' "Commercial area"?"

"I'll get to that in a minute. Now over here is the University complex. There are only about six hundred students and maybe fifty faculty, and anywhere else it would be called a college. It's still in the process of construction. Just about everything around there is being built up and added on to. And here to the north of the University grounds you've got the Meadows Settlements. Like a small city of retirement homes and homes where the employees live. That's all the secondary security area. Guards and gates to go through and so on, but not as tight as where the Manse and Communications are.

"You asked about the commercial area. This is it, all along the divided boulevard here for about three miles. This divided part of it is called Henrietta Boulevard after old Matthew Meadows' mother. It changes to two-lane when it gets to about two miles from the interchange, and changes back to State Road 433.

"This controlled commercial development is owned and managed by ECB Enterprises. ECB for Eternal Church and so on. What you have is the big Meadows Mall here, biggest mall in that end of the state. Along here are the big motels where the tourists and the pilgrims stay. And fast-food places, all leased from ECB. Lakemore Construction is the building arm of ECB.

It builds commercial to the tenant's wishes, and it builds all the little houses in the Meadows Settlements according to several standard floor plans. Then there is Meadows Development, Inc. I'm not exactly sure what it does. Planning, maybe. The executive offices for the commercial side are on the second floor in the Mall. The Mall is the third grade of security area, just enough guards and patrols to keep order there and around the motel parking lots at night and so on.

"ECB Enterprises seems to own the Central Citizens Bank of Lakemore. Anyway, they bought a controlling interest back from the bank holding company that picked it up years ago, and they have a majority on the board of directors.

"What have I left out? Oh, maybe the most important part.

In Communications they've got professional television and radio broadcast facilities, with first-class people. The early church service they had there this morning gets cut to fifty minutes and goes up to the transponders they've got on a couple of satellites, sent up there through the big GTE narrow beam dishes on the roof of Communications, over at the end away from the heliport. It's a full hour when they get through with it, with five minutes of solicitations in front and in back of the service. From the satellite, either Tex-Tel or Westar, it goes to the cable and to the television stations that use it direct, so you might have a couple hundred stations putting that morning service on the air right now.

"They try to stay on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, television, radio, Bible lessons, talk shows, repeats, pageants, God only knows what. They have a lot of local talk shows scattered around, and for that they draw on their affiliated churches, about eighty of them. What happens, they get people to tithe, to send in ten percent of their income and sometimes even twenty and thirty percent.

The money rolls in and the visitors roll in. Magazine and newspaper people, politicians, IRS, investigators from state and national committees, people writing books and lots and lots of hustlers. The big shots come in by private airplane and land on the strip back here beyond the hill where the Manse is.

Some of them even get to stay in the Manse, which I understand is considered to be one of the finest small hotels in the world. At least it is staffed by people who used to work in fine hotels. ECB Enterprises has a couple of Gulfstream jets, a couple of small Beechcraft and a chopper along with a little tower and a staff of ten to fly and maintain them."

2-4 "What do you mean about hustlers?"

"Big money attracts all kinds. Healers keep coming around to hitch a ride on the big bandwagon, but the Meadows family doesn't seem to want to get mixed up with any charismatics.

They stay on the fundamentalist side of almost everything.

And, of course, a lot of people come around who want to be licensed to sell souvenirs and trinkets. Those are handled by some kind of corporate subsidiary. Photographs, paintings, lapel pins, brooches, bumper stickers and insignia of their Society of Merit."

"Insignia?"

"There's lots of levels and degrees. Like if you give a hundred thousand dollars to the Church, you become a Founder of the Society of Merit, and you get a gold pin with diamonds, and you get to be flown in and stay at the Manse. The Manse looks a hundred years old, but it's only six. The people who want to sell stuff, they screen them very carefully. Just like they screen the people who apply for space in the Mall. I kept my eyes and my ears open, Mr. Owen, and the mail has to be trucked out there every single working day. Lots of bags of mail. There is a big mail room in Communications. Deposits go to the bank in an armored car. I can't make a guess because I don't have the figures on how many people contribute and tithe and so on.

But from what they spend and how they live, they've got to be taking in more than two million a week. Maybe an awful lot more. And the Church is tax-exempt. It got the exemption back in 1946 when old Matthew broke away from the Baptists and started his own church. He had sixty parishioners to start with, and one old lady died and left everything to him. He used the money to go on radio."

"I've been watching the broadcasts. I see Matthew Meadows once in a while," Roy Owen said.

Those are old repeats. He's got Alzheimer's disease. That's what they call senility these days. If they let him loose he wanders away and gets lost. What do you think of the television church services?"

They seem very... well organized. Very attractive young people in the choir."

The Angels. Some are students at Meadows University, and some of them work in the area, and some of them are kids in trouble that their folks bring and leave here. A lot of them live 2-5 in a dormitory inside the primary security area beyond the Garden of Mercy. The ones who aren't in school and don't have regular jobs have to do odd jobs around the area to pay for their keep."

"You certainly learned a lot about it."

Hanrahan slowly folded the map and handed it to Roy Owen.

