CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
The Portland field office was louder than a train station at rush hour.
Phones trilled in bursts like startled birds; printers coughed and whirred; a television in the far corner squawked about Russia’s latest yar-boo to the West. Kate had never seen so many strangers in Bureau-blue suits—sleek, foreign-cut jackets, knot-perfect ties—clustering up and down the main corridor, even on the landing halfway up the stairs.
A plastic sign taped to the wall announced North Atlantic Counter-Intelligence Symposium, Conference Room B. Every few minutes a pair of harried interns ferried carafes of coffee through the bullpen like battlefield medics.
She edged her way past a trio of men—Korean, judging by their rapid-fire vowels and rolling rs—who stood blinking at the directory map.
One of them mimed a desperate question about toilets.
Kate pointed to the right without breaking stride, and they beamed gratitude, or perhaps relief, before shuffling off.
Her own desk was half-buried beneath case folders, crime-scene photos and a laptop that hummed like it, too, might be close to breaking down.
Winters passed behind her for what seemed like the third time in as many minutes, carrying nothing, saying nothing.
Each time the heels on her court shoes clacked like a metronome of judgment.
Kate tried to lose herself in the evidence.
She’d printed up her image of the note from Sister Dorothy’s hand, and it lay in a transparent sleeve on top of the pile, its double message already branded into her mind:
Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray.
Is any cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is any among you sick?
Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
—James 5:13–15.
Why had that verse been left there? It seemed to suggest that Sister Dorothy’s kind of healing—with oil and incantations and faith —was divinely-approved-of, at least in the eyes of Christianity. But if that was the case, why had the person who left that verse cut her tongue out and killed her?
And beneath the Bible verse she couldn’t grasp the point of, was a shorter, seemingly more personal note. In a cramped, almost childish hand, it simply said: two years, two months.
She had already burned through every obvious avenue.
Birthdays, death anniversaries, prison sentences, Whitfield’s timeline, Harper’s timeline, Sister Dorothy’s.
Addresses, past and present, social security numbers, zip codes, telephone numbers, grid references, bank account details.
Nothing. Not the known victims of Whitfield, not among the ranks of Elijah Cox’s known acolytes, no spark of relevance to her own life, or Marcus’s.
She had fed the phrase through three different cipher programs, run it backwards, converted it into Hebrew letters, assigned each one a numerical value and fed the numbers through a program that made a noise like a pig munching apples as it hunted down patterns and symmetries and veiled meanings.
The noise was the only thing it yielded. Noise and no answers.
Two years, two months.
Winters strode past again. This time she slowed—just half a beat—then kept going, her silence heavier than any reprimand. She wanted to know what leads they had, what the next steps would look like. But right now, there was nothing to report.
And there was something ridiculous in Winters’s behavior right now.
On one level, it was benign, just part of her process, her way of dealing with the pressure she was undoubtedly under.
But at the same time, it was deeply unhelpful.
Hovering and circling weren’t going to produce results.
Kate wasn’t going to have a ‘Eureka!’ moment with the boss breathing down her neck.
Now, as always, in every investigation, there was only one thing to do.
Patiently, calmly and doggedly, follow up every angle that had presented itself.
Eventually, something would shift, fall into place, step into the light.
Eventually. You couldn’t will it into being.
Kate’s chest tightened. The bullpen’s din seemed to rise around her, a living pressure. The TV rattled off something about Russian gunboats in the English Channel, a paper-cup tower collapsed in the kitchenette, someone’s phone erupted in a burst of synthetic K-pop.
She stared at the Bible verse again, trying to feel what the killer might have felt when he chose it. The prayer of faith will save the sick man… and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
Was that a promise? Or a threat?
Meanwhile, the second line—two years, two months—just sat there like a locked door.
She rubbed her temples until tiny points of light swam behind her eyes.
Still nothing.
Winters came by once more, this time with a clipboard. She didn’t even glance at her.
That did it.
Kate snatched her phone, the note in its plastic sleeve, thumbed a quick number. Marcus answered on the second ring.
“Yeah?”
“Still at the crime scene?” she asked.
“Yeah. Trying to stand back and make Poppy do as much as she can. It’s hard. You just want to hop in and get it done, but she’s never going to learn that way, is she?”
