Here's another chapter for you!
The Messenger
Chapter 11
The Truth Will Out
Cho and Lisbon turned around and made their way back to the tired old diner just in time to see the cook and the black haired woman get in their car and drive away. Keeping back a discreet distance, Cho allowed another car to overtake him so he could surveille the two suspects. The car drove for a half hour, finally cutting off at a side road and proceeded to a small house set far back from the road. The clapboard siding had once been a light blue, with darker blue shutters adorning the large picture window on the low-slung, ranch style house. Cho watched the pair leave their car under a partition out of the sun and enter the house through a side door. Once they were inside, Cho pulled up and parked on the far side of the lot. Lisbon and Cho walked to the front door and rang the bell, glad that there was no dog barking on the other side of the door. A moment later the old wooden door opened to reveal the black haired woman wearing a flowered house dress and pink slippers. The garish red lipstick had been wiped off, replaced with a clear lipgloss. She looked slightly less outlandish now. Seeing Cho and Lisbon, the woman made to slam the door shut but Cho's heavy shoe stopped her efforts.
"Ma'am, we need to talk to you. We're FBI agents. We met this morning at the diner" said Lisbon with patience. The woman hid behind the door, putting her full body weight against it to keep Cho out.
"Mom! Mom what are you doing out there?" came a voice from the back of the house. A moment later the cook emerged and yanked the door open. A look of shock registered on his face and he was temporarily speechless. Flashing their badges yet again, Cho and Lisbon demanded to be let in, their patience now running low. The man knew he had run out of time, and backed away, opening the door to let the two agents inside the small house.
The diner was a pigsty, but Lisbon was equally shocked when she stepped into the house. It was immaculate. Tasteful furniture graced the large living room, with a few well chosen knick knacks sitting on the fireplace mantle and scattered across the large coffee table in front of the leather sofa. Photographs dotted the room in abundance, showing a happy family in earlier days. An oriental rug, or a imitation oriental rug lay on the polished wooden floor, adding rich colour to the warmly decorated room. Beyond the living room was a small dining room outfitted with a lovely dark wood table and chair set. The table was adorned with a cut glass vase holding a spray of pale pink flowers. More photos were on the walls here too. No doubt the kitchen and bedrooms would be just as tastefully decorated. The interior of the house was classy, well cared for and welcoming, the exact opposite of the interior of the diner. Cho looked as surprised as Lisbon at this turn of events, but took a step further into the room to start his questioning of the pair. As he did so, Lisbon walked the perimeter of the room like Jane always did, gazing at the photos and trying to figure out who these people were in relation to the cook and waitress. Mother and Son, so it appeared.
"I'm going to ask you once again if you have seen this man" Cho said, holding out Jane's photo. ""And let me warn you, lying to a Federal Agent will cause you regrets you don't want to have, not now" Cho said with force. The woman looked like she might faint so Lisbon stepped in and encouraged her to sit on the sofa and calm down. The man followed his mother and they both held hands as they sat and faced their inquisitors.
"Ma'am, please, we know that Mr. Jane came into your diner" said Lisbon, exaggerating their certainty that the lemonade bottle had belonged to Jane and not some random person.
"He purchased a bottle of lemonade last night, left and was never seen again. You're hiding something from us, and we need to know why."
"Let me remind you that Mr. Jane is a Federal Agent. Tell us what you know" said Cho sternly.
The woman looked into Cho's hard face and dissolved in tears, falling into her son's arms. He ignored Cho for a moment and comforted his distraught mother, shhshing her and rubbing her back as she sobbed. Finally he turned to Cho and Lisbon and took hold of the photo. With a quick glance at it he nodded, then handed it back to Cho.
"We saw him last night. He came into the diner when the storm was just beginning. He bought a lemonade and a bag of potato chips. I offered him eggs but he declined. Can't blame him, the diner is a disaster" he said simply.
Cho looked at Lisbon and smiled tightly. Finally a break.
"You lied to us this morning. Why? You set back the investigation into Mr. Jane's disappearance by hours!" he scolded them.
The woman wiped her eyes and slowly pulled herself upright again. Looking around the tidy room, she felt a huge weight could be lifted off her shoulders, like the worries of the world would be handed off to someone else finally. If she could trust these people. They would know everything soon enough anyway.
"We're not bad people, you must believe me. We were just doing what we had to do. What we were told to do" she said, looking at Lisbon, hoping this woman would understand her.
