CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The State University of Maine campus had that particular stillness that seemed to fall over American colleges on a weekend: wide brick paths lined with bare trees, a few of the most dedicated students trickling past with library books, and the faint hum of a lone lawnmower working over the quad.
Kate thought it looked almost too peaceful, too collegiate, as if the violence they were investigating belonged to another universe altogether.
And yet here they were, walking up the worn stone steps of the Anthropology Department, their FBI badges tucked away in pockets, already braced for whatever Angela Phillips might throw at them.
Her voice carried a mix of respect and irritation, as if the Doctor was a faculty member admired and resented in equal measure.
The office was bigger than Kate had expected, though the size was explained almost immediately: four desks, four battered chairs, four professors clearly condemned to share. Only Angela Phillips was working on a Sunday.
She stood at the far window, wiry frame outlined against the glass, gray-streaked hair pulled into a loose bun, sharp glasses perched low on her nose. She turned as they approached, and there was something hawklike in the way her eyes fixed on them—alert, sharp, unblinking.
“Special Agents,” she said, before they even introduced themselves. Her voice was low, clipped, with the faintest trace of the South in it. “I wondered how long it would take you.”
“Dr. Phillips,” Kate said, extending a hand. “We appreciate you making time for us.”
As they sat, Marcus gestured with his eyes to a connecting door at the back, ajar with a nameplate just visible. Dr Philips PRIVATE. So she had her own little office, Kate noted. But she was meeting them out here. What was that about?
Phillips took her chair, folding her hands neatly on the desk.
“You’re here about Whitfield and Harper,” she said flatly. “Both dead now. Not weeping into my pillow about it, I’m afraid.”
It was disarming, the bluntness. Kate let it hang for a moment. “You knew them?”
“I knew about them. You can hardly work in the field I used to work in without crossing their shadows.”
“What field is that, exactly?”
“I provided medical care attached to mission hospitals in Africa and Latin America. Rudimentary stuff – childbirth, childhood illnesses and nutrition, treating infections, minor surgical procedures.”
Kate and Marcus exchanged a glance. The killer knew surgery. If Phillips noticed their heightened curiosity, she gave no sign.
“It felt like running through quicksand. I’m trying to save lives with my limited box of scientific tricks.
Men like Whitfield and Harper were destroying them with lies and stories.
I buried more than one soul in Africa who died believing that God would heal them if they just donated more money.
Meanwhile, Whitfield was buying his fourteenth sports car. ”
She said it like an indictment, each word clipped, surgical.
“You wrote about them,” Marcus said, casually leaning against a bookshelf. “Letters to Evangelical Review and Pulpit, pieces on late-night cable, that kind of thing.”
Phillips’s mouth twitched. “I did. When the shepherds are wolves, someone has to warn the flock. Of course, it cost me. I was accused of bitterness, of jealousy, of betraying the very faith I’d given my life to.
So I left the mission field, came back to teach.
Anthropology is cleaner. Humans lie, but at least we study the lies. ”
Kate nodded slowly. “You seem to know a lot about Whitfield and Harper’s practices.”
“I do,” Phillips said. Her gaze sharpened, as if she was testing whether they would understand.
“I’ve spent years documenting it all. Interviewing the families who sold their homes to pay into Whitfield’s Prosperity Funds.
Trying to prove the coercion Harper subjected indigenous communities to.
But that pair of crooks, they represented just a corner of something much, much bigger.
Girls pressured into relationships under the guise of spiritual mentorship.
Gentle boys and young men sent to ‘sexuality conversion’ camps and nearly broken.
Women groped under the excuse of healing.
You think this is just about money? It’s not.
It’s about men wielding immense power. And power always corrupts. ”
The room felt smaller with each word, the radiator ticking softly beneath her voice.
Kate noticed a mock-up of a book cover amongst the papers on the desk.
“You’re writing a book?”
“Yes, and certainly not for the money,” Phillips said, with a wry smile.
“It’s about the entire faith industry. Not just Whitfield and Harper—though they’ll get plenty of inches—but the whole edifice.
The men who stand up and call themselves prophets while fleecing or abusing or terrorizing the weak.
I have names, dates, accounts, sworn statements.
When it’s done, I estimate a good thirty percent of religious leaders will be having sleepless nights.
Marcus gave a low whistle. “Sounds like a bestseller. Or a lawsuit magnet.”
“That’s why it has to be watertight,” Phillips said, almost fierce. “And why it’s taking so long. Every fact checked, every source corroborated. Men like Whitfield don’t just sue, they destroy. If you want to take them down, you’d better have a mountain of evidence behind you.”
“I was under the impression that dead men can’t sue,” Marcus said.
“Their estates can. You think these foundations and institutions are going to crumble just because the figurehead’s gone? Don’t you know how Christianity was born?”
