Page 40 of Go Under

A sound drifted to her ears, a car door opening. She whipped her head around and saw the priest of this church walking toward the door. She breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t the scapegoat. She still hadn’t found Nora.

She sobbed, not with grief but with frustration. The Lawgiver had offered his help, but not freely. He had a task for Nora, one she must complete before he would give her the information she sought: the name and location of the former Stuart Pelham, the false witness in word who must be the first to die.

Leave Kate Valentine a message for me. Embed it in your cipher. Show her the way. God’s will must be done, and she is the key.

Nora had left the message, but not with a perfect heart. She didn’t want Kate to find her. She didn’t want Kate to stop her before she had her chance at revenge. That wasn’t fair.

So, she’d obscured the message after Stuart Pelham’s murder, using different and more difficult codes. The final message she’d encrypted heavily, using a vintage Japanese coding machine she’d obtained during her decades of wandering under various assumed names. At the time she’d obtained the machine, she hadn’t understood its purpose. She understood now. God hadn’t wanted Kate to see the way. Not in time to stop His work. The machine was His provision, a tool that would veil the message Kate was to receive long enough to give Nora time to finish her task.

“Good evening, my child,” the priest said.

He smiled at Nora, his face kind, his eyes betraying a lust he likely never acknowledged in spite of the late night explorations the he conducted, half-lidded and breathing heavily in the darkness, telling himself that he was away, that his right hand wasn’t aware of what his left hand was doing, that since no actual women were harmed in this fantasy, it didn’t count as a betrayal of his vows.

He wasn’t going to try to act on his lust with her, though. He kept that buried deeply. It was just that Nora had a knack for seeing people as they truly were.

“Good evening, Father.”

“Forgive me for being forward, my child, but you seem troubled. What is weighing on you?”

Nora thought for a moment, then decided that God had sent him to her, and it wasn’t her place to call unclean what God had cleansed. “I have a job to do,” she told him, “and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to finish it.”

The priest nodded sagely, a habit formed early in his ecclesiastical career, though he had no idea what Nora was talking about. “God often gives us tasks that are difficult to accomplish, but He always provides us the tools we need to accomplish them. Tell me what He has laid on your heart, dear.”

Nora smiled. She got to her feet. “Actually, I think that’s what I needed to hear. Thank you, Father.”

The priest blinked. He frowned and opened his mouth to ask if Nora was sure she didn’t want more counsel or perhaps confession.

But Nora was already gone, her smile widening. She had felt doubt and fear, and God had sent His messenger—His flawed messenger—to remind her that though she was imperfect, He would give her the opportunity to complete her task.

God was good.

And she would smite the evildoer in His name.

CHAPTER TWENTY

As night fell once more over the Philadelphia field office, Kate, Marcus, and Darnell sat in the small conference room they’d commandeered as their unofficial task force headquarters and tried to determine where to go next.

“She’s finished, right?” Marcus said. “There’s no one left for her to kill.”

“We can’t just abandon the chase,” Darnell said. “Even if from some perspective the victims deserved to die—”

“Yeah, fuck you,” Marcus interrupted. “I didn’t say we give up. I’m just saying that she’s done, so looking for a potential victim is pointless. The prosecutors and the judge are all dead.” He tilted his head. “Maybe offer the surviving jurors protective custody. Just in case.”

“Yes,” Kate said firmly. “I don’t think they would have figured in Nora’s initial calculations, but they could now. She won’t stop. She’s gotten a taste for killing.”

“Has she, though?” Darnell asked. “She’s avoided it for thirty years and only started now because she’s avenging her brother’s murder now that her parents are dead. Possibly with encouragement from Cox.”

“Definitely with encouragement from Cox,” Kate said. Marcus and Darnell shared a look, but she didn’t have the patience to deal with either of them pussyfooting around the issue right now. “There have been four messages addressed directly to me. At least three, and I’ll bet my left eye the fourth one will come back addressed to me, too. Cox is behind this. No question.”

“Fair enough,” Marcus said. “I’m kind of leaning that way, too, to be honest. The scapegoat thing isn’t something people would know unless Cox told them.”

“And me makes three,” Darnell said. “And it’s nice that we all agree about that, but the point is that Nora Avery has been killing to avenge her brother’s death. There’s no one left to kill. She’ll go into hiding now, and frankly, she’ll be next to impossible to find, especially if she changes her appearance. Assuming she looks anything like the reconstructions we’ve made in the first place. Aging someone from fourteen to forty-six is a crapshoot.”

“She’ll find another victim,” Kate said. “She’s trying to fill a hole. Just like a junkie who needs that next fix, she’ll find someone else to murder. It’s the only thing that keeps the emptiness away.”

Marcus’s brow furrowed. “Are you talking about her or about Cox?”

“Both of them,” she insisted. “Cox is mentally ill. Maybe he doesn’t meet the legal definition of criminally insane, but he’s definitely got some antisocial personality disorder going on. He kills compulsively because he’s always needed to kill, and now that he’s created a framework that allows himself to believe he’s justified, he’ll do so with impunity.