Page 54 of Girl, Accused

The person on the threshold wasn't what Harper expected.

No flashy suit or imposing profile. Just dark clothes, a beanie hat and a scarf around his face.

‘Dr. Harper?’ the voice had no bass to it. It was soft, perhaps muted by the fabric.

Harper opened his mouth to respond, but something found his throat before words could form. Fire erupted across Harper's throat. Not pain, not yet. Just liquid heat that sprayed his pristine white coat and the suit beneath. Harper grabbed his neck and tried to catch life between his fingers, but his limbs wouldn’t respond. Shock took over, and Dr. James Harper collapsed onto his Italian marble floor.

His attacker stepped fully into the room and closed the door with delicate care, like a considerate houseguest.

The names drifted through his mind like anesthesia counting backward. Thompson. Brownstone. Benson. Atkins. Rodriguez. His private gallery of masterpieces gone wrong.

But no. These weren't memories surfacing in his dying brain. They were coming from this stranger’s mouth.

The figure crouched down, removed their scarf and hat.

Even seconds from death, Harper’s compulsion for aesthetic perfection wouldn’t let him avert his gaze from the botched skin dominating the figure’s forehead.

Because there, imprinted into the skin, was aW.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

The devil lived in a church. Not metaphorically. Ella had dealt with enough religious zealots to know the difference. Adam Canton, their new suspect, kept an apartment above First Light Assembly on Wexford Street according to his file, and Ella intended to find out if that's where he planned his executions.

Ella parked across from First Light Assembly and felt that strange sense of temporal displacement churches always gave her. Some peculiar weightlessness of being simultaneously reminded of childhood and mortality. Ripley manifested at her window and tapped on the glass.

When she got out, she nodded across the street at the power station. ‘There it is.’

The Granville South Power Station loomed like a concrete fortress on the opposite side. Construction equipment clustered around its perimeter while workers in hard hats scurried between trucks. A dull, droning sound came from somewhere, like nature's tinnitus. A chain-link fence adorned with 'AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY' signs separated the holy from the industrial. Power station and church. Two visions of Granville's future staring each other down across fifty feet of asphalt.

‘Is a church worth killing over?’ Ella asked.

‘Men have killed for less.’

‘True.’

‘I read the reports while you were at City Hall. They’re going to knock down First Light Assembly to expand the power station. I’d be pissed too. Rather see a church than a power plant.’

‘You ready?’ Ella asked, momentarily forgetting that all Ripley had was the clothes on her back. No badge or gun for her.

‘I got a fist and heels on my boots. I’m ready.’

They headed towards the church entrance. The graveyard that fronted First Light Assembly wasn't large – maybe forty headstones arranged in uneven rows, like bad teeth in an aging mouth. Ella registered details automatically; her brain couldn't help it. Dates goingback to the 1890s. Names weathered into illegibility. Fresh flowers on only one grave; bright yellow chrysanthemums defying December's palette of grays and browns. If the power plant extension happened – and it seemed it had already begun – Ella wondered if the bodies underneath her would be dug up.

A cloud passed overhead, briefly dimming the already reluctant sunlight. The temperature seemed to drop five degrees in that momentary eclipse, and Ella felt goosebumps rise along her arms

The church's entrance loomed ahead – massive oak doors beneath a stone arch inscribed with words nearly worn away by time and weather. Ella could make out only fragments: ‘...LIGHT UNTO...’ and ‘...PATH.’ The right door stood slightly ajar.

From this close, the building's disrepair became evident. Mortar crumbling between stones. A gutter hanging askew along one edge of the roof. Ivy that had once been decorative.

‘If Canton cared so much about this place, you’d think he’d take better care of it.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t care about it. Maybe he just wanted an excuse to start killing,’ Ripley said. ‘Do we knock?’

Ella pushed the door. ‘God’s house is always open.’

‘An open door’s an invitation.’

Her heart rate spiked as she stepped inside. A foyer greeted her, and it smelled like every church Ella had ever known. A bulletin board sagged with expired announcements. Someone had tacked up a Christmas program schedule, maybe the last Christmas schedule this church would see.

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