CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The interrogation room at the sheriff’s department had no softness in it.
Gray table. Gray walls. Gray floor scrubbed so often it held a dull chemical shine.
The cold overhead light pressed down from above without mercy.
The air smelled faintly of disinfectant.
Every room like this pretended to be neutral.
Selena had never believed that. Rooms like this were built to make people feel exposed.
Elias Croft, however, looked perfectly at ease.
He sat with one ankle resting over the opposite knee, hands folded loose in his lap now that the cuffs were gone.
The chase, the arrest, the transfer, the booking.
None of it seemed to have unsettled his posture.
He wore the same calm he had worn stepping off the bus, as if the entire process had merely delayed him from a speaking engagement.
Beside him sat his lawyer.
Martin Vail had arrived in under an hour and had the polished speed of a man used to swooping into rural counties and teaching local authorities the cost of procedural mistakes.
Mid-fifties. Lean. Hair silver at the temples in a way that looked managed.
A dark suit without a wrinkle in it. His legal pad already held two pages of notes in a tight, slanted hand.
Selena sat across from them with the case file spread open and a legal pad of her own under one hand.
No two-way-mirror theatrics. No raised voice. Those things rarely mattered with men like Croft. Better to pin him down with specifics and watch which details made him blink.
She started with Brenda Colter.
“April 5th,” Selena said. “Your revival was in Harlan County. Brenda Colter attended. Two nights later, she was found in the choir loft at St. Bartholomew’s, executed with biblical imagery surrounding her. Seems like an awful coincidence.”
Croft’s face did not change. “That is tragic.”
“Did you speak with her that evening?”
“I’ve already said I don’t remember.”
“You prayed with attendees after the sermon. She was exactly the sort of woman who might have approached you looking for help.”
Vail raised one finger. “Agent Raven, my client is not required to speculate on who might have approached him during a public event attended by dozens of people.”
Selena kept her eyes on Croft. “Did you see her?”
“No.”
“Did anyone in your party speak with her?”
“I don’t know. I already answered these questions at the bus the other night.”
“You keep a close circle. Your nurse. Your security. Someone must notice when women come back more than once.”
Croft tilted his head just slightly. “You think revival work is more organized than it is.”
Selena turned a page. “Let’s move on to Lauren Gimble.”
She laid out the date. The second county. The second service. The second body found posed on a gravestone. Croft listened with that same attentive gravity he used from a stage, as though every terrible detail grieved him personally while remaining entirely outside his control.
When she finished, he drew a slow breath through his nose.
“I minister to many people,” he said. “Lonely people. Frightened people. Women in trouble. Men who are lost. I do not catalog them like a banker keeps ledgers.”
“Convenient.”
Vail sat back in his chair. “You’re editorializing again, Agent.”
Selena ignored him.
“The victims,” she said. “All attended your revival. All ended up dead in staged scenes with religious language written beside them. Either you know more than you’re admitting or the people around you do.”
Croft’s gaze held hers. “I preach hope. I don’t kill women.”
“No,” Selena said. “You just refuse to tell me who travels with you.”
“That’s because I protect people who come to me broken.”
“From law enforcement?”
“From judgment. There is a law far higher than yours one must abide by.”
Something hot moved under her ribs then. Not anger exactly. The pressure of a theory resisting the first cracks.
Selena opened another photograph and set it on the table.
Tara Brennan in happier light, pulled from social media, standing beneath the revival tent with a hopeful caption under the image. Croft glanced at it once.
“Tara Brennan was at your service, too.”
“I don’t know her. Don’t tell me there’s been a third?”
“She was killed last night and found posed in an old grain silo before dawn.”
The room fell silent as Selena waited for something usable.
Then Croft said quietly, “That woman’s blood is not on me, nor are the other two. I only preach love and forgiveness.”
“Diabolus quoque angelus olim fuit,” Selena said. The devil was once an angel. One of the phrases she had learned on her old case when the bomber had left it as a cryptic threat.
She watched him carefully. A small look. Small enough to let her know that he understood.
He sighed. “Ridiculous.”
“So, you speak Latin?” she asked.
“Many Christian theologians study Latin writings, child,” he said.
Selena leaned forward. “I find that hard to believe these days. Latin writing was found at the murder scenes. Where were you last night?”
