A doorless wreck of a car materialized in front of Paul Morris.
He slammed into it, realized what it was, shoved Chico in, and jumped in after him just as bricks battered the roof with brutal fury, caving it in.
Paul threw himself over the child.
The noise was deafening. Smothering dirt blinded Paul. He felt the roof press against his back. He fumbled in his pocket for his phone. When he flipped it open, the display light pushed back the terror enough that he could dial 911 in the choking dust. “There’s been an explosion.” He gave the operator the address. “There’s a fire. We need ambulances. Dozens of people hurt and killed!”
“Please stay on the line, sir.” The woman’s calm voice gave the whole thing a nightmarish quality, but Paul knew he was wide awake.
The car’s roof vibrated with the thudding bricks, rapping out an ugly song on Paul’s spine. He dropped the phone on the floor, leaving it open so he could see, and slid onto his knees beside the little boy, ready to drag Chico onto the floor, too, though there was next to no space. Blood coursed through the silt coating Chico’s face. The car held what was left of its shape as the bricks buried them alive. Paul felt for a heartbeat and found one, weak but steady. With only inches to move, he struggled out of his zippered jacket and covered the boy’s mouth and nose to protect him from breathing grit.
The first siren was audible through the bricks. He picked up his phone and said to the 911 operator, “I hear them coming. Thank you.”
“Sir, wait until—”
Paul hung up but left the phone open for the light as he turned back to Chico. He could make out a black streak on Chico’s face that had to be blood. He pressed on the fast-bleeding cut with the jacket.
Paul’s phone rang. He remembered the 911 operator had told him to wait. “Hello, I’m sorry, operator, I didn’t mean—”
“I’ll try to get the evil out of her before she dies, but there is so much. She’s so filthy.”
The voice that had started all this.
Paul fought back the brutal, ugly, satanic words he wanted to say.
“I gave you the car.”
Paul shook his head. A voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It surrounded him and comforted him. It sheltered him, just like the car he’d fallen into.
He bowed his head and saw blood dripping down the front of his torn, dirt-coated T-shirt. “You gave me the car?”
A crooning voice spoke in his ear, “I saw you trying to save those evil men.”
“Boys, not men. They’re just boys.” Paul gripped the phone, coating the keypad with bloody fingerprints.
“They’re old enough to be evil. When you saved them, you missed your chance. Now Juanita will suffer the first plague. The plague of blood.”
The connection broke off.
He had to get to Juanita. Now.
Paul shoved at the space where the car’s door should be and found bricks. Chico stirred beside him, but Paul thought of Juanita and kept digging, shoving. He knocked a hole in the stack of bricks, and they clattered to the pavement as he squirmed outside into blinding grit and ear-piercing squalling sirens. He stumbled over debris covering the street and fell to his knees. His hands landed on shards of glass and jagged brick. He was only distantly aware of the pain.
He stared, curious about the spreading stain of red on the ground around him. An echo deep in his head told him it was blood, and the blood was his. A plague of blood.
Juanita. Those pictures.
A man emerged like a phantom from the cloud of smoke and grit and crouched beside Paul. “Sir, let me help you.”
The letters EMT on the man’s chest blurred. “I’m not the one who needs help. In… in the car. A boy.” The letters faded completely. “And Juanita. I have to save her.”
Paul saw the ground rushing up to meet him.
He had the presence of mind to thank God for the car.
Keren dropped to her knees beside the boy. He didn’t move. Whatever strength he’d had to get this far was gone. She slapped at sparks that still ate at the remnants of his clothes. A piece of the boy’s crisp, blackened skin slid away. Tears cut like acid through the grit in her eyes as she pulled her hand back.
“God, please, don’t let me hurt him any more.” She reached for his neck to feel for a pulse then stopped. He was so badly burned on his upper body she didn’t dare touch his throat. She caught his wrist. She couldn’t find a pulse. He wasn’t breathing. His chest was burned black. She gritted her teeth, tilted his head back to open his airway, and began chest compressions. An ambulance, siren wailing, whizzed past Keren and skidded to a stop. Two men climbed out.
She looked up, pressing rhythmically on the boy’s breastbone. “He doesn’t have a heartbeat.”
They gently moved her aside and took over as another ambulance screamed up. She stared at the boy’s blackened flesh where it had peeled away from him and stuck to the palms of her hands. Blood seeped through her fingers.
“Let me help you, miss. You’re bleeding.” A woman pulled Keren toward the ambulance.
She shook off the hands. “I’m Detective Collins, Chicago PD. There are a lot of people here who need help more than I do.” Teenage boys, bleeding and moaning, were collapsed all along the street.
