“I was locked inside the loft apartment. I was busy with Clyde. I couldn’t have gotten out even if I wanted to.” And then Somers saw it, the flicker of fear in her eyes that betrayed her. “Clyde will back that up.”

  But she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure at all about that.

  “You might have been inside the loft apartment,” Hazard said. “But you weren’t there the whole time.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You saw the door. For God’s sake, you were the one who let us out. The lock was broken from the outside. I couldn’t have done that from the inside. And I couldn’t have broken it and then gone in another way; we were on the second floor. There weren’t any ladders, so I couldn’t have climbed in through a window. There’s only one possibility: the killer broke the lock to trap me and Clyde while he murdered my poor husband. And now God has raised my husband up again as proof of his divine calling. This is a spiritual lesson, Detectives. Even the killer was only doing his part in God’s plan. Like Judas, he will be punished, but in his wickedness he is also an essential collaborator in God’s great mercy.”

  “Judas?” Somers said. “Judas wasn’t punished. Judas killed himself.”

  “You’re right,” Hazard said. “In part, anyway. The killer did break that lock and trap you in the apartment. One of the killers, anyway.”

  “One of the killers? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You used to be psychic,” Somers said drily. “You tell us.”

  “You have a pattern,” Hazard said. “And once you have a pattern, it’s easy to make the same mistakes. You’re the face of the operation. You’re the brains of the operation. You know how to be what people want you to be. You were a psychic in Vegas, and from what I read, you were a good one.”

  “I bet you played it to the hilt,” Somers said. “Beaded curtains, incense, a gypsy accent. God, you probably even had a crystal ball.”

  “I heard the voice of the Lord,” Kelley Jane snapped, a flush mottling her cheeks. “I was a heathen. I didn’t understand the whisperings of His Spirit, and so I misled those poor people. It wasn’t until I met my dear husband—”

  “That you saw a new way of conning people,” Hazard said. “A safer way. The law has been hard on psychics lately. Fraud charges, mostly. Even wire fraud; I found a case about that. But it’s a lot harder to prosecute a religious leader. Harder, but not impossible. Had you already cooked up the scheme when you met John Oscar Walden? Or was it his idea?”

  “It was hers,” Somers said, trusting instinct as he watched fury map the older woman’s features. “And she didn’t like getting pushed to the side.”

  “It was one thing for you to keep cool when Walden started bringing young girls into the fold, when he started taking advantage of them.”

  “Raping them,” Somers said.

  “That didn’t bother you. No, what bothered you was the money. Everything was in Walden’s name. It was your idea, and all the money was going to him.”

  “Did he give you an allowance?” Somers asked, his lips peeling back into a smirk. “Did he make you beg for pocket money?”

  “Fuck you,” Kelley Jane said, her voice roughening and taking on a harsh, Western accent. “You prissy little faggot. Fuck both of you.”

  “And so you decided Walden had to go,” Hazard said. “But you have a pattern. You’re the brains. You’re the face. But you’re not the muscle.”

  “In Vegas, you had Philip Garnet,” Somers said, and he went out on a limb, trusting his gut again. “He goes by something else here. What’s his real name? Brother Jesse? Philip Garnet? What did you call him when you were planning Walden’s murder?”

  “That?” Kelley Jane laughed. “That’s all you’ve got? You figured out that I knew Brother Jesse before? Yes. All right. That’s the truth; we were both sinners, and we both heard the Lord’s calling and repented of our sins.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “He was with Sirkaa Hastback. She’ll testify that he was with her all day. He couldn’t have done what you’re saying.”

  “We haven’t said anything yet,” Somers said.

  “Ask her. She’s old, but she’s not senile. She’ll say he was at her house the whole day.”

  “Of course she will,” Hazard said. “Jesse made sure of it. He tampered with the clock; he moved it ahead two hours. That was plenty of time for him to leave Sirkaa’s house, kill Walden, and break the lock on the loft apartment so that you and Clyde were safely out of consideration as suspects.”

