Page 98 of Deliver us from Evil

Cass is still pumping gas when we get back. Zach tosses his bag into the back seat and climbs up without missing a beat.

I head for a picnic table a few yards away, lighting a cigarette en route.

Grit crunches under shoes behind me, but I don’t turn around. “It’s Gabriel, isn’t it?” Apollo says.

I grunt non-committally, and then turn to face him as I pass him my cigarette.

He shrugs before taking it. “I’m thinking he paid someone to put up that article online. Paid that lawyer chick to handle everything as if he was dead.”

“No,” I murmur, taking back the smoke. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He wanted her back. Couldn’t find her. Knew this would get her attention. Seems pretty straightforward to me.”

“Then he’d have taken her somewhere we couldn’t find them in the first place.”

Back then, when Zach was lying in that hospital bed with tubes sticking out of him, I was sure I’d lose it. So instead of fixating on how likely he was to die, I tried to put together the pieces of this fucked up jigsaw puzzle.

But too much of it didn’t make sense.

Gabriel had evaded us for close to a decade. Then all of a sudden he pops up on our radar. All right, nothim, per se, but a bread crumb. The first of many. An article anyone but us would have missed.

A missing child turned up five years after he’d been kidnapped walking home from school one day. Told reporters he’d been abducted by a priest. Turns out the guy was a bank manager, and little Stuart only thought he was a priest because he wore a crucifix and spoke about God a lot.

The kid’s abductor made a run for it, and was never found, but that article sure as hell got our attention.

We visited the abandoned house where the kid had been kept. Then we broke in one night and took a look inside. Tried to figure out where Stuart had been held.

No surprise: it was the basement.

There were too many similarities in how it had been set up for it to have been a coincidence.

Mattresses, covered in dirty sheets, lying on the floor. Hooks dangling from the ceiling. Metal dog bowls for water and food. Metal sheets riveted in place over whatever windows there were.

And then there was the cold.

And the damp.

And rats.

That article, thathouse, eventually led to Father Gabriel. But before we could track him down,hecame to us.

ORPHANAGE UNDER NEW ADMINISTRATION

A short piece. Barely news-worthy. But it made it into the paper, and it had his name in it, and that’s how we located him.

We’d found the Guardian.

A man who moved around the country and set up basements like the one we were kept in. Like the one little Stuart had been found in.

A man who kept his record clean. A man no one would suspect.

A priest.

And because we knew so many of our Ghosts were men of the cloth, there was no doubt in our minds that we’d found the orchestrator of the biggest child sex-trafficking ring of this century.

But how could a man who was so cunning, so fucking intelligent and well connected, besostupid?

He could have taken Trinity anywhere, and we’d have lost them.

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