CHAPTER NINE #2
Purvis’s eyes glittered. “Not a prophet. A teacher. You people never understood him because you only listen with your ears. He was trying to show us what’s real — that the world we live in is the lie, and the lie we fear is the truth.”
“Sounds familiar,” Kate said. She took a deep breath. “Did he ever talk about me? Or my father, Dr William Valentine?”
Purvis frowned at her. “Why would he waste words talking about you? And who’s your father, anyway?”
It was an interesting response, she thought. Genuine, if contemptuous. It suggested Cox’s obsession with her was something personal, private. Or perhaps he only shared it with his closest followers.
“Did he tell you where he planned to go after here?”
Purvis’s smile was slow and pitying, like a man watching a child struggle with arithmetic. “He doesn’t go places. He arrives. That’s the difference.”
“Was he planning anything specific?”
“Yeah,” Kowalski muttered. “Freedom.”
Purvis shot him a glare. “He was planning salvation, salvation through and by means of revealed truth.”
Kate closed her notebook. “Alright, Tray. Thank you for your time.”
“That’s it? You don’t want to understand?”
“Oh, I understand,” she said softly. “I just don’t mistake manipulation for revelation.”
He stood abruptly. “You’ll see. Everyone will. You can’t lock the light away.”
“Guard,” Kate called.
“What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and walk humbly in His way?”
“That’s lovely, Tray, thanks.”
He was gone in a storm of muttering before the door even closed.
Kowalski let out a long breath. “Sorry about that. He’s… been like that ever since Cox got to him.”
“He converted him?”
“Brainwashed him, more like. Cox had this way of talking — calm, patient, like he already knew what you were going to say. He’d ask these questions that made you doubt yourself. Stuff like, ‘When was the last time you felt real?’ or ‘Who do you serve without knowing it?’ Tray ate that shit up.”
“And you?”
“I thought it was BS. The guy’s smart, sure — scary smart — but just another crazy underneath it all. He just had a way of making you want to impress him. He’d get you talking, then somehow you’d find yourself telling him everything.”
“And what did you tell him?”
By way of an answer, Kowalski fished a small piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his overalls and passed it across the table. Kate looked at it, but didn't pick it up.
“What’s that?”
“My commissary account. Fifty dollars, and I’ll talk.”
“Really.”
There was a long pause. Kowalski flashed her a grin; it was sheepish and a little bit flirty as well.
“One thing I learned in here, ma’am, in fact I learned it a long time before I ended up as a guest of the government, and that’s don’t trust anybody. Bureau included. Sorry. You can do it over the phone or go online, but it’s no monay, no parlay.”
Kate did his bidding, while he cracked each of his knuckles. When she showed him the screen of her phone, confirming the payment, Kowalski inclined his head graciously. And then he began.
“Cox wanted to know how we got into places we weren't supposed to, how we stayed invisible. We used to sneak into old hospitals, factories, churches — make videos, get views. He was obsessed with that. Wanted to know how we did it without getting caught. Also the technical kinda ins and outs.”
“Like what?”
“Like how to stay there long-term. How you borrow the utilities from your neighbors. Electricity, running water, internet signal.”
“Borrow?”
He flashed her another smile; she could picture Kowalski in the classroom, the naughty kid who always got away with it. Until he didn’t anymore.
“Why did he want to know all this stuff?”
“Said he was working on something. A kind of… pilgrimage circuit, he called it. He wanted to visit abandoned places of worship, hospitals, asylums. Said they were ‘thin places’ — spots where the boundary between life and death was fragile.”
Kate felt a chill creep up her spine. “Did he have a list?”
“I helped him draw one up. Mostly old churches and hospitals in New York and Jersey. He said he’d pay me for the research, but then he disappeared, and I guess that check’s lost in the mail.”
“Do you still have that list?”
He shook his head. “No, he took it. I don’t know what they did with all the stuff in his cell, though. You could ask.”
“I will. Do you remember any of the names?”
Kowalski frowned and, not for the first time, Kate was struck by how pretty he was. She imagined that plenty of his fellow prisoners felt the same way, and could only hope that he was able to charm his way out of trouble.
