For a heartbeat, neither moved.
“Here we go again,” Kate said.“Start the car.”
Marcus wasn’t arguing now.He tossed his cup into the footwell, started the engine, and pulled out into the thickening traffic.The wipers beat once across the glass as the first drops of rain began to fall.
Kate stared straight ahead, pulse quickening, the city blurring into streaks of light.
The name echoed in her head like a prayer—or a curse.
St.Simon and St.Jude.
Full circle.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dusk in the Bronx arrived early, the kind that didn’t so much fall as congeal in the air—purple at the edges, gritty in the throat.The Church of St.Simon and St.Jude crouched at the corner like a patient with a secret, boards nailed over the windows, the bell tower laced with pigeon droppings.
Kate stood in the lee of a derelict bodega, sucking on a tic-tac, and watching the last of ESU slip into the shadows along the fence line.Torres was a slim shape beside her, chin tucked into her coat, voice low into the radio.
“Two on the south door, two on the sacristy.Valentine, Reid, you’re with me at the nave.On my mark.”
Marcus adjusted his vest, jaw working on a piece of gum he’d been nursing since Queens.“You always take me to the nicest places.”
“Complain to the booking agent,” Kate said, pulling her hood tight.She was aware of her own breathing, the way it sounded loud in the wool.Inside her head, a map drew itself: altar at the east end, narthex at the west, side chapel to the left, sacristy through the chancel.She felt the hum of anticipation—that pre-raid cocktail that mixed focus with revulsion, like the moment before an injection.She glanced at the dark geometry of the boarded windows and thought, not for the first time, not here.Not again.Another St.Simon and St.Jude.Another knife-edge of then and now.
“On me,” Torres said.“Let’s go wake the saints.”
They moved.The south door gave reluctantly, wood splitting with the sound of old bones.The smell hit first—damp, old wax, a sweet, metallic tang that belonged to rust and something else.The beam of Torres’s flashlight cut the dark into white slabs.Pigeons thumped somewhere above, the noise amplified by the hollow space.For a moment, Kate saw the place as it must have been: a long aisle, pews in orderly ranks, fidgeting children and pious grandmothers.She blinked and brought herself back to now.
“Clear left.”
“Clear right.”
They fanned, boots careful on loose flagstones.The nave rose around them, columns scabbed with graffiti.Someone had tried to scrub the worst of it off and given up.The altar was mostly intact, with only a chunk missing.Kate read the words under some spotted fungus:Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanc-,and she fought the ingrained urge to curtsey.To the right, the wide door to the sacristy stood ajar.The angle of it said: recently used.
Torres chopped a hand toward it.“Valentine.”
Kate flowed toward the doorway, feeling the old floor shift under her weight.She pressed the side of her fist to the door and pushed.The room beyond was a monk’s cell turned storage unit—brick, low ceiling, the smell of rained-on cardboard.And signs.Obvious signs, because nobody had tried to hide them.
On the floor: a narrow camp bed, the kind that turns shoulders to knives.A sleeping bag with a cigarette burn near the zipper, stuffed with yesterday’s warmth.On the table: a small gas stove with a soot-blackened kettle, two spoons in a chipped mug that once said WORLD’S BEST GRANDPA in flaking blue.A neat line of food—cans of beans, condensed milk, peaches, all aligned label-out like a habit learned in some other life.
Above it all, the walls: a fever dream of paper.Pictures torn from porn magazines, taped up edge to edge—glossy limbs, mouths like wounds, eyes that didn’t look anywhere.Between them, tucked at odd angles, other clippings: a grainy photo of Times Square, a recipe for meatloaf, a flyer for a revival meeting in Yonkers.The collage of someone who’d tried to fix the world inside his head and failed.
Marcus lifted the stove with two fingers and sniffed the cold metal.“Recent,” he said.“Soot’s fresh.”
Torres crouched by the bed.“Boot prints.Size… eight?Nine?Hard to tell on this floor.”
“Notebook,” said a voice from the aisle.It was Officer Gina Park, one of Torres’s, eyes already bright with the hunt.She had her flashlight trained on a small fold-out table in the nave, the kind you’d bring to a yard sale if you were an optimist.“Looks like he was making lists.”
They came together at the table.Park pointed at a buff-colored notebook whose cardboard cover had been worn to fur.She flipped it open, using a pen.The top page was half-filled.Thick, toddler clumsy letters sprawled across the lines, each name pressed hard enough to bite the page beneath.Three—no, four—names.The last one had a line through it that wasn’t quite a line, more like someone had dragged the pen away to scratch an itch and forgotten to return.
Marcus read them aloud, quietly, the sounds too big in the empty church.“Laurens Terhooft.Serena Halberg.N.Dhar.El—” He squinted.“Eleanor Kaye?”
Park let out a short breath.“Oh, wow.”
“Wow what?”Torres said.
“I follow Kaye’s podcast,” Park said, with reverence, “She’s like, the ultimate investment disruptor.And Halberg runs Solstice Capital,” she went on.“Crypto-to-energy pivot.She’s on every panel.Meanwhile, Noah Dhar—are you guys gonna tell me you don’t know Dhar Holdings?”
