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KATE - THE SAVED REMNANT
So was that.Along with multiple cryptic symbols, mentions of Denton, fire, and justice.She took a couple of photographs, but the light from the fairy lanterns was too weak.In any case, it would take weeks, months maybe, to work out what this was all about.It was about obsession, that much was clear.
“Kate, you still there?”
Marcus’s voice startled her.“Yes, what have you found?”
Marcus said something indistinct by way of a reply.She went to the doorway to the next room, but he wasn’t there.There was a small set of steps in one corner of the room, leading, she imagined, to the main body of the church.
“Marcus, where are you?”
She tested the stairs with her foot.Rickety, but sound, she thought.She went up, and as she did so, heard something that sounded like a faint cry.It sounded muffled, distant; it could even have been from the street outside.She scoured the area with her flashlight, realizing that she was now on the edge of the church’s central hall.Unable to see where she was treading, she stumbled suddenly and fell, breaking the fall with her hands on the cold damp stone, hearing the light smash.She had tripped over Marcus, who was lying unconscious at the edge of some lockers, a nasty-looking gash on his temple.
Had he tripped and hit his head?
There was no blood on the lockers.Nor on the floor.Nor on the edge of the nearby pew.
Someone had struck him.Someone who was here.Nearby.
Ignoring her own racing heart, she felt for a pulse.It was weak, but it was there.Marcus was down for the count.With difficulty, she got him into the recovery position by the lockers.That accomplished, she took out her phone to call for backup.
Dammit.No signal.
Moonlight streamed through the remains of the stained glass windows.She could see well enough to know that in front of her was the pulpit, the altar from which Communion was served, and the stalls for the choir.Behind her would be the main entrance to the building.As she walked towards it, she realized that the floor was more than damp.It was wet.She smelled it.
Diesel.
Half of the church was like a funeral pyre: a huge, beetling stack of old pews, chairs, desks, curtains, and bits of carpet.It almost reached the beams that kept the roof up.And it was drenched in the killer’s accelerant of choice, ready to go off.He’d been busy.
And the main door was locked.Locked tight.
A beam of light suddenly struck her in the eyes, blinding and paralyzing her.It came from the pulpit area.
“Elijah?”
“I used to be Elijah.When I pass this stage, I will be named anew.”
She rubbed her eyes.“Like Saul becoming Paul, huh?Or Sarai becoming Sara.”
“Your Biblical knowledge is excellent, Kate,” he said, redirecting the beam so that it fell to the floor.“Or should I say Isobel?”
Kate didn’t like that.When she was seven, she had hero-worshipped the thirteen- year-old girl who moved into the house opposite for the summer, and after she’d left, requested to be renamed, in her honor, Isobel.It was a cute little story, and it wasn’t exactly a secret; she’d even told her colleagues at last year’s Christmas dinner.But it was like all the receipts and ticket stubs in that creepy little mind-map he’d constructed in the room downstairs: his ugly thumbprint, his dirty size fourteen footsteps across the surface of her private life...
“Why have you been spying on me?”
“It’s a tribute.You are very important to the plan.”
She pulled out her weapon.“No, I’m the FBI agent trying to stop the plan.”
“You think you are.In reality you are a cog, a wheel, a vital and intricate mechanism in the very thing you claim to be working against.You see, you’re dying tonight, Kate.Along with me.Our joint sacrifice ushers in the next phase of His plan.”
“I don’t know you very well, Elijah,” she said, keeping the weapon trained on him.“But I came to know Robert Denton very well.And I don’t think he’d have liked the idea of being a, how’d you call it, a cog in someone else’s plan.”
“You’re incorrect in that, Kate.He and I knew each other from a long time before the Corrections Center.At a Bible camp, I first spotted his promise, years before you’d even heard his name.I gave him spiritual guidance for his first kill.”
“Okay, if you know so much, who was Denton’s real first victim?”
“The world at large believes it was Micaela Sweet.Actually it was Sarah Nadel.Right?”
