CHAPTER ONE
The prison looked like someone had dropped a concrete spaceship in the middle of rural Maine and then wrapped it in razor wire just to be sure.
From the two-lane blacktop, Northbridge Special Management Unit rose out of the scrub like an accusation.
No trees within shouting distance, no softening shrubs, nothing that could be climbed or hidden behind — just gravel, fences and poured cement, everything squared off and hostile.
The outer wall had the dull, pebbled texture of cheap municipal pools, unfinished and unforgiving, as if the builders had decided aesthetics were for people who could leave.
Kate eased the Bureau sedan into a visitor’s space and killed the engine.
The tick of cooling metal filled the silence.
For a moment she sat there, hands still on the steering wheel, watching the heat shimmer up off the tarmac.
The May sky was a hard, polished blue, the kind that made the world look like a photograph with the contrast turned up.
Beyond the outer fence, the hills rolled away in soft green folds, all pine and scrub and the occasional farmhouse.
Up here the air smelled of warm earth and petrol, nothing more.
If she cracked the window she could probably pick out cut grass, maybe the ghost of manure from some unseen field.
Ordinary smells. Farm-town smells. If you ignored the watchtowers and the floodlights and the cameras hooded on their posts like metallic crows, it was almost peaceful.
Almost.
She could see one of the towers from where she sat, a narrow grey pencil shading the sky, topped with glass and shadow.
A figure moved behind the dark pane — the slow, restless pacing of a man whose entire job was to watch for trouble and be quietly disappointed when it didn’t arrive.
A rifle barrel glinted once and then was still.
Northbridge SMU was the most secure facility she had ever visited.
On paper it wasn’t even a prison, just “a dedicated high-risk housing extension” to the state penitentiary down the road.
The brochure language, the euphemisms, were almost funny if you ignored what they were wrapped around.
In practice, it was a box built to hold the worst men in America — the ones other prisons couldn’t or wouldn’t deal with.
Terrorists. Serial killers. Gang leaders who could start wars with a phone call.
And Elijah Cox lived here now.
The thought landed with a dull weight in her chest and stayed there.
Three months ago, she’d chased him through a derelict hospital in Manhattan, up stairwells that smelled of rust and ghosts, all the way to a roof lined with broken glass. Three months since the sirens had converged, since the NYPD had flooded the building like antibodies swarming an infection.
Three months since they’d dragged the so-called Lawgiver back into a cage.
The images were never far away. Cox running ahead of her, coat flapping, breath rasping, the hiss of his voice when he’d turned at the parapet and said, You came, as if she’d been fulfilling some sacred appointment rather than following a trail of bodies.
Kate exhaled slowly, trying to let some of the tension go with it. The breath clouded a little on the cooled windshield before vanishing. Today was not about the past. Today was about a phone call from a US Attorney’s office and an email that had landed in her inbox like a stone.
Inmate COX, ELIJAH SAMUEL has made multiple requests to speak specifically with Special Agent KATE VALENTINE.
Subject claims to have information concerning “an imminent divine action” relevant to ongoing investigations involving religiously motivated violence.
Please advise if SA VALENTINE is willing to interview subject on behalf of the Bureau.
She’d stared at the email for a long time before answering. The phrase imminent divine action had seemed to pulse on the screen, black letters gone radioactive.
Imminent divine action.
You could never accuse Elijah Cox of underselling his material.
Her phone vibrated against her thigh now, dragging her back. She glanced at the screen. MARCUS.
She considered letting it go to voicemail; her nerves already felt thin as filament, stretched and humming. But he’d only keep calling, and besides, she’d promised him—promised all of them—that she wouldn’t go near Cox again without telling someone first.
She swiped to answer. “Hey.”
“Tell me you’re on a beach,” Marcus said, in lieu of greeting. “Tell me you’ve finally taken my advice and gone somewhere with cocktails and no mobile reception.”
His voice sounded cheerful, loose, as if newly married life agreed with him. She pictured him in their cramped office, feet on his desk, tie already loosened even though it was probably not yet ten. A half-empty coffee, a half-solved crossword. Normal things. Civilian things.
“You know where I am,” she said. “And it’s not very beachy.”
There was a beat. “Umm… You’re at a prison.”
“Gold star.”
