Somers stared at him. He ran a hand over Hazard’s neck, his fingers sifting the thick, sable hair. “No.”

  “It’s not your choice, Somers.”

  “No.”

  “What the fuck do you mean—”

  “I mean no, Ree. No, you don’t get to give up because something’s hard. No, you don’t get to call it quits because you’re hurting. No—” Hazard turned towards the window, and Somers seized a handful of his jacket and yanked him back. “No, you don’t get to check out because you had a shitty childhood.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Do you know why you don’t get to do those things?”

  “Fuck you. Get your fucking hands off me.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “I’m going to break your fingers if you don’t get off me right now.”

  “You don’t get to do those things because of Clyde.” Then Somers loosed the jacket, and Hazard jerked back, his hands smoothing wrinkles from the wool, the movement reflexive and unconscious. “What you went through, Ree, God, I don’t even know where to start. But you didn’t deserve it. And now Clyde’s in a hospital bed because of the pieces of shit behind all of this, and he doesn’t deserve that either. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but you know that if you drop this in Swinney’s lap, you might as well just let the killer walk free.”

  “That’s not fair. You’re a detective. You’re a damn good detective. Swinney’s good too.”

  Somers knew the smile on his face was crooked. It was crooked because it reflected off the same dark glass in his mind, the place where he saw some of the truth about Emery Hazard. “I’m a damn good detective, but I’m not Emery Hazard.”

  Hazard didn’t answer. His hands still clutched his jacket, and he was braced against the car door. Somers settled into his seat and turned up Gillian Welch, listened to the dulcimer and the mandolin and the guitar. He turned her up louder, until the music was rattling his bones, and then even louder. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, on the horizon, on the cleft between two grassy hills where perspective converged into a pencil-point. If Hazard started crying, really got going, then Somers would do something. But not until then.

  One of Hazard’s big hands clapped over the stereo and silenced the music.

  “I’m driving,” Somers said. “My music. Those are the rules.”

  “You’re not driving. You’re sitting in the driver’s seat. We’re parked.”

  Somers grinned. “Parking? I haven’t heard that term for it in a long time. You have to kiss me first before we can call it parking.”

  Hazard snorted. “Swinney and Lender are asking the wrong question. We were too.”

  “What?”

  “Who?”

  “This feels like that Abbott and Costello skit you were laughing about so hard the other day.”

  Hazard’s eyes narrowed. “You said you were napping.”

  “I was napping. Until someone started guffawing loud enough to bring down the roof. Tell me about who and what and where and why. How, too, if you can manage.”

  “Who. We’ve been asking who had an opportunity to kill Walden. They’ve been asking who stole his body.”

  “So far, the answers suck: nobody had an opportunity to kill Walden, and our best suspect for the corpse-snatching is a woman who’ll never see seventy again.”

  “Why?”

  “Time doesn’t work that way, sweetheart. I’ll explain it when you’re older. And don’t make that badger face. I know what you meant.” Somers hummed. “Why? Why would someone kill John Oscar Walden?”

  “And why would someone steal the body?”

  Somers straightened in his seat. “They’re related.”

  “I told you that you were a damn good detective.”

  “We knew they were related. It’s too much of a coincidence that someone would kill Walden and then his body would disappear. But I didn’t think they were related.” Somers heard the contradiction in his words and ignored it. “Someone had an end in mind. A plan. Part one was killing Walden. But part two was getting the body.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t do that.” But Somers furrowed his brow, thinking. He cast a sidelong glance at Hazard. “You’ve already got it figured out. Just tell me.”

  “I want to hear what you think.”

  “This is the worst parking I’ve ever done.”

