Easy Prey

with each other. In five minutes, the pews were full, and people began sitting in the aisle.
    “The fire marshal would have a heart attack if he saw this,” Lucas muttered as people continued to jam into the church.
    Jael leaned toward him and said, “See the women?”
    “What women?”
    “In the dark blue vests.” She pointed with her chin.
    Lucas took a minute to pick them out: A half-dozen women were working around the front of the room, passing out sheets of paper, stopping to talk to people, laughing, chatting. Then Lucas picked out a couple of blue-vested men, also working the crowd. “Couple of guys, too. See the guy in the parka? He’s got one on underneath.”
    “Oh, yeah. I didn’t see him. . . . I wonder . . .”
    They were whispering, and Lucas whispered, “What?”
    “Is this a cult?”
    The lights began to dim, and Lucas shrugged. Then one of the women in blue vests gave them a stack of paper to pass down their pew, and they each took one and passed the rest. Lucas peered at the writing in the dimming light: the words to a half-dozen songs, and on the back, some kind of drawing. He put the paper in his lap and looked up as Olson appeared at the front of the church, stepped up on the dais, and started with, “How’re y’all tonight?”
    Some people said, “Fine,” or “Good.” Olson said, “I’m not very good. How many of you knew that Alie’e Maison was my sister? Hold up your hands.”
    Two thirds of the audience lifted their hands.
    “So you know my sister was murdered, and my parents were murdered, and that a man named Amnon Plain was murdered. I want to talk to you about that.” He talked about his sister and his parents for twenty minutes; how he and Sharon Olson and their parents lived their lives in Burnt River, a quiet, family-oriented small-town existence for the most part, with the one difference that Alie’e’s looks and talents made.
    “I didn’t know any difference. I didn’t know that even there, in Burnt River, running along the water, fishing with Dad, getting in apple fights with my friends, and BB gun fights—I’m sure more than a few of you have been in BB gun fights, even a few of you women, huh?” A ripple of laughter and acknowledgment ran through the audience. “I didn’t know in all of that young, childish fun, even there, the evil was reaching out to us. Long tentacles, reaching out of New York, out of Los Angeles, long wispy fingers of evil settling over the minds of us all. . . .”
    Lucas felt a creepy tingle. Olson had a deep, resonant voice, and knew how to play it: Although it seemed to drop to a whisper, and though it seemed to be aimed at each individual, it was loud enough to be heard perfectly. And he had the deep, stocky build, and the square, powerful head, that gave him a quality of suppressed violence.
    He talked about the evil, and about its expression on television, in the movies, in fast-food businesses and on the Internet. “I have been around a little bit. I was in the Marine Corps, I worked as a shore patrolman at Subic Bay on payday. I know all the trouble that people can get into with sex, and with dope, and with greed and with the need of possession. I know that there’s some of it in all of us—but I also know that an adult can fight it. Maybe not win, but can choose to fight. But have you personally looked into this newest evil, this Internet, that all the schools and libraries now are trying to sell us? Have you looked on the Internet? I have—I looked at a library, with a librarian, one of our people, showing me—and the evil on the Internet is beyond belief, beyond anything you might encounter at Subic, beyond anything you veterans of the world have seen, beyond all of that. And it is flowing straight to our children.”
    With that as a base, Olson began to preach: on the evil of the world, and the light to come; on Jesus, who was with us all the time, and who would be visible in the next few years. The end of times was upon us. . . .
    The preaching lasted for twenty minutes, a rising and ebbing of emotion, the emotional appeals coming in waves that would crest, each higher than the last, with Olson wandering halfway down the aisle, talking, calling on the children of God, reaching into the pews to touch people, both men and women. The audience rocked with him in a shoulder-pushing rhythm. The noise of the audience, the heat inside the church, and Olson’s voice together finally climaxed in a long, desperate