Unthinkable Read online

  Or were they simply fictions?

  Next I turned to the only tangible piece of evidence I had: that key card I had swiped off the table while Rogers wasn’t looking. The Praesidium was obviously . . . something. A private detective agency? Mercenaries for hire? Once I figured it out—and pointed the authorities in their direction—I was sure this scam would fall apart.

  The key card had that PR logo, which I scanned into my laptop. Soon, I was uploading it onto a site that promised me the web’s most expansive reverse image search.

  I was expecting hundreds or thousands of results. What company didn’t plaster its logo all over?

  But there was just one. I clicked on it.

  The link was dead. It was giving me a classic “404 not found” message.

  I returned to the search results to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. And, yes, there it was: the P and the R inscribed in a square. The search engine must have latched onto an archived version of the image floating somewhere out there on the web.

  Then I looked at the URL of the website that—at some point in browsing history—had contained the image.

  It was for something called the Cult InfoShare Network.

  Was this not the first time the Praesidium had posed as a secret society, a.k.a. cult?

  I went to the home page for cultinfoshare.org. According to the “about,” the Cult InfoShare Network was a 501(c)(3) whose mission was to “inform and educate the public and people whose loved ones may be involved with potential cults and NRMs (new religious movements).”

  Reading on, I learned the site essentially acted as an information clearinghouse for people whose children, spouses, relatives, or friends may have gotten wrapped up with one of these shady outfits.

  It was all about lifting the veil of secrecy underneath which cults thrived. Details of each organization were shared, wiki-style, by people who operated under usernames—but gave their email addresses to the Cult InfoShare Network.

  Users could then opt for different levels of privacy, everything from no contact, to messaging through the site, to permitting the Cult InfoShare Network to share their contact information with any member who asked. The ultimate point of the site was to connect people (mostly parents) who were trying to get their kids (mostly young adults just above the age of consent) away from these cults.

  The founder and executive director was a man who freely shared his heartbreaking story in his bio. His daughter had been repeatedly sexually assaulted while in a cult, then killed herself. After he retired from a career as an IT executive, he created and ran this website. It wasn’t difficult to infer this was his therapy.

  There was a phone number listed on the contact page, so I called it. I reasoned that because it was barely after seven in the morning, I’d get some kind of voice mail.

  But after two rings, a man answered. I introduced myself and soon learned I was talking with the aforementioned founder and executive director.

  I talked him through how I found his site, then emailed him the image.

  “Oh, yeah. Those guys,” he said. “Maybe three years ago I added a page for them. As soon as I put it up, I got a cease and desist letter from a lawyer, telling me to take it down. This wasn’t my first rodeo with this sort of thing. One of the things all cults have in common is that they don’t like being called cults. They threaten to sue anyone who tries to out them. But the ultimate defense against libel is the truth. So if I can establish that the information on the page is reliable? I tell the cult to go pound sand. We don’t let ourselves be bullied.”

  “But in this case you took the page down,” I said.

  “Yeah, I can’t remember what happened. Hang on, let me pull up the file.”

  I heard him typing.

  “That’s right,” he continued. “Everything I got on the Praesidium came from one user. That’s not game over, but it is a red flag. So I reached out to the user. His email bounced but I had a snail mail address. I sent him a letter the same way I always do, with ‘return service requested’ on it. The letter got returned with a new address. Then I sent a certified letter to the new address. He definitely received it. But he never answered. At that point, I felt like I had no choice but to take the page down.”

  “Can you tell me who the user is?” I asked.

  “Let me see what kind of permissions he gave us,” he said, then typed some more. “All right, here we go. Full access. His real name is Robert McBride. Want his contact info?”

  I said yes, and the man gave me both addresses. One was in Hudgins, Virginia. Wherever that was. But it didn’t really matter, since he wasn’t there anymore anyway.

  The second address was in Williamsburg, Virginia, which was about an hour away.

  “So this Robert McBride, all your information about the Praesidium came from him?”

  “Correct.”

  “Can you tell me what the page said?” I asked.

  “Not without potentially committing slander. Sorry, you seem like a nice guy. And I want to help you. But for all I know you’re from the Praesidium, you’re recording me, and you’re trying to see if you can trap me. Some of these cults play dirty.”

  I told him I understood, and before long I was thanking him and wrapping up the call.

  There was no chance I was going to send a letter to this Robert McBride. I didn’t have that kind of time.

  I needed to pay him a visit. I googled the second address so I could see where it was on the map.

  Instead, I found myself staring at a litany of results for Dominion State Hospital.

  Which was its modern, politically correct name. But that’s not what it was called for the first hundred or so years of its existence.

  It used to be known as Dominion State Lunatic Asylum.

  CHAPTER 6

  JENNY

  If you had told fourteen-year-old Jenny Welker that one day she would go to work in one of the tallest buildings in Virginia, she never would have believed it.

  After all, she was just a farmer’s daughter who lived in a county where the tallest occupied structure topped out at three stories. Early on, her greatest aspiration was to be named a 4-H All Star.

