CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dusk in the Bronx arrived early, the kind that didn’t so much fall as congeal in the air—purple at the edges, gritty in the throat. The Church of St. Simon and St. Jude crouched at the corner like a patient with a secret, boards nailed over the windows, the bell tower laced with pigeon droppings.
Kate stood in the lee of a derelict bodega, sucking on a tic-tac, and watching the last of ESU slip into the shadows along the fence line. Torres was a slim shape beside her, chin tucked into her coat, voice low into the radio.
“Two on the south door, two on the sacristy. Valentine, Reid, you’re with me at the nave. On my mark.”
Marcus adjusted his vest, jaw working on a piece of gum he’d been nursing since Queens. “You always take me to the nicest places.”
“Complain to the booking agent,” Kate said, pulling her hood tight.
She was aware of her own breathing, the way it sounded loud in the wool.
Inside her head, a map drew itself: altar at the east end, narthex at the west, side chapel to the left, sacristy through the chancel.
She felt the hum of anticipation—that pre-raid cocktail that mixed focus with revulsion, like the moment before an injection.
She glanced at the dark geometry of the boarded windows and thought, not for the first time, not here.
Not again. Another St. Simon and St. Jude. Another knife-edge of then and now.
“On me,” Torres said. “Let’s go wake the saints.”
They moved. The south door gave reluctantly, wood splitting with the sound of old bones.
The smell hit first—damp, old wax, a sweet, metallic tang that belonged to rust and something else.
The beam of Torres’s flashlight cut the dark into white slabs.
Pigeons thumped somewhere above, the noise amplified by the hollow space.
For a moment, Kate saw the place as it must have been: a long aisle, pews in orderly ranks, fidgeting children and pious grandmothers.
She blinked and brought herself back to now.
“Clear left.”
“Clear right.”
They fanned, boots careful on loose flagstones.
The nave rose around them, columns scabbed with graffiti.
Someone had tried to scrub the worst of it off and given up.
The altar was mostly intact, with only a chunk missing.
Kate read the words under some spotted fungus: Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanc-, and she fought the ingrained urge to curtsey.
To the right, the wide door to the sacristy stood ajar. The angle of it said: recently used.
Torres chopped a hand toward it. “Valentine.”
Kate flowed toward the doorway, feeling the old floor shift under her weight.
She pressed the side of her fist to the door and pushed.
The room beyond was a monk’s cell turned storage unit—brick, low ceiling, the smell of rained-on cardboard.
And signs. Obvious signs, because nobody had tried to hide them.
On the floor: a narrow camp bed, the kind that turns shoulders to knives.
A sleeping bag with a cigarette burn near the zipper, stuffed with yesterday’s warmth.
On the table: a small gas stove with a soot-blackened kettle, two spoons in a chipped mug that once said WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA in flaking blue.
A neat line of food—cans of beans, condensed milk, peaches, all aligned label-out like a habit learned in some other life.
Above it all, the walls: a fever dream of paper.
Pictures torn from porn magazines, taped up edge to edge—glossy limbs, mouths like wounds, eyes that didn’t look anywhere.
Between them, tucked at odd angles, other clippings: a grainy photo of Times Square, a recipe for meatloaf, a flyer for a revival meeting in Yonkers.
The collage of someone who’d tried to fix the world inside his head and failed.
Marcus lifted the stove with two fingers and sniffed the cold metal. “Recent,” he said. “Soot’s fresh.”
Torres crouched by the bed. “Boot prints. Size… eight? Nine? Hard to tell on this floor.”
“Notebook,” said a voice from the aisle. It was Officer Gina Park, one of Torres’s, eyes already bright with the hunt. She had her flashlight trained on a small fold-out table in the nave, the kind you’d bring to a yard sale if you were an optimist. “Looks like he was making lists.”
They came together at the table. Park pointed at a buff-colored notebook whose cardboard cover had been worn to fur.
She flipped it open, using a pen. The top page was half-filled.
Thick, toddler clumsy letters sprawled across the lines, each name pressed hard enough to bite the page beneath.
Three—no, four—names. The last one had a line through it that wasn’t quite a line, more like someone had dragged the pen away to scratch an itch and forgotten to return.
Marcus read them aloud, quietly, the sounds too big in the empty church. “Laurens Terhooft. Serena Halberg. N. Dhar. El—” He squinted. “Eleanor Kaye?”
Park let out a short breath. “Oh, wow.”