"You can have it. It wasn't hard finding out how they are organized up there and what goes on. It isn't any kind of illegal setup. I kept asking how I could get a security guard job and if it was hard work once I got it. Security guards talk because it is very dull standing around."

"Why all the security? Why so much?"

"I wondered too, at first. But pretty soon I realized why it has to be. John Tinker Meadows and his old man and his sister, they rope in their supporters by playing on their fears and on their hatreds and their loneliness. When you play that game with a big net, you are going to scoop up some people here and there who are pretty well unwrapped. Like they say, their elevators don't go to their top floors. There are metal detectors set into the frames of those big Tabernacle doors, and the guards are very good at quietly intercepting people going in. Six or eight times a year some loony tries to take a gun into church.

Maybe God told them to blow John Tinker away, or take a shot at that big Sister Mary Margaret. Maybe in some sermon or other John Tinker told any Church member married to a sinner to pack up and get out. So the sinner brings a gun to get even. Or some nutcake decides he's so steeped in sin that the only way he can acknowledge it is blow his brains out during the service. By now do you know what I've been trying to tell you?"

"I... I guess I do, Mr. Hanrahan. It's a great big powerful organization and they are geared to repel boarders of any kind.

With that sort of money coming in, they could make themselves immune to almost any kind of nuisance approach. My wife was just one person in a big crowd of... hustlers."

"And her chance of worming her way inside was zero, or the next thing to it. If they have to hire somebody to run the two-ton dishwashing machine in the Manse, they background them as carefully as the FBI and the CIA. Everybody working inside the primary security area has been cleared back to the cradle, and even so there is a lot of quiet surveillance going on."

z6 Roy Owen took a card out of his wallet and slid it across to Hanrahan, saying, "Did I get it right when you phoned me?"

He pushed the card back.

"Exactly right. Lenore Olan instead of Linda Owen. Amateurs tend to stick with the same initials. Room sixteen at the County Line Motel, which is way on the other side of Lakemore. That's where she stayed. And that's where whatever happened began, or began and ended."

Roy Owen was silent, remembering how Lindy had sounded when she'd phoned him on May sixth, that last Friday night he had heard her voice. Despondent was too strong a word.

Listless and tired.

"It isn't like I thought it would be," she had said.

"There's a lot of stories here, but nothing Out Front I would want to use. And maybe there's a nice juicy Out Front story behind the scenes, but I don't think I'm going to get it. If one lead works, I might stay a couple of days, maybe not. I don't know. Maybe I'll give up this line of work. Makes me feel just a little bit tacky. Now don't tell me how happy that makes you, or I just might not quit." He remembered hearing the soft husky sound of her yawning just before she said good night, told him she loved him and hung up.

"As I said in the written report, she phoned you on Friday night, Mr. Owen, and then she left the motel before dawn sometime during Saturday night. The motel owner didn't pay any attention particularly, because she was paid through Sunday. The room was empty and she and her rental car were gone. It was a cold trail by the time the police came into the picture. After you talked to her editor and said you couldn't reach her, they tried and then reported that she was a missing person."

"The report wasn't very clear about the car."

"Nothing is clear about the car. It was a Budget Ford on a corporate credit card. The license number was on the motel registration. When they traced it through Budget, they found out it had been brought here, to the airport lot. The keys and the rental agreement were in the glove compartment. The charge went through. By the time they found the car, it had been rented several times and it was down in Tampa. Car rental offices at airports have problems with people who cut it too close making their flight. They found the car in the airport lot on Monday, according to the charge they made on it, but 2-7 nobody knows when it entered the lot. Apparently there was no parking ticket issued, or it was lost."

"So if something happened to her in Lakemore, somebody else drove the car down to this city, Mr. Hanrahan. And if she was the one who drove it down here, then something happened to her at this airport or at La Guardia, or in the city before she got to her apartment. Which was it?"

"She was Eastern Airlines coach, round trip, and her name did not show up on any of the manifests of any of the flights Saturday, Sunday or Monday, the seventh, eighth or ninth.

The trail was ten days cold when the police got on it. And right now it's three months cold."

"I know. I realize that. But it is hell not to know. You keep thinking about it and wondering."

Hanrahan shrugged.

"We've got fifty thousand kids disappearing every year and every year they come up with maybe two thousand unidentified bodies of kids. That means there are lots of people doing a lot of wondering. A lot of pain. I'm not trying to make yours sound like less..."

"I realize that. I've got a month, a little less, of vacation. I'm in touch with my assistant. The market doesn't seem to be doing anything interesting. I don't want to be a dimned fool, but I keep thinking that if I could find somebody she got friendly with the time she was here... and if that person might have noticed anything... I don't know why, but I keep thinking of going to that motel and staying in that same room."

"I can tell you it's not much of a place." He stood up.

"There's nothing more I can do. I don't know what happened, if anything, and I don't know how to find out. I don't think that hanging around that area is going to do you any good. On the other hand it isn't going to do you any harm. And it will keep you from wondering if you could maybe have done something."