“Was that what happened with Eden? No one was willing to make the hard choice?”
She took a sip of her lemonade. “I made the hard choice. But we were too late. Doug must have warned them, briefed them on how it would go down when we came in, that they’d have a window to get everyone dead before we returned with the warrant. They had to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, and the skills to evade us could only have come from insider knowledge.”
Her tone was bitter, and the faraway gaze was gone, replaced by the anger of a predator who’d missed its prey.
“So you’re saying when Doug went native, he went in all the way?” Sam asked.
“Yes. So you can imagine, hearing after all these years that he actually got out and took the Rousch girl with him is confusing, to say the least. If he was so disillusioned, why not come back to us?”
“He was afraid of being prosecuted,” Baldwin said.
“Yes, yes, that’s the party line, I’m sure. It wouldn’t have happened. We would have spent time and money to see him deprogrammed, and he would have been a hero for finding that little girl. He wouldn’t have been an agent anymore, but he wouldn’t have to stay on the run, either.”
Sam couldn’t help herself. “What do you really think happened with Doug? You had serious clout. You could have protected him. Surely he knew that.”
She took another sip of lemonade. Pointedly avoiding Sam’s question, she held up a finger and shook her head.
“I assume you got the parents’ permission to exhume the body of the one we messed up on?” she said to Baldwin.
Baldwin nodded. “We have a tentative ID—Jennifer Harvey. Lived in an orphanage in Anacostia, may have gotten caught in the cross fire in a drug deal. We’re following up, and Kaylie’s stepmother is willing to cooperate if reparations are made. She’s a piece of work. We found the father dead in the bedroom. He’d been there for months, if not longer. There’s a team liaising with the local homicide office to make sure there was no foul play, but the woman was clearly addled. She hated Kaylie. That much was clear. Said she was a compulsive liar.”
Anne leaned forward in her seat. “Did she, now? How very interesting.”
Chapter
52
SAM WAS FASCINATED by Anne Carter’s sudden change in demeanor. It was as if she’d seen an answer to a question Sam and Baldwin hadn’t asked yet. She began muttering to herself, quietly, under her breath, like a simmering kettle ready to boil.
Sam leaned back on the sofa. “Why do you say that, ma’am?”
The blue eyes lasered onto Sam. “First, Dr. Owens, tell me, what information did Kaylie Rousch give you about the cult?”
“That they were selling babies. The women were routinely raped in something they called the Reasoning, and the resulting babies were sold off.”
“Is she telling the truth?”
Baldwin set his glass on a marble coaster with a clink. “We’re looking into it. A trafficking operation of this scale, totally off the record, would take quite a few people to pull off. There would have to be a funnel organization, so to speak, to get the babies to the market, and the money back to the cult. That’s a lot of people along the chain to stay silent. We’ve never seen anything like it.”
Carter’s eyes narrowed, and she clasped her hands in her lap tightly. “Dr. Owens, you asked what I think happened. Doug could have put the ball in motion for them, then got scared and run. He had a business background, studied economics. We were going to help him get his MBA. He had a strong head for business, and a promising future. It was one of the reasons I brought him along.”
“Trafficking is a big charge to level. Did you feel betrayed by his actions?” Sam asked.
“Betrayed?” She huffed out a short laugh. “I’m a grown-up, Dr. Owens. This is a sad reality we sometimes have to acknowledge—people do stupid things for stupid reasons. I suppose Curtis Lott made it worth his while to leave our fold and enter hers.”
“But he ran away, then spent a year sending in reports asking for help.”
“Was he asking for help? Or was he sending us on a wild-goose chase?”
“That’s part of why we’re here, Anne,” Baldwin said. “The SIGINT from Matcliff indicates he wanted help extracting another girl from the cult.”
She looked pained. “If only that were the case. Those girls are dead, Dr. Baldwin. You know that.”
“I don’t know that, not at all. It wouldn’t be unheard of for us to find them alive.”
“Now who’s kidding whom? You really think the Eden cult would keep them alive, all these years? Use them for this ‘Reasoning,’ sell their babies? It’s preposterous. They are victims, like Kaylie was. She just got lucky, made an impression on Doug somehow, and he got her out. The rest are gone. We searched for them high and low. Each one, each case, thousands of man-hours.”