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While Darnell held off the feds, Glenn called one final White Night, gathering his followers at the Pavilion for what he called “revolutionary protest.”

  Mass suicide.

  With federal forces closing in, Glenn convinced the people to consume fruit punch laced with cyanide. By this point, Glenn’s teachings had reached a new level of insanity, due in no small part to his escalating drug addiction. But still they followed him, every word he said. Three hundred eighty-four people died from the poison. It was the greatest instance of mass suicide in American history.

  The only ones Glenn didn’t poison were his Appointed, the ones he favored. Glenn took the Appointed to the speedboats in a foolhardy plan to escape through Winyah Bay and reach the sanctity of international waters miles off the coast in the Atlantic. The firefight continued on the boats. In the process, several of the CAE’s boats caught fire, including Glenn Downey’s.

  Nearly everyone on the boats died that night. And the whole world watched it happen. The media had been following the case since the feds first started negotiations. All month they’d lived in a makeshift town of vans and cables and cameras on the shoreline across from the camp. When the action began on the fateful evening, the cameras were rolling. Everyone in America saw the fires on the bay. They watched as the boats burned and the people died.

  Glenn Downey had been at the front of the pack, using the boats behind him as protection, but even his boat could not escape. Soon it was ablaze too. He burned to death like so many of his followers before disappearing forever into the depths of the bay.

  Spencer had been one of Glenn’s closest Appointed. Of the survivors, he was the only one who had been on Glenn’s boat.

  The media, in its predictable fashion, had its way with the story. The government agents were labeled as murderers. They were accused of aiming for the boat’s motors, trying to start the fires, purposefully killing the CAE members. The images of the burning boats were broadcast for weeks on end. A fresh wave of anti-government rhetoric spread through the country.

  Though there had been three CAE survivors from the boats and five who evaded the poisoning, Brad Walker had been the only person to escape the camp before the ill-fated night. He told his story with a major book deal. Break Free: The Collective Agricultural Experiment’s Lone Escapee. Brad used the book’s overwhelming success as leverage to start his You’re the Detective series. He always wondered if the mystery novels’ popularity had been due to their own merit or if people were buying them out of curiosity to see what a CAE survivor could write. It was something that nagged at him.

  Before joining the BEI, he visited the WWR from time to time, but he never worked there another day. Spencer, however, went back and continued to work there to the day. That was going to make Dale’s return visit that much more uncomfortable.

  The Worldwide Weekly Report office sat in a run-down, industrial side of Arlington, Virginia, outside the nation’s capital. When Dale worked there, he hadn’t yet gotten Arancia. At the time he drove an old Chevy truck and didn’t care where he parked it. But now, as he drove his De Tomaso Pantera through an area of crumbling buildings, wandering bums, and cracked sidewalks, he had considerable pause. Luckily the WWR had a parking lot, so he wouldn’t have to park her on the street, but even that made him anxious.

  It was a gray day. The sky and the buildings melted into one smoky blur. Still, when Dale opened Arancia’s door and stepped out into the WWR’s familiar gravel parking lot, he felt some of the case’s pressure lift from his shoulders.

  The office was a converted factory, fifty feet tall, with a sign over the front entrance that read:

  The Worldwide Weekly Report - Uncovering What the Others Won’t Cover

  Dale smiled. He was breaking about a thousand BEI regulations by coming here. SAC Taft would be one grouchy bear about this. Though he was given near carte blanche with his investigations, he couldn’t break the Bureau’s basic regulations. Still, he did so with some regularity, and it made Taft’s blood pressure shoot through the roof each and every time. But when times were desperate, when people’s lives were at stake, Dale did what he had to do.

  Stepping through the doors and into the office, the nostalgia hit him like a hurricane wind. It was just as he remembered it. There was the main office below with all the desks and the usual trappings of a busy newsroom—clacking typewriters, phones ringing, people darting about. Pictures of flying saucers, ghosts, and 1950s movie monsters peppered the walls alongside some of the bizarre artifacts that had been collected throughout the paper’s investigations. There was a mystery skull, a piece of metal from the Roswell crash site, and Dale’s personal favorite, the haunted basketball.

