Chapter Text
The heat hit Max before the smell did, and the smell hit him before the town.
He'd driven the last ninety miles with the windows down because the Crown Victoria's air conditioning had died somewhere outside Memphis, and the air that poured in was thick enough to chew—honeysuckle and diesel and underneath it all something sweetly rotten, like fruit left too long in a closed room. Mississippi in June. The Bureau had a sense of humor after all.
The sign appeared out of the kudzu like a headstone.
WELCOME TO JERICHO — POP. 3,204 — THE LORD KEEPS THIS TOWN
Somebody had shot the sign twice, small caliber, years ago by the rust blooming from the holes. Nobody had fixed it. Max noted that the way he noted everything: filed, dated, held against the light for later.
The town itself unspooled slowly. A water tower with the paint peeling off in long strips, like skin. A gas station where an old man sat in a lawn chair and watched Max pass without turning his head, only his eyes moving. Clapboard houses set far back from the road behind yards gone yellow in the drought, and on nearly every porch, he saw it—a cross. Wooden, wrought iron, two sticks bound with wire. Not decoration. More like the marks the Israelites painted over their doors so the angel of death would keep walking.
Somebody in this town believed the angel had stopped walking. Three bodies said they were right.
The sheriff's station squatted at the end of Main Street across from a church so white it hurt to look at. St. Ignatius, according to the file—columns out front like the town had once had money and ambitions, a steeple tall enough to see from the county line. The church was the biggest building in Jericho by a factor of three. That told Max most of what he needed to know about the place before he'd spoken to a single soul in it.
Sheriff Dale Prather was a big man gone soft, with a handshake designed to hurt and a smile designed to hide it.
"Agent Verstappen." He said the name carefully, like it might bite. "That's—what is that, German?"
"Dutch."
"Huh." Prather looked at him the way people down here looked at anything foreign, which was the way you'd look at a stain on the carpet in someone else's house—politely, and with judgment. "Well. Long way from Holland."
"Longer from Washington," Max said. "The bodies."
The smile faltered. Good. Max had learned early that people offered you two doors, friendly and useful, and they were never the same door. He'd stopped choosing friendly around 1979.
Prather walked him back through the station—two deputies pretending not to stare, a fan pushing warm air in circles, a coffee machine with a hand-written sign that said BROKE—to a back room where three folders lay on a table like place settings.
"Victim one, Delia Marsh. Waitress out at the truck stop on Route 9. Found in February, in the creek bed off Tanner Road." Prather opened the folder with two fingers, the way a man opens something he doesn't want to touch. "Victim two, Curtis Boyd. Drifter, did odd jobs, drank. Found in April in the old cotton warehouse. Victim three, ten days ago. Samuel Okafor. Schoolteacher over in the next county. Found in the woods behind the seminary retreat house."
Max spread the photographs out.
He'd seen a lot of dead people. It was the arithmetic of his career, and he'd made peace with it the way you make peace with weather. But these were different, and the difference was in the care. Each body had been washed. Arranged. Hands folded on the chest like the dead in a Renaissance painting. And carved into the skin of each torso, in letters so precise they must have taken an hour or more—an hour spent alone, working slowly, on a body cooling under your hands—were words.
Leviticus 20:9, on the waitress.
Leviticus 18:26, on the drifter.
Leviticus 17:11, on the teacher.
"You know what those mean?" Prather asked.
"I know what Leviticus is." Max turned the photo of the third victim toward the light. "The last one. Seventeen eleven. The life of the flesh is in the blood." He looked up in time to catch the surprise on the sheriff's face. "I was raised Catholic. It didn't take, but the reading did."
"Well," Prather said. "Then you know what folks around here are saying. That somebody's doing the Lord's cleaning for Him. Delia had a reputation. Curtis was a drunk. And Okafor—" He shrugged, and the shrug contained a whole ugly history that Max decided to let lie for now. "People say a lot of things."
"People say things because it's easier than being afraid." Max gathered the photos. "The file mentions a witness on the third one. The person who found the body."
Something moved behind Prather's eyes—amusement, maybe, or anticipation, the look of a man about to hand off a problem he was glad to be rid of.
"Oh, yeah," the sheriff said. "You're gonna love him."
