PROLOGUE #2
“Is anyone here?”
The words rose to the rafters and came back smaller.
Nothing moved.
Off to the side near the altar stood the narrow door leading to the tower stairs. Connor had barely fixed on it when a draft came through the church.
It slid over his neck and down his arms like cold fingers.
The nearest candle flame jumped.
Then another.
And another.
A whisper of moving air traveled down the aisle. One by one, the flames guttered out. Small hisses. Tiny threads of smoke. Glass chiming softly as the breeze passed them.
Connor stopped where he stood.
The last light near the altar burned thin, bent sideways, and died.
Darkness dropped over the church.
For a second all he could hear was his own breathing and the low pulse in his ears.
Then, above him somewhere in the tower, wood creaked.
Not the lazy sound of an old building settling. Weight. A step, perhaps, or a shift. Something real.
Connor thumbed on his flashlight.
The beam sliced through the black, catching pew backs, a fallen hymn book, the blank face of the old cross above the altar. The church seemed larger now that the candles were gone, the dark around the beam too deep to trust.
He swept the light toward the altar and froze.
Words had been written on the wall behind it.
Dark strokes, uneven and crude, but careful enough to form lines. Not English. At least not any English he could make out. Latin, maybe. Church language from funeral services and old ritual, half-heard across years of listening without really understanding.
The substance on the wall had dried in some places and run in others.
He held his breath for a moment.
It looked like blood.
Connor raised the light higher, tracing the words, trying to make sense of them. He couldn’t. One word looked vaguely familiar, but that was all. Below the writing, a slow, dark line had dried down the plaster.
Another creak came from above.
He moved toward the tower door, every muscle locked tight, the flashlight beam steady only because he made it steady.
This was very different from what he was used to.
The slow rural life he enjoyed policing.
This was not it. This was something else, he could feel it in the cold dark corners and the stagnant air.
Connor grabbed the radio on his shoulder without taking his eyes off the stair door. “Dispatch.”
Cheryl answered through a crackle of static. “Go ahead.”
“I’m inside St. Bart’s. Front doors were open. Candles lit. Possible break-in. Someone’s vandalized the place.” His gaze flicked behind him for a moment, to the writing on the wall by the altar. But its meaning continued to elude him. “Send Arnold, Cheryl.”
A moment passed. “You not up to this alone.” Cheryl was clearly joking, but Connor was not in the mood. Not now.
“Just send him.”
“All right. He’s on the way.”
Connor clipped the radio back to his shoulder and pushed open the stair door.
The hinges let out a long, miserable groan.
A narrow staircase curved upward inside the tower, boards worn smooth at the center from decades of feet that had long since stopped climbing. The smell there was different. Less dust. More iron. Wax. Something else under it that made the back of his throat go tight.
His light found the banister.
Dust coated most of it except for one streak where a hand had recently dragged across.
Connor started up.
Every step complained under his boots. The beam moved over old timber, flakes of peeling paint, a dead bird in one corner, scraps of nesting material tucked into the cracks. The air moved more here. Wind moaned faintly through gaps higher up in the tower.
Halfway up he stopped and listened.
No voices.
No hurried movement.
No breathing but his own.
He kept going.
The staircase narrowed before opening into the choir loft, a platform with now glassless windows overlooking the dark roof and body of the church below.
The walls felt narrower here for some reason, with discarded pieces of church furniture punctuating the dark shadows, broken stands and a warped cabinet shoved against one wall.
A shape sat at the center of it all.
Connor’s light skimmed across the floorboards.
A shoe.
A chair leg.
The pale curve of a hand.
He stopped so suddenly the floor gave a sharp crack under his weight.
The woman sat in a straight-backed chair near one wall.
Her head was bowed. Hands folded carefully in her lap.
Dark hair spilled over one shoulder. A faded dress, once a cheerful color, perhaps, covered her knees.
Candle stubs had been set around the chair and along the window ledge behind it, most of them extinguished. The remnants cast paltry light.
For one impossible split second he thought she was alive.
Then the flashlight found her throat.
A cut opened the flesh beneath her jaw, deep and black where the blood had dried. It had soaked the front of her dress and run down into the chair and onto the floorboards beneath.
Connor went cold all over.
He had worked death before. Wrecks. Shootings. A combine accident that had left him unable to eat supper that night. Bodies in this county usually came with accidental chaos attached. Panic. Drunkenness. Stupidity. Rage.
Nothing about this was chaotic.
This had been arranged.
Whoever killed her had taken time. Had posed her with care. Folded her hands. Bowed her head. Sat her upright like a sinner brought to church for judgment.
Connor kept his gun up and swept the loft with the flashlight in case the murderer was hiding somewhere. No movement. No sign of anyone hiding in the corners.
The wall behind the woman held more writing in the same dark substance as downstairs.
He barely recognized it for what it was this time because the body held his attention so completely.
The sight turned his stomach.
Not because of the blood. Not only that.
Because of what it meant for the place he loved. A place he had always found peaceful.
Because it meant somebody in Harlan County had done something methodical and cruel in the middle of the night, then took the time to make the scene look the way they wanted it.
A local woman, Connor thought. Mid-thirties, maybe. The face was partly shadowed by her bowed head, but there was something familiar there. A face he ought to know. Grocery store familiar. Church picnic familiar. Like he’d passed her somewhere in daylight and never imagined seeing her like this.
His beam moved once more across the corners of the loft.
Nothing.
He wanted to step closer. Needed to know whether there was a pulse even though his brain told him there wasn’t. Needed to see if anything in the room named the victim. Needed to understand what the writing said, why the candles had been arranged, why this place of all places had been chosen.
But the rest of him understood something else first.
Don’t touch it, he thought. The scene mattered now.
One wrong step and he could ruin whatever chance there was of reading it properly later.
Connor lowered the gun a fraction but kept it ready. His pulse thudded in his throat. Somewhere down below, the body of the church stretched away in darkness, the pews nothing but black shapes. The whole building seemed to listen.
He looked at the woman again.
Nothing like this had ever happened under his watch. Not in Eagleton. Not anywhere in Harlan County while he had been sheriff. His world was dead livestock dumped on roadsides, fights that started with beer and old grudges, stolen tools, family trouble, meth tucked away in barns.
This was something else. A callous malevolence that had crept its way through the beating heart of the county, like a thief in the night.
A far cry from the sleepy rural county he spent his nights patrolling.
Connor stared at the body, at the folded hands, at the words on the wall he barely recognized, and knew one thing with complete certainty.
This might be beyond him.
He was going to need some help.