EIGHTEEN

SOMEWHERE OVER CALIFORNIA, FLIGHT AA102. 21 JUNE 2011. 2 A.M.

In the window seat beside him, Dan snored. He’d fallen asleep minutes after take-off, at the same time Kyle had fired up his laptop to begin assembling a rough cut of the footage they’d shot in Phoenix in the sit-down interview with Detective Sweeney.

Three shoots in three days and Kyle hadn’t slept more than two hours the previous night. They were due to land in Seattle at 5 a.m. and intended to drive straight to Martha Lake’s house from the airport; the plane journey to Seattle being their only chance for any rest now until the US schedule was in the can, sometime early the following afternoon. But sleep was the last thing Kyle would allow himself, even on a plane. It now felt plausible that he would never sleep again without dreaming of something that might get him sectioned.

He arranged his laptop and the Martha Lake notes on the fold-down tray. Fought with his rucksack until he found Levine’s Last Days. Thought hard again on his questions in light of what he had learned from Aguilar and the two cops. Leafed through Levine’s book and arrived at the plate section, in which the journalist had favoured the most famous portrait of Martha Lake: the Seattle PD mug shot after she’d been arrested for shoplifting in 1971, one year before her association with the cult.

Martha Lake had been the prettiest of all The Temple of the Last Days girls that Kyle had seen pictures of: Amish wholesome and broad of face, arresting brown eyes, voluptuous lips and perfect American teeth; long hazel hair parted down the centre and tied in bunches either side of the guileless face; a dusting of freckles across a sexy cartoon character’s upturned nose.

There were other pictures of Lake as a younger woman that Kyle had saved to file from a Google Images search. Most of the photographs online had been uploaded onto cult-obsessed blogs run by amateur enthusiasts. These featured Lake at twenty-three, during her return to Arizona under police escort to give a statement, and to eventually testify against Brother Belial. That was the intention behind her extradition from Canada, though her participation at trial was never required.

In the photographs shot as Lake walked through Phoenix Sky Harbor airport beside her lawyer, Marti Trussconi, and surrounded by a four-man plain-clothes police escort, she had worn a check pinafore over a high-necked blouse; a disarming Little House on the Prairie ensemble. Her eyes were hidden by big sunglasses, her hair covered by a wide-brimmed floppy hat: Diane Keaton chic from the chin up.

As the investigation drew on, there were pictures of her leaving the police station in Phoenix, wearing tight leather knee boots and a dress coat, a subtle smile at the corners of her mouth and shining within her big eyes. There was another of her in strappy high-heeled sandals, a lilac-coloured suit and sheer pantyhose on long legs that returned the press photographer’s flash to illuminate the pornographic fantasies of the average American male. She’d not long crawled out of hell with a baby on her back, but Kyle was tempted to believe she enjoyed the attention by that stage of the investigation. Martha was off the hook. Martha had escaped. Star witness, cult fox, killer starlet, heroic mother, depending on which tabloid was read back then by people thirsty for gore and desperate for sensation. The media’s obsession with Martha Lake had been erotic in its intensity, and agape in its incredulity that such a beautiful young girl-next-door could have been mixed up in all that.

A terrible book was ghost-written for her in 1976 called A Mother’s Tears, a Child’s Cry, which she later denounced as total fiction. Kyle had tracked down an old paperback from an eBay seller. After reading Levine’s book, he merely skimmed through A Mother’s Tears and its hyperbole-riddled fixation with the sexual antics of the cult; there was nothing about the bloody climax of Sister Katherine’s paradise because Lake had not been at the mine in July 1975, and there was little information about the group’s hierarchy or rituals because Lake had probably not been consulted when the book was written. A movie made for TV based on the book called Bloody Martha, which credited her as a producer, was a take-the-money-and-run collaboration if ever he’d seen one. The film still hadn’t even made it on to DVD; he’d checked.

But the forced couplings, the drug frenzies in Eden, the unknown father, her intimate proximity to a pack of crazy-faced Satanic killers at an abandoned copper mine, all trailed behind her like a comet’s tail. An imaginary force that lifted her out of the frame of the press photos. For nearly two years she’d danced with the devil and opened wide to eat from his table out in the moonlike Sonoran desert. She had a mystique, beauty and enigma that must have made Sister Katherine’s ashes whirl like a dust devil within her municipal grave. Katherine went down in popular history as a fat frump, an obese Countess Bathory, a manipulative psycho. While Martha Lake, and the recently deceased raven-haired beauty, Bridgette Clover, came out of that mine fantasized about like Playboy centrefolds and revered as feminist anti-heroes. Film critics still hailed them as the precursors to the hard-body scream queens that populate trashy horror slashers. They had the requisite beauty and a proximity to genuine evil, if not a potential participation in it, to become icons.

Until 1981, when the wild-eyed and feral creature that Martha became saw her celebrity dwindle onto the lesser pages, revealing tawdry stories of substance addiction, alleged promiscuity, credit card fraud, and the familiar saga of a child being taken into care of the court. The money was gone, the looks were going. And then she vanished for thirty years. Until tenacious Max found her three months prior to their interview for the film.

And he was actually going to meet Martha Lake in a few hours. ‘Where you been all my life, Martha?’

Dan turned in his seat with a groan.

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