The witness was waiting in the interview room, which was really just the room where the deputies ate lunch, with a table, two chairs, and a window painted shut. Max stopped in the doorway and looked at him through the wired glass for a moment before going in, because that was habit, and because the first look at a witness told you things the next hundred hours wouldn't.
The man was young—mid-twenties—and sitting very straight, hands folded on the table in an attitude that could have been prayer or could have just been good posture. He wore a black cassock, actual floor-length clerical black, buttoned to the throat in ninety-five-degree heat, and somehow he was the only person Max had seen since crossing the county line who didn't look like he was sweating. Fair hair, neatly kept. A face that was all long clean lines, the kind of face that belonged in a stained-glass window, lit from behind.
He looked composed. He looked serene, and it irritated Max instantly and without any reason he could name, the way a picture hanging slightly crooked irritates a certain kind of person.
Max pushed the door open. "Mr. Russell."
"That's me." English. The file had said so, but hearing it in this room, in this town, was still strange—like finding a page from the wrong book bound into a novel. The witness looked up at him with blue, steady eyes. "And you're the FBI. They said Washington was sending someone. I'll admit I expected—"
"Someone else."
"Someone older," George Russell said. "But do sit down. You've had a long drive, and you look like a man who hates being looked at, so it'll be kinder to both of us if you're the one doing the looming from a chair."
Max stood there for a second longer than he meant to.
Then he sat, set the recorder on the table, and clicked it on. "Interview with George Russell, June eleventh, 1985. Agent Verstappen, Federal Bureau of Investigation. State your full name and your business in Jericho."
"George William Russell. I'm a seminarian—final year of my Master of Divinity, through a college in England you won't have heard of. I'm here on a twelve-month placement at St. Ignatius. I assist Father Aldous, I teach the Sunday school, I visit the sick and the shut-in, and lately," his voice stayed level, but something passed through it, quick as a fish under ice, "I find bodies in the woods."
"One body."
"One was sufficient, thank you."
Max opened the folder. "Walk me through it. The morning of June first."
"I've told the sheriff three times."
"You haven't told me."
George studied him. It was an odd sensation, being studied by this man—not the wary once-over Max got from suspects, or the flinching glance he got from frightened witnesses. George looked at him the way you'd read something. Carefully. Line by line.
"I walk in the mornings," George said finally. "Before Matins—before morning prayer, if you don't—"
"I know what Matins is."
"Do you?" Mild surprise, filed away. "Then you're the first person in this building who does. There's a path behind the retreat house that goes down to the creek. I walk it most days. It's the only hour it's cool enough to think. That morning there was a smell. And I—" He paused, and for the first time the composure showed its seams, just a hairline crack. "I want to say something first, so it's on your tape. Everyone here keeps telling me how calm I was. Sheriff Prather seems to find it suspicious, being calm. I'd like the record to show that I've sat with dying people. Part of the training. You learn what to do with your hands and your face so that you're of use to somebody instead of being one more thing they have to manage. It isn't calm. It's just—triage."
Max kept his face still. "Noted. Continue."
"He was laid out in a clearing off the path. On his back. Hands folded." George's own hands, folded on the table, tightened slightly—Max watched the knuckles pale. "His eyes were closed. Somebody closed them. And the—the writing. I could see it through his shirt, they'd dressed him again after, and the blood had come through in the shape of the letters. Like a brass rubbing." He exhaled slowly through his nose. "I checked for a pulse. I knew there wouldn't be one, he was cold, but you check. Then I said a prayer over him, and then I walked back to the church and telephoned the sheriff."
"You prayed over him."
"He was alone in the woods and someone had used him to write a message to God," George said. "Yes, Agent Verstappen, I prayed over him. What would you have done—dusted him?"
Max let the silence sit for a moment. Outside, a cicada started up, one long electric scream.
"The report says you saw someone."
"I saw a shape." George's voice dropped, careful now, the wit going out of it like air from a room. "At the far edge of the clearing, in the trees. It was still half dark. When I stood up from the body, it moved. Not running—withdrawing. Like it had stayed to watch and had seen enough."
"Description."
"Tall. Robed, or wearing something long—a coat, a vestment, I couldn't tell you. That's all in the report." He stopped.
