CHAPTER THREE
Pastor Whitfield’s office looked more like a banker’s suite than the nerve center of a megachurch.
Kate stepped through the doorway behind Marcus, the soles of her plastic booties crackling on the Persian rug, and felt the dissonance hit her in the chest. Mahogany bookshelves lined with calfskin-bound commentaries.
A sideboard gleaming with cut glass decanters.
An oil painting of some generic Alpine lake—three feet wide, in a gilded frame—that screamed auction-house indulgence.
But then there was the body.
The earthly remains of Pastor Jonathan Whitfield lay sprawled across the desk, his gray-flecked beard soaked dark with congealed blood, his head twisted at an unnatural angle. His mouth had been forced open, the cavity ragged and raw.
Marcus swore under his breath. “No sign of the tongue.”
Kate crouched. She didn’t flinch. “Clean cut. Blade, sharp and short.”
She straightened up, caught the eye of one of the CSIs, a petite woman with whom she’d often worked before, called Desiree. “Did you already bag it, or…?”
Desiree shook her head. “Killer must’ve taken it as a memento. The vic died around midnight,” she added. “Give or take an hour.”
“Any idea how they could have subdued him?” Marcus asked. “He was a big guy. Strong-looking.”
“Hey Marcus,” Desiree replied. “There’s nothing immediate. He doesn’t look to have fought back.”
Kate straightened, eyes roving the scene. If there was no struggle, then potentially Whitfield hadn’t seen his attacker as a threat until it was too late. Or had an extraordinarily trusting relationship with them. Who would you open your mouth for? Your dentist?
And Midnight. Seven hours before his sister-in-law Margaret found him. That gap told her more than words could.
Margaret sat hunched on a chair in the corridor outside, wrapped in a police-issue blanket, face buried in trembling hands.
Every time someone stepped near, she broke into fresh sobs.
They’d tried twice to question her. Both times she’d dissolved into a heaving cascade of salt-water.
The local sheriff had retreated, muttering about shock, or perhaps it was snot.
But Pearl Raymond—Whitfield’s secretary—stood stiff-backed against the wall.
Early forties, neat bob, a suit too practical to be expensive but pressed within an inch of its life.
Her lips pressed thin when her gaze slipped anywhere close to the doorway, but she kept her voice level when Kate approached.
“Miss Raymond? You worked closely with Pastor Whitfield?”
Pearl nodded once. “Eight years. I managed his calendar. All his appointments, travel, correspondence. Everything went through me.”
Kate detected something in the air around the secretary. Fresh booze. A stiffener to calm her nerves? Or to ensure she stayed in control.
“Tell us about yesterday,” Marcus said gently.
Pearl clasped her hands, principally to hide their shaking. “Usual Thursday routine. Prayers and Guided Meditation on our online channel. A meeting of the finance team. Then the rest of the morning training the new Messengers.”
“Messengers?” Kate queried.
“Spreading the Word,” Pearl said. “We’ve got satellite churches up and down the eastern seaboard, and now we’re moving into the southern states. Messengers prepare the ground before the Temple Builders come in.”
Messengers… Temple Builders… Anything that had its own vocabulary set small alarm bells ringing in Kate’s mind.
A whiff of the cult. Once you created your own language, you created your own, unique way of looking at the world.
And from there, it was just a bunny-hop from dividing the world into them and us. Or them against us.
“The prayers and the meditation session. Was that a daily thing?” Kate asked.
“Yes. We have subscribers worldwide. The Pastor believed in starting each day with the Word fresh in his mouth.”
Kate glanced back through the doorway at the ruined mouth. Not anymore.
“In the afternoon, Pastor Whitfield had physiotherapy for his shoulder.”
“Why’s that?” Marcus asked.
“Someone shot him,” Kate said, suddenly remembering. “Three years ago, that right?”
Pearl nodded. “When he was preaching in Baltimore.”
“Didn’t he offer the guy a job when he got out of prison?”
“He still visits the man regularly,” Pearl said, not quite answering the question. “To continue with the schedule: after the physiotherapy, Pastor Whitfield worked for two hours in our call centre. He went for a walk around the lake with his wife, and then he rested in preparation for the evening.’
