else.”

  Everyone cheered, and Jake wondered if these poor idiots could really pull off such a thing. Chances were, they’d wind up in jail. Would they talk then? Name names? How would she keep them from it?

  As the band members began loading up their equipment to take to the Viper Pit, Jake tried to shake the swirling doubts in his head at what they were all getting into. Another kid was going to die, and what was it all about? To purify the culture, by getting rid of those who were ethnically inferior?

  Things were getting hazy, and now it didn’t seem about any cause at all. The first death had been about getting even with some preacher guy who’d insulted Cruz. This second one was about diverting the police.

  It was hard to get behind a cause that wasn’t really a cause.

  As they dispersed and headed for their cars to the Viper Pit, he moved slowly, thinking of speaking up, questioning what they were about to do. Jennifer approached him near his car. “Hey, Jake,” she said in that sweet way that made him feel favored above all the others.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was thinking about your aunt. How safe do you think Cruz is with her out there?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, she was snooping around here last night. She saw things. Her apartment was hit. What if she goes to the police and tells them about the carpet in the bonfire? What if she identifies my brother?”

  “Identifies him as what? She doesn’t know anything.”

  “She could cause trouble, is all I’m saying.”

  “But she won’t. If she did, she’d get me in trouble, and Issie won’t do that.”

  “But she’s mad about her apartment—the cat and everything. Maybe she’s scared and won’t feel safe till she exposes us.”

  He wanted to ask her why they didn’t think of that before they’d terrorized her, but he managed to keep his mouth shut. “You don’t have to worry about Issie. I talked to her last night, okay? She’s cool. She doesn’t want me to get tied up as a murder suspect, so she won’t say anything.”

  “I was just thinking that…maybe we need to make sure.”

  Anger tingled in his face. “So what are you suggesting? Kill her too?”

  “Jake!” She smiled and took his hands, pulled him close, and clasped his hands behind her back. He hadn’t been this close to her before, and he smelled the strawberry scent of her hair. His heart was on overload, hammering out a maddening beat. He hoped the others saw this. “Of course I don’t mean kill her. What kind of person do you think I am?”

  He thought of saying that she was the kind of person who would order a murder just to throw people off of her brother, but the words seemed broken, incomplete in his mind. He couldn’t think clearly when she was this close.

  “I’m saying that maybe she needs to be watched. Maybe she needs to be a little more afraid than she is.”

  “She’s plenty scared. She slept at my house last night because she was afraid to stay home.”

  “Excellent,” Jennifer said. “Really, that’s excellent. Then you talked to her?”

  “I told her to stay out of it.”

  “Do you think she will?”

  “Like I told you, Issie’s kept my secrets before. The last thing she wants is to see me thrown in jail. Really, Jennifer, you can trust me and my family.”

  “I thought I could,” she said, gazing down into his eyes. He saw adoration there, infatuation so deep that it almost mirrored his. She liked him too, he thought. It wasn’t just his imagination. He wasn’t one of those geeks that she was manipulating into committing crimes. This wasn’t like that.

  She leaned down and kissed him so suddenly that it startled him, and then he gave into it and gave back. Just when he thought his heart would leap out of his chest, she stopped. She released him and stepped back, looked down at the ground, swept her hair behind her ear. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said, looking embarrassed.

  His throat was suddenly dry, and he rasped out, “No, don’t apologize. It was…it was good.” He laughed then at his own poor choice of words. “Excellent.”

  “Yeah, it was excellent, wasn’t it?” she asked. She leaned into him and whispered, “Just like I thought.” Then, as if she couldn’t bear to face him after saying that, she turned and headed back to the van.

  Jake stood there watching her, his heart beginning to hurt. It wasn’t just his imagination. She had singled him out.

  How had he gotten so lucky?

  Forgetting the doubts that had swirled through his mind earlier about the cause not really being a cause, he finished loading his drums.

  Chapter Seventeen

  So you’re the grandson of Sidney Clairmont, the grand wizard of the KKK?” Stan asked Jason Cruz as he sat across from him in the interrogation room.

  “That’s right,” Cruz said, thrusting his chin up as if they were talking about a former U.S. president.