Max had done four hundred interviews, maybe five. He knew the shape of a full stop and he knew the shape of a hand pressed over a mouth, and this was the second one.
"That's all in the report," Max repeated. "What isn't in the report?"
George's eyes came up.
And Max saw it—the calculation running behind them, fast and fine. Not the panic of a man caught in a lie. The hesitation of a man holding something he thought was too fragile to hand to a fool, deciding whether Max was one.
"It said something," George said quietly. "As it turned away. I didn't tell the sheriff because Sheriff Prather already thinks I'm either hysterical or involved, and this would have decided the matter for him. And because I heard it and I've spent ten days trying to convince myself I didn't."
"What did it say."
"Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi." His accent shifted as he said it, the Latin coming out worn smooth, the way words come out when a man has said them a thousand times on his knees. "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. It's from the Mass. You say it before Communion." He paused. "Before the sacrifice is consumed."
The cicada outside stopped, all at once, and the silence it left behind had a pressure to it.
Max looked at the man across the table—the folded hands, the black cassock buttoned to the throat, the face that belonged in a window—and felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the case, or not only the case. He'd worked ritual crimes for six years. He knew the difference between a killer quoting scripture to frighten and a killer quoting scripture because he meant it, and this was the second one, and the only person in three thousand souls who could hear that difference was sitting in front of him being pale and precise and English.
"Why tell me?" Max said.
"Because you knew what Matins is." A ghost of the earlier dryness came back. "And because you've been sitting there for twenty minutes deciding I'm irritating, but not once deciding I'm stupid. In this town that makes you a rare bird, Agent Verstappen. I thought I'd better feed you before you flew off."
Max clicked the recorder off.
He sat back. Through the painted-shut window, the white steeple of St. Ignatius rose over the roofline like a raised finger, admonishing the whole street beneath it. Somewhere in this town, or in the counties around it, was a person who washed the dead and folded their hands and carved Leviticus into their skin with the patience of a monk illuminating a manuscript. That person had stood in the trees and watched George Russell kneel over the body. Had watched him pray. Had spoken to him—liturgy, an invitation, a threat dressed as a blessing—and then withdrawn.
Lamb of God.
The killer had already chosen his next verse. Max would have bet his badge on it.
"Here's what happens now," Max said. "You don't go back to the retreat house. You don't walk your path in the mornings. Whoever this is knows your face, knows your routine, and stood close enough to speak to you. Until I close this, you're a protected witness, and you stay where I can see you."
George blinked. It was the first thing Max had said that seemed to genuinely land off-balance.
"I have duties. Sunday school. Father Aldous is seventy-one, he can't—"
"You can teach children about Noah with a federal agent in the back pew. What you can't do is turn up cold in a creek bed with a Bible verse carved in your chest, because then I have four bodies and no witness, and I've wasted a very hot drive."
"Your compassion," George said, "is a wellspring."
"I'm not paid for compassion."
"No," George said, looking at him with that reading expression again, longer than was comfortable, long enough that Max had to fight the urge to look away, "I don't imagine you are. What are you paid for, exactly? Looming and grim arithmetic?"
"Results."
"Well." George stood, and gathered the folds of the cassock, and even that he did neatly, like everything about him had been pressed and put away. "Then I suppose I'm one of your results now. Should I fetch my things, or does the Bureau provide a kennel?"
"There's a motel on Route 9."
"The Starlite." George pronounced the missing letters with visible distaste. "Yes. I've seen it. The sign flickers so that at night it just says tar." He moved to the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame and looked back, and the wit fell away from his face all at once, leaving something younger underneath, something Max would spend a long time afterward trying not to remember.
"Agent Verstappen. That morning, when it spoke—the voice was kind. That's the part I can't get out of my head. Whatever it is, it thinks it's doing something merciful." He looked out the wired glass toward the white steeple. "I've read a great deal of theology, and I can tell you there is nothing on this earth more dangerous than a person who has confused cruelty with mercy and has scripture enough to hide the difference."
He went out. The door clicked behind him, soft as a prayer book closing.
Max sat alone in the lunch room with three folders of dead people, listening to the cicada start up again, and thought, with a flat certainty that felt less like intuition and more like sentencing: This town is going to be a problem.
He was thinking about the town.
He told himself he was thinking about the town.