Page 3 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

It was a truly stunning autumn morning and the route northward from Portland took them across a shimmering vista of lakes, ponds, and inlets.

Kate remembered some line from a writer her father had been fond of, a description of the west coast of Ireland, “where God ran out of land and had to spread it thin and patchy, like the last bit of butter.”

“Shame we’re en route to a crime scene, huh?”

“I’m happy to drive if you want to enjoy the surroundings,” Kate replied, archly.

“I won’t be able to enjoy them if you’re driving.”

Marcus and Kate had been partners for less than a year, but in that time, they had slipped easily into a fond, teasing relationship.

Kate wondered, sometimes, if it would ever move to another stage, or if that was as good as it ever got when you were paired with a man.

She liked the burly New Yorker, felt safe in his company, valued his strength, his instincts and his street smarts.

Even so, she felt a little jealous of some of her colleagues, like Esposito and Clarke, who were as tight as a pair of sisters, even borrowed each other’s clothes.

That could never happen with Marcus. And not just because his clothes wouldn’t fit.

“You’re quiet this morning.”

“Am I?” she said, reddening slightly. “Well, you know, hearing your name was found at the scene of a brutal murder…”

“Sorry. What I mean is, talk to me, Vee.”

She glanced briefly at him – remembering how she’d felt when she was first introduced to this barrel of a guy with a buzzcut and a broken nose. She had him all wrong.

“I’m fine, Marcus. Thank you for being concerned. I’m creeped out, of course. But that just makes me want to get to the bottom of it. And I will. With you as my trusty sidekick.”

“Hold up, you’re my trusty sidekick.”

“You just carry on believing that.”

She enjoyed the to-and-fro. That and the scenery kept her mind off things. But not for long. A patch of fresh red paint on a fence went by, and she had a sudden thought.

“Can I see your tablet?”

“Ga’head.”

The crime scene techs had sent over an image of the page, torn from a hymn book.

“I’m trying to see what color the ink is.”

Marcus glanced at it. “Blue. Black. Ink color. Why?”

“Just an idea. Back when people still wrote letters, there were all kinds of ways of communicating different messages, above and beyond the words on the page. The kind of paper you used, the color of the ink. Red was a warning. Green was… I can’t remember, I think it was to do with lying.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? What did you notice about the circles? Around the letters spelling my name.”

“I’m driving, Vee. They’re circles.”

She tutted. “Neatly done, or sloppy? Complete circles, or with gaps?”

Marcus gripped the steering wheel. It looked like a toy in his hands. The size of Marcus, the sheer bulk of the guy, often made Kate smile. She didn’t understand why.

“Each one’s a perfect circle,” she said.

“So he wets the bed? Dresses up as a pony?”

“If you apply to art school, like SAIC in Chicago, it’s one of the tests they give you. Draw a perfect circle, free-hand.”

“So we’re looking for an artist?”

“Someone meticulous, at least.”

Despite the sunshine glinting on the water, the warmth of the car, and the pleasing, leathery scent of Marcus’s cologne, Kate shuddered a little then.

She knew why. It was the contrast. The same contrast she’d seen in Denton, who was dead, but might as well not be for all the nights he spent inside her head.

The precision and the preparedness. The neat creativity versus the ugly, savage, frenzied way he destroyed lives.

Two kids roared by on a motorbike, the pillion passenger flipping them the finger for no reason at all. Marcus tutted.

“They’ll end up in wheelchairs going that speed.”

Kate smiled. “Wasn’t that the sort of thing you got up to?”

“Yeah. And Dominic ended up in a wheelchair.”

“I thought Dominic joined the Coast Guard.”

“That was Dom Shoes.”

“Shoes?”

“His dad owned a shoe store.”

Marcus barely discussed his time with the Navy SEALS.

Again, Kate felt it was something that might never change.

The things she knew about her partner’s military career she could count on one hand.

Afghanistan. Yemen. An injury and a long recovery.

Three comrades lost in a single afternoon.

But this secrecy, or privacy, or whatever it was, didn’t extend to other parts of his life.

If Kate had to sit for an exam entitled Marcus Reid: The Bensonhurst Years, she felt sure she’d ace it.

The school friends and the nicknames – Dom Shoes, Fat Timmy, Spud and Poke and More Fingers – along with apocryphal stories of how they came to be bestowed.

The fights and the run-ins, the scrapes and the girlfriends.

As a campus kid, and only daughter of a surgeon and an academic, Kate had nothing to compare.

Her friends had all been like her: good girls, serious girls, marching in formation on a path from choir recitals to eating disorders to scholarships at prestigious schools and then…

what? She’d lost touch with all but one of them.

And she was aware that the others were all still in touch with each other.

She supposed she’d never really fit in. But she wasn’t a typical FBI agent, either.

She supposed she just didn’t fit in anywhere.

The spotted calf.

That was what Denton called her. A cruel reference to the small, port-wine birthmark under her chin.

But more than that, part of the man’s twisted, private theology, his justification for killing.

She wished she could erase him from her memory, wished her mind was like those tv ads for detergent, the brain emerging sparkling white and blossom-scented from the washer-dryer, each painful scene broken down by miracle molecules.

