Claire Booth - The False Prophet: Conspiracy, Extortion and Murder in the Name of God

One
Where are the Stinemans?

Two
A Quiet Night in Woodacre

Three
The Search for Selina

Four
A Prophet in the Making

Five
On a Mission

Six
Drifting Away

Seven
Exerting Control

Eight
Transforming America

Nine
Children of Thunder

Ten
The Day the War Began

Eleven
The Point of No Return

Twelve
Logistics

Thirteen
No One Will Tell

Fourteen
The Cleanup

Fifteen
Monday, August 7, 2000

Sixteen
Making the Connection

Seventeen
The Duffel-Bag Murders

Eighteen
Charging Ahead

Nineteen
Safecracking

Twenty
Freedom at Any Price

Twenty-One
Separated at Last

Twenty-Two
Sons of Perdition

Nancy Hall drove up the quiet street and parked in front of her parents house. She had brought her lunch and was hoping to eat with them during her noon break from work. She did this often, but today she had an additional motive: she wanted to check up on them. She had tried calling four or five times the night before and no one picked up. The answering machine wasnt even on, which was not only irritating but a little odd as well.

She got out of her pickup truck into the midday heat and walked up to the house. It was a modest, white two-story with a balcony over the garage and shade trees in the front yard. The neighborhood was a quiet one off Treat Boulevard in Concord, a bustling suburban city in the inland valley just east of San Francisco Bay. Her parents, Ivan and Annette Stineman, had lived there for thirty years. He was eighty-five, she was seventy-eight.

But this morning, they were not at home.

Nancy stopped and stared at the four newspapers littering the front step. These people are retired. Thats all theyve got to do, is read the paper in the morning, she muttered as she let herself into the house. As she stepped through the entryway, she noticed that the door straight ahead, which usually closed off the kitchen from the front room and the foyer, was wide open. And there was a bowl sitting on the kitchen table. They always picked up their stuff, she thought. Since her mother did the cooking, her father did the dishes. And it was not a chore he usually left undone.

She kept looking around, and her gaze landed on the stove, where a pot still sat on the burner. Mold was growing on the leftover soup in the bottom. Nancy stared at the mess and felt her bewilderment turning to alarm. There was no way her parents would leave a pot in such a state in their pristine kitchen. No way. Her thoughts immediately turned to Ivan and Annettes most valuable possessionstheir cats. She quickly went into the garage, where her parents kept the two cats when they left the house. Their beds, food, and water were all there, but Oreo and Twoy were not.

As she walked back into the house, Nancy caught sight of Oreo sitting outside, looking at her through the back glass door that led to a screened-in porch. Well, come on in here, she said. As she let the black-and-white cat in the kitchen, she noticed there was no water bowl for him on the porch. With temperatures in the high nineties, that bordered on neglect. She watched as the thirsty animal streaked off toward the garage and his food and water. She thought briefly that perhaps her parents had asked her to care for the cats while they left town. She shook her head; she would have remembered them telling her that.

Nancy took another look around and then headed back to the living room. Annette, who entertained often, did not allow the cats and their dander into the front room or upstairs, where they might bother guests. But so many things were not right; Twoy could be anywhere. Nancy searched the rest of the ground floor and then headed upstairs. She was starting to panic.

The bedroom doors were shut, which also was out of the ordinary. She walked down the hallway and into the master bedroom, where everything still seemed to be in its proper place. Nancy opened the door to the master bath, which was split in two, with the sink in one area and the toilet and shower off to the side in a smaller room. She spotted a cat cowering behind the toilet. He had been so traumatized, she could barely tell it was Twoy. His eyes looked huge in his distorted little face. He just stared at her and refused to move.

Nancy started to cry. She had no idea how long hed been trapped there, but the bathroom rug bunched in front of the shower was full of feces. Hed had no food, and because her parents always put the seat down, hed had no water, either.

Who would do this? she wondered. She knew it wasnt Mama and Daddy. They would never, ever, leave their precious cats like this. As she looked through tears at Twoy hiding behind the toilet, a more disturbing question pressed forward in her mind. Where were her parents?1

Ivan and Annette Stineman were predictable, in that nice, reassuring way that everyone wants their parents to bethe result of spending more than half a century together. They met in 1945, while Ivan was still in the service. A mutual friend introduced the Coast Guard quartermaster second-class to the pretty USO hostess seven years his junior. When her mother laid eyes on him for the first time, she looked at his receding hairline in horror. Oh, Annette! Hes too old for you, she told her daughter.

The two hit it off so quickly they were engaged within three months. It came as no surprise, considering all the things they had in common. Theyd both been born in the Midwest, Ivan in Indiana and Annette in Oklahoma. Their birthdays fell only a day apart. They had the same unusual middle nameLane. And their families had each migrated to Southern California during the Depression.