by Mary Nealy
She couldn’t figure out a way to get rid of him. “Fine. I suppose you’re better than nothing. The autopsy’s scheduled for this afternoon. Go home. We’ll call you when we’re finished, so you can examine the photographs.”
“I’ll just sit in on the autopsy.”
The idea galled her. “You will not! I wouldn’t let you within a hundred feet of that girl! You couldn’t handle it.”
“Wanna bet?” Something in his tone made the heels Keren was digging in slip a little. She studied his eyes. They’d gone a flat blue, as cold and dead as the nails in a coffin. She couldn’t believe what a difference it made in him. It changed him into the cop who had run over her. And it reminded her of how much she disliked him. “I know you used to be a cop. But this still isn’t where we need your help.”
He gave her an extended look that seemed to worm right into her brain. “You knew I was a cop?”
“Yeah, I’m a cop myself,” Keren said dryly. “I’m forever detecting.”
“So what’s your problem? You know I can help you with this.”
The arrogance she remembered so well was right there. She longed to slap him down. “No problem, Rev. And you won’t slow us down, because I won’t let you.”
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t respond.
“So you went from a cop to a reverend? That’s quite a transition.”
“Is it? It seemed natural enough to me at the time.” He quit talking and studied her until she felt like a bug under a microscope.
He smiled in a way that told her he was deliberately trying to make her squirm.
“You know, Rev, it’s not very Christian to enjoy making me feel uncomfortable.”
“And you’re such an authority on being Christian?”
Somehow it hurt that he hadn’t sensed it in her. She wondered if that might be because she’d been relentlessly rude to him ever since they’d met. “Oh yes. Born and raised. I have …”
She almost told him about her gift. She was shocked at how close she’d come to blurting out the grim message she’d gotten from the murder scene. She’d learned very young never to talk about it. It had created too many awful situations when she’d seen demonic work in the oddest places. And it had ruined a relationship that she’d thought was ordained by God. She’d done some fast growing up and never mentioned her gift again. If the reverend understood, he’d be the first one who did.
She wondered why she’d come so close to telling him. Honestly, the man probably had his parishioners confessing things to him right and left.
“You have …?” he prompted.
Keren couldn’t imagine what in the world to say. The truth was not an option, and she had no intention of lying. The only thing she could think of was to snarl at him some more. A plan which appealed to her.
“And by the way, you can’t be born a Christian. We all come into this world needing to make the choice for ourselves.”
“I know that.” A nice theological debate would get his mind off her slip of the tongue.
O’Shea came trotting up.
She took one look at his face and forgot all about her gift and her need to confess it. “What?”
“We’ve just had another missing person reported.”
Keren knew what he was going to say next. She prayed she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
“There’s a carving over the door.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land.
This little carving was his gift to the world, not that the world deserved it. Uncultured, uneducated, unwashed, and completely unable to appreciate him. But they’d see his greatness. He dawdled and decorated the polished oak with his chisel.
EAMUS.
And enjoyed the work of his hand. The way she cowered and cried inspired him to greater heights.
MEUS.
He’d found new restraints that held her better. He talked as he worked, trying to make her understand the honor he was bestowing on her.
NATIO.
He’d brushed her hair and read to her from Mother’s Bible. He even went so far as to show her the artwork he’d carved on his own body.
MEARE.
Still, like Pharaoh, she didn’t see reason. Pravus held the power of life and death. Like God. No he wasn’t like God, he was God. And this sinner had been given all the chances he was going to give her.
The beast within urged him onward to the second plague.
“You can come up to the apartment door, Rev, but you can’t come inside. We can’t let you touch—”
“I know the drill, Detective Collins.” He breathed out anger and breathed in God. It was his own Christian version of counting to ten. He couldn’t quite figure out how he’d gotten on the pretty detective’s bad side, but he’d managed it—in spades.
“Uh, sorry, Rev. I keep forgetting you were on the force.”
Paul had the distinct impression that Detective Collins never forgot a thing.
“Good. I don’t want to carry the mantle of ‘cop’ around with me anymore.”
She shoved at her hair as if she were swatting away a gnat. He remembered the wild tangles from his hospital stay. He towered over her as they walked into the apartment building. He was six one. He glanced at her with experienced cop eyes. She was five six, all lean muscle and coiled energy, hidden under the kind of cheap suit a cop could afford. She started up the outside steps of the apartment building at a fast clip. Paul tried to keep up and it hurt like blazes.
He was trying to like her, but his ribs were her sworn enemy. “I have better luck helping the people at the mission if they don’t sense the badge.”
She entered the building and started up the stairs to the missing woman’s apartment. “Should you have shed the sling and collar so quickly? You look lousy. You’ll probably end up back in the hospital.”
Paul didn’t answer her. He hadn’t had time to breathe all his anger out yet. For him to do that, she would have to shut up and give him a little more time. He was tempted to ask her to do just that.
