CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They were back on Berkman before Vic said anything about the Rivera file. She had been reading on her phone since they pulled out of the construction site lot, scrolling through what Sarah Kim had sent over.
"His medical history is interesting," she said.
"The anxiety diagnosis goes back six years.
He's been on some form of medication for most of it, not just the Lorazepam.
Before that he was on an SSRI for two years.
His GP's notes mention chronic stress response, sleep disruption, elevated cortisol.
" She set the phone in her lap, thinking.
"The behavior at Lone Star, the volatility, the erratic episodes…
it lines up with someone whose anxiety was untreated or undertreated during that period.
That's not a profile for meticulous, patient planning. "
"No," Miles said. "It isn't."
"Our killer planned two murders with precision and left zero physical evidence at either scene. He executed modifications to live electrical installations without getting caught or injuring himself in the process. That requires a very controlled mental state over an extended period of time."
"Rivera spent six months arguing with clients and having conversations with himself on job sites."
"Right." She picked the phone back up. "He's still worth keeping on the list until we rule him out completely. But I don't think he's our guy."
Miles had been leaning in that direction since the van search.
The receipt helped, but it was the prescription bottle that had crystallized it.
A man managing his anxiety with Lorazepam and still barely holding it together at a routine construction job was not the same man who had infiltrated two businesses, modified high-voltage electrical equipment without detection, and walked away clean both times.
The profiles didn't fit the same person.
"So where are we?” Vic said. It wasn't quite a question, but more like an admission of feeling stuck.
"We've got a second victim we barely know anything about,” Miles said. “Celestine had seven years of public presence, reviews, and a neighborhood reputation. We could build a picture of her. But what we know of Song we're getting secondhand from a bar manager who knew him as a regular."
"The church," Vic said.
"Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. He was a youth pastor. That's where people actually knew him. It might not give us anything on the killer, but…"
"But it might give us something on Song that connects back to Celestine,” Vic said. “Right now, those two victims have nothing obvious in common, and I want to know if that's true or if we're just not seeing it yet."
“Is the church address in the police report?” Miles asked.
Vic pulled the report up on her phone and nodded. “Yeah. It’s on Lamar Boulevard. I'll pull it up."
It took less than twenty minutes for them to get there.
It was set back from the street behind a small parking lot.
From the outside it looked like a converted storefront, the kind of narrow commercial space that had once been a record shop or a furniture showroom, with large plate-glass windows across the front fitted with frosted film.
A hand-lettered wooden sign above the door read CROSSROADS COMMUNITY CHURCH in clean block letters, and below that, in smaller type, ALL ARE WELCOME.
The interior was visible through the glass panel beside the door, showing exposed brick walls and dark wood pews that looked deliberately reclaimed rather than simply old.
A string of Edison bulbs ran the length of the ceiling.
It was the kind of church that had clearly thought about how it wanted to present itself, traditional enough in its materials to feel grounded, minimal enough in its decor to feel accessible.
A woman at a small welcome center looked up when they came in. Miles showed his badge and introduced them both, remaining polite but also speaking and moving quickly.
"We're looking into the death of Derek Song," he said. "We'd like to speak with anyone who may have known him well.”
The woman smiled sadly, barely even looking at the badge. "That would be Pastor Gladding. He's in his office right now…speaking to the funeral home and some of Mr. Song’s family and friends on the phone, I believe." She came around the welcome center desk and said, "Let me tell him you're here."
She stepped away, down the hallway and then to the right.
She came back a minute later and led them down the same route.
The pastor met them at his office door rather than waiting behind his desk—a small touch that Miles appreciated.
He was in his late fifties but could probably pull off late-forties on a good day.
He had a close-cut gray beard and reading glasses hanging around his neck on a cord, and he shook their hands with both of his in a way that was warm without being theatrical.
"David Gladding," he said. "Come in. I've got coffee if you want it."
“Sounds good,” both agents said nearly in unison as they stepped inside.
His office was small and lined with books, a wooden cross on the wall behind his desk, a framed photograph of what appeared to be a mission trip on the shelf beside it. He poured three cups from a carafe on the credenza and sat across from them.
"I've been expecting someone to come," he said. "I just didn't know who."
"We're sorry for your loss," Vic said. "We'll try to keep this brief."
Gladding nodded. He held his coffee cup in both hands and looked at the desk surface for a moment.
"I've known Derek since he was seventeen years old.
His mother started coming here, and she brought him, and he sat in the back with his arms crossed for about six months, and then one Sunday, he didn't."
"What do you mean?" Vic said.