Further details about the Pastor were coming back to Kate. There’d been some dispute over rights to the shore of the lake, a fishing club mounting a protest. All things worth looking into.
‘And what was the evening event all about?’ Marcus asked.
‘It was a party for recent graduates of our First Fruits Investment Academy. There were sixty of them, plus another sixty friends and associates of the church. There is an invitation list, and the security log confirms who came at what time, and when they left. But I can assure you, I’ve checked both of them myself, and there are no anomalies. ’
‘We’d still like to take a look,’ Marcus said.
‘Provided it is treated in the strictest confidence,’ Pearl replied. If she was shaken by the Pastor’s death, she still hadn’t lost her professional steel.
‘Did anything happen at the party?’ Kate asked. ‘Anything that stuck out, wasn’t expected, seemed unusual at the time, or strikes you now as being out of the ordinary?’
Pearl unwrapped a mint without hurry, and popped it in her mouth before replying.
‘Nothing at all,’ she said, eventually. ‘It was a very successful evening. Taxis arrived for everyone at 11.30pm, and the Pastor was there to say goodbye to every guest. Then he retired to his office to work on his latest book.’
‘Did he do that every night?’
‘Every night. He said he was at his most productive in the small hours.’
“They waited,” Kate murmured.
Pearl frowned. “I’m sorry?”
Kate turned to Marcus. “The killer must have hidden in this office, sometime during the party. That takes knowledge. Patience.”
Marcus’s face hardened. “Inside information. Someone who knew his habits.”
Kate turned to the secretary. “Who served the drinks?”
“We had seven volunteers from the congregation, plus half a dozen students from the High School up the road in Willington. Actually, it was only five because one of them dropped out at short notice, you know… teenagers… something better comes along, or they forget their own heads and feet… so we drafted in one of the security team. Transport to home was arranged for everyone who needed it.”
Kate moved back into the office, leaving Marcus to finish up with Pearl.
The trappings of wealth pressed in on her—the marble paperweight, the leather blotter embossed with gold initials, the Montblanc pens aligned like soldiers.
Whitfield might have styled himself as a shepherd tending his flock.
But he looked more like a CEO feathering his nest.
She leaned closer to the desk. Beneath the man’s lifeless arm, the wood surface was scored with deep carvings. Not random. Shapes. Letters.
Kate’s pulse throbbed faster. She recognized the alphabet immediately—Hebrew, scratched by a sharp instrument.
She photographed each mark, then pulled out her notepad. Quickly, she copied the characters down, one by one. Some were reversed, others oddly paired. A code.
“She’s gone to get the lists,” Marcus said, joining her. “And she’s going to see if Whitfield’s ol’ lady is up to speaking to us. What did you make of her? She seems keen to help, but she’s keeping something back.”
“Atbash,” Kate said, quietly.
Marcus stepped closer. “Huh?”
“It’s an old Hebrew cipher. Substitution—first letter of the alphabet for the last, second for the second-last, and so on. Used since Biblical times.”
She scribbled, converting each character. The letters tumbled into words, the words into lines. Her breath caught as the meaning took shape.
She read it aloud: “Treasures of wickedness profiteth nothing, but righteousness delivereth from death.”
Marcus nodded, thoughtfully. “As in – if you’re not righteous…”
“You die.”
She moved to the second line. Another verse decrypted, stark and cold. “The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom, but the deceitful tongue shall be cut out.”
The words seemed to burn into the air. Verses from the Book of Proverbs. About the tongue. About deceit and riches and righteousness. About life and death.
Kate stared down at Whitfield’s mutilated mouth, then back at the carved scripture. A message as clear as it was cruel.
Marcus said it for her. “Somebody shut him up. And they wanted us to know exactly why.”
Kate swallowed hard, her eyes tracing the lavish office one last time. The symbols, the silence, the grotesque absence where the pastor’s tongue ought to have been.
This wasn’t murder. Wasn’t just murder. It was judgement.
A security guard approached them; an older guy, a little stout with a slight limp and name-badge that read ‘Hernandez’.
“I’ll walk you round to the Pastor’s house,” he said, quietly.