More ambulances arrived with glaring lights and screaming noise. Keren yelled over the cacophony, “A man, over there, and a little boy.” She started to lead the woman there.
O’Shea came lumbering up to her. The medics headed toward the right spot, and she saw that a couple of paramedics were already lifting someone into their ambulance. She couldn’t bear to see that heroic man and that little boy, crushed to death.
“Keren, what happened? Are you all right?” O’Shea pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to her forehead.
Mick O’Shea had taught her nearly everything she knew about being a cop. He’d saved her when she came close to being busted off the force by an arrogant, grandstanding superior officer, and Mick was lead investigator on the Juanita Lopez case.
She brushed his hand away and saw the handkerchief was soaked with blood. “Where’ve you been?”
“I got hung up in traffic,” O’Shea said. “There was an accident on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and I was the first cop on the scene.” The EMT drew a sheet over the burned boy’s face. She pressed the handkerchief back against her head wound and let her bloody hands cover her eyes.
The fire department arrived, and more police came. The rubble crawled with rescue workers. Keren turned toward the chaos. Her steps faltered. She looked at the sky-high cloud of billowing grit. It wasn’t the sight of the carnage that stopped her—the air was so clogged with dirt that she couldn’t see any details—but Keren knew evil. From her earliest memory, she always had. She was almost overwhelmed by what she sensed about whoever had done this. Usually she had to be in the presence of someone before she could discern their spirit. But this was more powerful than anything she’d felt before.
She saw a rescue dog whining and digging at shattered bricks. She and O’Shea exchanged a grim look and plunged into the madness.
Keren was a tough cop. She liked to think she was a little tougher than most.
So those weren’t tears running down her face, soaking the dust mask she’d been issued, salting her lips. It was grainy air that made her eyes run. She ignored it and kept working. She was grateful for the cover of night, even though it meant she’d been working nonstop for twelve hours. The whole block had burned out. The buildings were all condemned, but there were homeless people living in them. Many had gotten out, but with terrible injuries. Keren knew there had to be many more trapped inside and most likely dead.
Keren had a gift for sensing the difference between simple, human evil and a demonic hand. Her father had told her it was a gift given to her by God, to discern spirits, both good and evil. It had been her cross to bear all her life. In this tumult she felt an overpowering sense of the devil at work.
A boy, not older than six, hung limp in her arms. Keren hugged his dead body close, unwilling to flinch from his blood and crushed bones. Tears flowed until they streaked the coating of gray ash that encrusted the boy. She did her best to avoid numbing her feelings. This little boy deserved the respect of Keren’s horror. She let his face burn into her mind, even though she knew it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
She lay the boy gently down on a spread-out body bag and left him. Let someone else zip the bag closed; she’d give him his last minutes in the air. As she straightened, she heard the sad whine of the cadaver dogs as they began to resist hunting through the wreckage of the apartment buildings. Their handlers urged them on with coaxing voices that sounded as depressed as the hounds. She knew how the dogs felt. She was about ten minutes away from curling up on a pile of jagged bricks and going to sleep.
O’Shea grabbed her empty arms. He gave her a long look. From behind his dust mask he said, “Cap wants us at the hospital. It sounds crazy, but this explosion may have something to do with the Lopez case.”
“We can’t leave.” Keren’s voice broke.
“Orders, Keren.” O’Shea took her arm and started dragging her over the jumble of bricks.
It was a testimony to how exhausted she was that she let herself be manhandled. “How could this have anything to do with Juanita Lopez’s disappearing act?”
“They’ve got someone there, just now waking up, who claims he knows what happened and the two are related.” O’Shea kept dragging her and she kept letting him.
“Could he be responsible for this?”
“The guy in the hospital?” O’Shea asked.
“No,” Keren said sarcastically, “the captain. Of course the guy in the hospital.”
“I don’t know. I barely caught his name. I don’t even know if what I’ve told you is right. I probably made part of it up, ‘cuz Cap was yelling his head off and shouting orders at everybody. I got the basics and ran like a scared rabbit.”
“Smart man.” Keren let O’Shea into her five-year-old Impala then went around to her side. Her car was blue somewhere under its coating of gray grit.
She caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and was appalled. She pulled the dust mask off and it was worse. Her eyes, which she called light blue, looked gray to match the car and her clothes and the whole rest of the world. Her hair sprung out in a hundred directions. She looked like a science experiment gone horribly awry.
“We should clean up first. We’ll probably get kicked out of the hospital.”
O’Shea snorted, which was as close as her partner came to a laugh most of the time. “Everyone there’s gonna look the same. We’d get kicked out if we were clean.”
