“Sure. That it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.”
“You ask me, we got a lot of rich men trying to squeeze themselves through that eye.”
“How so?”
He spread his hands and shrugged. “It’s just a feeling. I used to patrol this neighborhood. Solid working class. Lifeblood of America. But the last five years, there’s been a big push for gentrification. Housing prices have reached the heavens faster than anyone who sits inside this place. The poor bastards who grew up here can’t afford to stay.”
My eyebrows rose in surprise. “You do care.”
“Don’t start spreading rumors.”
We started down the aisle, Clyde hugging my side. Weston came to meet us.
“Thanks for the call,” Bandoni told him.
Weston nodded. “A head bash ain’t nothing like getting your balls cut off. So the MOs don’t match. But . . .”
“The words,” Bandoni said.
“Right. The words.”
“No ID?” I said.
“Not on the body,” Weston said. “But Ms. Pitlor thinks it’s a kid from their youth group. Dashiell Hammett Donovan. Better known as Dash. We’ll get a confirmation on fingerprints. Guys are working on it now.”
Another grunt from Bandoni. “Who the hell names their kid Dashiell?”
“Someone who loves crime fiction,” I said.
Bandoni scratched an ear. “I ain’t tracking.”
“Dashiell Hammett. Crime writer.” I looked at the men. Blank expressions. “Sam Spade? Nick and Nora Charles?”
Weston made a face at Bandoni. “She like a professor or something?”
“Something,” Bandoni said.
I said, “I’m ready to see the body.”
Weston stepped aside and waved an arm toward the altar. “Have fun, kids.”
As Bandoni and I approached the altar, the body emerged, pale and scarred, from the murk.
“Fuck me,” Bandoni said.
The man lay on his back. His head tipped onto the stairs that separated the altar from the rest of the church, revealing a gaping throat wound. Blue eyes, cloudy with death, stared at something beyond the high ceiling of the sanctuary. His killer had slashed his throat so deeply that the spine shone white within the red gore. His penis and scrotum had been hacked away, leaving a ragged, bloody ruin. Carved on his chest were the words Vengeance is ours, we will repay.
Blood had spilled down the altar onto the stairs and pooled near the railing. Which meant they’d killed him here, in the church.
Man as sacrifice.
I stared at the ruin of the victim’s manhood.
Shade it black.
My fingers curled into fists, and I heard my own breath rasp in my ears, my heart and lungs coupled into a fast rhythm like a pair of runaway horses. The church vanished, and the plywood walls of Mortuary Affairs threatened to close in. Half-heard, wholly imagined, the rotors of a Black Hawk helicopter thumped the heavens outside, bringing the dead.
My counselor’s voice echoed in my head. I’m not talking just any death, Sydney. This is the worst kind.
I rested my hand on Clyde’s head as he leaned his weight into me.
The helicopter fell silent.
We’re still good.
The photographer’s flash flared. Black ink seemed to scurry like beetles over the victim’s body, leaping outward in brilliance, then falling back as the light dimmed.
“Words and more words,” Bandoni muttered. “Some carved. And some in ink. Like the guy’s a damn whiteboard.”
Words. Lines and spaces. Tightly printed letters riding in columns down his arms and legs, circling in tight coils around his arms, tripping across his blood-streaked stomach. Thousands of letters, hundreds of lines, scores of words. I caught god is unjust and we are filled with rage and—simply—the word unfair. All written over and over. Across his stomach was our anger is righteous. And near his ruined groin, payback is hell.
It was a torrent of lettered rage. An entire dictionary of hatred.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was not with God, and the Word was not God.
We all jumped as a hymn blared over the sound system and echoed through the vast space.
Abruptly the music stopped. The silence of the sanctuary descended once more.
“Nelson,” muttered Weston. “I sent him to switch the lights back on. About gave me a heart attack.”
The photographer took yet another photo. The victim seemed to jerk in the flicker-frame while written screams poured down his gaping throat.
For the next two hours, Bandoni and I worked the scene. Emma Bell arrived and broke her usual reserve to tell us that the cause of death was almost certainly the severed throat and that the removal of his hand and the words carved into the victim’s skin, unlike Noah’s wounds, had been done posthumously.
Except the castration. He’d been alive for that.
Within an hour we had a confirmation on the victim’s name and had gained emergency access to his social-media accounts.
Dashiell Donovan was a twenty-one-year-old college student from Twin Falls, Idaho, enrolled at Denver University. His online activity showed him to be a highly competitive tennis player as well as an outdoors enthusiast—rafting, hiking, rock climbing. He’d listed himself as unattached, although there were plenty of photos of Donovan with young, attractive women. He had a self-professed 3.7 GPA, a position on the university’s swim team, and two thousand social-media friends.
Everything a young man could want.
Except a future.
“Our victims have got nothing in common other than being white, twenty-something men,” Bandoni said. “Can’t find one damn thing so far that links Donovan to Noah.”
“Todd plays tennis,” I reminded him.
“We got that.” Bandoni palmed his skull. “And speaking of Todd, the young Mr. Asher is MIA. Not at home. Not at the hotel with his parents.”
“We also have ‘our anger is righteous.’ On Donovan’s chest and—”
“The sign over Noah’s computer.” Bandoni turned his bloodshot eyes to me. “Which fucking side was Noah playing? And what did he and Donovan do to piss in the killer’s cornflakes?”
His phone buzzed, and he answered with a curt, “What?” He listened for a minute, then said, “Damn,” then, “Good.” He disconnected and frowned.
“Riley Lynch is in the