  “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Most cults disintegrate when the leader dies or is removed,” Somers said slowly. “That’s only logical: cults exist primarily because of the charisma of the leader. The control mechanisms help to keep people in line, help maintain and stabilize the cult, but it only begins, it only really grows, because of the leader’s charisma. So maybe someone wanted the cult to fail. Only that doesn’t explain the body. And—” He straightened again, and his heart cracked against his ribs, and he saw one of Emery Hazard’s secret smiles, and those scarecrow eyes like sunset, a New Year’s Eve sunset, the coldest sunfire of the year. “And the cult didn’t disintegrate. It’s gotten bigger. Jesus. Somebody’s making a power play. Someone’s going to be the new leader, the leader of a bigger, more powerful cult.”

  “Somebody already is the new leader. Someone charismatic, with a history of conning people.”

  “Kelley Jane Walden.”

  HAZARD STARED AT SOMERS as he voiced the same conclusion that Hazard had reached. The fine black hairs on Hazard’s arms stood on end; his skin tightened and prickled. The skin at the center of his chest, that skin especially felt like it had been stretched over a drum. Somers, blond and golden and the perfect version of a swimsuit model—very skimpy swimsuits, very sexy swimsuits—was hot. He was goddamn attractive. But Somers using his brain, Somers thinking, Somers following the same facts to the same conclusion—Jesus Christ, Hazard thought, aware of the sweat on his lower back, aware of that tender-tight skin across his chest, Jesus Christ, Hazard was going to need life support if Somers got any hotter.

  And it wasn’t just the fact that the smart Somers was so damn sexy. It was all of it: the fact that Somers had been patient, the fact that Somers had watched Hazard beat a fencepost with a length of pipe, the fact that Somers dealt with all of Hazard’s craziness with the same dry humor. And now this, the raw intelligence underlying those perfect, golden good looks.

  The most shocking part, the part that magnified all the rest of it, was how oblivious Somers was. He knew he was attractive, of course. God damn, the man could give a college class on self-confidence, and correspondence courses on how to drive everybody in the world out of their damn minds. But he didn’t know the rest. He didn’t know that his intelligence, his kindness, his good humor, that they were hundred times more important than the taut lines of his body.

  Hazard remembered their last night together, his hands on Somers’s body, and redid that math.

  Well, they were at least fifty times more important.

  “We can’t arrest Kelley Jane just because she has the best motive,” Somers said. His turquoise eyes skimmed Hazard. “Why are you sweating?”

  “I just hit a fence post with a piece of lead pipe. A lot.”

  With a shrug, Somers said, “Besides, Kelley Jane has a solid alibi: Clyde. That means Clyde is lying, but I didn’t think he was lying. At least, he wasn’t lying about being with Kelley Jane. He was too embarrassed to lie.”

  “But you think he was lying about something?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a human lie detector.”

  “But you think he was lying.”

  “I think he’s hiding something. This stuff about Sheol. There’s something funny there. Something he skirts every time we try to ask him about it. Have you noticed that?”

  “Sheol is the Hebrew word for the underworld. In the Hebrew Bible, it is where the dead are. It can also represent evil.” Hazard frowned. “It’s a strange word for Walden’s cult to use. Sheol is very Hebrew. It’s not a Christian concept.”

  “No,” Somers said, “we’ve got a nice heaven and hell situation cooked up.”

  “So what does Sheol mean to them? Why use it?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “I don’t know everything, Somers.”

  Somers cocked an eyebrow.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I know you don’t know everything, Ree.”

  “All right, I get it.”

  “I mean, it’s pretty obvious.”

  “Drop it.”

  “If you knew everything, you wouldn’t have to watch those horrible documentaries. That’s how I know you don’t know everything. Because you’re still learning.”

  Hazard’s words came out in a growl. “You made your point.”

  With a grin, Somers said, “Do you really think Clyde will give up Kelley Jane just because Jesse beat on him for a few hours?”

  “I thought you said Clyde was telling the truth.”

  “Somebody’s lying, Ree. Somebody had an opportunity to kill Walden. Kelley Jane makes the most sense, so I say we focus on breaking her alibi.”

