Page 31 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

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?”

Kate didn’t want to seem impressed. But it seemed Elijah was telling the truth.

“How does it feel to be here, Kate? Do you feel close to your father?”

“Shut up!”

Inwardly, she checked herself. Don’t give him the reaction. The reaction is what he wants.

“I imagine Denton was pretty pissed off that I survived his attack. It was how he got caught after all.”

Cox laughed. “You see? You are so very wrong. Denton didn’t break the rules by attacking you.

He followed the instructions to the letter.

He was meant to get caught that way. Meant to end on death row.

And you were meant to witness it all: the judgment, the years of waiting, the lethal injection, the last word.

It was all ordained. As is this. And what will come after. ”

“I don’t believe you,” she said sharply. “Put your hands in the air now, or I’ll shoot.”

He complied. “Come on, Kate. You saw what he did to the others. How do you think it is that they were all made into hamburger, but you survived? He never intended to kill you.”

She wanted to block this out. It was too much to handle.

He started to come down the pulpit steps now. He was taller than she’d imagined – a quite impressive figure, dressed in priestly robes.

“Stop where you are or I’ll shoot.”

He came to a standstill in front of her, holding a disposable cigarette lighter in his right hand. He stared from it, to her, and back again. He was drenched in diesel himself, she realized, a perverse kind of baptism, his hair plastered to his forehead.

“Kate. One spark from this lighter and everything goes up. You might get a bullet into me, but you and your friend won’t get out alive. One spark.”

She kept the gun on him.

“Drop it, Kate. You know it’s true. Drop it.”

She let it drop to the floor.

“Good girl.”

Slowly, he reached into the pocket of the robes and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

“Go up,” he said, indicating the pulpit.

She swallowed. So this was his plan then: the pair of them cuffed together in the pulpit as the inferno took hold. She took the first step.

“I thought you could do better than that, Cox. Guy with your imagination.”

“Quiet.” He gave her a shove, walking behind her back towards the pulpit.

One of the most sensitive parts of the human body is the top of the foot, specifically the thin skin covering the calcaneus and navicular sockets, which form the frontal section of the ankle.

The area is like an eight-lane freeway intersection, with an assortment of fragile bones, nerve tissue, and muscle fibers overlapping one another.

An instructor at the FBI Academy had shown Kate and her class of novice agents exactly how to stamp down on that area with a scraping motion, disabling one’s opponent from behind.

She repeated the move now, feeling a satisfying crunch.

Cox roared in agony and disbelief as the pair of them tumbled back down the stairs.

She followed up the move with a thumb in his eye as he flailed about on top of her, trying to grab her hair.

She thought she heard the cigarette lighter skittering across the stone floor, but she didn’t have a second to spare, staggering to her feet and running towards the choir stall.

Based on the many churches where she’d sung and played as a girl, she had an idea of the classic layout.

There’d be a door at the back of the choir stall, another tiny staircase down, connecting to a corridor that ran underneath the main body of the church, leading off it, further rooms for storage and teaching and furniture.

She was in luck: she was right. But it was pitch black, and the flashlight was long gone.

Tentatively, she sniffed the air. It was the usual ecclesiastical smell: damp stone, candlewax, and moldy hymn books.

Cox didn’t seem to have come down here with his can of diesel and thus far, she couldn’t detect any hint of smoke. Long may that last , she thought.

Her eyes grew a little more accustomed to the darkness and she started to edge her way down the corridor.

She could hear footsteps somewhere in the building; it was Cox, she assumed, but as to whether he was coming closer or moving further away, she couldn’t tell.

It was likely to be the former, though. If the sick bastard really believed their joint “sacrifice” was ordained by God, then he wasn’t going to slink off home for an early night.

He was going to scour the building until he found her, and drag her back to that pulpit for his grand finale.

She checked her phone. Still no signal.

She was about to continue down the corridor when she heard the sound of footsteps directly over her head.

That meant Cox had to be in the choir stalls.

She froze, not even daring to breathe, waiting for the creak of the door.

But there was nothing. Was it safe to move on?

Where the hell was he? Then, an abrupt, violent sound as the door was suddenly yanked open and he headed down into the basement of the church.

Thinking quickly, she darted into the room opposite – some sort of institutional former kitchen. She hid behind the door, trembling.

She smelled him now; the diesel stench was overpowering. It probably wasn’t doing his lungs any good, because she could hear him wheezing and coughing as he came down the corridor. Maybe the guy would actually pass out before he got to her…

She saw the light from his flashlight, scouring the corridor.

She held her breath, terrified that Cox might be able to hear her heartbeat.

He was like some wild beast, snuffling and snorting like a boar.

He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.

She saw the beam of his flashlight dancing across the floor.

God, please let him move on. Please.

He coughed and started to move away.

Thank God.

Then, the unthinkable happened. Her phone beeped. The battery died. The goddam battery died, and that was what it chose to do with its last, miniscule unit of power. It beeped, and it betrayed her.

Cox was on her in a second. She screamed, struggled in his grip as he slammed her against the wall, cracking her head.

She fought back, trying to get her fingers into the soft tissue, eyes, nose, neck. Felt something slip around her neck. Silky. His face close to hers, grinning, a dead look in his eyes. He’d put the stole around her neck.

“You don’t have to be alive for the sacrifice,” he hissed. “You just have to be here!”

That awful smell of the fumes as he squeezed.

Her vision blurred at the edges. She seemed to be outside of herself, watching the scene from a high point, far away.

She was aware of herself kicking and struggling in his grip, his bulk pushing her against the wall, his grunting as he squeezed tighter and tighter. She knew she was dying.

How sad , she thought, as blackness gathered and bees buzzed. How sad .

And then, suddenly, she was on her knees, retching onto the cold stone flags. Cox was on the floor beside her, out cold, blood seeping out of his ear.

Marcus dropped the lump of wood. She started to sob.

“You’re safe,” he said. “You’re safe.”