and all female-only universities and colleges connected to Stanton Wilkey or Natural Order. Global search.”
Acknowledged. Working …
“You’re doing the daughter. Where did she go?”
“Online. Two bachelor’s degrees and an MBA from his online college.”
Search results show no college or university on-planet with those parameters.
“Because women don’t need higher education,” Eve concluded.
“Plus, it might give them ideas. He let his daughter get those degrees—but not in a social or open setting—because he can use her. I found some photos of her online, with him. Sometimes her mother or her brothers are in them, too. Mirium’s always in the background. She looks like staff because that’s essentially what she is.”
Eve drank some coffee. “Wouldn’t that bug the shit right out of you?”
“Me, yeah. But it’s the way she was raised, it’s what she’s been taught.”
“Wouldn’t you say the woman we spoke to today on that veranda deal could think for herself? Even had a sense of power and authority?”
“Yeah, I would. Until her father joined us.”
Eve lifted a hand, shot a finger at Peabody. “Exactly. He masks bigotry with benevolence. She masks intelligence with subservience. I think they’re both liars.”
She looked over at Yancy. “Got anything interesting?”
“I think so, here and there.”
“Why don’t you come over here, bring a chair?”
He brought the one he’d been sitting on, and his portable.
“I’m going to let this other Wilkey stuff stew back here for a while.” She waved her hand at the back of her head. “Give me what you’ve got on Steenberg.”
“Okay, she and her husband didn’t join the order until they were in their late forties. She worked as a domestic, he had a small handyman business. This was outside of St. Paul. Financially they were underwater more than above. What I put together is Carl Steenberg did some work for a member, and over the course of the job, the member talked up the order. Steenberg already belonged to Freedom Warriors—that’s been taken down, but it was a white nationalist group in the Midwest back then—so it was preaching to the choir.”
“Are you still synched with the screen?”
“Yeah.”
“Put Carl Steenberg up there. I like the visual.”
When he had, Eve saw a hard-eyed man in his upper sixties, going jowly. Gravel gray hair in a severe buzz cut.
“Split screen Gayle Steenberg and keep going.”
“They look like the mean version of American Gothic,” Peabody commented, and Yancy laughed.
“They really do. I have to figure the member sponsored the Steenbergs, because that’s one way to get into meetings and seminars, and they couldn’t afford the orientation and screening fees required otherwise.”
“Sponsored?”
“I set up a fake account and filled in a questionnaire on their website,” Yancy told her. “The orientation and screening fees are pretty sticky, but they waive the orientation fee if you’re sponsored by a member in good standing who’s been in for a minimum of three years.”
“That’s good work, Yancy. Good thinking.”
He shrugged. “You get curious. Six months after they joined, Steenberg closed his business, and they went to work at a Natural Order center—maintenance for him, domestic for her. A few years later, they packed up, moved to Kansas. They worked on the order’s Heartland Farm, and their kids went to the farm school. Five years after that, they moved to the HQ in Connecticut.
“Their kids didn’t.”
“What happened there?”
“The address I got for both kids, at the time of that move, was back in St. Paul. Maternal grandparents. Both had reached eighteen, so the Steenbergs couldn’t legally stop them. Both still live in that general area. The oldest one’s a cop with St. Paul PSD.”
“Is that so?”
“It’s an hour earlier there, so I went ahead and reached out. Detective Leroy Russ—both of them changed their last name legally to their grandparents’. I’ll have it all in the report, but to sum it up, he said his father was a vicious brute, and his mother no better. And Natural Order’s full of the same, along with lunatics, assholes, dumb shits, and other colorful terms.”
“I take it he didn’t enjoy his time with them.”
“Counted the days. He said he would have left when he hit eighteen, but couldn’t leave his brother. The minute the brother hit, they walked off the farm, stuck out their thumbs, and rode them back to St. Paul. He says he still remembers how his grandparents cried when they saw him and his brother at the door.”
“Any contact with the parents?”
“None. He said if we need anything from him to ask. He and his brother had to put it all