"I don't get it. You live in a lovely home, obviously you care about it, but your diner should be condemned. You're living a double life" Lisbon said. She got up and reached for a photo sitting on the mantle. Bringing it back, she held it out and pointed to the people in the photo. There was the cook, in younger days when he as slimmer and had more hair, but it was him. He had his arm around the shoulders of a slim, pretty young woman who could have been his sister. Next to them stood an attractive older woman, neatly coiffed with a head full of shining silver hair, conservative makeup and tailored clothes. It was the waitress, but she looked so much more reserved and respectable in the photo. Rounding out the photo was a tall smiling man, obviously the woman's husband as he held her hand tightly.
"This is you isn't it?" said Lisbon, pointing to the woman in the photo. The woman leaned forward and took the photo reverently from Lisbon's hand and traced her finger over the picture of the girl and the older man.
"Yes…" she said softly, a tear forming in the corner of her eye. "That's us, in better days. This is me, who I really am…" she said, pointing to herself in the picture. Cho let her ramble. Something was really wrong in this little family.
"And this is my son, as you probably guessed" she said with a sad smile. Her son rubbed her arm and encouraged her to continue.
'This is my husband, God rest his soul. He died four years ago. I miss him every day." She stopped for a moment, then soldiered on.
"And this is my daughter. My beautiful daughter. Evangeline. Evie for short. Isn't she beautiful?" she asked no one in particular, lost in her memories of a happy family years ago.
"Yes, she's lovely" said Lisbon quietly. "Tell us what happened. Where did Mr. Jane go last night after he left your diner?" she asked again.
The man next to her smiled and gave her a slight nod of his head. "Go on Mom, tell them everything."
Cho got out his notepad and pen and started the interview in earnest. "Can we start with some names?"
The woman sniffed and wiped her eyes with a tissue, regaining her composure.
"Of course, of course. I'm Dianna McCall, and this is my son Richard. My husband was Robert, and of course, there is my daughter Evie."
"Where is Evie Mrs. McCall?" asked Lisbon kindly. She didn't want Dianna to fall apart again.
"She's out there, somewhere" Dianna said, waving her hand vaguely through the air.
"Out where?" asked Cho.
Mrs. McCall turned to face Cho directly. "My daughter is a very kind soul, an old soul, some people have told me, if you believe in that sort of thing...and she always wanted to take care of people, stray animals, plants. Any living thing. She was always a very spiritual girl as well. I don't know where she got that from because none of us ever went to church when she was growing up. It was just a need she had, a way to make sense of the world" the woman continued.
Richard took over the story as his mother looked to him for help.
"Evie graduated with top marks from high school then went to Concordia University in Austin for her nursing degree. She loved the patients and the work. The only thing was, there were no jobs forthcoming when she graduated. The few jobs that were out there were scooped up by nurses who had been working for a few years already. A new grad didn't stand a chance of getting one of those positions. She was pretty depressed about it but felt her luck had changed when she met a man one day who told her he needed nurses for his private clinic."
Cho was getting frustrated with this meandering story and still no answers regarding Jane and his visit to the diner. Lisbon could tell he was going to press Richard for news on Jane, so she took the lead. This was all important, somehow.
"So Evie got a job. Happy ending?" she shortcutted to the conclusion of the story.
"No, not a happy ending. The man, Michael, she called him, told her he was running a refuge for people who had issues. Social misfits, chronically unemployed, displaced folks who needed a helping hand up to a better life. Seekers who wanted a quiet, more spiritual existence and wanted to escape the temptations of the city. That's how Michael described his refuge. He was also building a small hospital on-site so he could provide his people with the care they needed. And for that he needed nurses. Evie was interested. This was something she could really enjoy, and the fact that it was a spiritual place was the icing on the cake."
"She took a trip out to the place with Michael and came back home very excited. She wanted to be a part of his Refuge Ranch, as she called it. She gathered her things and a few days later a man came and picked her up to take her there to work."
"How is this a bad ending?" asked Lisbon. "Sounds like a good fit for her and her skill set."
"That's what we thought too" said Diana, leaning forward now, anger rising in her voice. "We thought she would work there and come home to visit whenever she had a free weekend. But months went by before we heard from her again. When she finally contacted us, she was changed. She wasn't herself anymore."
"She was a robot!" Richard interrupted harshly. "A damned robot controlled by that lunatic Michael. She had to work for another 2 months before they would let her come home. It was 5 months from the time she left until we saw her again. By then she was thin and exhausted, and completely under Michael's control. I guess he only let her come home to prove to us she was alive and well. She went back again even though we begged her to stay home with us and try to find a job in Austin again."
"She said she owed everything to Michael and she couldn't let him down. She packed her things and off she went again" said her mother, a red flush of anger skating across her cheeks.