“In my bus.”
“All night?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Yes.”
“Can anyone confirm that?”
“Yes,” Croft said.
The answer came so easily that it made something tighten at the back of her neck.
“Who?” she asked.
Croft folded his hands again. “My head of security, Leon. Tell me, did you do a background check on him? I assume everything was correct and proper.”
She had. Leon had no priors.
“The last time we spoke,” Selena said, “you told us no one could verify you were in the bus because you liked the solitary life.”
Croft smiled. “After speaking with you and the sheriff yesterday, I upped my security. You did tell me that a killer was attending my revival sermons. But if that’s not enough, there is one other person who could definitely testify that I never left my bus last night.”
“Who?”
“Sheriff Chase should be able to.”
Silence hit the room hard enough to feel physical.
Selena did not move.
Did not blink.
Did not let her face give anything away.
But in her head, the pieces rearranged themselves into a splinter.
Connor arriving at her position in the trees with two coffees.
The split in the trees. The view of the bus.
The angle of the fairgrounds. Croft inside, perhaps looking out through one of those dark windows with binoculars, seeing headlights, seeing movement.
He could have sent someone to creep up and spy on them to confirm that they were there.
That made sense. It would explain why they took the opportunity to flee as soon as she and Connor left.
Elias had not needed Connor to see him on the bus. He only needed to know Connor was there, that the sheriff himself had come to join the surveillance in the middle of the night. Enough to muddy the timeline. Enough to say later, with maddening plausibility, that he had remained inside all along.
Vail was already writing.
Selena could hear the scratch of his pen.
Croft watched her now with quiet patience, the expression of a man allowing truth to dawn in someone he believed slower than himself.
“At some point during the night,” he went on, “Sheriff Chase came out to the grounds. I noticed his vehicle from the window of the bus. I assumed he was checking on Agent Raven, who had chosen to conduct an informal watch from the trees rather than request proper support.”
Vail looked up from the pad. “Interesting. So, you were under observation yet are still being treated as though you fled. The sheriff’s department and the federal government are persecuting you.”
“You didn’t mention seeing Sheriff Chase before,” Selena said.
“You didn’t ask.”
Vail said, “Agent Raven, are you now prepared to concede that your department pursued, stopped, and arrested my client while in possession of information that materially undercut your own theory?”
The room seemed smaller than it had a minute ago.
Selena kept her gaze on Croft. “Seeing us near your camp does not clear you of murder.”
“No,” Croft said softly. “But it is a very good alibi. Is it not?”
Selena pivoted fast, trying to salvage ground before the whole line gave way.
“Who else knew Tara Brennan?”
“I don’t know. And I don’t know her.”
“Who drove the escort vehicles today? Were they some of the employees you’re trying to hide?”
“My attorney advises me not to answer.”
Vail nodded once. “Correct.”
“You obstructed a lawful stop.”
“My client did no such thing.”
“His vehicles boxed us off the road.”
“My client was a passenger on a bus. If his driver didn’t respond as he should have, then it should be he you’re questioning.”
He’s happy to let one of his followers take the fall, Selena thought.
Selena turned the next page and pressed on Brenda, then Lauren, then Tara again, but the force had gone out of the room.
Every question now carried the knowledge that she had overcommitted, that Croft had seen it, that Vail had seen it, and that both were content to let her keep digging while the soil fell back into the hole behind her.
At last, she circled once more to the third murder.
“Tara Brennan was taken while you were camped less than twenty miles away,” she said. “Your revival was the last confirmed common thread between all three victims.”
Croft’s expression remained almost compassionate.
Selena moved uncomfortably in her chair.
“And I have an alibi,” Croft finally answered.
Vail closed his folder with a crisp snap. “Your office should have considered that before staging a roadside spectacle and hauling in a preacher with no evidence beyond proximity and prejudice.”
Selena felt the blow of that last word and despised him for using it because it was clever enough to be effective.
“There’s more here than proximity,” she said.
“Then by all means,” Vail replied, “present it.”
No one spoke for a moment.
The lights above cast sterile hues.
Far away in the building a phone rang and stopped.
Croft looked down at his folded hands as if the whole thing bored him now.
Selena closed the file.