Instead, however dead Denton was, he lived on.

He lived on, and in his wake, fresh cohorts of sickos clamored for her attention.

++++++

It was a miracle, of sorts. Dedicated to St. Andrew, the patron saint of fishermen, the church in Douglas Cove had been built entirely of wood, one-hundred-and-forty-five years ago.

Despite being doused in diesel at three separate points, only the front, easterly section of the building had been destroyed, leaving the place looking as if a bite had been taken out of it by some gigantic hungry beast.

“Lucky it’s got rising damp, or it could have been worse,” said Owen Daniels, chief of Linnaeus County PD.

Kate didn’t know how to respond to that. The priest had been incinerated, and the historic church would still have to be bulldozed. Perhaps he meant that the fire hadn’t spread, which was, admittedly, a good thing.

By the time Kate and Marcus arrived, the body of Father Thomas had gone to the labs back in Portland, and a couple of white-suited crime scene techs were still on-site, bagging and cataloging evidence before stowing it in their van.

Kate and Marcus met with Daniels in the church hall, a boxy, ugly, one-story building squatting on the undamaged side of the church.

“The next-door neighbor, Kyle Walsh, smelled the smoke at about eight-oh-five. He’s cut up about it, because he thought it was a bonfire.

People burn a lot of leaves this time of the year,” the chief added, in case the FBI agents weren’t acquainted with the changing seasons.

“In truth, it wouldn’t have made a difference; the fire department say that whole area was drenched with accelerant. He would have gone up fast.”

He gazed downward, as if in respect, for a moment or two, then continued. “Walsh has

second thoughts about four or five minutes later, walks out to investigate.

” Daniels gestured to the fire door opposite them.

“Out there’s the church garden. Walsh’s house is the other side of it.

Took him no more than a minute or two to get around and see what was happening.

Made the call at eight-twelve p.m. Hauled his garden hose out, but he couldn’t stop the flames. ”

“I take it Walsh knew the priest.”

“Everyone knew Father Thomas. He was well-liked,” Daniels said, gazing directly at Kate. The chief was a strikingly handsome man in late middle-age. Lean and craggy, distinguished in his dark uniform, he looked out of place in this shabby little hall.

“Had he been here long?”

“Four years. I met him a few times. County Fair, public meetings, and so on. He got involved. Do you remember the Santa Clara ? He was involved in a lot of that. Probably still is. I mean, sorry – “

He stopped himself, aware of what he’d just said.

The Santa Clara was an oil tanker, blown off course in tumultuous seas three years ago. The resulting oil slick had wrought terrible damage on the Maine coast and its inhabitants, and birthed a rash of lawsuits. As the chief had meant to imply, they were probably still ongoing.

“So he was an activist?” Marcus asked.

“Well , active , rather than an activist.”

“How long was he in holy orders?” Kate asked. “Any idea?”

Daniels shrugged. “I’ll tell you one thing. He seemed to have worked everywhere. I don’t know if that’s unusual for a priest, but if you mentioned somewhere, odds-on, Father Thomas had a connection to it.”

“Like where?” Kate asked.

“Ireland, Northern and the Republic. Boston. Virginia. Pennsylvania. Up and down the east coast. I don’t know if he was a restless soul or – “ He left it there. “He was a popular figure. People are very shocked.”

He checked his watch and hitched his pants. “Your boss requested some kind of working space for you.”

“Yes, is that possible?”

The chief nodded. “If you folks don’t mind hauling some boxes and filing cabinets out of the way, then we’re happy to have you… I have to say, though, I don’t really understand why the Bureau’s been called in on this.”

“I’m afraid we can’t discuss that,” Kate replied.

“Operational reasons,” Marcus added.

They used those two lines a lot.

Outside in the parking lot, they caught up with the scene-of-crime duo: one sipping coffee from a thermos, the other chastising a child on the telephone.

Kate nodded to the coffee drinker. “Mind if I look at the haul?”

She moved so that Kate could sift through the evidence bags in the topmost crate.

“You do what Daddy says,” said the other tech. “And I have to warn you: I’m already on the brink of canceling Friday.”

Kate found the bag with the torn-out sheet from the hymn book.

“Can I see the chart?”

With the hint of a sigh, the tech put her coffee down and reached for a slim, brown envelope. Inside was a rough floor plan of the building, listing evidence tag numbers with the locations where they’d been found.

“And the page was found at the back of the church?” Kate asked.

“Yup, on a chair,” said the tech. “Separate from all the other chairs.”

“And there was no accelerant anywhere near that corner of the building,” Marcus said to Kate. “So, whoever set that fire –”

“Wanted the priest dead, and that note found.”

Kate felt a quickening: excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

“Wait up. What’s that on the other side?”

Marcus tapped the plastic-encased hymn sheet in Kate’s hands. She turned it over.

Faintly, with something like a blunt pencil, someone had etched three shapes on the opposite side of the page. A trio of Z shapes of varying size, the lines connecting the printed letters of another hymn, vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

There was clearly another message here. But was it intended for her, or someone else?