  Once she achieved that, she set her mind on something even more audacious: becoming valedictorian of her small high school class, a distinction that almost never went to a true local. It was usually the child of some Yankee doctor or businessperson—a “come here,” as they were known, and they usually beat the “born here” kids for every significant award and honor.

  Until, four years of A-pluses later, born-there Jenny was delivering the valedictory at graduation.

  Her next ambition was to earn enough scholarships to be able to go to college. And, lo and behold, she did that too—graduated Phi Beta Kappa and everything.

  Then it was law school, something no one in her family had ever even thought about aspiring to. After that came law review, and a prized summer internship with a federal judge, and on and on and on.

  At every step she had to stare down the self-doubt, beat away the feelings of inadequacy, ignore that voice in her head that said a farm girl probably wasn’t good enough.

  And now here she was. Thirty-eight years old and going to work at the world headquarters of Carter, Morgan & Ross, a sleek tower encased in reflective glass, located just around the corner from the federal courthouse, near the state capitol, in the locus of all that mattered in Richmond, Virginia.

  Jenny parked in a garage across the street, walked through a plaza dotted with fountains, then entered through a needlessly large atrium-style lobby with polished marble floors and a bronze statue of the firm’s long-dead founders.

  It was all meant to convey the power, wealth, and importance of the building’s occupants—a thirteen-hundred-lawyer firm whose annual revenues topped $1 billion.

  Jenny’s small slice of this domain could be found on one of the lower floors. She spent the morning jumping between meetings and conference calls. The usual. Then, around 10:45, she recei
ved a text message: Short notice, I know, but can you do 11:30?

  It came from a burner phone, a number she knew well, even though she had never programmed it into her phone. Every time she saw it flash up, a jangle of nervous excitement passed through her.

  She wrote back one word: Yes.

  The same word she almost always wrote back to this particular texter, who had become so important in her life.

  Then she immediately erased the exchange. You could never be too careful.

  Half an hour later, Jenny informed her assistant she was headed out to an early lunch. The assistant accepted the lie smoothly. Soon Jenny was crossing back through the marble atrium and past the fountains again.

  But she didn’t go to her car. She kept walking at a brisk pace—just another woman in high-heeled shoes, a leather document case under her arm, hurrying along the street in downtown Richmond, Virginia.

  Her destination was The Commonwealth, a hotel within sight of the state capitol. She had kept a room booked there for the past two months. These meetings were difficult to schedule and often only came together at the last moment, when schedules meshed. It was easier to keep the room on standby, just in case it was needed.

  She had arranged for the billing to go directly to Carter, Morgan & Ross, so it wouldn’t show up on her credit card or in her expense report. CMR’s coffers could handle it.

  There were certainly grander hotels in downtown Richmond—the Jefferson, the Berkeley, the Omni. There was just too great a chance of running into someone she knew in the lobby.

  She didn’t want to have to answer any questions about what she was up to.

  The Commonwealth, while not exactly a hot-sheet establishment, was simpler. Its lobby was small, and not noted for being a local hangout. Yet the hotel was still centrally located, which made it the best of both worlds.

  The elevators were directly in line with the main entrance—no awkward nods at the reception desk staff needed—and Jenny was soon zooming up toward the top floor.

  Once there, she turned left down the narrow hallway, and went to the room at the end, taking a key card out of her purse and letting herself in.

  She was not the first to arrive.

  There was already a man waiting for her there, his large frame sprawled across the bed. He was about Jenny’s age. He had a square jaw and full-bodied hair that was the envy of all.

  “Hey,” she said as she entered, tossing her document case on the desk.

  “We’ve really got to stop meeting like this,” he said, grinning.

  “We’d better not.”

  “The lady is so demanding,” he said mock-seriously.

  “So, what, is this not going to be worth my time today?”

  “No, no. I promise it will be.”

  CHAPTER 7

  NATE

  Robert McBride wasn’t a doctor.

  Google could tell me that much.

  Nor did he seem to be any other kind of staff member. A quick check of the Virginia public employee database on the Richmond Times-Dispatch website confirmed as much.

  Which meant he had to be a . . . patient?

  A man who had mental illness severe enough to be hospitalized and yet also knew something about the Praesidium.

  Had Rogers kidnapped him too? Perhaps driven him to madness?

  Whatever was going on, Robert McBride knew . . . something. More than I did, at any rate. I had to at least attempt to talk with him.

  Without the girls, obviously. I needed to jettison them with their grandparents again. Dominion State Hospital was not quite on the way to Surry, but it was at least sort of in the same direction.

  My in-laws, Sebastian and Deborah Welker—Seb and Deb, as everyone called them—lived on a farm that had been in the family for three generations. I called them and was soon overwhelmed by Deb’s gushing about how she’d love to take the girls again.

  Seb, who was beyond handy—and had a stash of spare parts that would make a prepper blush—offered to help me with the plumbing problem that I was, once again, using as cover for emergency childcare. I talked him into realizing he was really too busy with the farm and convinced him I had it covered.

