The Mephisto Club

down there tonight.”

They. She had no claim to him. The church, of course, directed his life. They owned him.

He wrapped his arms around her, his breath warming her hair. “Let’s go away sometime,” he murmured. “Somewhere out of town.”

Where no one knows us.

As he walked to his car, she stood with her door wide open, the cold streaming around her, into the house. Even after he drove away, she remained in the doorway, heedless of the cruel sting of the wind. It was her just punishment for wanting him. This was what his church demanded of them. Separate beds, separate lives. Could the Devil Himself be any crueler?

If I could sell my soul to Satan for your love, I think I would.

THIRTY

Mrs. Cora Bongers leaned her considerable weight against the barn door and it slid open with a tortured creak. From the dark interior came the nervous bleating of goats, and Jane smelled the gamey scent of damp straw and crowded animals.

“I’m not sure how much you’ll be able to see right now,” said Mrs. Bongers, aiming her flashlight into the barn. “Sorry I didn’t get your message earlier, when we would’ve had daylight.”

Jane flicked on her own flashlight. “This should be fine. I just want to see the marks, if they’re still there.”

“Oh, they’re still here. Used to irritate the heck outta my husband every time he came in here and saw them. I kept telling him to paint over ’em, just so he’d stop complaining about it. He said that’d just make him madder, if he had to paint the inside of a barn. Like he was doing up House Beautiful for the goats.” Mrs. Bongers stepped inside, her heavy boots tramping across the straw-covered dirt floor. Just the short walk from the house had winded her and she paused, wheezing loudly, and aimed her flashlight at a wooden pen, where a dozen goats massed in an uneasy huddle. “They still miss him, you know. Oh, Eben complained all the time about how much work it was, milking them every morning. But he loved these girls. He’s been gone six months now, and they’re still not used to anyone else milking them.” She unlatched the pen and glanced at Jane, who was hanging back. “You’re not scared of goats, are you?”

“Do we have to go in there?”

“Aw, they won’t hurt you. Just watch your coat. They like to nibble.”

Now you be nice goats, thought Jane as she stepped into the pen and latched the door shut behind her. Don’t chew the cop. She picked her way across the straw, trying to avoid soiling her shoes. The animals watched her with cold and soulless stares. The last time she’d been this close to a goat had been on a second-grade school trip to a petting zoo. She had looked at the goat, the goat had looked at her, and the next thing she knew, she was flat on her back and her classmates were laughing. She did not trust the beasts, and clearly they did not trust her; they kept their distance as she crossed the pen.

“Here,” said Mrs. Bongers, her flashlight focused on the wall. “This is some of it.”

Jane moved closer, her gaze riveted on the symbols cut deeply into the wooden planks. The three crosses of Golgotha. But this was a perverted version, the crosses flipped upside down.

“Some more up there, too,” said Mrs. Bongers, and she pointed the beam upward, to show more crosses, cut higher in the wall. “He had to climb onto some straw bales to carve those. All that effort. You’d think those darn kids would have better things to do.”

“Why do you think it was kids who did this?”

“Who else would it be? Summertime, and they’re all bored. Nothing better to do than run around carving up walls. Hanging those weird charms on trees.”

Jane looked at her. “What charms?”

“Twig dolls and stuff. Creepy little things. The sheriff’s office just laughed it off, but I didn’t like seeing them dangling from the branches.” She paused at one of the symbols. “There, like that one.”

It was a stick figure of a man, with what appeared to be a sword projecting from one hand. Carved beneath it was: RXX-VII.

“Whatever that means,” said Mrs. Bongers.

Jane turned to face her. “I read in the Police Beat that one of your goats went missing that night. Did you ever get it back?”

“We never found her.”

“There was no trace of her at all?”

“Well, there are packs of wild dogs running around here, you know. They’d pretty much clean up every scrap.”

But no dog did this, thought Jane, her gaze back on the carvings. Her cell phone suddenly rang, and the goats rushed to the opposite side of the pen in a panicked, bleating scramble. “Sorry,” said Jane. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, surprised that she’d even gotten a signal out here. “Rizzoli.”

Frost said, “I did my best.”

“Why does that sound like the beginning of an excuse?”

“’Cause I’m not having much luck finding Lily Saul. She seems to move around quite a bit. We know she’s been in Italy at least eight months. We’ve got a record of ATM withdrawals during that period from banks in Rome, Florence, and Sorrento. But she doesn’t use her credit card very much.”

“Eight months as a tourist? How does she afford that?”

“She travels on the cheap. And I do mean cheap. Fourth-class hotels all the way. Plus, she may be working there illegally. I know she had a brief job in Florence, assisting a museum curator.”

“She has the training for that?”

“She has a college degree in classical studies. And when she was still a student, she worked at this excavation site in Italy. Some place called Paestum.”

“Why the hell can’t we find her?”

“It looks to me like she doesn’t want to be found.”

“Okay. What about her cousin, Dominic Saul?”

“Oh. That one’s a real problem.”

“You’re not going to give me any good news tonight, are you?”

“I’ve got a copy of his academic record from the Putnam Academy. It’s a boarding school in Connecticut. He was enrolled there for about six months, while he was in the tenth grade.”

“So he would have been-what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“Fifteen. He finished up that year and was expected to come back the following fall. But he never did.”

“That’s the summer he stayed with the Saul family. In Purity.”

“Right. The boy’s father had just died, so Dr. Saul took him in for the summer. When the boy didn’t return to school in September, the Putnam Academy tried to locate him. They finally got a letter back from his mother, withdrawing him from the school.”

“So which school did he attend instead?”

“We don’t know. Putnam Academy says they never got a request to forward the boy’s transcripts. That’s the last record of him anywhere that I can find.”

“What about his mother? Where is she?”

“I have no idea. I can’t find a damn thing about the woman. No one at the school ever met her. All they have is a letter, signed by a Margaret Saul.”

“It’s like all these people are ghosts. His cousin. His mother.”

“I do have Dominic’s school photo. I don’t know if it does us much good now, since he was only fifteen at the time.”

“What does he look like?”

“Really good-looking kid. Blond, blue eyes. And the school says he tested in the genius range. Obviously he