There was a silence. Kate let it stretch, then said softly, “Would you be willing to share what you have so far?”
Phillips hesitated. Then she nodded briskly.
“I’ll print you a draft of what there is so far.
It’s messy, needs an edit, absolutely none of it is cleared for printing or quoting or forwarding…
” Here she fixed them with a steely gaze over the top of her spectacles.
“But you’ll get the picture.” She stood, smoothing her skirt.
“It’ll just take a minute. The departmental printer is on the main floor. ”
As she left, Marcus’s eyes flicked instantly to the connecting door.
Kate’s voice was quiet, warning. “Marcus—”
But he was already moving, a silent glide across the floor. He slipped through the door like a shadow.
Kate sat stiffly, listening to the hum of the radiator, the faint clatter of keyboards in the outer office. After a few minutes she coughed—once, sharply, hoping the sound would be enough to pull him back.
The door behind her opened again, and Angela Phillips returned, carrying a thick stack of papers. She looked at Kate, then at the empty space beside her. The silence was sharp as a blade.
“Your partner?” she asked, voice deceptively mild.
Kate forced a cough again, exaggerated this time, but Marcus didn’t reappear.
Phillips’s expression cooled. She walked past Kate and opened the connecting door herself. Kate followed her sheepishly.
“Curious, Agent?”
Marcus straightened guiltily, caught mid-step. Kate saw his eyes flick once to the wall and understood why.
Every inch of plaster was covered. Newspaper clippings, printed articles, glossy photographs fixed with push-pins in a ragged mosaic.
Whitfield at a podium, Harper shaking hands with politicians, headlines screaming about prosperity ministries and financial fraud.
But interspersed with the press clippings were other images—grainy shots taken through telephoto lenses, both men in assignations: Whitmore with a voluptuous blonde companion in a fancy restaurant, Harper handing a briefcase to the driver of a silver humvee.
And in the corner, unmistakably, stills from surveillance cameras, timestamped, some of them no more than a few weeks old.
Phillips made no move to hide it. She only crossed her arms, standing beside Marcus, her profile sharp against the chaos of images.
“I’m working on the chapters about Whitfield and Harper,” she said, matter-of-fact. “This is my aide-memoire. Easier to arrange it on a wall than in files.”
“Surveillance footage?” Kate asked, carefully neutral.
Phillips nodded. “Yes. Some public, some less so. You don’t expose men like these without evidence. They would sue me into oblivion otherwise. So I document. I corroborate. If that means photographing who they sneak into hotels with, so be it. Every lie they lived, I will drag into the light.”
Kate stepped closer, scanning the wall. It did look like research, the obsessive compilation of a scholar building a case. And yet something about it made her uneasy: the sheer density, the pins clustering like constellations, the red lines connecting dates and locations. It spoke of obsession.
Then her eyes caught on something else. On the back of the office door, mounted high, hung an object gleaming faintly in the dull light.
A sword. Long, curved, unmistakably Japanese.
Kate’s heart jolted. An authentic katana—or, more specifically, a samurai sword, polished steel edge reflecting just enough light to draw the eye.
She shot Marcus a look. His eyebrows twitched in the barest acknowledgment.
Angela Phillips followed her gaze, then smiled faintly. “Ah. That. A gift, many years ago. I spent time in Japan after leaving the mission field. Studying the clash between Shintoism and charismatic Christianity.”
Her voice was too calm.
Kate closed her notebook. “We’ll need you to come with us, Dr. Phillips. Back to Bureau headquarters.”
Phillips tilted her head, regarding them both with an expression caught between amusement and irritation. “On what grounds?”
Kate held her gaze. “On the grounds that two men you denounced met their ends in a remarkably ritualized fashion, and your office wall looks like an intelligence operation. You have sufficient medical knowledge to perform a whole extraction of the victims’ tongues.
And that sword, meanwhile, looks remarkably sharp. ”
“I keep it that way. The Japanese have a unique method of preserving the blade.”
“I know all about it. Whale oil. The killer uses it, too.”
For the first time, Dr Phillips looked genuinely shocked.
“We’re not accusing you, Dr Phillips,” said Marcus. “We just need to rule you out—or in.”
For a moment, Phillips said nothing. Then she set the stack of printed pages down on the desk with a soft thump.
“Very well,” she said, voice cool as glass. “If it will satisfy you. But I warn you—what I know will burn more than just Whitfield and Harper. It will burn half the faith industry to the ground.”
Kate met Marcus’s eyes. He gave a fractional nod.
Together, they guided Dr. Angela Phillips out of the cramped office, past her startled colleagues, and into the bright, empty corridor. The silence of the campus seemed suddenly thinner, stretched tight as a drum.
And Kate could not shake the feeling that, sword or no sword, Phillips knew more about the deaths of Jonathan Whitfield and Daniel Harper than she had yet chosen to admit.