past the Randall Market. The bumpy and barely paved road curved through a small stand of trees before straightening out near the hospital. A mile or so farther and they reached the Episcopal church. Brad stopped the truck.
GOD DAMN YOU ALL
The words jumped out--a harsh and jagged red against the placid tan of the brick building. The letters were fully three feet high, covering the north wall of the church, the paint dripping in horror-show icicles. The church's two tall stained-glass windows had been smashed, and multicolored bits of glass littered the gravel parking lot.
GOD DAMN YOUR SOULS
TO HELL PIG FUCKERS
Gordon felt his pulse accelerate as he looked through the windshield at the desecration. The small peach-fuzz hairs on the back of his neck bristled. His eyes focused on the small shards of colored glass glinting in the sunlight. He had never been an avid churchgoer, but this.. ..
GOD DAMN YOU ALL
He looked again at the message, his eyes following the dripping red paint that obscured the letters on the lower portion of the wall. And he realized suddenly that it was not paint.
'Goat's blood,' Carl Chmura confirmed, sticking his head through the doorway of the sheriff's office. 'The lab just called.'
Jim Weldon stopped massaging his tired temples and looked up. 'All right, Carl. Thanks.' He slowly stood up, grabbing his hat from the rack next to the desk and putting it on. 'Wait a minute,' he said.
'Carl? Call some of the local farmers and ranchers. Check up as far as Turner Draw if you have to. See if any of them have any goats missing.'
Carl nodded. 'Gotcha.'
'Oh, and try Selway's number one more time. Let's give him another chance. I'm going out to the church to see if there's anything we missed. I'll stop by the hospital on my way back and find out if any of the patients saw anything.' He grabbed his holster from its hanger on the wall and buckled it on. 'Call me if you find something out.'
'Will do.'
Jim looked around the office, his eyes searching the room as if there was something he had forgotten. He absently patted his pockets. He knew there was something that had slipped his mind, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. He shook his head. This case was really rattling him. Nothing like this had ever happened in his town before--nothing like this had ever happened in any town he'd ever heard of--and he wasn't quite sure what to do. He was just playing everything by ear. He'd already contacted Tim Larson, and Tim was going to clean up the blood and the rest of the mess. And he'd called some glass workers in Flagstaff who were supposed to come up next week with some new fitted windows. But there was still something he was forgetting.
He sighed heavily and followed his deputy out the door into the hall.
He opened the small alarmed gate that separated the back of the building from the front and walked past the front desk toward the sliding double-glass doors that led out to the parking lot.
'Wait a minute! Sheriff!' Rita, sitting by the switchboard, waved him down. 'I have the diocese on the line. You wanted to talk to them?'
That was it.
'Yeah. Thanks,' he said. He turned back down the hall. 'Switch it to my office. I'll take it in there.' He walked into his office and picked up the phone, punching the blinking square light of line three.
'Hello. Sheriff Weldon here.'
'Mr. Weldon? This is Bishop Sinclair. I am returning your call.'
'Hello Bishop.' Jim's mind quickly ran down his list of options. He could chat casually with the bishop, easing into the news. He could come right out with it, plunge right in. He could pull a Jack Webb, take the official line. He decided to plunge right in. 'Has Father Selwaybeen in contact with you at all today?'
'No he hasn't.'
'Then you don't know what's happened up here?'
The bishop's voice sounded wary. 'No. What happened?'
'The Episcopal church has been vandalized. Some person or persons unknown smashed all the windows, tore up the landscape --'
'The Episcopal church?'
'That's not all of it.' Jim paused for a second, not quite sure how to proceed. 'You see, Bishop, someone painted . . . curses all over the front of the building.'
'Curses?'
'In goat's blood.'
There was a long silence on the other end of the line. 'I got a call from Tim Larson this morning,' Jim continued. 'Tim's the janitor out at the church. Anyway, he told me that the church'd been hit, told me to get over there as soon as I could. I--'
'What kind of curses?' the bishop asked.
'You sure you want to hear this?'
'I'm sure I've heard such words before, Mr. Weldon. I've probably used them myself.'
'There were three lines. The top line said, 'God damn you all.' The next line said, 'God damn your souls,' and the bottom line said, 'To hell pig fuckers 'God damn you all. God damn your souls to hell pig fuckers It covered the whole front of the building.' The bishop said nothing.
Jim cleared his throat. 'That's why I was calling you. You see, we don't really know what happened here, and we were wondering if Father Selwayhad contacted you at all.'
The bishop's voice was quiet. 'No he hasn't. But he should have. What did he say to you about it? Does he have any idea as to who might have done such a thing?'
Jim cleared his throat again. 'Well, that's the thing, Bishop. We don't know where Father Selway is.'
'You don't know where he is?'
'No. Tim tried to call him first, before he called me, to tell him what had happened, but no one answered the phone. Then when I went out to the house around a half hour later, no one was there. The whole family was gone. The front door of the house was open, but the place was empty. A team's out there now, investigating the house, but it doesn't appear that anything happened to the family. The Selways’ car is gone, and we have reason to suspect that they might have used the car to drive somewhere.'
The bishop's voice grew suddenly cold, stern. 'What exactly are you trying to say, Mr. Weldon?'
'Nothing, Bishop. Like I said, we don't know what happened. At this point, we'd just like to talk to Father Selway and see if he knows anything about this.'
'What are you implying?' His voice was a monotone, but there was a threat in that monotone, a suggestion of rigid enforceable authority.
Jim closed his eyes, beginning to feel a tinge of frustration. There was nothing he hated worse than civilians who tried to throw their weight around, who tried to tell him how to do his job, but he kept his voice even, modulated, official. 'I'm not implying anything at all.
It's just that--'
'Don't you think something might have happened to the Selway family?
They might have been kidnapped.'
'We're investigating all possibilities, Bishop. But to be honest, at this stage of the investigation Selway looks more like a suspect than a victim. We found his fingerprints all over the church.'
'Of course his fingerprints are all over the church. It's his church.'
'Bloody fingerprints?'
He could almost feel the bishop's anger through the silence of the line.
'Bishop?'
'Yes?'
Jim cringed at the coldness of the voice. 'We just want to talk to Selway right now. That's all. If any charges are to be filed in this matter they will have to be filed by the church.'