“Still, I’d hate to drip brick fragments into some guy’s newly sewn-up head.”
“We’ll risk it. Drive.”
Keren obeyed him. Amazing what a little trauma will do to a person. “What’s the name of the guy Cap said to question?”
Keren eased her car into the street.
O’Shea checked his notebook. “Paul Morris.”
Paul Morris! Keren’s stomach took a dive. No, it wasn’t that uncommon of a name. It couldn’t be the same guy.
“Where is Paul Morris?” Keren yelled over the din in the emergency room.
A harassed nurse actually balled her fist. Keren got ready to duck.
“Find him yourself! I’m busy!” The nurse walked away before Keren could threaten the poor woman into cooperating.
There were bleeding people everywhere. Some injured. Others, obviously worried family, crying and dragging on the arm of anyone who looked official. Every cubicle was jammed with cots.
“How, in all this chaos, are we supposed to find anyone?” Keren shook her head at the chaos.
O’Shea shook his head, then he shook it again as if he were trying to shake out the vision of bleeding, weeping, grieving people. “You start in the cubicles. I’ll start asking around out here.”
“Okay, that should only take ten or twenty hours,” Keren said.
“I’m open to suggestions.” O’Shea glared at her.
“If that means I have to use my brain, forget it. I’m sucking fumes. Just start. Even if we could get a nurse to talk to us, she probably wouldn’t know where he is in this mess.”
O’Shea waded into the crowd. Keren heard him asking, “Do you know a Paul Morris? Is one of you Paul Morris?”
Keren sighed and went into the first cubicle.
It was over an hour later when she found him. She peeked between two poorly closed curtains and saw a man sleeping on a gurney, amid five other occupied beds.
It was him. The man who’d run up to the tenement building with that wooden sign and been shoved inside. The man who’d risked his life to save those kids.
She was surprised at the strength of the image she had of strangling him with her bare hands. The neck brace wouldn’t save him. Not if she threw herself into it.
With the same insight that had washed a demonic presence over her at the bomb site, she knew she was looking at a good man. Sometimes she got a mild impression of good or evil dwelling inside a person. Sometimes it hit her so hard it almost knocked her to her knees. Right now, she was taking a hit.
Paul Morris, whatever he had been when he’d stomped Keren under his heel, was now a man of powerful faith. She found herself moving into the room—drawn to him, even in his sleep, wishing she had as strong and bold a spirit.
He was wearing the tattered remains of sweatpants, and Ace bandages where his shirt should be. Besides the neck brace, he had a bandage covering half his head. One of his arms was in an inflatable cast, strapped to his chest with a blue sling. Bruises blackened his face. Stitches lined his temple, jawline, and lower lip.
Keren stared at him and felt forces clashing inside her. She wanted to talk to him, share her faith, and learn about his.
She wanted to break his other arm.
Was Morris even going to remember her? He’d done all his damage long distance, taking down several young detectives when he’d stormed through their lives. Keren was the only one who had put up with the reprimands and suspension and stayed on the force. Now, she could sense the goodness in him. It was completely at odds with the glory-hogging, career-destroying rat he’d been. So, maybe he’d changed, or maybe he’d always had both goodness and cruelty in him. Keren had never before gotten close enough to him to get a positive impression.
There was no point in dredging up the past. If she did mention it, he’d probably demand another police officer. Keren wondered if he really knew anything now, or was he just in the right place at the right time? He’d left the force. Maybe he missed having his name in the paper.
She stepped out of the cubicle and waved to get O’Shea’s attention over the crying and shouting injured. O’Shea nodded. She went back for one more look before she schooled her features into neutrality for O’Shea’s benefit. She sucked in a deep breath and tried to remember it wasn’t Christian to hate someone’s guts. She’d take Morris’s statement then get back to real police work.
Paul Morris was the guy who’d run into the building, and that meant he hadn’t set the bomb. She’d just lost her prime suspect. She had hoped to find a man on whom she could blame this whole mess. It wasn’t going to happen.
O’Shea slipped into the cubicle.
Keren had never told O’Shea about Morris and why she’d been assigned to the evidence locker. After six months of pushing paper, she’d helped O’Shea crack a case, and he’d asked for her to be assigned as his partner. She wasn’t about to go into it now. “Paul Morris?”
His eyes popped open so quickly, and his focus was so clear, Keren doubted he’d been sleeping.
“Yes. Pastor Paul Morris, Lighthouse Mission.”
Pastor? Keren checked the ceiling to see if pigs were flying overhead. “I’m Detective Keren Collins, Chicago PD. We got a call that you had information about today’s bombing.”
