Blasphemy

Eddy nodded again. “A shame.”

The coffee began to perk. Eddy took the opportunity to busy himself getting out the mugs, sugar, and Cremora, placing them on the table. He poured out two cups and sat down again.

“Actually,” said Bia, “I’m here about something else. I was talking to the trader in Blue Gap yesterday, and he told me about the . . . problem you’d had with the collection money.”

“Right.” Eddy took a swallow of coffee, burned his mouth.

“He told me how you marked up some money and asked him to keep an eye out for it.”

Eddy waited.

“Well, yesterday a bunch of those bills showed up.”

“I see.” Eddy swallowed. Yesterday?

“It’s kind of an awkward situation,” said Bia, “which is why the trader talked to me about it, instead of calling you. I hope you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you. I don’t want to make a big deal about it.”

“Sure thing.”

“You know old lady Benally? Elizabeth Benally?”

“Of course, she attends my church.”

“She used to graze her sheep up on the mesa every summer, had an old hogan up there near Piute Spring. It wasn’t her land, she didn’t have any right to it, but she’d been using it most of her life. When the tribal government took over the mesa for that Isabella project, she lost that grazing land and had to sell her sheep.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It wasn’t so bad for her. She’s in her seventies, and they got her into a nice HUD house down in Blue Gap. Problem is, with a house like that, you suddenly have electric bills, water bills—you know what I mean? She’s never had to pay a bill in her life. And now her income’s down to just her government stipend because she doesn’t have any more sheep.”

Eddy said he understood.

“Well, this week her granddaughter’s having her tenth birthday and yesterday old lady Benally bought her a Gameboy at the Trading Post as a present, had it gift-wrapped and everything.” He paused, looking steadily at Eddy. “She paid for it with your marked bills.”

Eddy sat there, staring at Bia.

“I know. Pretty surprising.” Bia removed a wallet from his back pocket. His big dusty hand slipped out a fifty and pushed it across the table. “No point in making a big deal over it.”

Eddy could not move.

Bia rose, put the wallet away. “If it happens again, just let me know and I’ll cover the loss. Like I said, there’s no point in the law getting involved. I’m not sure she’s all that compos mentis anyway.” He picked up his hat and fitted it back down over the sweat mark on his salt-and-pepper hair.

“Thanks for your understanding, Pastor.”

He turned to go, then paused. “And if you see Lorenzo, give me a holler, okay?”

“Sure will, Lieutenant.”

Pastor Russ Eddy watched as Lieutenant Bia walked out the front door and disappeared, then reappeared through the window, striding across his front yard, right over where the body was buried, his cowboy boots kicking up streamers of dust.

His eye fell on the soiled fifty-dollar bill, and he felt sick. And then angry. Very angry.

22

FORD ENTERED HIS LIVING ROOM AND stood at the window, gazing at the crooked form of Nakai Rock rising above the cottonwoods. He had completed his assignment, and now he faced a decision: Should he report it?

He flung himself into a chair and dropped his head into his hands. Kate was right: if the news got out, it would fatally damage the project. It would destroy their careers—Kate’s included. In the field of science, the whiff of a cover-up or a lie was a career killer.

Satisfied? he asked himself again.

He got up and angrily paced the room. Lockwood had known all along that he would find the answer by asking Kate. He’d been hired not because he was some brilliant ex–CIA agent turned PI, but because he just happened to have dated a certain woman twelve years ago. He should’ve walked out on Lockwood when he had the chance. But he’d been intrigued by the assignment. Flattered. And, if the truth be told, way too attracted to the idea of seeing Kate again.

For a moment he longed for his life at the monastery, those thirty months when life seemed so simple, so clean. Living there, he’d almost forgotten the awful grayness of the world and the impossible moral choices it forced on you. But he never would have made a monk. He had gone into the monastery hoping it would give him back his certainty, his faith. But it had done just the opposite.

He bent his head and tried to pray, but it was just words. Words spoken into silence.

Maybe there wasn’t any such thing as right or wrong anymore—people did what they did. He made his decision. There was no way he was going to take a step that would damage Kate’s career. She had had enough hard knocks in her life. He would give them two days to track down the malware. And he would help them. He strongly suspected that the saboteur was a member of the team. No one else would have the access or the knowledge.

Walking out the front door, Ford took a turn around the house as if taking the air, making sure Wardlaw wasn’t hanging around. Then he went into his bedroom, unlocked a filing cabinet, and removed his briefcase. He punched in the code to unlock it and tapped in the number.

Lockwood answered so fast, Ford thought the science adviser must have been waiting by the phone.

“News?” Lockwood asked breathlessly.

“Not much.”

A sharp sigh of exasperation from Lockwood. “You’ve had four days, Wyman.”

“They simply can’t get Isabella to work. I’m beginning to think you’re wrong, Stan. They’re not hiding anything. It’s just like they say—they just can’t get the machine to work properly.”

“Damn it, Ford, I don’t buy it!”

He could hear Lockwood breathing hard on the other end. This was a career-breaker for him, too. But the fact was, he didn’t give a shit about the man. Let him go down. Kate was what mattered. If he could buy them a few more days to find the malware, there was no reason for Lockwood to ever know.

Lockwood went on. “You heard about this preacher, Spates, and his sermon?”

“Yes.”

“This shortens the time frame. You have two, maybe three days, max, before we pull the plug. Wyman, you find out what they’re hiding—you hear me? Find it!”

“I understand.”

“You searched Volkonsky’s place?”

“Yes.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing special.”

Silence from Lockwood, then, “I just got the preliminary forensic report on Volkonsky. Looking more and more like suicide.”

“I see.”

Ford heard a rustling of papers over the line.

“I also looked into some of the research you asked me to. As for Cecchini . . . The cult was called Heaven’s Gate. You probably remember, back in ‘97, that cult whose members committed mass suicide, thinking their souls were going to board an alien spaceship that was approaching Earth behind Comet Hale-Bopp? Cecchini joined the cult back in ’95, stayed in it less than a year, and left before the mass suicide.”

“Any evidence he still believes it? The guy seems a bit like an automaton.”

“The cult doesn’t exist anymore, and there’s no evidence he believes it. He’s had a normal life since—if a bit of a loner. Doesn’t drink or smoke, no girlfriends to speak of, few if any friends. Focused everything on his career. The man’s a brilliant physicist—totally dedicated to his work.”

“And Chen?”