  “But she’s smart,” Hazard said. “She would have known that she’d be a suspect. She made sure she had an alibi—a disgusting one, but a solid one. Not just Clyde. The door was fucking locked from the outside, for Christ’s sake. Think back to Vegas. She wasn’t working alone, remember? She had that guy, Philip Garnet. Her accomplice.”

  “Right. And here she had John Oscar Walden.”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, you’re right that she and Walden were working together, but they weren’t a team. Not the way we might have expected. I think she had somebody else here.”

  “Garnet?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe just another scumbag she’s teamed up with.”

  Somers frowned, his forehead furrowing again, and again Hazard felt that wave of invisible heat. “The people in Walden’s cult aren’t particularly bright. Or motivated. Can you imagine trusting Brother Dan or Brother Paul with a murder? God, I wouldn’t trust them with five bucks at the Price Chopper.”

  “What about Jesse?”

  “Yeah. He’s creepy enough. And vicious enough—we saw how he maneuvered Clyde into the car, and it sounds like he worked him over a lot worse afterward. But it doesn’t have to be a man.”

  Hazard snorted. “Sister Sapphira? She doesn’t like any of them, and I don’t think she’d have any qualms about killing, but she doesn’t have a motive. Anna and Claudia—Christ, can you imagine that? They couldn’t figure out how to fire a gun between the two of them.”

  “They wouldn’t have to fire a gun. Walden was stabbed to death.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. And I think Peyton Laflamme could have picked up a knife or fired a gun or done whatever it took. She’s playing the victim pretty well, and she’s got a great story—daughter of a D-list celebrity escaping from a cult, huge inheritance, all of it. But she’s one cold piece of meat, Ree. I could see her killing if she thought she needed to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s crazy.”

  “No. There’s another why we haven’t considered. Why kill Britney Cowper? That’s who the girl was, right? The girl in the cave?”

  Somers nodded. “I think so. We found Walden’s Chevy. I don’t know who else it could be.”

  “Why kill her?”

  “She knew something.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Think about it.” Somers leaned forward. “She was arguing with Walden. We know that; Clyde told us. She was crazy, too. All those years living on the street, and then the cult. She had those insane ideas about being a Judas, killing Walden so he could be resurrected.” Somers whistled. “There’s an idea.”

  “Britney killed him?”

  “And then Kelley Jane killed her.”

  Hazard nodded. “It’s possible. At this point, anything’s possible.”

  “So what do we do?” Somers said. “Do we go back like Cravens said? All hands on deck because a crazy cult revival is sweeping through town?”

  Shaking his head in disgust, Hazard buckled his seatbelt.

  With a laugh, Somers eased the Interceptor onto the highway, heading north again. “I thought that’s how you’d feel.”

  THEY WENT TO THE WALDEN farm first, where they found a miniature city being built. Tents had sprung up like dandelions, and several RV campers circled a freshly-dug firepit. There was even a clothesline strung between a telephone pole and a Subaru hatchback, and pairs of Star Trek-themed boxer shorts hung along the line, still dripping. Hazard recognized none of the people that had gathered at the Walden farm, but he recognized them for what they were: lunatics. Lunatics persuaded, in some way that Hazard couldn’t understand, to believe in Walden and his horseshit. And now they were here, building up Walden’s insane family.

  Hazard and Somers found Sister Anna and Sister Claudia chopping firewood behind the house. The two stocky women moved like clockwork: Claudia scooped up a length of timber, and Anna brought the axe down hard, and the split pieces tumbled to the ground. Then Claudia tossed the firewood into a stack and placed the next piece on the block. Hazard thought of his own words earlier. The two women might not be smart enough to fire a gun, not even between the two of them, but they sure as hell knew how to handle an axe. And that made Hazard think of the bloody mess of Walden’s guts.

  “We haven’t seen anybody,” Sister Anna said, planting her hands on her face, wiping sweat from her brow.

  “Anybody,” Sister Claudia echoed.

  “Ladies,” Somers said. “We haven’t even asked you yet.”