  Somers fought to keep his face still. That little revelation was a particularly clever piece of deduction, something on the equivalent of a magician’s sleight of hand, but the fact that Hazard had kept it from him made Somers want to knock some sense into his partner’s head. Preferably the hard way.

  Kelley Jane’s eyes were rock steady on Hazard. “You can’t prove that. It’s a lie. It’s insane. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds insane.”

  “Jesse told us. Or Philip if you prefer to call him that. He was eager to tell us.”

  She shook her head, and the darkest glimmer of a smile lifted her expression. “That’s a lie.”

  “Because he’s innocent?” Somers laughed, but inside, panic laid a finger on him. She suddenly seemed too confident.

  “You’re lying,” Kelley Jane said. “You have no proof.”

  “We already had him for Sister Naomi’s murder. He practically killed her in front of Sirkaa Hastback.” Those invisible, intuitive processes galvanized inside Somers, and suddenly he saw what Hazard had seen. “Naomi suspected what Jesse had done, and she went to Sirkaa’s house to prove it. We all noticed that the clock was fast the first time we went to Sirkaa’s house. Jesse had used his trick with the clock twice—once for the murder, and once to steal the body—and he must have figured that eventually someone might check. It is, after all, the only clock Sirkaa keeps in the house. She tells everyone. So he went back to fix the clock and set it back to the correct time. Naomi arrived. She saw what he was doing. At that point, he had to kill her. Naomi was a true believer; she wouldn’t have let Jesse get away with murdering her Lord and Savior.”

  Hazard’s scarecrow eyes glowed like electrified amber; he was so fixed on Kelley Jane, his gaze so viscerally sharp, that Somers felt a moment of fear, as though Hazard might launch himself in an attack. “Jesse dragged Naomi to a creek and butchered her. But she wasn’t outright dead; Jesse didn’t have time to make sure. He had to go because he knew Sirkaa would call the police. And Naomi lived long enough to leave us a message.” Hazard produced Clyde’s Bible from his jacket, and he opened to a dog-eared page. “And the sun stood still,” he read, “and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” He closed and pocketed the book. “The sun stood still. That’s what she was trying to tell us. She understood the trick that Jesse had pulled, and the last thing she did, after she had tried to drag herself to help, when she knew she was dying and no one would come for her, was to try to tell us.” Hazard’s voice had thickened and dropped, and it was black and bottomless as hell. “That’s hope. That’s belief. That’s fucking faith, right there.”

  The April breeze cracked the sheets taut, and Somers glimpsed black engineer boots. Brother Jeremiah hadn’t gone far. Kelley Jane didn’t trust the police, but Somers realized that she probably didn’t trust her followers much more.

  And then Somers understood the rest of Hazard’s plan with the same lightning flash of discovery. He drew the forged document from inside his jacket and extended it towards Kelley Jane. “If you’re covering for Jesse, you might want to know about a few withdrawals he made in your name. You know, you really shouldn’t trust a murderer with your finances.”

  Kelley Jane’s hand was steady as she reached for the document, but as she unfolded it, the paper trembled, and the pages rasped against each other like dead leaves in high winter. As she turned through the forged bank statement, where Somers had carefully invented fraudulent withdrawals emptying the account, the color in her cheeks faded, leaving her face like February snow, gray and crusted and frozen.

  Like a hand drawing aside a curtain, the air shifted the bedsheets, and the smell of Gain wafted through the clearing. The black engineer boots had moved closer.

  “That bastard,” she said. “That motherfucking thieving bastard. He deserves what he got. He deserves Sheol. I’m going to—”

  With a cry, she threw the pages at Hazard and sprinted towards the screen of bedding. Hazard launched out of his seat. A gun fired, ripping a hole in a sheet. The bullet exploded into one of the maples, spraying splinters of bark. Hazard staggered. He was reaching for the .38 holstered under his arm, but the black engineer boots were moving closer, and Hazard was in shock, too slow.

