The Prophet Motive Read Online Free PDF Page B

absence of logic. For those seduced, rather than repelled, by a particular flyer’s message, a phone number or mailing address was typically printed at the bottom of the text, where more information—if not complete salvation—could be found.
    She examined the sheet closely. The sponsor’s name wasn’t written anywhere, and the pamphlet pusher himself wouldn’t provide it, she assumed. For when cult members took to the streets to collect donations, or to lure potential converts, they usually hid their cult affiliation. In fact, new cult converts were often not told the name of their cult until they’d been thoroughly indoctrinated.
    She read a paragraph on the need for preserving nature, which made her hopeful that she held in her hand an Earthbound document. But her hope died in the third paragraph when she read testament to the magical, healing power of red crystals. The pamphlet and the pusher belonged to Gnosis, a local New Age cult.
    “Help stop the world population explosion!” The Gnosis recruiter shook the coins in his coffee can at her.
    Marilyn balled up her yellow sheet of paper and tossed it into a nearby wastebasket. Then she marched two blocks to the Alternative Living Medicine Health Clinic, where the staff treated the ache and throb in her feet with a massage, herbal tea, and a Buddhistic incantation.
     

    After nightfall, the streets of Berkeley turned rougher. As Marilyn skirted by the junkies lounging in People’s Park, a dealer approached her, whispering the latest nicknames for his drugs. “Joystick? Elephant X? Red Screamers?” A homeless man felt free to urinate in the street, and in an alley behind a music store she glimpsed a hetero pair of street punks copulating against the side of a dumpster.
    A bearded man with an angry walk and a swinging ponytail followed her for blocks, never speaking, but constantly mumbling to himself. She had no gun, given the character she was playing, and had no stand-by assistance from her so-called team at all, just a cell phone.
    “Hey, you!” her stalker called. “Wait up!”
    But she didn’t. She half-ran to where her Lexus was parked in an unattended lot. She unlocked the car with her remote control key chain, jumped in behind the wheel, slammed the door shut, and locked it before revving up the motor.
    Her stalker halted directly outside her door, open-mouthed instead of mumbling. He continued to gape at her vehicle as she roared off into the night. The highlight of her day.
    She returned to the streets early the next morning. Her search remained luckless late into the afternoon. She ducked inside the restroom of Jody’s Books and Café and pouted a bit in front of the mirror when she saw that her 30 SPF sun block hadn’t prevented the emergence of a pink tint upon her normally steamed milk complexion.
    “Next stop, fortune-teller face,” she said to her reflection, applying more sun block. Before leaving, she used her fingers to widen a rip in her shirt and then, working at cross purposes, brushed the horrid remains of her whitish blonde hair until she’d made a small aesthetic improvement.
    Back on the sidewalk, she continued walking her all too familiar beat. At a crowded coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue, she sat down with some iced mocha and a cinnamon-raisin bagel. Glancing through a food-stained newspaper, left behind by the previous table occupant, Marilyn found her mind wandering back inside John Richetti’s tidy condominium. In his bathroom cupboard above the sink, she’d found some prescription sleeping pills, shook them at him.
    “What’s keeping you up nights, John?”
    “I think you better come back with a search warrant.”
    Marilyn fixed her gaze on him. “I spoke with Captain Switzer as soon as I learned about your impending divorce.”
    “He already knew.”
    “So I discovered. And still, he backs you, because you’ve earned his trust over the years, and because your history of undercover work, while ancient, is stellar.