“At last.” A sigh of relief almost wiped the pain and concern off his face. Almost. “I’ve been asking to talk to the police. I have some idea what happened this morning. I mean, I don’t know who did it or anything.”
“Of course he doesn’t,” O’Shea muttered. “Life just isn’t that sweet.”
“I was at the gang hangout this afternoon,” Keren said. “I was looking for Juanita Lopez when the building exploded.”
“Juanita.” Morris’s eyes closed. “Poor Juanita.” He shook his head and flinched with pain. “Sorry, some of it’s a blur.”
Keren said, “Tell us what happened.”
“I got this phone call.” Morris raised his uninjured hand to his head. “But before that, a delivery man dropped off a package. Or no… pictures. He dropped off pictures of Juanita, and a sign.”
Morris shook his head. “I’m not making sense. I’m sorry. The doctor has given me some pain medication. I’m not thinking too clearly.”
“Just start at the beginning, Pastor Morris. Tell us what happened first.”
“I was just back from my morning run. Before I got inside, a delivery man came up to me with a large manila envelope. I went into the mission and ripped the envelope open. I found…”
The beautiful writing was done with ink too coarse to be a marking pen. Paint of some kind. It made Paul uneasy, for no reason he could define. He slipped his thumb under the flap. The paper ripped open. He reached inside just as his cell phone rang.
He answered. “Hello?”
“I’m an artist, you know.” A man spoke, his voice so smooth and quiet he purred. “I’ve given you something priceless.”
“Who is this?”
“Wood isn’t my favorite medium, but I’m very good with it. Every new creation is like a child. And who can create a child? A father. Or God.”
God?
Paul realized at the same moment the man spoke, that he held a piece of wood in his hands. It was a rectangular plaque about an inch thick, sanded satiny smooth, stained to a dark brown.
“Are you the one who sent this wood carving?” Paul turned his attention from the gift to the caller. It wasn’t that unusual to receive gifts from people who supported his mission.
Pravus was etched in a delicate script in the lower right corner.
“It would be worth a fortune if I’d gone into art as a living.” The voice was soft, almost singsong, with a tone that made the hair on the back of Paul’s neck stand up.
“Who is this?” Paul repeated. “I’d… uh, like to send a thank-you note. This is beautiful.”
And it was. There was delicate carving across the front. Letters that spelled words Paul couldn’t read, although they struck a chord. Natio. That was Spanish maybe, which he spoke adequately but couldn’t read. Natio meant “nation” or maybe “tribe.”
“My true creation is in the photographs.” A sigh of ecstasy hissed across the phone lines.
There’d been a time when Paul’s instincts had kept him alive. Those instincts kicked in hard. Paul dropped the envelope on the table and used a pen to tip it. Polaroid pictures slid onto the table. The instant he saw them he knew what kind of paint the caller had used to write the address.
Blood.
“What have you done?” It had been five years since he’d been a cop, and he no longer had the detachment he needed to survive this kind of thing.
“Isn’t she beautiful?”
Sickened by the pictures, Paul forced himself to study them, desperate to understand what this caller wanted. Then his eyes fell shut. He whispered, “Juanita.”
“Yes, that’s right, Juanita. I’d forgotten her name. She’s just canvas to me, not as nice to work with as wood.”
“What have you done to her, you…” Biting back rage, Paul knew then he could turn back into a cop. All the reflexes were still there.
“Now, now, Reverend, I expected better from you than that. We’re in this together.”
Gripping the phone until his fingers ached, Paul asked, “What are we in together? Why are you calling me? Where is she?”
“She’s going to stay right where she is unless you deliver a message for me, Reverend.”
“Message? What message?”
A scream sliced through the phone line.
“No,” Paul roared. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do what you want.”
The screams increased. Paul couldn’t think. Not as a pastor. The old coldness that at one time had cost him his faith, his family, and almost his life, settled on him. “Tell me what you want, Pravus.” Paul heard the level tone of his voice and couldn’t believe he sounded like that while his heart thundered with fear.
“Take the sign to the address I included in the envelope. Don’t call the police. Don’t talk to anyone. Hang it on that building and wait for me to phone.”
“Hang it on the building? Wait! How do I do that?”
“That’s your problem, Reverend. When you have delivered your message,” Pravus cooed, “I’ll tell you where to find this harlot.”
Juanita’s cries increased, broken by screams of pain.
“I’ll do what you want, and then, if you want to survive this, you’ll give me Juanita.”
There was an extended silence on the phone. Pravus said, “You sound more like a policeman than a man of God. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”