As I left the parking lot of Ernst Vielstich's apartment building and pulled out into traffic, I dialed AnneMarie Robinson's number on my cellphone.
"It's Rennie," I said. "Busy?"
"No, thank goodness," she said. "Joseph's off to preschool."
"Good," I said. "Grab a notepad. Here's what I need: Have any members or associates of the white supremacist group Stormfront died in the last three days? If so, I need to know exactly how."
I waited as she caught up.
"You know that people like that don't normally publish membership rosters," she said.
"I knew you'd appreciate the challenge," I said.
For normal information gathering, I know how to google as well as the next person. For hard-to-get stuff, there's AnneMarie Robinson. She's got four children, a husband in environmental science, a cosy split-level in the suburbs, and more hacking know-how than any five IT security firms, and she puts it to good use in her little work-from-home setup when the kids are in school and the laundry's caught up.
She assured me she'd get back to me by afternoon, and I hung up and merged onto the freeway.
According to what Mr. Vielstich could tell me, Hans Mueller and crew would likely use the information in the book to summon a major, big-ass demonic entity. After all, why go halfsies on something as important as ridding the world of "mud races"? The problem, though, is that none of them were likely to have any sorcerous experience, and thus would be unable to handle such an invocation on their own.
The book, though, came complete with a helpful solution for neophytes who want to dive right into playing with fire. The group could summon a lower-level entity through a simple blood ritual, a herald of sorts who would then take up residence in the body of one of the summoners (Vielstich stopped short of calling it "possession") and give him the magical fortitude and expertise to bring about the big, ol'-fashioned end-of-the-world invocation.
And all it would take is the life of one of those who helped summon the herald.
I didn't feel like going back to the office and puttering. My gymbag was in the back seat, so I headed over to the club and changed into my sweats, then climbed aboard a treadmill and did my best to ignore the young twenty-something girls with their leotard thongs up their butts who looked and acted like the club was a very sweaty singles bar.
My mind kept pace with my feet, chewing on the case. Mr. Vielstich hadn't mentioned changing the scope of my services, but it had changed just the same. Obviously, I was no longer just looking for a book. No, now, I was trying to make sure that something disastrous wasn't brought into the world by men too blinded by habitual hate to understand the consequences of their actions.
Annoyance and frustration sped up my pace.
I had once met a drunk man in a bar who claimed that he wasn't only a drunk man, he was a drunk Catholic priest. He told me that priests have an indelible mark put on their soul at ordination that branded them a priest forever, no matter whether the priest in question was a sinner or an unbeliever, whether he had been censured or kicked out-of-doors by the Church, or left the life of the Priesthood on his own. He couldn't escape being a priest. He told me this to convince me that he could marry us, we could go find a motel room and knock knees, and then he could annul the marriage, so our sex wouldn't be a sin. He was very drunk and I was on a case, and I excused myself and let him practice celibacy for one more night. I often wondered how well that complicated explanation worked as a pick-up line for him.
Sometimes, I feel like there's an indelible mark on my soul, something branded there by who I was and what I did before I had Beth and tried to find normality again. Something about me, some permutation of the laws of probability, kept drawing me into cases and situations that harked back to my old days and pushed past the edges of rational judgment. The fact that I wanted no part of it apparently had very little bearing on things.
I realized that I had run the equivalent of two counties, and slowly brought my pace and heartrate down before hopping off the treadmill. I showered and changed, and went back out to my car knowing no better where to go next than I had when I went in.
I had left my cell phone in the car. There was a message from AnneMarie Robinson, and I called her back.
"I've got what you wanted," she said.
"That was fast."
"It was a slow work day. If you want to come over and get what I've got, you need to come before the kids get out of school at three."
"I'll be right there," I said.
** ** **
AnneMarie Robinson had a matronly haircut and an even more matronly posterior. She ushered me into the house and down the hall to the spare bedroom she worked from. As we passed the family room, I could see the "slow computer" for the kids that could probably kick sand in the face of the one I had back in the office.
"Here's what I did," she said as she settled into her executive chair and I perched on the padded folding chair she let down. AnneMarie always filled me in on exactly how she had gotten the information before she let me know what she had gotten. Not that she was bragging, of course; she knew that the provenance of what she found was useful in determining how relevant and reliable the information was. Plus, she was bragging.
"The first part was easy," she said. "I got into the files for the Medical Examiners for the metro and state police, and the various county coroner's offices. I put together a list of names from that of the recently-deceased."
Sifting through the confidential files of a dozen organizations was the easy part, then.
"Now, like I said, organizations like Stormfront don't have public rosters, maybe not even private ones," she said. "They don't have a webpage, telephone listing, or any of that either. But I did manage to find a number of names associated with Stormfront through newspaper articles, letters to the editor, and discussions on some members-only messageboards dedicated to white power.
"The name that turned out to be what you wanted, though, was actually found in a mimeographed newsletter that published out of Idaho. Somebody from down here had sent in a donation to support the newsletter, along with a short note saying, ‘Keep up the good work.' The newsletter had published it on their letters page, and the editor had noted that this individual was a member of Stormfront.
"Oddly enough, I found the newsletter not on a white supremacy site, but on a hate-group watchdog site where they had it archived in PDF format.
"All of which means that one Darren Piper, until recently a member of Stormfront, was found dead in his apartment two days ago."