“Wow what?” Torres said.
“I follow Kaye’s podcast,” Park said, with reverence, “She’s like, the ultimate investment disruptor. And Halberg runs Solstice Capital,” she went on. “Crypto-to-energy pivot. She’s on every panel. Meanwhile, Noah Dhar—are you guys gonna tell me you don’t know Dhar Holdings?”
“Sorry,” said Kate, bemused.
“Maybe up there in the Bureau you don’t worry about your pension plan,” said Park. “Dhar’s the property king. Makes Trump look like a hobby-trader.”
“What about the other guy… Laurens…”
Park held up a hand as she searched on her phone. “Joker in the pack. Another corporate lawyer. Investment, tax… just opened a second office in Johannesburg.”
Kate stared at the names until the ink seemed to breathe.
Bad, childlike handwriting. An unfinished list. It reminded her of Gadd’s journal, but less crazy.
She swallowed. “Targets,” she said, because it was obvious and it needed to be said out loud so it would become policy and not just fear.
“Manhattan big beasts. The kind of people who work seven days because the market never sleeps and they think that makes them righteous.”
“Great,” Marcus said. “Do we warn them or put them under immediate surveillance?”
“Both,” Kate said. “And we go wider. Figure out who else could fit this list if the author had time to finish it.” She tapped the paper. “Big in money, Sabbath-breakers, prominent enough to make a sermon of their deaths.”
Park leaned in again, eyes scanning the margins. “There are arrows,” she said. “Look—crude little arrows pointing to scribbles. Addresses? Abbreviations. ‘58/Lex,’ ‘Hudson Pk—’ he ran out of letters, maybe. None of it’s systematic.”
“Does it look like Cox?” Marcus asked.
Kate felt the prickle at the base of her skull that never meant anything good. “His watermark, but not his writing. I mean—I can’t imagine Cox writing like that.”
Torres circled her flashlight beam around the floor, slow and patient. “What next?”
“We split,” Kate said. “Torres, take Park and one more and get everything to the lab. Bag everything, the cans, the stove, any hair on the blanket. Marcus and I will—”
The noise came like a cough from above them. Not loud, but wrong in a way that carried. A footstep where no footstep should be. The bell tower, to their left and back, a square of dark the color of an old bruise.
“Hold,” Torres breathed, hand up, eyes already angling toward the tower. For a second, the church decided to be a church again. The quiet was so complete that Kate imagined she could hear dust settling.
Another sound. A metal scrape. Pigeons startled, then resettled. Human, definitely.
“Up,” Kate said. And then they were moving—she and Marcus toward the base of the tower, Torres peeling right and hissing into the radio for the south team to cover the alley-side exit.
The stairs inside the tower were a spiral of grudges.
Stone worn to a dish at the center, iron handrail slick with history.
The smell shifted as they climbed—more pigeon, more more fungus.
The steps narrowed until they were a negotiation.
Kate went first, her gun low, eyes reading the dark.
She felt the give of the step before it gave and shifted her weight.
Marcus’s breath was a metronome behind her.
Halfway up, a flash of motion—something small and fast. Her finger tensed, then eased as a rat scuttled away and vanished into a hole in the plaster big enough for a small family and a holiday guest.
“Lovely venue,” Marcus murmured.
At the landing below the bell chamber, the air changed.
Colder. The draft from the louvers cut in sideways and smelled like rain about to happen.
Kate stilled, one step below the opening.
She heard it—the scrape-gasp of a person pulling air in a throat that didn’t want to share. Not panic. Calculation.
She moved. The bell chamber spilled around them—big black shape of the bell like a frozen wave, the rope hanging stiff as a question.
Slats of the louvered openings let dusk strip the space into bars.
A shape slid between them, low and fast, and hit the far ladder to the roof like it had always known it would.
“Hey!” Marcus shouted. “Police! Stop!”
The figure didn’t look back. Up the narrow ladder, onto the service catwalk, through a door that wasn’t a door so much as wood pretending it still was one.
Kate went after him before her body had time to remember that it didn’t like heights.
The door flapped, a shadow dove, and suddenly there was roof, open air, light rain.
The roof was a bad idea in 3D: slate loose as teeth in an old mouth, lead flashing peeled like skin.
The wind found them and shook them. The figure skated across the ridge with a familiarity born of hunger and practice.
Kate’s foot slid; she corrected without thinking.
Below, an alley waited for someone to fall into it.