The apartment building they were in was just outside the neighborhood Paul served. Shabby, but hanging on to respectability by a thread. Paul tried to trot up the steps behind her, but every time he jostled his ribs, his chest hurt like a heart attack. He settled for watching her disappear around the corner of the stairs. Then the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, O’Shea, passed him.
Paul trudged on, left in the dust of real cops. “Humility is the name of the game, isn’t it, Lord?”
O’Shea turned around and looked at him. Detective Collins leaned over the railing above and stared down.
He looked back and forth between them. “Did I say that out loud?”
O’Shea gave him a disgusted look. Collins rolled her eyes. They exchanged a look, shook their heads, and started moving again. By the time he made his destination, the fifth floor, they had disappeared inside a room. The hallway was dismal—the paint old, the carpet stained. But there was no trash strewed around. The doors were all on their hinges. Only one stood open. Paul smelled mold and decades of cigarette smoke, but there were no bullet holes to be seen.
There was enough noise coming from the apartment to clue Paul in that they weren’t the first ones there. He very carefully stayed out. Over the door he read, Pestis Ex Rana, carved in a beautiful script. Paul examined it, as he hadn’t had time to examine the carving he’d been given.
The words were etched into a wooden sign the same size and color as the one Paul had received. Pravus could have hung it there in a matter of seconds.
Pestis ex rana. “Plague of frogs.” Paul didn’t know how Pravus intended to harm anyone using frogs. But, on the other hand, Juanita hadn’t drowned in that ghastly pool of blood. Pravus had killed her before he’d thrown her in the water. Frogs didn’t matter any more than the blood.
After he studied the carving, he stayed outside as bossy Detective Collins had orde
red, but he began looking inside, snooping for all he was worth. There was a collection of pictures on a wall just inside the door.
“No!” He stumbled and would have fallen if he hadn’t hit the wall across from the open door. Detective Collins was at his side before the pain in his chest could knock him down.
“What is it? Are you hurt?” He noticed she reached for the sprained wrist, checked her movements, and reached for the other arm. “You need to go back to the hospital.”
She brushed his hair off his forehead. “I should never have let you come!” She leaned close. She looked deeply into his eyes.
He looked back. He hadn’t expected this kindness. He hadn’t expected the warmth in her mysterious blue-gray eyes. He hadn’t—
She blinded him with a high-powered flashlight. “You probably still have a concussion.”
He flinched away from the light and gasped from the pain flinching caused.
“I told you this was a bad idea.” She talked to him like he was a slightly backward second grader. “Now we’re wasting time with you when we should be—”
“Get that light out of my eyes,” he cut her off. “I’m not sick.” He sounded like a cop and fought to control it. “It’s the pictures. The pictures in the hallway.”
She snapped her head around, immediately forgetting him. “Those pictures hanging on the wall?” She dragged him along right into the apartment, forgetting her stern warnings to stay out of her crime scene.
“I know the woman in those pictures.”
There were several of them, including group snapshots taken in casual settings, framed and hung with care, around a glowing picture of an ocean sunset with “Make a Joyful Noise All the Earth” across the bottom.
“Which woman?”
Paul reached up and, without touching the picture, pointed to LaToya. A young black woman with hope and humor shining out of her dark eyes. “Her. LaToya. LaToya Jordan, she’s someone who spent a lot of time at the mission.”
“Are you telling me …” Detective Collins broke off. When she spoke again Paul felt like her rigid jaw was grinding her words into dust. “… that you know both of the victims?”
Paul nodded. He had to tear his eyes away from LaToya’s picture. He knew what was in store for her. The shock passed and he began panicking deep inside, shaking in his gut. “No, dear God. Not LaToya. Don’t, please don’t let this be happening to her.”
Detective Collins wrenched him around to face her. “You know what this means, don’t you, Rev?”
He looked into her tough cop eyes and wanted to drop to his knees and beg her and the other policemen here to tear Chicago apart looking for LaToya. “Yes, of course I know. It means someone I care about is right this minute living through a nightmare.”
“No,” Detective Collins snapped at him. She shook his arm. “Get ahold of yourself and think. Use your brain for a change. That’s not what it means.”
“Of course it is. You saw the carving above the door. LaToya didn’t leave of her own volition.” Paul pointed to the hallway.
“She’s out there somewhere. She’s—”
“What it means,” Collins interrupted, “is that these murders aren’t about the women.”
“What kind of crazy thing is that to say? Two women are—”
“Remember who you used to be. Try for just one second to think like a cop. These murders aren’t about the women, they’re about you.”
Paul wheeled away from her cold eyes and her heartless truth. He stared at LaToya in horror. Seconds ticked by as the possibility cut its way into his heart. Finally, he spoke to the picture in a whisper, “LaToya, I’m so sorry. This is my fault.”
“We’ve got to interview you more thoroughly. We’ve got to hunt in your life for enemies. You deal with dangerous people at the mission.”
“They’re not dangerous. We’ve never had trouble—”
“Not dangerous, like Carlo, the gang member whose building you ran into just before it exploded?” she cut in. “He’s got a rap sheet as long as your arm. If he wasn’t a juvie, he’d be doing life.”
