“Sorry,” said Kate, bemused.
“Maybe up there in the Bureau you don’t worry about your pension plan,” said Park.“Dhar’s the property king.Makes Trump look like a hobby-trader.”
“What about the other guy… Laurens…”
Park held up a hand as she searched on her phone. “Joker in the pack.Another corporate lawyer.Investment, tax… just opened a second office in Johannesburg.”
Kate stared at the names until the ink seemed to breathe.Bad, childlike handwriting.An unfinished list.It reminded her of Gadd’s journal, but less crazy.She swallowed.“Targets,” she said, because it was obvious and it needed to be said out loud so it would become policy and not just fear.“Manhattan big beasts.The kind of people who work seven days because the market never sleeps and they think that makes them righteous.”
“Great,” Marcus said.“Do we warn them or put them under immediate surveillance?”
“Both,” Kate said.“And we go wider.Figure out who else could fit this list if the author had time to finish it.”She tapped the paper.“Big in money, Sabbath-breakers, prominent enough to make a sermon of their deaths.”
Park leaned in again, eyes scanning the margins.“There are arrows,” she said.“Look—crude little arrows pointing to scribbles.Addresses?Abbreviations.‘58/Lex,’ ‘Hudson Pk—’ he ran out of letters, maybe.None of it’s systematic.”
“Does it look like Cox?”Marcus asked.
Kate felt the prickle at the base of her skull that never meant anything good.“His watermark, but not his writing.I mean—I can’t imagine Cox writing like that.”
Torres circled her flashlight beam around the floor, slow and patient.“What next?”
“We split,” Kate said.“Torres, take Park and one more and get everything to the lab.Bag everything, the cans, the stove, any hair on the blanket.Marcus and I will—”
The noise came like a cough from above them.Not loud, but wrong in a way that carried.A footstep where no footstep should be.The bell tower, to their left and back, a square of dark the color of an old bruise.
“Hold,” Torres breathed, hand up, eyes already angling toward the tower.For a second, the church decided to be a church again.The quiet was so complete that Kate imagined she could hear dust settling.
Another sound.A metal scrape.Pigeons startled, then resettled.Human, definitely.
“Up,” Kate said.And then they were moving—she and Marcus toward the base of the tower, Torres peeling right and hissing into the radio for the south team to cover the alley-side exit.
The stairs inside the tower were a spiral of grudges.Stone worn to a dish at the center, iron handrail slick with history.The smell shifted as they climbed—more pigeon, more more fungus.The steps narrowed until they were a negotiation.Kate went first, her gun low, eyes reading the dark.She felt the give of the step before it gave and shifted her weight.Marcus’s breath was a metronome behind her.
Halfway up, a flash of motion—something small and fast.Her finger tensed, then eased as a rat scuttled away and vanished into a hole in the plaster big enough for a small family and a holiday guest.
“Lovely venue,” Marcus murmured.
At the landing below the bell chamber, the air changed.Colder.The draft from the louvers cut in sideways and smelled like rain about to happen.Kate stilled, one step below the opening.She heard it—the scrape-gasp of a person pulling air in a throat that didn’t want to share.Not panic.Calculation.
She moved.The bell chamber spilled around them—big black shape of the bell like a frozen wave, the rope hanging stiff as a question.Slats of the louvered openings let dusk strip the space into bars.A shape slid between them, low and fast, and hit the far ladder to the roof like it had always known it would.
“Hey!”Marcus shouted.“Police!Stop!”
The figure didn’t look back.Up the narrow ladder, onto the service catwalk, through a door that wasn’t a door so much as wood pretending it still was one.Kate went after him before her body had time to remember that it didn’t like heights.The door flapped, a shadow dove, and suddenly there was roof, open air, light rain.
The roof was a bad idea in 3D: slate loose as teeth in an old mouth, lead flashing peeled like skin.The wind found them and shook them.The figure skated across the ridge with a familiarity born of hunger and practice.Kate’s foot slid; she corrected without thinking.Below, an alley waited for someone to fall into it.
“Left!”Marcus yelled, because he’d seen the same thing she had: a gap where the nave roof met the transept, a place where the carpenters of whatever century had left a trap for idiots and police.The figure didn’t take it.He took the riskier route—across the ridge, onto a jut of stone that had once been a gargoyle and was now a nub.
“Stop!”Kate’s voice sounded like someone else’s above the wind.The man was slight, stringy with elbows.A coat two sizes too big flapped around him, and for a flash, he looked back.A face cut by street and cold.Eyes too pale, hair hidden.Then he was gone again, over the lip, and Kate swore and followed.
They hit the next roof hard enough to rattle.It didn’t belong to the church.It belonged to the tenement next door, built at a time when corners were made for pigeon roosts and laundry lines.Someone had stretched blue tarps over holes.A door at the roofline’s far side slammed open.The figure went through it.
“Stairs!”Marcus shouted, already angling for them.The door was cheap metal with aspirations.Marcus hit it with his shoulder and it considered, then caved.The stairwell smelled like cooking oil.The walls were tagged with both politics and love.They pounded down three flights, the echo making it sound like they were thirty men, all of them too late.
The figure was faster than a greased weasel.He slipped through a dogleg in the hall, shoved through a door that led to nowhere, and vanished into a crawlspace that, by rights, should have held only dust.For a second Kate didn’t see him.Then she saw the flick of that too-big coat vanish right toward a service ladder.It led to the fire escape.The fire escape led to the alley.The alley led to—
“South team,” Torres’s voice cracked in their ears.“Alley covered.Take him to you.”