“Aww. You’re a good teacher, Agent Reid.”
“I don’t know about that. But I remember what it was like. I spent my whole rookie year fetching donuts for the old snaggletooths before I put my foot down and demanded some proper training. Anyway, once we’re done here, we’re going to swing by that financial consultant guy and shake him down.”
“By the book, I trust.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Poppy is young and impressionable and I don’t want her to think that your idiosyncratic approach to interviewing suspects is the correct procedure.”
“Idio-what?”
“Doing things the Marcus Reid way.”
“I’m hurt and insulted, Agent Valentine. Anyway, where are you now?”
“I’m still stuck on the references in this note, so I’m off to the Pixie Hollow.”
“OK—give my best to the Pixie-in-Chief.”
She ended the call, checked to see where the boss was on her seemingly perpetual, silent orbit, then slid her jacket on.
Badge in her pocket, she walked out through the clamor—past the lost Korean delegates, past the humming printers and the brooding Winters—until the cool November air hit her like a reprieve.
Only when the glass doors shut behind her did she breathe again.
+ + + + +
The bell over the door of The Pixie Hollow chimed like a toy glockenspiel as Kate stepped inside. The smell of cinnamon and steamed milk hit her first; the sight of a roomful of mushroom-shaped tables and waitresses in gauzy wings came a close second.
Gabe Levine was already there, perched on a red-spotted toadstool seat as if he had been designed for it.
A neat, compact man in a suit the color of Irish moss—today it was offset by a sober, charcoal-hued tie.
Gabe never seemed to wear the same glasses twice: today’s entry was a round, red, tortoiseshell frame, overlaid with a filigree of bronze ivy.
“Kate!” he said, springing up with a gymnast’s bounce. “I was beginning to suspect you’d stood me up.”
She let him fold her into a quick hug. “This place is even more… twee than I remember.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t love it,” Gabe said, waving her to a seat. “Now, before anything else—prepare to have your mind pleasantly blown.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “You finally joined TikTok?”
“I’ve taken up bodybuilding.”
Kate blinked. “You? The man who once claimed jogging was an activity for people too lazy to read?”
He flexed one wiry arm with mock solemnity. “Three times a week. Squats. Deadlifts. My trainer Rhydian says I have ‘explosive glutes.’ Imagine! At my age!”
She laughed so loudly one of the winged waitresses glanced over. “Rhydian? That’s one of those names I never know the gender of.”
“He’s all man,” Gabe said. “All Welshman. Do you know, he was born and raised in the same street as Tom Jones.”
“Who?”
Gabe flashed her an open-mouthed, horrified look, before breaking into a grin.
“You mustn’t do things like that to me. My heart isn’t strong enough.”
“Marcus says hey. He called you the Pixie-in-Chief.”
“I preferred the earlier one. Il Pixie-di-tutti-pixie. So!” Gabe leant forward, eagerly, rubbing his hands. “What can I do for you on this raw November Monday?”
Kate slid the transparent sleeve across the table. “This. You’ve probably seen the headlines.”
Gabe adjusted his ivy glasses and read the note carefully, lips pursed. “James five, thirteen through fifteen… and a mysterious ‘two years, two months.’ Yes, I’ve followed the case. Distressing work you do, Kate. I wish you’d taken my advice and stayed in academia.”
“You were the one who told me to quit academia and join the Bureau.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, I wish you hadn’t listened to me then.”
He tapped the biblical quotation. “This, at least, is straightforward. Jesus of Nazareth did not appear out of nowhere. He was one of many itinerant hasidim wandering Galilee—pious mendicants who claimed to be healers and wonder-workers, men with the apparent gift of passing on a message from the dead, or telling the anxious bride whether her intended would be faithful, or curing a nasty rash. Charismatic freelancers, if you like. And here’s St. James saying: folks, that whole Muppet Show is over.
Healing now belongs to the church—elders, congregation, prayers in an established liturgy.
Official. Authorised. Alternatives prohibited, on pain of a fifty-shekel fine and your name in the local newspaper. ”
“So,” Kate said slowly, “he’s saying that the healing that the last victim, Sister Beverly offered is forbidden.”
