“Even though we still have no proof?”
“We may not have direct proof of a current crime, but now we have proof that she is capable of the worst.”
“Because she did abortions?” Trent winced at the memory of this inconvenient fact.
“And she did them without remorse. It was scary, how nice and normal she seemed, and then to find that out … You would never see it coming from someone like her.”
“I know!” Trent cried. “It seems impossible.”
Dopp sat down and leaned forward. “Even after all these years, it’s still shocking to wrap my mind around how good some people seem and how evil they really are. It’s like trying to understand death, or the size of the universe—some things are on a scale that most of us can’t register.”
“Exactly,” Trent admitted. “I guess it’s easier to think she may have changed her ways than to think she’s a monster.”
“It’s easier because it feels much safer. But that doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”
Trent nodded miserably.
“This is the worst time for us to quit.”
Trent knew the DA was set to issue his report about the governor’s bribery in a few weeks, and after that, the state budget talks were to resume. The talks that could make or break their jobs.
He imagined Arianna’s delicate hands covered in an infant’s blood.
“We should keep going,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” Dopp replied. “Keep seeing her as much as you can to strengthen her trust—and keep following her. By the way, where did you follow her to on Friday? You never mentioned it.”
Trent pictured the dented steel door. He still didn’t know what was behind it. But if he mentioned it now, he would be setting his own trap; he imagined Dopp’s likely response: You knew she was going somewhere strange, and yet you still wanted to quit the case?
“She went to a drugstore,” he said. “It wasn’t anywhere worth mentioning.”
“I suspect that’s not the whole story. Follow her every chance you get.”
“I will,” Trent said, resolving to wait another few days before mentioning the seedy church. In the meantime, he would investigate it better, and remember to bring his gun.
“And don’t give me another scare like that.”
Trent sighed. “Thanks for talking sense into me, boss.”
“Anytime.”
Trent turned away cringing, for Dopp’s tone clarified his real meaning: Don’t let it happen again.
* * *
Trent walked back to his desk, ashamed. How could he have blinded himself to her criminal capacity? Only last night, he had told her how much he was looking forward to seeing her again. Now, he would have to still endure the agony of lying—but for an honorable purpose, he reminded himself. And the agony lay in the possibility of what she could be doing.…
A red light on his phone was blinking: a message from her. He felt a swell of delight. We are both sick, he thought.
“Hi, Trent,” came her cheerful voice. “You’re probably writing, so don’t let me interrupt you. But let me know if you’re free later today. There’s somewhere special I want to take you.”
He stood in front of his desk, facing the picture of the Crucifixion. But he saw nothing except the phone buried under his white knuckles. He loosened his grip and fumbled with the buttons.
“I’m free,” he said as soon as she picked up. “Where are we going?”
* * *
Trent hid his disappointment as he climbed the stairs to meet Arianna at the Museum of Natural History. What could she possibly want with him there?
“Hey,” she said, using her cane for balance as she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. “I’m really glad you could come.” He noticed that her eyes, despite the levity of her smile, seemed serious.
The first thing Trent saw as they walked into the entrance hall was the eighty-foot-long skeleton of an Apatosaurus dinosaur, as dramatic as he remembered from childhood. Again, he wondered: Why were they at a museum that specialized in dinosaur fossils?
“So what’s the surprise?” he asked.
“You’ll see.”
At the admissions kiosk, a short line of people waited, most with children. In front of the left wing of the museum, Trent noticed a handful of silent protestors whose signs read, WE ARE NOT APES and GOD IS THE CREATOR.
“Who are they?” Trent asked, pointing as he followed Arianna into line.
She gestured to the words high above the protestors’ heads, painted in silver onto the wall: DARWIN HALL: EVOLUTION TODAY.
“I guess you haven’t been here for a while,” she said.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“Those people have been trying to convince the museum to take down that exhibit.”
“I think I did hear about that,” he said, recalling a stir of controversy that he had experienced only through glimpses at online headlines. “But everybody knows there’s proof of Darwin’s theories now, with DNA analyses and all that.”
The thought of evolving from monkeys had not unsettled Trent, as it had so many of his colleagues and churchgoing peers—once the proof was widely evident, he had dismissed their vitriol as unfounded. To Trent, a disciple of journalistic objectivity, their anger was akin to sulking about the bacteria invisibly crawling on one’s hands: it was unpleasant to think about, even contradictory to the senses, yet ridiculous to deny.
“Well, you know their attitude toward proof,” Arianna said.
Her words homed in on a deeper conflict within him, pointing out a paradox he had recently realized: Christians rejected the need for proof to support belief in God, yet dismissed proof altogether when it was there.
Suddenly a conversation with Dopp and his colleagues came rushing back to him, from a meeting months earlier: I never understood how anyone could claim embryonic stem cells would help people, Jed had said, without any proof of it at all. Now this response triggered a question that had not occurred to Trent then:
Did they have proof of God?
And if they did, would it be called God,
