The Bondurant woman was right.
It was the same.
The sun burned through the trees as Elizabeth drove Channing down the mountain. It was quiet in the car until they approached Channing’s neighborhood. When the girl spoke, her voice was quiet, yet wound like a coil. “Have you ever gone back to the place it happened?”
“I just took you there. I just showed it to you.”
“You took me to the quarry, not to the place it happened. You pointed. You talked about it. We never went near the little pine where the boy knocked you down. I’m asking if you’ve ever stood on the exact spot.”
They stopped in front of Channing’s house, and Elizabeth killed the engine. Beyond the hedge, brick and stone rose, inviolate. “I wouldn’t choose to do that. Not now. Not ever.”
“It’s just a place. It doesn’t hurt.”
Elizabeth turned in her seat, appalled. “Did you go back to the crime scene, Channing? Please tell me you did not go alone into that godforsaken house.”
“I lay down on the place it happened.”
“What? Why?”
“Should I try to kill myself, instead?”
Channing was angry, now, a wall going up between them. Elizabeth wanted to understand, but struggled. The girl’s eyes were bright as dimes. The rest of her seemed to hum. “Are you upset with me for some reason?”
“No. Yes. Maybe.”
Elizabeth tried to remember how it felt to be eighteen, to be stripped to the bone and held together with tape. It wasn’t difficult. “Why did you go back?”
“The men are dead. The place is all that’s left.”
“That’s not true,” Elizabeth said. “You remain, and so do I.”
“I don’t think I do.” Channing opened the door, climbed out. “And I think maybe you don’t, either.”
“Channing…”
“I can’t talk about this right now. I’m sorry.”
The girl kept her head down as she walked away. Elizabeth watched her move up the drive and fade into the trees. She would make it into the house unnoticed or the parents who didn’t know what to do with her would discover her creeping through the window. Neither outcome would help the girl. One of them could make things a whole lot worse. She was still thinking about that when her phone rang. It was Beckett, and he was as twisted up as the girl.
“How fast can you get to your father’s church?”
“His church?”
“Not the new one. The old one.”
“You’re talking about-”
“Yeah, that one. How fast?”
“Why?”
“Just answer the question.”
Elizabeth looked at her watch, and her stomach rolled over. “I can be there in fourteen minutes.”
“I need you here in ten.”
Beckett hung up before she could ask another question.
Ten minutes.
He stood by the window in the north transept. Bits of colored glass had been broken out years earlier, but much of it remained. He peered through a hole and watched the world as if he could see the storm coming. Adrian had been out of prison for barely a day. When news of another murder broke, it would go viral. The church. The altar. It was too big, too gothic. The city would call for blood, and everything would come under scrutiny. The sentencing guidelines. The judge and the cops. Maybe even the prison.
How did the system let another woman die?
If news of Gideon’s shooting broke, too, the storm would spin out of control. Beckett saw how the papers would play it, not just as a story of murder and family and failed revenge, but of systemic incompetence as the first victim’s child slips through every crack in the system only to be shot in the shadow of the prison. Someone would figure out that Liz had been at Nathan’s, and that would make the cops look even worse. She was the angel of death, the department’s largest black eye since Adrian himself. The city was already turning against her. How bad would it get when people learned she’d worked to keep Gideon clear of social services? It was a royal mess, all of it. Dyer would never allow Liz on the scene.
But, Beckett wanted her here. She was his partner and friend, and she still had feelings for Adrian. Beckett needed to fix that.
“Come on, Liz.”
He paced to the altar and back.
“Come on, damn it.”
Seven minutes later, his phone rang, and James Randolph’s number popped on the screen. Beckett didn’t answer.
“Come on, come on.”
At the ten-minute mark, Randolph called again, then again. When the fourth call made the phone burr in his pocket, Beckett ripped it out and answered.
Randolph was frustrated. “What the hell, Charlie? I’ve got the ME on hold and eight cops staring at me like I’m crazy.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Beckett heard voices in the background, the clatter of gear.
“Are we rolling or not?”
Beckett saw a car on the road. It crested the hill at speed, then slowed. He gave it a five count to make sure, then said, “You can roll, James. Call Dyer, too. He’ll be twitchy, like I said. Just tell him it’s my call. Tell him it’s the same.”
“Goddamn.”
“One other thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Find Adrian Wall.”
Beckett then walked outside to meet Liz on the worn, granite steps of her childhood church. Even at a distance, her unhappiness was unmistakable. She was moving slowly, her eyes on the great trees, the fallen steeple. It was going to get ugly, and Beckett hated that.
“I never come here,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
They met on the bottom step, and Beckett hated the way doubt colored every glance. The church had been the center of her life for years: the congregation, her parents, and childhood. Though it had never been a rich church, it had been old and influential. Most of that changed after Julia Strange died on the altar. She’d been married in the church; her son was baptized there. Most of the congregation never got past her death or the desecration of their church. The few who persevered insisted on moving to a new location. Elizabeth’s father fought the idea, and her mother, in the end, forced the issue: How can we pray where one of our own died alone and in fear? How can we christen our children? Marry our young people? Her impassioned pleas swayed even her husband, who broke, it was said, with exceptional grace. What followed was a clapboard structure on a skinny lot in a dangerous part of town. The church continued as best it could, but only a fraction of the congregation made the move. Most drifted off to join First Baptist or United Methodist or some other church. Liz’s life changed after that.
Her parents descended into obscurity.
Adrian Wall went to prison.
“We don’t have much time,” Beckett said.
“Why not?”
“Because Dyer will arrest us both if he finds you here.”
He pushed into the interior, and Elizabeth followed him through the darkened narthex and into the light beyond. She moved as if it hurt and kept her eyes down until the balcony passed above her head, and the ceiling rose up. Beckett watched her face as she took in the rafters and the char and the fixtures hung like iron crowns. She turned a bit, but kept her gaze from the altar, let it light first on windows and walls and a thousand shadowed places. He could not imagine her thoughts, and nothing on her face betrayed them. She held stoic and straight, and when she finally faced the altar, it took three seconds for her to acknowledge that she understood what she was seeing.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“You know exactly why.”
“Adrian didn’t do this.”
“Same church. Same altar.”
“Just because he’s out of prison…”