Marcus and Kate shared a glance. ‘Walk you round’ meant ‘escort’. It meant ‘go exactly where we want you to go, and nowhere else’. But for now, they’d accept the offer.
Kate peeled off her gloves as they walked out into the hallway, Hernandez keeping a respectful few paces ahead. The lights were harsher out here, bouncing off decorated tiles and polished floors, a world too bright after the hushed menace of the pastor’s office.
Margaret hadn’t moved from her chair. She rocked gently, whispering fragments of prayer into her palms. The deputy caught Kate’s eye, as if to ask whether to press her for more. Kate gave a subtle shake of her head.
Marcus fell in beside her, his shoulders filling the narrow corridor. “So. A preacher with a silver tongue, and somebody takes it literal.”
Kate folded her gloves, slipped them into a bag. “Not literal. Symbolic. They want it understood. Two references from the Book of Proverbs… that wasn’t just graffiti. It was doctrine.”
“Wait!”
Footsteps behind them, rushed. Hernandez stiffened, old instincts – maybe cop instincts – instantly preparing for danger. But he relaxed as he saw who it was: Desiree, the CSI, running to catch them up.
“Thought you’d like to know,” she said, breathlessly. “We just found a few fibres under his fingernails. Both hands. Two different kinds of black fabric, cotton and polyester-wool mix. Suggests he might have struggled with his attacker.”
“Thanks,” Marcus said.
Desiree’s face folded into a smile. “No problem.”
Kate flashed Marcus a look, but he avoided her eye.
They continued on their way for a few paces before Kate stopped dead still. Hernandez looked at her curiously.
“Did you serve drinks at the reception last night?”
Hernandez blinked in surprise, as if he wasn’t used to being spoken to.
“Yes?” he said, warily.
“Dressed like that?”
He touched his jacket, a military-style number with epaulettes and silver buttons. Then understanding seemed to dawn.
“No, no. They got me a black shirt and pants, same as all the other servers.”
As they pushed through the heavy double doors, Kate took advantage of the noise to speak to Marcus. “Killer could have been one of the servers. Or posed as one of the servers.”
Outside the building, a light rain was falling, running in dirty trails across the hoods of patrol cars. A handful of church members had gathered at the yellow tape, murmuring, arms folded tight against the morning chill. One woman clutched a Bible to her chest as if it was a shield.
The county sheriff, Daniels, met them halfway. He was broad, genial-looking, but his eyes were lined with fatigue. “You going to talk to the widow?”
“Hoping she’ll talk back,” Marcus said.
Daniels glanced back at the church building. “This is going to hit the town hard. Folks either loved him or hated him, but everyone knew him. You put a man like that in the ground and the ripples go everywhere.”
Kate gave a small nod. “The ripples are the point.”
Daniels frowned, as though she’d suddenly spoken in a foreign tongue.
Kate let it lie. She wiped a raindrop off her nose, inhaling the scent of wet grass and exhaust. A siren wailed faintly somewhere far off.
Her mind went back to the desk, the grooves in the wood, the words of Proverbs made jagged and bloody. … The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom, but the deceitful tongue shall be cut out
Carefully chosen words. The killer had read deeply, studied, thought. Waited.
They went through a gate, Hernandez respectfully holding it open as they walked into a walled garden, prettily planted with a couple of abstract sculptures on the lawn. Kate felt sure she’d seen one of them at an exhibition in DC.
“You got that look, Vee.”
“What look?”
“The one that says you’ve already put the next fifty pieces of the puzzle together, and you’re not gonna sleep until you’re sure you’re right.”
Kate shrugged. The Proverbs verses looped again in her mind, like a chant.
“Not fifty,” she said quietly. She stopped by a bench. “This wasn’t random,” she said.
Marcus crossed his arms. “Never is.”
“No. I mean—it’s not just a killing. It’s an indictment. They’re saying that his own words condemned him. His tongue condemned him. And they silenced it.”
Kate looked at her shoes. “And they left scripture as the justification. Scripture in code.”
Marcus studied her, then the body. “So we’re looking for a zealot.”
Kate exhaled, eyes still on ground. “A zealot who knows Hebrew. And who knows me.”