burst into tears of joy and stood up, hugging him. Dafoe held her till she steadied. Then he helped her check out of the hospital, gather up her prescriptions, and get into his pickup.
* * *
Tears of rage came hours later, after Sang-mi hiked to a remote meditation cabin with a simple meal for GreenSpirit. She found the Wiccan leader murdered, mutilated, her body drenched in blood.
Sheriff Walker rushed out there as soon as the breathless, hysterical Korean acolyte called 911.
“A ritual murder, that’s what we’ve got,” the sheriff later told a large, tightly pressed crowd of journalists who’d raced up from the city. He described the lurid pentagrams that had been carved into GreenSpirit’s chest, cheeks, and belly, and promised a “full and complete investigation, no matter where the evidence leads.” The comment immediately sparked speculation that GreenSpirit’s vicious demise was linked to the one man who might have the most to gain by her silencing: presidential candidate Roger Lilton.
But every witch and Pagan in the region feared that a witch hunt—in the most horrific sense of the words—had begun.
CHAPTER 11
The presidential palace gleamed white as sugar under the glaring sun, a promise of shade and drink amid marble and silk. A mere block away, Rick Birk, seventy-four-year-old investigative reporter, fanned himself furiously as his rickshaw driver made his way through the crowded streets. Despite his discomfort, Birk loved breaking out his tropical-weight safari suits—custom tailored with high collars to hide his sagging neck—for equatorial forays that reminded viewers he was still a dashing, war-torn foreign correspondent.
Decades ago he’d draped his fit young frame in khaki every morning, and he could still wax nostalgic for the years when he wore his bwana garb to cover the Vietnam War for the Associated Press. Especially alluring were his deeply cherished memories of dropping his soft cotton drawers for nights soaked with gin and tonic and sex with a staggering array of Saigonese women. That’s if they were women. They were so goddamned teensy that it had been hard to tell in his nightly stupor, so Birk made a point of preserving his upright sense of self by never asking their age. Just grab two, three, four of them and go. Break out opium, hash, and Thai sticks, and share the smoke with his newest nubile friends. And then cavort for hours in petite fields of firm flesh. Ah, those were the days. Don’t let anybody kid you. Christ, he was glad to have been alive when you could wet your wick and not get sick. At least not with anything truly ghastly.
His Vietnam reporting earned him a Pulitzer before he jumped the Good Ship Print for the greater fame of television, where he was lauded for possessing the pluck of Morley Safer, the unmitigated gall of Mike Wallace, and the sangfroid of Peter Jennings—all names that meant less and less with the passage of every hour in the fiercely burgeoning multimedia universe of the twenty-first century.
Birk’s highest accolades had come decades ago. These days, he was even scorned in his own newsroom. No less than Jenna Withers could hang up on him with outrageous impunity. It helped to know that there had once been a much sweeter time when she would have done penance on her knees for that impropriety—or been out on her ass.
Intimations of his glory days often crept up on Birk when he found himself, as he did this afternoon, on his way for drinks. Or as he preferred to call it, a “briefing from a high government official.” In this case, the Maldivian minister of defense.
That these randomly cast, largely forgotten islands should even need a minister of defense would have struck the world as ludicrous, until the second terrorist bombing in a year tore apart a street no more than three blocks from where Birk ambled along … so slowly that he had to actively resist an urge to slip off his fine alligator belt and flog the little brown bugger hauling him along.
No one but idiots was impressed with his television appearances these days. He ascribed this to the decline of “traditional media,” rather than his ravaged looks—the pits and craters from the removal of numerous precancerous skin growths. The relentless sun, not his withered organ, had humbled him most visibly. In bad light, Birk looked pocked with shrapnel, and when he appeared on camera, he layered on more pancake than a drag queen with a five o’clock shadow.