“Exactly. He’s also kind of demystifying it.
Instead of healing being some sort of unique gift that a handful of special people are just born with, it’s part of the day-to-day, communal business of the church.
You pray to God for healing, you don’t go paying some street performer. What’s the matter?”
Kate frowned and shook her head. “It’s so… mild. Almost academic. It just doesn’t sound like the voice of someone who cuts out people’s tongues, you know?”
“Why assume it’s the same person?” Gabe countered gently. “The mind that crafts the theology need not be the hand that wields the knife.”
Kate felt that thought settle like a cold stone in her chest. She’d been assuming a single killer with a single motive. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe someone else—the ‘operative,’ as she now thought of him—was only carrying out orders.
“And the other line?” she asked. “‘Two years, two months.’”
Gabe’s eyes gleamed. “Ah. Not so easy to track, I can see why you had problems. It’s a reference from the Book of Ezekiel.
We’re talking 593 bc, thereabouts. Ezekiel was born into a priestly lineage, but he also had the gift of prophecy.
Fat lot of good it was doing him, though; he and half of Israel were living in Babylonian captivity, a squalid kind of refugee camp on the banks of the Kebar canal. ”
“Funny how… I don’t know… modern that sounds.”
“There’s nothing new under heaven,” Gabe said, drily.
“So you’ve got an exiled population, leaning out for a sign of hope.
And demand, inevitably, finds a supply. False prophets like Hananiah pop up, telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.
‘Cheer up. God is on our side. We’ll be free in two years.
’ But Ezekiel, knowing better, declared that Hananiah would be dead in two months.
And he was. Was in the story, anyway. As for the historical reality… ” He shrugged.
“You think it’s just an allegory?”
“It’s a dramatic, perhaps dramatized encounter that illuminates a central debate in the ancient Israelite religion.
The role of prophets. If you pay a guy for his vision of the future, how honest is that vision going to be?
But…” Gabe paused for a gulp of coffee. “That doesn’t mean the clash between Ezekiel and Hananiah never happened. We know the exile in Babylon happened.”
Kate felt a chill. “So—do you think this could be some kind of countdown? Another two false prophets will become victims? Two months until the killer strikes again?”
“Perhaps. But remember, these original texts also became oral traditions, shaped with each re-telling in the diaspora, before early ethnographers started collecting and writing them down again in the 19th century.”
“Got any examples?”
Gabe stared into space, as if the thing he wanted was floating there, in his own, personal, invisible cloud.
“In the midrashic folk collections of Poland and Belarus, Ezekiel and Hananiah are rewritten almost as friendly rivals: the true healer and the wily crook. Hananiah is a master of disguise—often impersonating Ezekiel to fool people and outdo his opponent. In one tale Ezekiel is sick, resting in a farmer’s house.
The wife has taken a shine to him and is fussing over him, making sure he’s got blankets, bringing him little treats from the kitchen.
With his usual mix of guile and cunning, Hananiah tricks Zeke out onto the roof in his underpants and locks the window.
Then he takes Ezekiel’s place in the warm bed, eating the stew meant for him. ”
Kate smiled despite herself. “That’s… not the sort of story I learned in Sunday school.”
“Same,” Gabe said, already fishing his phone from his pocket. “Outside of Hasidic circles, the rabbis were very disapproving towards all of these little folk traditions, but they functioned to keep the faith alive for ordinary people.”
His fingers flurried across the screen, fast as any child’s, before he pressed ‘send’ and put the phone down. “I’ve just sent you a link to a paper I wrote about those very stories, back in ‘97. Footnotes and everything,” he added, with a smile.
She sipped her coffee. “Thanks, Gabe. I’m not sure yet what it means, but it’s something.”
“Well, it strikes me that perhaps the victims are all Hananiahs of a kind,” Gabe said softly. “Telling people what they wanted to hear. And someone—your killer or whoever it is who’s pulling your killer’s strings—has decided to play Ezekiel.”
Kate looked down at the verse again, the neat black letters swimming against the sleeve’s sheen. Hananiahs, false prophets, men and women who promised, but couldn’t deliver, who grew rich from the desperation of their deluded followers.
For the first time that day, she felt a small, dangerous flicker of hope.