  Two huge objects dominated the office space. In the back was “the Montana Monster,” a stuffed grizzly bear with a bizarre looking face, standing ten feet tall on its rear legs. A rancher named Vernon Caldwell claimed to have shot and killed the Monster after it ran off with three of his sheep. But when he brought it to the Worldwide Weekly Report, the staff soon discovered that the Monster’s face had been heavily doctored. The bones of the snout had been removed, and a new metal structure had been put in its place, turning the bear into something akin to a fuzzy crocodile. The fur, some of which was synthetic, was stitched together in patches to cover the new monstrosity.

  Then there was the enormous hook that hung from the ceiling. When he took over the old factory, Vance gutted the building and sold off all the equipment. But he decided to leave the hook. It dangled dead center in the room on forty feet of chain with links the size of a man’s hand. It came within a couple feet of the ground. The hook was a good three feet tall with a rusted orange-red patina. The sheer size and simple lines of its form made it look like a piece of modern art. With its pulley and housing, the whole apparatus easily dwarfed a six-foot man. Vance had saved it not just for its visual appeal but also for its symbolic nature. In writing, the “hook” is the attention-grabbing moment that occurs early in a piece to grab the reader’s attention and compel him or her to read the rest. When you have a newspaper concerned with ludicrous stories of alien abduction and mutant trout, a hook is of particular importance.

  Someone across the room recognized Dale and began to walk toward him. It was Vance. He was two months younger and two inches taller than Dale. Even now, wearing a look of utter confusion, he crossed the newsroom with long, commanding strides.

  “Br— I mean, Dale,” Vance said as he approached. He tilted his head, narrowed his eyes, then smiled wide and pulled Dale in for a strong hug. “Didn’t I fire you?”

  “No, I quit.” It had been two years since Dale had seen Vance, but in this briefest of exchanges, Dale felt like he’d seen him yesterday. That’s how all good friendships should be. “You’re looking smart, as usual.”

  Vance was wearing a dress shirt and plaid, dark brown pants. He had a warm smile and New England good looks, sort of like a Kennedy, except Vance was no politician. He was the genuine article.

  “Thanks.” Vance flicked his shirt’s butterfly collar. He looked Dale over. “T-shirt and jeans. Nothing changes you, does it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But nothing comes between me and my 501s.”

  “Well, you sure haven’t changed up here.” Vance pointed to his head. “Some of us have.” His dark blonde hair was an inch further back on his head and a bit thinner than when Dale last saw him.

  “Happens to the best of us,” Dale said. “I need to look into something.”

  Vance lowered his tone. “But … you said you could never come back here. You in some sort of trouble?” He put his hand on Dale’s shoulder and squeezed.

  “I’m beginning to think this case I’m working has a connection with the CAE.”

  Vance paused. “And you want to look through the archives?”

  “Right.”

  “You sure that’s something you want to do?”

  Dale took in a breath. “It’s something I have to do.”

  “I take it this is off
the record?”

  Dale smiled. “My friend, it’s five miles off the record.”

  Vance’s office was on the upper level of the building off the catwalk that looked down upon the old factory floor. Dale and Vance stood over a large table. Spread out before them was a collection of materials—bound copies of The Worldwide Weekly Report, newspaper clippings, magazines, photographs. Vance had rolled up his sleeves. They were looking at one of the bound collections.

  “Here’s where you began working on the story. Four years ago.” Vance put a finger on the front page of one of the issues of the Report.

  THE COLLECTIVE AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT: TERROR ON WINYAH BAY

  by Brad Walker

  There was a picture of the camp beside the title. It was a photograph Spencer had taken. Images and memories of the CAE had been resident specters of Dale’s mind in the years since he was there. But he had never gone back to the place, and he had avoided any photographs. His heart pounded now. The physical reaction to seeing the camp once more was greater than he thought it would be.