“No, I’m not talking about Carlo. I mean—”
“We’re not going to discuss this here. We’ll take you downtown and start talking about people who might be crazy enough to want to hurt you.” Detective Collins caught his arm.
Paul pulled away. “I’ll do whatever you need to do, but what about LaToya? Every man and woman who wastes time talking to me isn’t out hunting for her.”
“Oh, we’ll be hunting for her, all right,” she said grimly. “We’ll just be hunting inside your head.”
She grabbed Paul’s arm again and hauled him out of the apartment. He went along peacefully, feeling like he was being arrested but too upset about LaToya to care. She was right. Detective Collins had it figured out exactly right.
Juanita and LaToya had been killed because someone hated him.
It was true.
“It’s a lie!”
After two hours of badgering in the interrogation room, Paul had it figured out, and he told Detective Collins that for the tenth time. “These murders aren’t about me.”
“You know they are.” Detective Collins had her heels dug in.
Paul sat with his hands clenched together on the table in front of him. It was all he could do to keep from leaping over the table and shaking some sense into the pretty little tyrant.
“Just because they’re both from my neighborhood, and I knew them both, doesn’t mean this is about me. You’re wasting valuable time. If you won’t go out and hunt for her, at least let me.”
“Rev, do you really think O’Shea and I are the only ones working this case?” she stormed.
“I know how it is when a crime gets committed on the South Side. It’s not a priority.”
“This one is. We’ve got forensics working on the pond, both women’s homes, and the site of the explosion.”
“That fountain.” Paul’s stomach twisted and he’d only seen the pictures. “He made a fountain flow with blood.”
“Blood meal. It’s a garden fertilizer. Available in every store that sells potting soil. All it really did was dye the water red. Just another thing we’ve found out while you say we’re doing nothing.” Detective Collins placed her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “The ME is personally doing all the prelims for the autopsy. The forensics lab has pushed this case ahead of everything else. The FBI is running all the results we’ve got through their computer looking for similar crimes. We’re tracking down the delivery man who brought that package to you. We’ve got people going through your records at the mission—”
“I shouldn’t have let you do that,” Paul interjected. “I should at least be there. Those records are—”
“—and hunting through your old case files from your cop days.” She kept talking as if he were a buzzing insect. “We’ve got one poor schmuck going to every art supply and hardware store in the city, trying to identify the exact type of cutting tool Pravus used to make his signs. We’re tracking down the name. Someone thought Pravus sounded Middle Eastern. I told them it was Latin, but still we’re trying to rule out any terrorism. We’re digging through the rubble of that building, tracking down the source of every incoming call on your cell. We’re questioning everyone who might know someone you drove completely crazy!”
Paul inhaled sharply. Somewhere along the line, he’d done something to someone that had resulted in this. He scrubbed his face with his right hand, still coddling his left. He wanted to wash reality away. “I can’t bear to think about it.”
Keren caught his arm, his good arm, and pulled it away from his face. “Well, you’re going to have to think about it! I don’t have time to baby you while you—”
“Back off, Keren,” O’Shea growled from where he leaned, with his arms crossed, against the wall off to Paul’s left. “He’s a witness, not a suspect.” He’d mostly observed, throwing in a question now and then. Paul got a sense the two of them were doi
ng a routine with him that they’d performed a hundred times before. But Detective Collins was losing her cool. That wasn’t part of the routine.
She let go of his arm. After a few moments of obvious effort, she said, “Sorry, that was out of line.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Paul said through a clenched jaw. “I know you’re trying to find a connection between me and this lunatic. But I’ve thought it over and we’re on the wrong track. Yes, I know both of them, but lots of people know both of them. They were from the neighborhood. This guy could have come from here and been victimized by someone in this area.”
“Pravus phoned you, Rev. He knew you and cared enough to track down your cell phone number and mail you that sign.”
“But don’t you see, he could have done all that without it being personal. I’m the logical one in that neighborhood. My cell phone number is no secret. I’ve got it posted on the bulletin board at the mission. He kept saying Juanita was evil. He said, ‘I’ll tell you where to find this harlot.’ He might see me as someone who would join his twisted fight against all the ills around the Lighthouse Mission.”
“Listen, Rev, you can speculate all—”
“Will you quit calling me Rev?” Paul lunged to his feet. His ribs punished his chest. His temper pounded in his wounded forehead. He spun away from the mouthy cop who wouldn’t quit.
He needed to spend some quiet time in prayer. He knew he was fraying badly around the edges. His temper was hot, his impatience was boiling over. All his old cop instincts were fighting to emerge, and they were the worst part of himself. But even if he could get away from this nagging woman, he’d still dash around looking for LaToya instead of kneeling before his Savior, seeking peace.
Hang on. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it.
Collins slammed a fist on the table. “We don’t have time to argue about your title.”
Paul lost it.
He whirled around to take her apart. She was fuming. Her hands were clenched until her knuckles turned white.