  “So what was his part in this murder and in my church burning?”

  “My granddaddy had no part in this. He’s an old man. The KKK ain’t hardly even active in this town anymore. You�
�re the cop. You ought to know that.”

  “Looks like we might have a new generation of hate mongers.”

  “Hate mongers?” He leaned up on the table, getting closer to Stan. “Hey, man, you’re white. And if that was your church, then you’re Christian. Don’t you want your country back? Don’t you want to take care of your own?”

  “Some of my own are black,” Stan said.

  “Right.” Cruz leaned back in his chair and leveled those hypnotic eyes on him. “Come on, be straight. Don’t you ever imagine what our country would be like if every culture under the sun wasn’t here?”

  “I’m sure the Indians used to think that, when we whites were moving into their land.”

  “But they’re inferior too. God gave the land to the people with the brains, man. The ones who could make it fly. And we have, except that the gays and blacks and Latinos and Jews and Muslims and who knows who else are in here corrupting everything and turning it into hell.”

  “Actually, it’s people like your group turning it into hell,” Stan said. “If it weren’t for people killing each other and destroying each other’s property, it might not be a bad place to live.”

  “But they’re killing each other and destroying property.”

  “So you feel justified in killing them?”

  Cruz sighed, as if Stan was too dense to understand. “I told you, I didn’t kill nobody. That’s not what we’re about.”

  “Then what are you about?”

  “We’re about being left alone to worship and work and live together. We’re about protecting ourselves from Big Brother.”

  Stan was getting weary, and he looked down at the boy’s file. He had little on him, but much on his grandfather and mother, and even on his father who’d become an informant just before he vanished from town. He’d had many suspicions, himself, about what had happened to the man, after the first black mayor of Newpointe was murdered. Terrence Cruz had become an informant, but without any evidence of a body, they’d had to let the matter go.

  He tried to find an approach somewhere in the file, but finally he shut it and slid it away from him. “I’m just gonna be honest with you, Cruz. I’ve known about your family for years. When your father vanished a few years ago, I spent a long time looking for him. I had my suspicions that something had happened to him.”

  Cruz seemed unduly interested in a spot on the table. “My father is dead.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “God, according to my mother.”

  Stan narrowed his eyes. “God killed your father?”

  “My daddy was eat up with sin,” Cruz said, bringing his eyes back to Stan’s. “He was an immoral traitor, and God rained destruction down on him.”

  Stan sat back in his chair, staring at the boy. “I think I know why your mother might call him a traitor. But why do you call him immoral? I thought you people thought everything you did was moral.”

  Cruz’s jaw began to pop. “What has my daddy got to do with that church burning?”

  “I’m just saying that one day he talked to the police about the murder of our first black mayor, and the next day he vanished.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Sticks in my memory,” Stan said, shaking his head. “I don’t like having unsolved crimes.”

  “It’s not unsolved,” Cruz said. “I told you, he’s dead.”

  “And God did it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But God hasn’t struck your grandfather for burning people’s houses down, terrorizing them into leaving town, killing the mayor…”

  “My granddaddy was never convicted of nothin’.”

  “No, but some of his cronies were. If I remember, some of the informants who told us what happened mentioned that you and your sister were involved in some of the crimes the KKK committed. You must have been little then. What? Eight? Nine?”

  “They weren’t crimes,” Cruz said. “They were battles. Little battles in a big war.”

  “Then you admit that you’ve been involved with the KKK since you were a kid.”

  Cruz breathed a laugh. “You know I have been. I was practically raised in their headquarters. I stuffed envelopes, answered phones, went to meetings.”

  “And you were with your father and grandfather when crosses were burned in people’s yards…”

  “I never did nothing wrong. The Klansmen are soldiers in a war, and war is not criminal. It’s necessary.”

  “So was it war last night when you killed that kid? Or was it just getting even with Nick Foster for what he did to your picket line at the gay Mardi Gras ball?”

  Cruz slammed his hand on the table. “Is that what that sleazebag told you?”

  “He said you were angry. That you’d threatened him. Is that true?”

  “Threatened him? I hardly even knew he was there!”

  “He said he broke your signs and took home the youth from his church.”