  If this wussy display was any indication, he was in for a tough set of research.

  The buildings in the picture were all square and cinder block construction. Plain, monolithic. They had been in a rundown state even when the CAE was in operation. The camp had been a large storage facility at one point, but by the time Glenn moved his people in, it looked like some sort of abandoned Eastern Bloc plant.

  Next to the picture of the camp was the photo of Brad Walker that adorned each of his articles. Dale hadn’t particularly wanted his image to appear in the paper, but Vance, who always had more business sense, pimped out Dale’s handsome mug to help sell copies.

  Brad Walker stared at Dale now with a clean, casual smile and bright eyes. The picture was taken when he first started at theWWR, which made it six years old. Dale was blessed with good genes, so he hadn’t aged to speak of since the picture was taken. Nevertheless, the differences in the photo spoke volumes. This man of six years ago had not been to the Collective Agricultural Experiment. He hadn’t made the decision to join the military, to make something of himself. Dale was embarrassed by the man.

  He scanned over the article and saw nothing that related to Camden Marshall.

  “Let’s go back a bit further,” Dale said. “Look at some of the background material.”

  Vance pushed the stack of bound WWRs to the side. He stretched his arms out wide to pull the other stacks closer. The pile collapsed, creating an avalanche of books.

  They dug into the materials. It was like the early days at the Report, the days when it wasn’t quite the rag that it would become. Sure, they wrote their fair share of articles about Kennedy assassination conspiracies and el chupacabra, but they put some serious research into their work. These were long nights of coffee and pizza—in a time before Dale’s healthier diet, of course. Doing the work again, hunkering over the books with Vance as he had so many times, made him realize how much he’d missed having a friend.

  About ten minutes into their searching, Vance shouted out. “Brad, look!” He covered his mouth. “I … I’m sorry.”

  Dale shook his head. “Old habits die hard. What do ya got?” He took the article from him.

  It was published a year before the Collective Agricultural Experiment began. Vance pointed toward a paragraph near the bottom.

  Downey has had difficulty procuring sponsorship for his work. The mainstream churches have all rejected his requests. All of the grant proposals he has submitted have been denied. The main source of his initial funding, such as it is, has come from individual donors. The Neville Family of industrialists has agreed to a partial funding with the desire to learn more about small team labor dynamics. Two economics professors at Virginia Tech University have also donated money in hopes of further developing theories of non-traditional economies.

  “Camden Marshall is a Virginia Tech prof,” Vance said.

  “Indeed he is. We’re onto something here.”

  “Here are some more articles from that time frame,” Vance thumbed through the clippings and handed a stack to Dale.

  Like the first article, these were all concerned with the founding of the CAE. There were a couple of newspaper articles about the property that was going to be used for the camp. A small blurb in a Time magazine article mentioned the camp under the topic of the entrepreneurial spirit of ’70s America. Another article discussed the legal ramifications of the endeavor.

  And then Dale stopped flipping through the materials. He noticed someone in one of the photos.

  It was Camden Marshall.

  The man sitting in the Augusta County Jail, the man who forced him to bark, the man who taunted and antagonized him, dangling the lives of 146 people in front of him. There he was.

  Standing with Glenn Downey.

  “It’s him, Vance.”

  It was a yellowed newspaper article, and the content was focused on the two Virginia Tech professors’ contributions to the CAE. The photo was four inches across and sat to the right of the text.

  Centered in the frame, larger than life, were Camden Marshall and Glenn Downey, shaking hands and smiling for the camera. Above their clasped hands they each held an end of an oversized check. Marshall wore a dark turtleneck and a blazer, looking every inch a college professor. His beard was longer and scruffier than it was now in the jail, which made sense given the picture was taken at a time closer to the man’s glory days of 1960s hippiedom.