"He stopped resisting," Gladding said. "He had a lot to resist at that point.
He was already drinking pretty heavily by then.
Seventeen. His father had left, his mother was working two jobs, and Derek was filling the time with whatever he could find.
By eighteen, he was drinking every day, and by nineteen, he'd added whatever pills he could get.
" He paused for a moment, and Miles could see he was struggling.
“Pastor…are you okay to go on?”
“Oh, yes. Sorry. It’s…it’s fresh, you know? I’m still not quite able to fully grasp that he actually died, if that makes sense.”
“It does,” Vic said.
“Anyway…the poor guy had his first DUI at nineteen.
His mother called me the night it happened, not knowing what to do.
I went to the jail and sat with her while they processed him, and when Derek came out, he looked at me like he was waiting for a speech.
I didn't give him one. I just asked if he was hungry and we went and got breakfast." Gladding turned his coffee cup in his hands.
"He got worse before he got better. That's almost always how it goes.
He overdosed when he was twenty. His mother found him.
He was in the hospital for three days, and when he came out, he was different.
Not fixed, that takes years, but different.
He called me from the parking lot of the hospital the day he was discharged.
He said he didn't know what he was supposed to do next.
I told him to come here, and we'd figure it out together.
" He picked up his coffee cup and set it back down without drinking.
"He came in the next morning at eight o'clock.
He was shaking…just out and out trembling, you know?
He sat in one of those pews out there for about an hour just being quiet, and then he came into my office, and we talked for most of the day. "
"What did he talk about?" Miles asked.
"Everything. His father leaving. The drinking.
What it felt like when he couldn't stop and what it felt like when he tried to.
He talked about the kids he'd grown up with, the ones who were doing the same things he was doing.
He said he felt like nobody had caught him.
Not his mother, she tried, but she was stretched too thin.
Not his school. Nobody." Gladding shook his head and sighed.
"He asked me what I thought he should do.
I told him what I genuinely believed, which was that he understood something most people didn't. He knew what it felt like to be unreachable.
And that was going to be useful to someone, someday, if he let it be. "
"That's when he decided on youth ministry?" Vic asked.
"Not immediately. It took another year of recovery, some setbacks.
He went to a community college for a while.
But yes, that conversation was where it started.
The idea that his experience wasn't something to be ashamed of, that it was actually part of what made him effective with young people.
" Gladding stopped and was quiet for a moment.
"He was extraordinary at it. The kids trusted him because he didn't pretend the hard things were simple. He'd been there."
The office had gone eerily quiet. Somewhere further in the building a door closed, and someone coughed softly.
"He provided guidance," Miles said, not quite directing it at either of them.
"Yes," Gladding said. "That's exactly what he did. Real guidance. Not false hope. He was careful about that. He'd say, I can't promise it gets easy, but I can tell you it gets possible."
Miles sat with that word. Guidance. He had seen it recently, applied to Celestine: the Yelp reviews Sarah had pulled, the descriptions from the community around her shop.
Spiritual guidance. The killer's manifesto had called her a charlatan, but the people who came to her had used that same word with evident sincerity.
And now a youth pastor, a man who by any credible measure had provided something real to vulnerable kids, had been killed alongside her.
The manifesto's language came back to him.
False light. Manufactured warmth. People who projected something they didn't possess.
The killer believed he was distinguishing between authentic guidance and counterfeit guidance, but he was drawing that line according to some internal framework that had nothing to do with the actual people he was selecting.
A fortune teller and a sober youth pastor who ran karaoke nights for troubled kids were not the same thing by any reasonable measure.
But they were the same thing to this killer and understanding why required information he didn't yet have.
Without understanding the framework, they couldn't predict the next target.
Without the next target, they had a growing body count and a partial picture.
The killer would move again before they got ahead of him, and somewhere in that next move would be information they didn't have yet, and someone was going to pay for that information.
He was aware of his irritation building as he thought it through, a low, pressurized feeling he recognized and didn't try to talk himself out of.
It was not useful anger, because there was nothing to direct it at.
The investigation was where it was. But knowing that didn't make it easier to sit with.
“Miles,” Vic said quietly from beside him. “Hey…”
Miles snapped out of his reflections, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry. I sort of went somewhere else for a second.” He smiled and got to his feet before Vic was fully aware of what was going on.
“Pastor Gladding, thanks so much for speaking with us,” he said.
He found himself suddenly very anxious to get out of the church. Because as his mind continued to simmer the ideas it had just considered, he felt that familiar anger rising up within him, sitting heavy in his chest like something waiting for a direction.