KnockOut

to.”
    “We’ll be on a flight this evening, Sherlock,” Savich said, and turned the Camry onto the main road, heading east from Bricker’s Bowl. “Right now I’ve got a surprise for you.”
    “Anything to make this headache go away.”
    “How about MAX found the address of the Children of Twilight?”
    “He’s been working on that for days. You’re not kidding me?”
    He shook his head. “Nope, got it.”
    “Oh, yeah, that’ll do it.” She snapped her fingers. “Headache’s gone in four-point-five seconds. How did MAX find out where they’re located?”
    “Whistler’s mother.”
    She punched him in the arm.
    He grinned. “MAX couldn’t find any property in Caldicot Whistler’s name, so we dug into Caldicot Whistler’s antecedents, his father, then his mother. Father’s dead, so is the mother, but I had him do a property search within a hundred-mile radius of Bricker’s Bowl, flag anything that might be suspect. He finally found a good-sized property hidden within two holding companies, the first under the proprietary name of the second. That second company’s name was listed as C. W. Huntingdon, Limited. The initials C.W.—as in Caldicot Whistler—triggered MAX’s algorithm, and he went for it. Underneath all the layers, MAX discovered the property actually belonged to Mrs. Agatha Whistler as sole trustee. She inherited it from her husband when he died some fifteen years ago. Although the trust isn’t in the public record, it must have been passed to Caldicot when she died only last year at the age of eighty-five years. Caldicot is her only surviving child, now age fifty-two. Her other child was much older and is also dead.
    “So Caldicot made a good stab at hiding the property, but MAX dug him out anyway.”
    The pride in his voice made Sherlock smile. “What sort of property is it?”
    “An old flue-cured tobacco farm.”
    “What on earth is that?”
    “Flue-curing is still used commonly on tobacco farms in Georgia, supposedly produces the best tobacco. Evidently they string the to bacco leaves onto sticks that they then hang from tier-poles in the curing barns. Then brick furnaces heat flues that ‘cook’ the green tobacco leaves.
    “According to the deed, the farm was active until the nineteen thirties. There are two curing barns still standing after more than a hundred years, and a huge stone mansion, built in the early part of the twentieth century that now probably houses the cult. I can’t imagine what other use Whistler would have for it. It’s located about two miles outside of a small town called Peas Ridge, ten miles from Haverhill, where Caldicot Whistler supposedly sells cars.”
    “May I ask when you worked with MAX on this?”
    He shrugged. “I woke up early this morning, couldn’t go back to sleep. You looked so happy in whatever dream you were having, I didn’t have the heart to wake you. I already called Ethan about it.”
    Sherlock nodded. “He needs all the info he can get. Good job.” She frowned at him. “You could at least act like you’re a bit tired.”
    “Hot tea’s my secret, you know that.”
    “All right, macho man, the Children of Twilight. I haven’t told you where I think that name comes from.”
    “Yeah, you were going to tell me about that earlier.”
    “I found a couple hundred references to the name, but the one that caught my eye was a Children of Twilight group back in the fifteenth century in Spain, which was at the height of the Inquisition. They were called Los Niños en el Atardecer in Spanish. They’d been around for maybe a hundred years before that, living in isolation, causing no trouble.
    “Torquemada himself went after the cult. You’re going to like this—the Children of Twilight were all supposedly endowed with psychic powers.”
    Savich said slowly, “They wouldn’t have called it that back then. How were they described?”
    “Torquemada called them Adoradores del Diablo —devil worshippers—who communicated not only with each other but with the devil himself to further the devil’s evil schemes.”
    “Not a good ending for them, I’ll bet.”
    “No, not a good ending. Those Torquemada caught were burned at the stake. Auto-da-fé —an ‘act of faith.’ Isn’t that lovely? Some escaped, but the group was never heard from again.”
    Savich said, “So if this present-day cult has taken up their name, that leads to an interesting conclusion, doesn’t it?”
    “The same direction Whistler’s