  Glenn wore his tinted glasses and a baggy suit with a wide tie and wider lapels. His usual slimy sneer was slathered all over his gaunt face, and his eyes had their typical twinkle, somewhere between that of a department store Santa and a local union leader.

  “This is it,” Dale said. He pumped his fist.

  “Leave it to you to drive all the way here and risk your job to find one damn photograph.”

  “It’s the proof I need. Marshall was involved in the CAE. The Marshall Village isn’t some grand experiment in resource-based economy—it’s an extension of the Collective Agricultural Experiment.”

  “What would Marshall have to gain by creating a second cult?”

  “I don’t know.” Dale ran his hand along his chin. “But I’m going to find out. Can I take this stuff with me?”

  “Yes, you may,” Vance said, and Dale rolled his eyes. “But we’re going to need to box it all up.”

  “No problem,” Dale said. “Arancia’s got a little bit of storage space. Too bad we can’t have the whipping boy load it.”

  Vance lowered his head. “The kid’s still with us.”

  “Yeah. I know.” Dale paused. “Didn’t see him out on the floor.”

  “I have him in one of the upstairs offices now,” Vance said, motioning to the catwalk outside his door. “You know, he might remember something about Camden Marshall and the CAE.”

  Dale nodded. “Is he doing well?”

  “He’s doing well at his job. I couldn’t speak for how he’s doing in the outside world.” Vance glanced at the window. “Want to talk to him?”

  “Not really.” He put the newspaper article on the table. “But I should.”

  Chapter 33

  In A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past reveals to Scrooge the darkest times of his personal history. At the moment, as Dale hesitated before knocking on the door to Spencer’s office, he felt like he’d had his own spectral visitor. His guts had just been pulled through the wringer with images of the Collective Agricultural Experiment camp and Glenn Downey. But those two things were going to be mere appetizers to the main course of seeing Spencer Goad.

  He exhaled. And knocked.

  There was the squeak of wheels from an office chair followed by footsteps, starting faint at the back of the room and getting louder. A dark figure appeared behind the frosted glass and grew larger.

  Spencer was right on the other side of the door.

  The handle jiggled. The door inched open.

  A man familiar b
ut quite different appeared. Spencer was on the short side and nerdy thin when Dale had known him. He’d bulked up considerably. He looked broader in the chest and fuller in the face, which had been covered in zits but was now acne-free. As before, he had a mop of sandy blonde hair, parted on the left. Dale had forgotten how blue the kid’s eyes were. Piercing, ocean blue, like two shiny marbles.

  Neither of them moved nor said anything. Dale couldn’t react. There was nothing on Spencer’s face either. His lips were a thin line.

  Dale tried to say something but nothing came out. He flirted with something profound, something that was fitting of the occasion, but all he could say was, “Hi, Spencer.” It came out piteously, like the dying putter of a lawn mower as it runs out of gas.

  “Long time no see … Dale? That’s your name now, right?”

  “That’s right. Dale Conley.”

  Dale was encouraged. ‘Long time no see’ was something that the Spencer he knew years ago would not have said. It was far too casual, too easygoing. Plus, it looked like he’d been exercising. This was all encouraging. Dale always thought Spencer was a bright, good-looking kid. He just needed some confidence.

  When he and Vance gave him a hard time, called him the “whipping boy,” it was all good-natured. They wanted to help the kid. He was smart, and he had a good heart. Dale knew that both of these things could easily get him eaten alive in the real world.

  “Well, come on in, Dale.” Spencer opened the door wider and walked into his office. He leaned against his desk, folding his arms across his chest and crossing his legs. “What are you doing here?”

  Again, Dale hesitated. “I’m working a mass abduction case I think might have a connection back to the CAE. I know this is incredibly awkward, but I need to ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “When you were helping me with the background research on the CAE, do you remember anything about the connection with Camden Marshall?”