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“On the fucking ground!” Faith snarled.

“There’s no need to swear,” the killer said. “I’ll comply.” Then, as an afterthought. “I won’t harm you.”

His voice was soft, almost gentle. It reminded Faith of West’s compassionate tenor. Her stomach turned, then turned again when she saw the body lying in the freshly dug grave.

Faith’s finger twitched slightly on the trigger. She caught herself, took a deep breath and said, “Spread your hands wide. Open your fingers. Legs too.”

The killer did as he was told. He was tall, six-three or -four, and wiry.

It was impossible to tell for sure underneath his jeans and sweater, but he didn’t seem to have an ounce of body fat on him.

His gray hair and lined face placed him in his late forties or early fifties, but it was easy for Faith to believe that he was strong enough to carry these bodies and dig these graves.

“I’m going to place you in handcuffs,” Faith said. “If you so much as flinch, my dog will bite you, do you understand?”

Turk emphasized this warning with a deep, bellowing bark.

“I understand,” the killer replied.

Faith planted her knee in his belly and pulled his right hand behind his back. As she snapped the first link around his wrist, he spoke again. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done.”

“Yeah, I don’t think God’s very happy with you right now, buddy,” Faith said, snapping the second link closed. “Stay there. Turk, if he moves, make him stop moving.”

Turk barked again. His teeth were bared, and his eyes were narrowed in an almost human expression of disgust. The killer remained where he was as Faith checked the body for a pulse.

There was none, of course. They had reached the killer too late.

She sighed heavily and got to her feet, bringing her hands to the top of her head. “Damn it! God fucking damn it!”

“Please don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” the killer urged.

“Go to hell!” Faith snapped.

“I can’t. My soul has been redeemed—”

“Shut up!” Faith spat. She pulled her radio from her pocket. “Michael, I have him.”

“Yeah, I figured when I heard Turk start barking like he had a bear up a tree. I should be at your position in about two minutes. Good job, Faith.”

She chuckled bitterly. “Yeah, not so much. We have a dead body too.”

Michael didn’t seem surprised. “Ah. Well, he’ll be the last one.”

Faith closed the connection before saying, “Tell that to his family.”

***

Commander Thomas Holbrook, USN (ret.) sat placidly in the interview chair opposite Faith.

Turk stood on guard, although with shackles anchoring the former Naval chaplain to the floor and the table, there was no chance of Holbrook doing something stupid.

Part of Faith regretted that. There were few things in her mind as evil as using religion as an excuse to kill people.

Michael entered the room with a cup of water. A bendy straw like the kind you’d find attached to a juice box stuck out of the cup. He set the water in front of Holbrook, then took the seat next to Faith.

“Thank you, Special Agent,” Holbrook replied.

He steadied the cup with his hands, then bent down to the straw. When he finished sipping, he released a contented sigh and straightened. “I have already signed a written statement, but if you’d like to record a verbal one, that’s all right with me.”

“This conversation is being recorded,” Faith said, “and it can be used against you in court as can anything you say, but I don’t need another confession. I just need to know why.”

“Of course.” Holbrook sighed.

His smile faded. For a while he was silent. Faith nearly broke the silence to ask if he planned to answer her question or not. Just before she opened her mouth, though, Holbrook asked, "Did you serve Special Agent Bold? You have the demeanor of someone who served."

“I did. Six years with the Marine Corps. Two tours in Iraq.”

Holbrook nodded. “Can you hear them scream?”

Michael scoffed. “All right. We’re done with that. Forget about this guy, Faith. He’s just another whack job trying to justify his sickness.”

Faith didn’t scoff. She knew exactly what Holbrook was talking about. “No. Not those who served with me, anyway. But I hear others sometimes. Those I’ve lost in performance of my duty to the FBI. Do you hear voices? Do they tell you to kill and bury these men?”

Holbrook smiled, but his eyes were haunted. “From time to time, I hear them scream. They don’t speak to me. Even God doesn’t speak to me. Not the way you and I are talking right now. I feel the Holy Spirit guide me, but I don’t hear words.”

“The screams. These are from men you’ve lost in combat?”

He shook his head. “Men who live when they should have died. Men who lost their comrades but were denied the chance to die a warrior’s death with them and awaken to the glory of God and the special table he has set for those who sacrifice their lives in service of their country.