“The one Cox is at?”
“The same.”
Silence knitted itself across the line for a moment, thicker than static.
“And this is about that message you got,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if you were going to go.”
“Me either,” Kate replied. “Then I became sure.”
The truth was she’d gone back and forth so many times the mental gears had started to grind.
Ignore him and risk people dying, if by some freakish chance he was telling the truth.
Go to him and risk giving him exactly what he wanted: space in her head, time with her attention, another chance to perform.
She shifted in her seat, watching a white Department of Corrections van trundle past toward the staff entrance.
The driver didn’t look at her; he had the air of a man who’d long ago decided that eye contact within a hundred yards of this place was above his pay grade.
Dust kicked up in the van’s wake, settling on the already-filmy chain-link.
“He could be bluffing,” she said. “Trying to claw back relevance. Or he could really have a follower out there, a disciple… whatever we’re calling them this week. Someone who wants to keep the brand alive.”
“Copycats,” Marcus said. “The sincerest form of flattery. And the biggest pain in the ass.”
“Exactly.”
In the field, the idea of a copycat was almost worse than the original.
Originals had patterns. Logic, however twisted.
Copycats had fandom. They mixed devotion with improvisation and came up with the kind of chaos that made profilers weep.
But thus far, Cox had either done the killings himself or commissioned followers.
No one had operated outside of the fold.
But Cox had never been so securely confined before.
“You think he’s co-operating?” Marcus asked. “Like, genuinely trying to stop something? That doesn’t seem very on-brand.”
“It might if he thinks it serves the myth.” She picked at a loose thread on the steering wheel, nails worrying the fake leather.
“And bear in mind, if someone else is using his Commandment shtick without his permission, that’s a threat to his control.
The one thing he cares about more than theology is copyright. ”
“Or,” Marcus said, “and I’m just spitballing here, he’s playing with you because he’s bored out of his mind in supermax and you’re the only reality TV he gets.”
A reluctant smile tugged at her mouth. “I am aware that that is a possibility.”
“Good. Because I can’t shake the feeling this is exactly his idea of a spa day. You show up. He gets to look all soulful and talk about judgment and divine justice. You go home pissed off. Ten out of ten: would manipulate again.”
“He’s not going to see me pissed off,” she said, more sharply than she intended.
“Uh-huh,” Marcus said. “Whatever you say, partner.”
She rolled her shoulders, trying to shake out the tension, and turned the key partway to bring the windows down an inch. Heat rolled out, stale and stuffy, and the air that came in was cooler, edged with cut grass and the faint chemical tang of whatever they used to keep the grounds obedient.
“You know I can’t ignore it,” she said quietly. “If there is someone out there and I stayed home because I thought he was lying…”
"I know," Marcus said, softer now. The joking tone stepped aside, letting the older undercurrent through.
"I'd be the one yelling at you if you did.
I just—" He broke off, then started again.
'I'd like this recovery streak to continue for us both.
Fewer mad chases through abandoned buildings.
More paperwork. Maybe a nice embezzlement case, where the worst thing that happens is we get bored and argue. "
“Come on,” she said. “You’d hate that. And you’d complain.”
“Absolutely,” he agreed. “But I’d complain from a position of not being dead, which is my favorite kind of complaining.”
A car door slammed somewhere across the lot, sharp in the thin air.
She glanced over. A correctional officer in grey tactical gear crossed to the entrance, her boots leaving small asthmatic puffs of dust with each step.
She moved with the unhurried assurance of someone who spent all her days in the company of people who would cheerfully kill her if given half a chance.
Kate pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’ll be careful. Warden says I’ll have line-of-sight supervision the entire time. No contact, full restraints.”
“And if he starts on the whole ‘you’re my witness’ routine? I know you told him you didn’t care, but I’m not sure that will have sunk in.”
A flicker of the rooftop again, when he’d looked at her with blood on his teeth and said, The work has barely begun. She pushed it firmly away.
“Then I’ll hang up the phone like a civilized person and let the warden deal with his hurt feelings.”
“Good.” He paused. “You want me on standby when you’re done? Debrief, or just call and tell me he was full of it?”
“Yeah,” she said. The word surprised her with the relief that came in its wake. “Yeah, that’d be good. Unless…”