“Some,” he said, after a long, thoughtful silence. “Place called St. Dymphna’s in Yonkers, an old mental hospital. A church in Newark — St. Cecilia’s, I think. And some fisherman’s chapel out on Long Island. Why? You think he’s hiding in one of them?”
Kate didn’t answer.
Kowalski gave a weary shrug. “If you catch him, tell the Bureau I cooperated. Maybe they’ll shave something off my time.”
“I’ll note it,” she said, though she knew she couldn’t. She wasn’t even supposed to be here.
He smiled, half-hopeful. “You’re alright, Agent Valentine. Not like most of them.”
She gathered her things, feeling like a heel.
Outside, the corridor felt colder. Day was waiting by the door, hands clasped behind his back.
“Well?”
“They talked,” Kate said. “Mostly nonsense. But one of them might have given me a lead.”
“Then it was worth it.”
She nodded. “Maybe. What happened to his belongings?”
“Cox’s? The guy travelled extra-light. Bible. Crucifix. Coupla very graphic marriage proposals. That was it. Why?”
Kate made a gesture: halfway between shaking her head and shrugging. Her hopes hadn’t been running high. If that list had been important to Cox, he’d have memorized it, or kept it with him. She still had a lead, of sorts.
“Thanks for the access, Governor. And for keeping it quiet.”
He gave her a look that might have been amusement or warning. “You worry too much about being found out.”
By the time she reached her car, the light had turned brittle. The air had the electric stillness that comes before snow. She started the engine, turned the heater up, and sat for a moment, watching her breath fog the windshield.
Cox’s words — the ones she’d read in transcripts, the ones she’d heard whispered in interrogation rooms — looped in her mind: Truth is a contagion. Once you breathe it, you can’t go back to sleep.
She pulled out of the lot.
The road wound back through the forest, shadows stretching long between the trees.
For the first few miles, she told herself the unease in her chest was just fatigue.
She’d slept badly, she was driving alone, she was thinking too much.
But when she checked the mirror, she noticed the car behind her.
Old. Boxy. Pale blue under the road grime. An Oldsmobile, maybe late eighties. She wouldn’t have noticed it at all if it hadn’t been keeping the exact same distance for the last five miles.
Her pulse quickened.
She changed lanes. So did the Oldsmobile.
She slowed for a bend. So did it.
Every instinct she’d trained herself to trust came roaring back.
At the next junction she indicated right — then at the last moment, swung left onto a smaller road. The car behind hesitated, then followed.
Definitely not coincidence.
Her heartbeat steadied. Fear had no place here; fear clouded judgment. She flipped her phone into the passenger seat, GPS still active, though she doubted there’d be a signal this deep in the woods.
A mile ahead, the road forked again. To the left, the main route to Portland. To the right, a service road leading to a disused quarry. She took the right, hard and fast, tyres spitting gravel. The Oldsmobile followed — slower, heavier, engine growling.
She accelerated, the trees blurring past. Then, halfway up the incline, she cut her lights. The world went black except for the silver slice of sky. She braked, swung the wheel, and rolled the car into a narrow layby screened by fir trees.
The Oldsmobile’s headlights swept past moments later, carving brief arcs of light through the trunks. Then they were gone.
Kate waited, counting silently. Ten seconds. Thirty. A minute.
No brake lights. No reverse.
She exhaled slowly, muscles unclenching by degrees. She wished Marcus was with her.
After another minute, she started the car again, taking a different route back toward the highway. Her hands still trembled slightly on the wheel.
Maybe it was nothing — some out-of-towner who’d taken the wrong turn, a local tweaker forever getting high and lost. Or a paranoid mind seeing patterns where there were none. She’d learned long ago, though, that paranoia was just pattern recognition in overdrive. Sometimes it kept you alive.
As the sky darkened to violet, she caught sight of the ocean again, faint and cold on the horizon.
She told herself she’d done the smart thing, the professional thing. But the truth pressed harder the closer she got to Portland.
Cox was alive. He was likely in New York, and watching. And maybe — just maybe — he was right about one thing.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror, half expecting to see the Oldsmobile again, its headlights blooming in the dusk.
Nothing.
Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d crossed a threshold today — that something in her had shifted. But she didn’t know what, or why.