  They ignored him and went back to work.

  Hazard and Somers circled the farmhouse. The tarps along the burned-out wall tensed against their rope, snapping as the wind raced behind them. On the wind was the stale, burnt smell that Hazard remembered from their last visit. He thought again about Sister Naomi sleeping in a place like this for weeks, maybe months.

  When they knocked on the door, Sister Sapphira answered. She wore a terrycloth robe printed with puppies, and she arched her back, thrusting her chest towards Somers. Hazard had to cough to pull his partner’s attention back.

  “Yes,” Somers said. “Um. We were . . .”

  “We’re looking for Sister Naomi,” Hazard said. “Or Kelley Jane. Or Jesse. Any of them.”

  “That’s very rude,” Sister Sapphira said, her tongue darting out to touch her upper lip. “A girl likes to be courted.” She touched the chemically fried hair pinned up at the back of her head. “Why would I even think about giving you what you want? I don’t suppose you’ll ravish me if I keep silent. I think you’d be very good at ravishing.” This last bit she directed at Somers, and although the tone was playful, her eyes had a flat, emotionless quality.

  “That’s not in the job description,” Somers said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hazard muttered.

  “But I probably would be good at it,” Somers added.

  Sister Sapphira barked a hoarse laugh, and then she waved red nails at them. “Kelley Jane, if you have to know, is in town. With Brother Jesse, I think. They’ve got a lot to do. You know how it is: obtaining the right permits for us to assemble, looking for a new church building, meeting our neighbors. My God, do you have any idea how much work it takes just to keep all these people from clogging the toilet? They left me in charge, and I think I’m going to give it up and crawl into bed.” She smirked at Somers, and again Hazard was struck by the lack of expression in her eyes: like film that had been played one too many times and was now scratched and dull.

  “What about Sister Naomi?”

  “That old bird?”

  “Where is she?”

  “You know those other detectives are looking for her. You know the ones I mean? One’s a lady. The other’s like a squirrel with a big pair of glasses. Is the lady a dyke?”

  “Did they come around here?”

  “They think Sister Naomi stole Brother Jeshua’s body.”

  “What do you think?” Somers said.

  “I think Brother Jeshua rose from the dead.” But her smile was just a nasty slash like she was in on a joke that nobody else knew.

  “I think a seventy-year-old woman couldn’t carry a dead man,” Hazard said.

  Sapphira’s eyes flicked to Hazard before returning to Somers. “Maybe you two aren’t as stupid as you seem.”

  “We think Sister Naomi might know something,” Somers said.

  “What?”

  “Something about Walden’s body disappearing,” Hazard said. “She was there. She went there for a reason.”

  “She’s a believer.” Sapphira’s hand slid between the folds of the robe, parting the terrycloth to expose more bosom. “She went there because she wanted to be the next Mary Magdalene.”

  Somers glanced at Hazard.

  “The first woman to see Jesus after his resurrection.”

  “Standing there with a sign for the bathroom and holding out a pack of smokes,” Sapphira said.

  “I think you know where she is,” Hazard said. “And I think you know that we aren’t going to cause her any trouble.”

  For the first time, Sapphira’s expression grew serious. “You boys can’t do anything but give her trouble. The only thing you’re ever going to be for her is trouble. Can’t you see that?”

  “What does that mean?” Somers said.

  “It means you want to find who killed Brother Jeshua.”

  “You think she doesn’t want to know who killed him?” Hazard asked.

  “No,” Sapphira said. She was clutching at the terrycloth now, all attempts at seduction vanished, as though a cold wind had put out that flame. “You two are cops and you haven’t even learned that much?”

  “What do you mean?” Somers asked.

  “I danced. You wouldn’t believe it now, but I was one hell of a dancer. It’s mostly about the legs, you know.” She cocked her hips as though demonstrating. “And the pussy, but that’s what nobody wants to say out loud. I danced in Reno. I was going to school, and I danced for some extra money.”