  “I still had plenty of supporters, and we made new signs, okay? Nick Foster isn’t going to stop me. And there is a thing in this country called freedom of speech. Picketing was perfectly legal. It’s my duty as a Christian to point out to those people that they’re bringing God’s wrath upon themselves.”

  “But to tell them God hates them? I’d be interested in seeing where in the Bible it says that. Wanna show me?”

  “I don’t wanna show you nothing,” the kid said. “You’re as much the enemy as Nick Foster is, embracing those people and pretending to worship with them, like God can even hear you when you’re such an abomination.”

  “Then you do consider Nick Foster your enemy?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Where were you yesterday morning between the hours of four and six A.M.?” he asked suddenly.

  Cruz seemed thrown by the sudden shift. “I was sleeping.”

  Stan began to write on his legal pad. “Where?”

  “At home, of course.”

  “Was your sister there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did your mother say she hadn’t seen you in a couple of days?”

  “Because she hadn’t. She was asleep when I got home, and gone when I got up.”

  “But she said you hadn’t been home in a couple of days.” Stan made a point of turning the pages in his legal pad, looking for his notes he’d taken when he’d gone looking for Cruz earlier. “She said, and I quote, ‘Them kids never tell me nothing. They stay out all night and sleep all day, and sometimes don’t come home at all.”

  “So you jump to the conclusion that I must be a murderer?”

  “Actually, the conclusion I’ve drawn is that you must be a liar. You just told me you were home.”

  “Well, my mother misses a lot of things. She never has seen half the things going on in our house.”

  “I thought she home-schooled. Aren’t most home-schooling moms real attentive?”

  “We’re both eighteen. We don’t need home-schooling no more. But when we were young, a lot went on that she didn’t see. Truth ain’t one of her passions.”

  Stan looked down at the legal pad again, and he began to wonder what kind of childhood these kids must have had, with every adult in their lives engaged in criminal activity against anyone they saw as different. How many murders had they witnessed? How many lives had they terrorized? How could any child come up with a healthy view of society when they’d been taught nothing but hate?

  And when they slapped the label of Christianity on that hate, it got even more confusing.

  No wonder so many Americans thought Christians were hateful zealots with murderous agendas and evil hearts.

  He looked across the table at the kid who had probably grown up too fast. What were the secrets he harbored about his father’s immorality and his mother’s blindness to it? What immorality had he borne as a child?

  If murder wasn’t considered immorality, he could only imagine what was.

  The door opened, and Chief Jim Shoemaker leane
d in. “Stan, can I see you a minute?”

  “Sure.” He got up and stepped outside, closing the door behind him. “What is it?”

  “There’s been another church burning,” he said. Stan caught his breath. “Bayou Missionary Baptist Church. And there was a victim in this one too. My understanding is that this one isn’t dead yet.”

  “Then maybe he can tell us who did it.” He spun around and looked through the glass. The kid was sitting there with his face in his hands. Stan was pleased he had gotten to him. “Pick up his friends,” he said. “And his sister. They had to have something to do with it.”

  “We have cars en route. Sid located them at a bar called the Viper Pit. We’ve had problems with them before for serving to minors. It’s the teenage hot spot.”

  “I gotta get over to that church,” Stan told him. He nodded toward Cruz. “Can we keep him here a little longer?”

  “Yeah, I’ll get somebody else to question him for a while, just to mark time until you’ve worked the scene. It’s over on Bri-arson and Catalpa Street. I’ll meet you over there.”

  Stan took off without a look back, hoping another kid wouldn’t have to die.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jennifer’s three chosen ones were a wreck by the time they got back to the Viper Pit, after doing what she had ordered. They came in, soaked with sweat and trembling, and instantly split up to get lost in the crowd. Jake tried not to miss a drumbeat as he looked for his best friend. Benton looked like he’d been in a fight. He had blood on his shirt and scratch marks on his face. His eyes were wild as they darted east to west. He came to the edge of the stage and looked up at Jennifer as she banged on the keyboard. She nodded to him that she would come down, and quickly announced that they were taking a break.

  Jake followed her off the stage and watched her usher Benton into a back room.