  Somers had seen the boots, though. He had watched. And he had the .40 caliber Glock in his hand. And his first shot went through the bedsheet like a stampeding elephant, and it caught Brother Jeremiah in the chest. His hair floated up, and for a moment he looked suspended, baptized in the sunlight and the spring air and a mist of his own blood, and then he thumped down, and the sound was like potatoes rolling off a cart.

  Hazard, amber eyes wide, glanced at Somers in shock.

  Somers picked at the splinters that pincushioned his cheek. Jerking his head after Kelley Jane, he said, “She’s getting away.”

  And for a brooding Neanderthal, Emery Hazard sure ran fast.

  MIRANDA CARMICHAEL AND GEORGE PETERSON showed up in a black-and-white, the lights spinning lazy blue cones in the dusk. Carmichael had her hair buzzed, the consequence of an encounter with an angry old woman a few months before. Peterson, thin and black as midnight, hadn’t changed. They took custody of Kelley Jane, who had subsided into miserable silence after Hazard caught her, and started taping off the scene of the shooting. Brother Jeremiah’s body they left where it was; gnats clouded above the dead man, a shifting, shadowy shroud.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Somers said as Hazard turned towards the Interceptor.

  “To get Jesse.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Ree, there’s going to be an officer-involved shooting investigation. We’ve got to wait—”

  “I’m going. Are you coming with me or not?”

  Somers let out a sigh. Catching up to Hazard, he climbed into the Interceptor.

  “Hey,” Carmichael shouted at them, her small form bouncing as she flagged them down. “Hey, you can’t leave.”

  Somers gave her an apologetic wave, shifted the Interceptor into reverse, and left the park.

  “This wasn’t how I planned on tonight going,” Somers said.

  “You didn’t intend on catching two killers?”

  The tires thumped over one of Market Street’s many potholes. “You always get salty after you close a case.”

  “I’m not salty. And this case isn’t closed.”

  “See? You’re being salty right now? You do this every time.”

  “We’ve got Kelley Jane on record saying some incriminating things,” Hazard touched the phone in his pocket. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a closed case.”

  “If we find Jesse, I think we can consider it closed.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t have to be salty. Just because you were right, you don’t have to get a big head.”

  “For God’s sake, Somers, I’m not being salty. I’m just saying—” Hazard rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know. None of that felt off?”

  “I thought I handled Brother Jeremiah pretty well.”

  “Not that. Before. She seemed honestly surprised by what you said about Jesse. And then—and then something was off.”

  “I noticed that too. She trusted him; at least, she trusted him as far as she could. How the hell did you put all that together, by the way? About the clock?”

  “I read the Bible.”

  “Now you’re trying to be funny.”

  Hazard scowled. “What she said about Judas, that didn’t strike you as odd?”

  “Not really. We’ve been hearing variations of that song since we started working this case. Peyton said the same thing; she said Britney thought she was going to be a Judas, that she was called to kill Walden so he could be resurrected.”

  “But when we mentioned that to Naomi, she was—” Hazard groped for a word.

  “Horrified,” Somers said, surprised that he hadn’t thought about the old woman’s reaction earlier. “She was almost frightened.”

  “For a time, it seemed possible that Britney had killed Walden. But from everything people told us, I don’t think that’s true. She was a true believer. Maybe she could have been convinced that killing Walden really was a good deed, a kind of divine mission. But everyone also told us she was—”

  “She was too stupid to come up with an idea like that on her own.” Somers pursed his lips, thinking. “So where did she hear it? And why was Naomi so horrified that we knew about it?”

  The town whipped past them in a gray blur, streaking into the April gloom so that the world became strata of shadows. Ahead, a silhouette against the burnt embers of the horizon, rose Walden’s townhouse, where a girl named Britney Cowper had been murdered, where someone had stabbed John Oscar Walden, and where the seeds of this madness had found fertile ground.

  “Kelley Jane said those words.” Hazard’s voice was low, but it had a ripple in it like wind slapping water. If Somers hadn’t known better, he would have thought Hazard was afraid. “She said the killer was a Judas.”

