Theresa is our first subject. She’s quiet in a keen, observant kind of way. Bria walks her through the measurements she wants to take. She shows her how the devices work, what she will and won’t record, and how the data will be stored and used. Theresa asks questions and Bria answers each one succinctly. When the consent form is signed, Bria places the leads on Theresa and opens her laptop, and then the interview can begin.

I start Theresa off with standard questions. We discuss her first encounters with Legio Agni, when she was a new resident of New Jersey where she’d taken a job as a Food Processing Technologist at an industrial bakery. She describes her initial loneliness, and how relieved she was when another young woman at her gym befriended her, inviting her to a women’s “networking support” group. From there, she was quickly absorbed further and further into the insular subculture of the Legio Agni cult. First it was their meetings. Then their supplements. Their closed online groups. Their retreats. Their aspirations. Their crusades. If there was an enemy, a threat to Caron’s empire, it became her enemy. Her threat to crush.

We lay all the groundwork, and Theresa answers each question, with as much detail as she can pull from her memory. Bria and Agent Langille remain silent, Langille taking notes and Bria tracking the metrics from her instruments while she types observations. After an hour of discussion, we take a short break before moving on to questions specific to Caron.

“When did you first meet Caron Berger?” I ask after Bria has reattached the leads to Theresa and nods her confirmation to continue.

Theresa pulls at wispy strands of red hair that escape the loose bun at the base of her neck. “Not until after I was done working at Catalyst. I had to prove my commitment there first.”

“What’s Catalyst?” I ask as Agent Langille scribbles notes from his seat along the wall.

“It’s a lab. Epsilon Health and Wellness outsourced some of their product testing and quality control to Catalyst.”

“What did you mean you had to ‘prove your commitment’ there?”

Theresa twirls and untwirls a strand of hair as her gaze drops to her glass of water. “Cynthia. She arranged for me to speak on the phone with Caron directly. He said he wanted me to join the Lana compound. He said that first, I had to get a job at Catalyst. He wanted me to steal samples of Epsilon’s products that came in for testing, as well as any lab reports or other documentation I could find related to the company.”

Agent Langille and I exchange a glance. If Bria thinks anything about this revelation of industrial espionage, she doesn’t let on. She’s focused on her laptop as the readings tick along across the screen.

“I know it was wrong,” Theresa offers. Her gaze remains on the glass as tears fill her eyes. “But Caron said Epsilon was endangering people. He said their products were impure, not like ours. He promised I would be helping people. And I wanted to belong. I wanted to run away from the world, honestly. I wanted to live at Lana and be…special. Protected.”

“Did you provide Caron with what he asked for?” I ask as Theresa wipes her eyes with the edge of her thumb. I push the box of tissues toward her and she takes one.

“Yes,” she replies.

“Did you go to the Lana compound?”

“Yes.”

“What can you tell us about your first face-to-face meeting with Caron Berger?”

Theresa takes in a deep, tremulous breath, letting it out slowly as she looks to the ceiling and into her memory. “I remember thinking he was super hot,” she says with a huff of a laugh. “Isn’t that crazy? I’d been stealing for months for a man I’d never met, and I’d never stolen before in my life. My first thought wasn’t to be worried about it catching up with me or that what I was doing was wrong. It was just wow, he’s really good-looking. And then I felt so much gratitude. I was grateful to be accepted into the community, to have a chance to leave the outside world behind.”

“Did you take any photos during your time there? Any of Caron?” I ask, knowing it’s a long shot of a question.

Theresa shakes her head emphatically. “No. We weren’t allowed to bring any phones or cameras. Once you’re in the compound, there’s no access to technology at all without approval and supervision.”

“Whose supervision?”

“Only someone in the uppermost levels. Caron. Cynthia. One of the top-tier girls. There were a few.” Theresa’s gaze darts to Agent Langille. “I don’t want to get the girls in trouble,” she says.

“It’s fine, you don’t need to elaborate on them,” I reply, reassuring her with a faint smile. “It’s Caron I’d like to know more about. Did you have the opportunity to speak with him frequently? Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Not much,” Theresa says as she runs her thumbnail along the veins of dark lines in the wooden table. “He wasn’t there often. One day he’d appear and he’d be there for a week, the next he’d be gone. But the first night I…”

I wait, silent and still. Bria’s presence looms to my left, though nothing about her has changed. When we prepared for these interviews, it was a suggestion she made. Wait for them to fill the silence. And after a long moment, Theresa does.

“The first night I slept with Caron, he told me a little about his past. He said he had a very religious upbringing and saw the harm it did to others. He said his family didn’t want him. They abandoned him. There was a night when he nearly died. When he woke up, he said that’s the day he decided to do everything to change his life and build a safe place for people like him. Specifically women. He wanted to protect women who had been hurt, or abused. Neglected. He wanted to make a safe community for us. And it was. It was a beautiful, safe place. Until it wasn’t anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I got sick.” Theresa says. “I have Lupus. I was in a long remission before I went to Lana. I thought maybe it was gone for good. After about six months at the compound, I had a really bad flare-up. I needed medication. Corticosteroids. But they didn’t like that. The others…they thought I should be able to manage with Lamb’s anti-inflammatory detox. It didn’t work.”

“What happened when it failed?”

“One of the other girls, she took me to the hospital. You’re interviewing her tomorrow.”

“Did you try to go back to Lana once you recovered?”

Theresa shakes her head, another tear rolling from her lash line to streak across her cheek. “No. We knew they wouldn’t let us come back. Once you’re there in one of the compounds, you can’t ever leave. But Sienna told me it was dangerous anyway, that we’d left in time.”

“Why?”

“Because someone is coming to kill Caron, and whoever it is, they don’t care who stands in their way.”

OceanofPDF.com

30

OceanofPDF.com

BRIA

Well, shit. I guess Gabriel-slash-Caron knows that Ava-slash-Bria’s hostage demands might be disingenuous, thanks to my fuckup with Abigail-slash-Theresa.

I’ve been kicking myself the last thirty-two hours since the first interview. I should have seen the giant red flag that Abigail’s photo was in the Archive subfolder Samuel pulled from Praetorian. Fucking sloppy. Samuel would be disappointed. I’m disappointed. It was an amateur miss.

Not only that, but the FBI is now on the same page as Caron and me in our little game of house cat versus feral cat, thanks to Abigail-Theresa’s revelation of Caron’s awareness of another player on the field. I was hoping to keep that between the cult and me, but it wasn’t meant to be. The next day’s interview subject, Sienna, went into more detail about what she overheard from a discussion Caron had with Koffi N’Doli, the CEO of Praetorian. As it turns out, they’d had their suspicions before Tristan went missing. They’d already figured out someone was on their tail.