"And what does any of this have to do with Mr. Jane's disappearance?" demanded Cho, his patience gone.
Dianna turned to Cho and looked at him as if the answer was obvious.
"Michael's got him" she stated plainly.
Cho sat up and turned to look at Lisbon, whose face had suddenly lost all of its' colour.
"Why do you say that?" Cho asked, seeing why the long story had to play out.
"Michael has a man, Calvin, who travels around the back country roads trying to make contact with potential Refuge members. We were told by this man that we needed to open up the old diner again so he could meet with more people. The diner used to belong to my uncle years ago, and when he died, my Dad was going to sell it off for the value of the land" explained Richard.
"Can you describe this Calvin to us?" asked Lisbon.
Dianna gave a remarkably accurate physical description of the vile man. She had spent hours studying his weasley face. She would never forget it.
"When Dad died before he could sell the diner and the land, we just locked the doors of the building. Calvin, the man sent from Refuge Ranch, found out we were the owners and demanded that we open it for business again. He came to see us here and by the time he left, we knew we had to do it" continued Richard.
"But why? What was the point if he could just meet people anywhere and try to persuade them to join Michael's group? What about the entire city of Austin, just down the road? Surely the diner was a poor way to do that?" said Lisbon reasonably.
"Calvin said he needed a home base, some place to check in and watch for new people going by. His reasoning sounded nonsensical to us but he had all the power to connect us to Evie, so we had to go along. He warned us that if we didn't do it we would never see Evie again. You have to understand. We don't know where this Refuge Ranch is otherwise we would go and get her ourselves!" continued Dianna.
"We've looked and looked but nothing shows up on any internet search or map. We've driven thousands of miles looking for the Ranch but so far, we can't find it. If standing behind a counter a few hours a day will help to bring Evie home again, I have to do it!" said Dianna, running her hand through her harsh black hair.
"Do you think I like looking like this? This ridiculous hair and the dirty uniform? I know better than to live like that!" said the older woman.
"We reopened the diner like we were told to do, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend one penny fixing it up to make it more appealing in order to lure some poor soul into Michael's clutches, just for the mistake of coming in for a meal" she continued.
"We hoped that if we kept the diner as filthy as possible, no one would linger. So far it has worked pretty well and Calvin isn't having much luck persuading anyone to go away with him. At least, God, I hope not…" said Richard, deep in thought.
'Your Mr. Jane came in last night. We were as unfriendly as we could be but Calvin was sitting right there on that damned stool he always perches on. We had to offer your agent food at the very least" said Dianna. "We had to show Calvin we were playing by the rules."
"He had the good sense to decline and instead just bought his snacks and left. Calvin warned him to watch out for flash floods and signs on the highway indicating road closures" said Richard.
"What happened when Jane left the diner?" asked Cho.
"I was on the phone with a neighbour of ours, but Mom told me that Calvin called someone on his cell phone the minute Mr. Jane left. After that, we just don't know what became of your agent" Richard concluded.
"Michael has him! That damned Calvin called someone and now Mr. Jane is missing. I heard there was a flash flood not far from here last night. If your agent didn't keep to the main road for some reason, then maybe he got caught up in the flood" she surmised, seeing the possibility of Calvin engineering a roadblock to fool Jane.
Lisbon was on her feet instantly, feeling sick to her stomach. After a very long and circuitous story, the whole mystery was starting to make sense. A check with the Department of Transportation and Roads would soon reveal which roads had officially been closed last night. Cho stood up and closed his notepad.
"Mrs. McCall, Richard, thank you for the information. You've been a big help. Here is my card in case you need to reach me with any news that you think will help" said Cho, handing his business card over to Richard. Lisbon did the same, eager now to get going and find this mystery man Michael, and the location of Refuge Ranch. As they turned to leave, Dianna reached out and took Cho's sleeve in her hand.
"Find my baby Evie. Please! Find my Evie and you'll find your Mr. Jane!"
"We will. Be strong" said Lisbon kindly, then she and Cho let themselves out of the front door. They walked quickly towards their SUV and once inside, sat for a moment digesting this new piece of the puzzle.
Cho turned to Lisbon and gauged her reaction. She was clearly worried. He dared to reach out and patted her hand, a most un-Cho like demonstration of affection.
"We'll find him Lisbon."
Squaring her shoulders with determination, she nodded briskly and wiped a tear away from her cheek.
"I know. Let's go and catch that bastard!" she barked. Cho turned the key and drove off at speed, not bothering to ask if she was referring to Calvin or Michael. It hardly mattered. Both of them were now on the FBI's radar. With luck, their days of power over poor people like Dianna and Evie were numbered.