  “Good. That’s more proof that she’s the mastermind behind this.”

  Hazard didn’t answer. His face was full of the evening, full of light the color of limestone, and he was afraid, Somers realized, he was terrified. Nothing in the world frightened Emery Hazard—well, just about nothing. And Somers found himself braking harder than he meant to, and the Interceptor threw up gravel and dust as they skidded to a halt in front of Walden’s house.

  “What?” Somers asked.

  Hazard shook his head and hurried towards the house.

  Somers raced after him. But Hazard passed Walden’s house and headed for the barn. The smell of straw and dry alfalfa and last year’s manure still filled the air, but the space was vast and dark in the evening. Hazard rushed into that darkness, while Somers fumbled for a light. Bulbs clicked on, and Somers sprinted after his partner. Hazard passed the loft apartment, and Somers felt a twinge of shock. What was he looking for? What could possibly be here if not in the loft apartment? That was how Kelley Jane had managed to hide her involvement; surely Hazard wanted something here, something to prove that it had been Jesse who broke the lock.

  But no. Somers took a breath, and the barn’s dust tickled his throat, and he coughed once, violently, and it left his chest raw. No, Hazard had said he was coming to find Jesse. And pieces of their conversation with Kelley Jane began to fall together in Somers’s mind. Once, in high school, a science teacher had shown a video of a wine glass breaking. Then, in an effort to explain something—Somers had a vague recollection that it had to do with entropy—the video had reversed, and the shards of glass had flown into the air, seamlessly melding together as though called by some strange witchcraft. And that same witchcraft was working in Somers’s mind. All the pieces and fragments were flying backwards, were falling up, and they were all coming together, and he was starting to see, and his heart beat faster, and sweat slicked his back and prickled across his chest, and he had a glimpse of what had made Hazard so afraid in the car, and all he could think was no, no, not that, he can handle anything but that.

  In the tack room, the scent of oil and sweat lingered after the saddles and bridles and harnesses had long since been given away or scavenged or stolen. Hazard swept one foot across the ground, dust and old straw washing over his wingtips, and he swept his foot back, changing the arc each time. The dust pillowed in the air, puffing up, rising as Hazard scraped his sole back and forth along the ground. Then the wingtip scratched wood, and Hazard froze.

  “Ree,” Somers said. “Maybe I should—”

  Dropping into a squat, Hazard ran his hands along the ground, his fingers outlining a rectangular panel in the dust. Those same fingers—hard, strong, callused fingers, fingers that now seemed strangely hesitant—danced across an iron ring set into the trap door.

  “Whatever it is,” Somers said, “it’s nothing you could have changed.”

  “When the fuck have I ever changed anything?”

  Muscles bunching, Hazard hauled on the ring, and the trap door squeaked and shimmied free of the warped frame. Below, blackness. And from the blackness came a stench: shit and piss, yes, but also wet soil, and rot, a smell that Somers associated with worms when the spring rains carried on day after day and the sidewalks flooded with them. For a long moment, it seemed like it was the blackness itself flowing out of the pit, that it would rear up and crash like a wave, drowning the men and the lights and the world. Nothing could live down there. It was a place for the dead, for corruption, for a silent, icy eternity.

  “Sheol,” Somers said, and he didn’t know how he knew, didn’t want to know, only that the smell coated his tongue and he thought he’d taste it when he ate, taste it when he bathed, taste it on Hazard’s mouth too, that this oily slick would always be between them.

  Hazard dropped to his knees, leaning into the darkness, and it looked like the emptiness would swallow him. Then he grabbed something, reared back, and blew out a ragged, wet breath, as though he were close to losing his lunch.

  He was gripping Brother Jesse by the wrist. He heaved again, and Brother Jesse flopped forward a few inches. Dead weight, Somers thought. He’s just dead weight. There was so much blood on Jesse’s face, and it made him colorful, almost lively, as though this were some grotesquerie meant to horrify and entertain. But he was dead. Dead weight. And with that thought, only part of Somers meant the ungainly flopping corpse.