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“Hedge fund manager.”
“Damn. Well, that explains the view.”
“Enough about my morally gray career. The IRS got them? The cult?”
“No. What they did was open a case, which allowed them to audit the paperwork the apostle had turned in to have the cult recognized as a church.”
“And therefore tax exempt?”
“Exactly.”
“Like how they got Al Capone for tax evasion.”
He liked that she wasn’t focused on the shitty personal parts of the story. Later—months, years later, he might let that little boy out of the box at the back of his mind and tell her about some of the pain he still carried. She could be trusted with that. He knew it the way he knew that the sun would rise again tomorrow.
“Not quite,” he said, bringing his mind back to the story. “You see the IRS is really cautious about denying church status to organizations. They have to err on the side of caution.”
“But if it was a cult, couldn’t they do something?”
“What’s the difference between a church and a cult?
Autumn opened her mouth, frowned, then made a frustrated noise.
“Exactly. It’s easy when you’ve got people promising the space ships are on their way. But one of the technical definitions of a cult is a group whose beliefs and practices are regarded by others as strange.”
“Oh…That’s a problem, because how do you define ‘strange’?”
“You see the issue.”
Autumn squeezed his hands, then stood. He watched her as she walked to the kitchen, grabbed another wine stem, poured him a very full glass, and brought it over.
“If we’re discussing the technical definition of cults, we should be drinking,” she declared.
“Fair enough.” He waited for her to raise her glass, tapped it with his own, then took a sip. “I’ll cut to the chase. Usually when I give these talks, it’s to law enforcement seminars.”
“Wait, so youarea fed. Just not undercover.”
“No, not a fed. Wait until the end of the story.”
“Fine.” Autumn laced her fingers through his, using her other hand to raise her wine glass to her lips.
“The IRS investigation gave Agent Salford access to current financial records. And this is where that man’s genius really shows. You see, the church had a business selling ceramics. Handmade stuff that they sold online. The website had a whole section about how each piece was special, hand made by someone who’d devoted their life to god. There was a gimmick about how the members would go out and pray in the desert at dawn, then bring back handfuls of sand that were full of the ‘Holy Spirit’ and mix them into the clay.”
Autumn’s lip curled. “Ugh.”
“People ate that bullshit up. Well, Agent Salford used the pictures on that site, along with the information I was able to give him, to definitively identify three women in particular who were featured in photos and listed as the artists on the church business site.”
“And who were they?”
Even now, the next part of the story made him smile.
“What they weren’t, was adults. They were all minors.”
Autumn raised a brow. “Wait, did he get them for violating child labor laws?”
“Yep, and then, he took it one step further. He got them for human trafficking.”
Autumn sucked in air. “The cult leader was forcing the kids into prostitution?”