I heard them scream every day until I realized that God’s will was for me to deliver them from Satan’s hand and usher them to the gates of Heaven. ”

Michael scoffed again, and Holbrook looked at him.

“It’s not something a nonbeliever would understand.

I don’t expect either of you to understand.

But when I liberated Paul Martinez, a weight was lifted from my shoulders.

The screams stopped. I looked at his face, peaceful and free for the first time in decades, and I knew that I had found my calling. ”

He took a deep breath and looked over them, as though God was smiling down at him from Heaven.

“You may not agree with my actions, Bold, but even if you don’t hear the screams of your lost comrades, you must know the sort of guilt and pain that plagues those who survive when their brothers and sisters in arms perish. ”

Faith recalled her conversations with Stan Merchant, Maria Fuentes, and Martin Coster’s widow. “I do.”

“Then you understand why I had to do what I was called to do, even if it meant losing my freedom.”

His eyes met Faith, pleading for her to understand, to tell him he was a good person, or at least not a bad one. She wouldn’t give him that relief.

“They had families, Thomas. People they loved. People who loved them. They had friends. They had careers. They had lives. They survived the hell of war and came home to find something meaningful in spite of what they suffered. Yes, they still hurt sometimes. Yes, they had bad memories. But they weren’t defined by those memories.

They made something better of themselves.

You? You let those screams turn you into a murderer. ”

Holbrook’s left eye twitched. “I was following the will of God.”

“You should read His Book sometime,” Faith suggested. “It might give you an idea of how God feels about murderers and about people who change His message.”

She stood. She’d satisfied her curiosity. As usual, it didn’t make her feel any better than she did before.

Holbrook remained silent as the three of them left the interrogation room. She glanced back at him as she walked through the door. His eyes were haunted again, and his fingers pressed into the table. Perhaps he was hearing different screams this time, the screams of those his victims left behind.

Or maybe not. Maybe it was too much to hope that he would feel guilt for what he did.

The agents stayed silent for the first half of their journey back to Philadelphia. Michael broke that silence with a predictable statement that Faith had absolutely no interest in hearing.

“It wasn’t your fault, Faith.”

She sighed and tried to play along, hoping it would end the conversation. “Yeah. I know.”

“I mean it. It wasn’t your fault. We did the best we could.”

She couldn’t stop herself from snapping, “Yeah? Tell that to Carl Jameson’s family.”

“Faith…”

“We waited for him to kill someone else, Michael. That was literally our plan. Stake out burial sites so the next time he murders someone, we can catch him when he ditches the body.”

“That’s not true,” Michael replied. “We knew he was likely to strike again last night, and we did everything we could to identify him before he did. We weren’t able to identify him, so we did the next best thing.”

“We couldn’t identify him because we were looking at the wrong people,” Faith countered. “We were looking at medical personnel. We never even thought about chaplains.”

“We’re human. We make mistakes. Honestly, we did better than most people would have. Not that it’s a contest, but—”

“Michael…” Faith sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I know you’re trying to help, but I really need you to stop talking right now.”

Michael did so. Turk whined gently and laid his head on the center console, but even he couldn’t fix Faith’s mood.

Faith knew all the words to say. Michael had said most of them.

Gordon Clark—a mentor of hers who had been murdered by Franklin West—would have said a few more.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty. You can’t blame yourself for the actions of murderers.

We save who we can, but we can’t save everyone.

More would have died if you hadn’t caught the killer.

All wonderful. All just flippin’ fantastic. Except if you were Carl Jameson’s husband, or Paul Martinez’s wife, or Kevin Barnes’s kids, it didn’t help to know that no one else was hurting. You had lost your loved one.

And Jameson had to die for Faith to know who his killer was.

Intentionally or not, she had used him as bait.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t her fault that he was dead, but knowing that didn’t help.

Being in the FBI was a lot like being in Iraq.

It might look from the outside that they were winning the war, but just like insurgents with their IEDs, killers kept popping up.

Innocent people kept dying. There would always be a Thomas Holbrook out there somewhere.

There would always be a Franklin West. There would always be a Messenger.

She looked out of her passenger window so Michael couldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes. She and Turk had caught the bad guy.

But she didn’t feel victorious. Not even close.