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“Hello, Agent Raines. Out of curiosity, why didn’t you call her and ask her yourself?”
“Because,” Raines muttered.
Charlie sighed. “So I take it you have not read everything she sent you, or you wouldn’t be asking me this.”
“I saw that video, and I already know the havoc this is going to cause,” Raines said.
“You should have read it all before you called, because then you’d know a religious cult called the Church of The Righteous has dispatched three hit men to kill her. One already tried. He’s sitting in a Dallas jail in deep shit. She sent you a video of the incident, along with all of the info that ties him to The Righteous, and I wasn’t even there. It happened at the office, and I was in court, waiting to testify on a case.”
“Jesus,” Raines muttered. “But she’s put a bounty on these men’s heads.”
“No, she did not, and you know it. All she asked for were their identities. If any of them are harmed in any way, or interfered with, the cash reward is nullified, and if anyone gives her a fake name trying to get the money, she’ll file charges against them for fraud.”
“What’s she going to do with the info?” Raines asked.
“Reveal them to the world for who they are...and what they were willing to do to her, for no other reason than that she was born. I back her fully, so there’s that,” Charlie added.
“Fine. So what’s with the Church of The Righteous...other than a religious cult?”
“Dammit, Raines. Read what she sent. The preacher is money laundering for a man named Preston Davis, who’s buying and selling stolen weapons. Go do your job and give them something more to worry about than what they can do to her,” Charlie said and hung up.
Hank Raines groaned. His wife was planning to grill T-bones tonight, and now he was going to be late going home for dinner. He turned back to his computer, pulled up the rest of the files that Wyrick’d sent and started reading. By the time he had finished, his toes were curling in his shoes. He didn’t know how much of the information Wyrick sent was clean enough to use. They’d have to verify it from their end before they could act, but she was a wonder.
He reached for the phone to call his boss. His guess was they’d pass it off to the ATF, and if they did, they were going to have a field day with this.
The video Wyrick sent to the media had set its own fire. Another message from the famous Jade Wyrick was solid gold, and when they began airing it, it blew up across social media, and the comment threads for every station that had aired it.
Preston Davis had gone to a family funeral in Baton Rouge, and was sitting at his aunt’s house having pie and coffee, when someone pointed at the television.
“Would you look at that!” someone said.
He turned around just as Jeremiah Raver’s face flashed on the screen. He set his food aside and walked closer, but by then the story was over. It was bothering him that someone he did business with had made national news. He needed to know what it was about without showing the concern he was feeling.
“Hey, Shirley, what was that all about?” he asked.
His cousin looked up at him from where she was sitting.
“That’s the preacher who heads up the Church of The Righteous over near Paulette.”
“So what’s going on?” Preston asked.
“Oh...they say he’s been preaching against a woman named Jade Wyrick, calling her an alien, and an abomination in the eyes of the Lord because of how she was born. A man in Dallas, Texas, was just arrested for trying to kill the Wyrick woman, and he claims his preacher sent him to do the deed. And it appears he’s not the only one. The Wyrick woman claims the preacher sent three men after her, so two more are still out there. She just put a quarter of a million dollar bounty on each of the other two men. She don’t want them dead or nothin’. She just wants their names and a picture. She’s about to blast their little secret society out of the water. What a mess. What a mess.”
“Indeed,” Preston said, but his mind was racing.
If the law got after Raver, and began digging deeper into his business dealings, that could mean trouble for him. It appeared he needed to do a little housecleaning himself, before things got out of hand.
Within hours of the video’s airing, every member of Raver’s church was in a panic. Was this going to fall back on them? Were they going to be arrested for abetting an attempted murder, when it was something they knew nothing about?
One by one, they began calling Jeremiah Raver, demanding answers, demanding their names be taken off the church register, but he wasn’t answering. They wanted the whole thing to go away, and their connections to him and the church off the World Wide Web.
And all the while this was going on, Jessup Wallis and Farrell Kitt were en route to Dallas, with no idea of what they were driving into.
Jeremiah was at his brother Samuel’s house in the bayou, and the cell service was spotty. He was anxious about what was happening, but he couldn’t get a call in or out. He needed to know what was going on to protect himself, so he got in the car and started driving until he got a strong cell signal, then pulled over on the old dirt road and started checking messages.
That was when he found all the missed calls from his church members. After listening to the panic and the anger in their voices, he realized the depth of trouble he was in. He had severely underestimated Jade Wyrick. If she had found out all this, then there was a chance she knew about his other activities, too. The men he did business with weren’t fond of publicity, and if they wanted the link between them destroyed, erasing their names in his contacts wouldn’t do it. They’d want him dead.
He needed to go home long enough to get to his computer and take down the website and delete the files in his email. He drove back to Samuel’s to let his sister-in-law, Maisie, know where he was going, and found his brother sitting on the porch.