  I quickly threw on some business casual clothes—no shower for Daddy—then got the girls loaded in our SUV. We had a gray Range Rover that Jenny had picked out for us when she first got pregnant because she had read somewhere that it had advanced antirollover technology. Also, it looked like it could survive a cruise missile strike.

  As I got underway, I kept checking my rearview mirror, seeing if I was being followed. I didn’t want Rogers and/or the higher powers at CP&L to know what I was up to. I assumed I had been under some kind of surveillance for a while now. Rogers knew what time Jenny got home, and he knew that my girls had been with their grandparents the day before.

  I didn’t see any obvious tail as I left the city and got on the highway. The closer I got to Surry, the more I became confident I really was alone. At least for now.

  After dropping the girls off, I made my way to Dominion State Hospital. The site that had once been the home of the lunatic asylum—and all the electroshock therapy, phrenology experiments, forced sterilizations, and other horrors of early-twentieth-century psychology—had been condemned long ago.

  Dominion State Hospital was now housed in a sprawling complex of two-story buildings with wings extending in every direction. Numerous signs warned me I was under video surveillance.

  I parked and went into the main entrance, where I found the admissions desk.

  “Hi,” I told the receptionist. “I’m Nate Lovejoy. I’m here to see a patient named Robert McBride.”

  She typed and stared at the screen.

  “He’s in our high-security unit. Are you law enforcement?”

  High security. So, unsurprisingly, Robert McBride had done something criminal.

  Like getting conned into killing his wife?

  Thinking quickly, I said, “Oh, actually, I’m a lawyer.”

  Which was not untruthful—at one point, anyway.

  If she asked for a business card, I was going to be out of luck. But she said, “Okay, Mr. Lovejoy. Can I please see a driver’s license?”

  I had one of those, no problem. And before I knew it, she was entering me into the computer, taking my picture on the small camera attached to the computer, and printing out a visitor’s badge.

  She informed me I couldn’t take my phone into the high-security area, so I ran it back out to my car. When I returned, she asked me to wait “a moment” for my escort.

  A moment turned out to be more like half an hour, but eventually a guard led me down a long series of hallways, through a pair of locked doors that we needed to be buzzed through, and into a small interior room. It had been divided in half by a thick Plexiglas partition, which had a circle of pea-size air holes drilled into it.

  There was a chair in front of the glass. The guard told me to have a seat and left me alone.

  Another wait ensued. Then, finally, the door on the other side of the divider was opened by a guard. A man entered. He was dressed in orange scrubs that had been tucked into an elastic waistband and wore black plastic slides on his feet. No belts or shoelaces in this part of the hospital.

  He was anywhere between forty-five and sixty. What little hair he had was shaved down to an uneven stubble. His beard was gray and ill tended. His glasses were at least thirty years out of style.

  I don’t mean to say that having a bad haircut and unfashionable eyewear made him look like he belonged in a psychiatric hospital. But as social mammals, human beings have many millions of years of evolution that make us gifted readers of other human beings. We instantly judge a thousand small factors—everything from the way someone walks to, yes, what kind of glasses they wear—to make decisions about each other.

  And based on nothing more (and nothing less) than all that, my first impression of Robert McBride was that it was entirely possible he was mentally unbalanced enough to belong here.r />
  He sat down.

  “Mr. McBride, I’m Nate Lovejoy. Thanks for coming to see me.”

  “Call me Buck,” he said. “Everyone else does.”

  Buck McBride. He had a rural southern Virginia accent, not terribly different from my father-in-law’s.

  “And you can call me Nate.”

  “They say you want to be my lawyer or something?” he asked, appropriately mystified.

  “Something like that,” I said. “I got your name and address from the Cult InfoShare Network. I was hoping you could tell me more about these people.”

  I reached into my pocket and took out the key card. The moment he saw the logo, Buck leaped from his seat, knocking the chair over as he scrambled toward the back wall—because apparently that thick glass partition didn’t give him enough separation from me.

  “Where did you get that?” he hissed, glaring at it like it bore the devil’s mark. “Vanslow DeGange sent you, didn’t he? Don’t lie.”

  “I assure you, he didn’t. I’ve never met the man. Some of his people kidnapped me yesterday but I managed to get away. I stole this key card off one of them. But I don’t know a thing about them.”

  “Prove it,” Buck snarled. “Take off your shirt. Take it off, right now.”

  I had no idea how that would prove anything, but I did as he asked, unbuttoning my shirt and stripping it off.

  “The T-shirt too,” he said.

  Again I complied, pulling it over my head so I was now sitting there bare chested.

  “Lift up your arms,” he ordered. “Hold them out.”

  I obliged him, hoping neither of the guards was looking in at what would have appeared to be one of the stranger attorney-client conferences in legal history.

  “Look, Buck, I don’t know what we’re doing right now, but can I put my shirt back on?”

  “You’re really not with them?”

  “I’m really not,” I said, redonning my clothes. “I don’t really even know who they are.”

  Suddenly, he was in the chair and had gotten as close to the air holes as he could get.