Page 51 of Go First
His fingers flurried across the screen, fast as any child’s, before he pressed ‘send’ and put the phone down. “I’ve just sent you a link to a paper I wrote about those very stories, back in ‘97. Footnotes and everything,” he added, with a smile.
She sipped her coffee.“Thanks, Gabe.I’m not sure yet what it means, but it’s something.”
“Well, it strikes me that perhaps the victims are all Hananiahs of a kind,” Gabe said softly.“Telling people what they wanted to hear.And someone—your killer or whoever it is who’s pulling your killer’s strings—has decided to play Ezekiel.”
Kate looked down at the verse again, the neat black letters swimming against the sleeve’s sheen.Hananiahs, false prophets, men and women who promised, but couldn’t deliver, who grew rich from the desperation of their deluded followers.
For the first time that day, she felt a small, dangerous flicker of hope.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Kate sat at her mother’s kitchen table long after midnight, staring at the darkened window.The reflection that looked back at her was pale and grainy, her own face cross-hatched by the faint glow from the under-cabinet light.She’d been through Gabe’s words a hundred times, turning them over and over like stones in a riverbed, trying to feel their weight.Somebody pretending.Somebody not what they seem.An imposter.But which somebody?And what exactly were they pretending to be?
Her notes lay in front of her—scraps of paper scrawled with times, names, fragments of scripture.She re-read each one until the letters blurred, but the shape of the puzzle refused to settle.Every time she thought she’d found a pattern, it dissolved like smoke.
A floorboard creaked.Kate started.Her mother, wrapped in a faded blue robe, leaned against the doorframe, worry sharpening her features.
“Kate.It’s almost five in the morning.You haven’t slept at all.”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“You’re not.You look like a bad Polaroid.Get an hour.Two.I’ll give you the alarm clock.”
Kate wanted to protest, but the sudden drag in her bones made her voice thin.“One hour,” she bargained.
Her mother set the old travel alarm beside her bed like a nurse setting out medicine.“Two.And you should know by now, Kitty: I don’t negotiate.”
Kate didn’t remember closing her eyes.
When she jerked awake, the room was a furnace of late morning light.Ten-twenty-two.The alarm sat mutely beside her pillow.Her phone glowed with a cluster of missed calls—dozens.The vibration in her palm startled her.Winters.
“You’re alive, thank God.We were about to deploy helicopters.”Winters snapped before Kate could speak.“Listen carefully.Two deputies picked up Santos at seven a.m.to move him to County Jail.At nine-thirty, another two deputies arrived to do the same.Guess what?County Jail never saw him.”
Kate’s stomach turned cold.“Sprung.”
“Exactly.First pair signed the log as Officers Law and Giever.”
Kate’s mind snagged.Lawgiver.
“That’s one of Cox’s monickers, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”Her pulse jumped.“Ma’am.Cox.We have to keep him locked down.His wounds from the attack weren’t healing.There was talk of moving him to the hospital today.”
Silence—then a hiss of fury.“The Governor didn’t think I’d need to know that.”A click.Winters was already calling the prison.
Kate splashed water on her face, tried to scrub the fatigue from her eyes.The phone rang again.
“Too late,” Winters said.“Cox left half an hour ago.En route to the hospital.Get to HQ.Now.”
The drive blurred.Gabe’s warning—impostors—looped in her head.At a red light she thumbed a search on her phone.Father Michael Santos.The headline hit like a fist:
Parish Priest Found Murdered, Tongue Removed.Under Investigation for Swindling Parishioners.
Just under three months ago.Florida.
Her breath caught.The real Father Santos had been the first victim.But with no cipher left at the scene, no one would later have linked it to the killings in Maine.
She felt a physical chill at the thought of Cox’s machine-like, calculating manipulation.That he’d been preparing for this, from the moment she’d stuck him back in jail. How relieved she’d been, how deluded, more accurately, to think that she could rest because the monster was behind bars.Bars truly didn’t matter to him.