At the time, Zeke had been a little embarrassed. Maybe that he wasn’t intellectual enough to solve any of this. Maybe Timothy was right in the implication that he was just an athlete whose brawn outmatched his brains. In their partnership, Sybil had always been the brains, and maybe he’d gotten a little ahead of himself, thinking he could understand the psychology behind what Betty was running from.
It was ironic, Zeke thought now, what Timothy had said. It hadn’t even occurred to him thathewas indoctrinated, but maybe, in some ways, he was. He’d been told that this was the only thing he was good for, made to believe that he had to dedicate his life to a cause that he wasn’t even sure he believed in anymore. Or maybe no one had told him that. Maybe that wasn’t fair to his parents and Lani, who probably would have been fine if he coached Little League and worked as a UPS driver. He was the one who had convinced himself this was the only place he had any worth, not anyone else.
He took a left down a street with oversized new builds. He thought about Betty. How so few people are able to extricate themselves from situations such as hers; how maybe she did burn that fucking church down, and if she did, it was a triumph that she had freed herself. He thought about that dickhead, Matthew, her sister’s husband, and how he expected reverence from a stranger in Georgia, when Zeke was always the one who had been revered. Maybe that’s a little fucked up, too, Zeke thought, that he and Matthew weren’t all that different, but also, he and Betty weren’t either.
But something about all of it didn’t make sense. Zeke couldn’t pin it down, and if he had the guts to call Sybil and apologize, surely she could. He’d spent his entire career fine-tuning his instincts—when to wave off a pitch, when to brush the batter on the inside, when to go a little wild—and his instincts here said that Betty ran because she was scared, not because she was guilty. Or maybe he was just a fool who had deluded himself into thinking his instincts counted for something. Maybe they counted for jack shit. He hadn’t moved out of the way of Schmidt’s line drive when he could have. So.
The sun was coming up by the time he got back to the condo. Back to being a cog in the wheel. But whatever clue he was missing still pricked him, a splinter in the sole of his foot. If Betty didn’t do it, he thought, who did?
55
Night Twenty-Three
Sybil
January 13th
Sybil had narroweddown Levi’s location to just three possibilities. There were only twelve postcards, leaving three landmarks on the Fodor’s list remaining. The last postcard had been sent from Mount Rushmore eight months ago, May, back before any of this started between the four of them. Sybil could barely remember the time before she’d hopped online, posted to the forum, foundBeartownandKingofQueens, before they met at the diner on the Upper West Side and became inextricably linked to one another in a way that felt permanent.
Sybil had texted Simone earlier that morning. She wondered if Julian’s partner—Richard, according to his notes, which were scattered across her kitchen island—might have any insights. Simone had replied with Richard’s cell number. He picked up on the first ring, and after Sybil assured him repeatedly that she wasn’t a telemarketer and that she was calling about the Revivalist Church, and that Simone had given her his number, he sighed and said he didn’t remember many of the details.
“Could you look?” she asked. “It’s sort of important. I think Julian wasn’t settled with how it ended.”
“You have to understand, Julian and I dealt with dozens of bad operators over the years. Once we closed a case, we closed it,” he said. “Although Jules always had a harder time moving on than I did.”
“Do you think his…accident, uh, the car that hit him, could be retaliation for a case?” Sybil was surprised to hear herself pose the question. As if the notion only just presented itself in her brain and then it flew out of her mouth.
“Possibly,” he said.
“Actually?”
“No one could dismiss that. What we do, what he did, I should say, before he retired, was dangerous work. You know he nearly dropped dead from this case, right? We forced him into retirement. Simone and me.”
She heard him shuffling some papers.
“Right, but in this case, the guy we were investigating, he’s been ruled as dead,” he said.
“Aaron Jones?”
“The one and only.”
“The newspaper articles said it was quasi-inconclusive.” Sybil grabbed a pen and made a note to follow up with Annabeth.
“Yeah, the determination came out a few months after the fire department cleared the place for the rebuild. DNA remnants, his wedding band. No signs of any bank account usage. They could only identify his wife by dental records. It was…oh, here’s a photo of the scene…right, it was gruesome. Did you know the human body burns at about seven hundred degrees?”
“I—I did not,” Sybil stuttered. She thought about it. Sheremembered something vaguely about burn victims from medical school, but Richard was a man who knew more than she did. And she was learning to accept this.
“Right, well, the main explosion occurred…” Sybil heard him reading his notes, and she reached for Julian’s folder, a road map to what Richard was saying. “The main explosion occurred off the kitchen, by the boiler, just off the dining area where dozens of congregants had gathered for dinner. In a confined space like that, the explosion could easily reach a thousand degrees upon combustion.”
“I see,” Sybil said. She stared at the photo of the aftermath. Bodies that had turned to dust.
“Yep, it became an incinerator,” Richard said, with the passivity of a man who had seen too much.
“So Aaron Jones is declared dead, and the case against him is dropped?”
“No, ma’am, we didn’t have a rock-solid case, at least nothing that was indictable yet.That’s not what Jules and I did. We gathered evidence to make the case. And we didn’t have any reason to believe that anyone else, at least who was still alive, in his…clergy, I guess you could call it, was involved in the questionable financial issues. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to nail Jones, it’s just that when he died, there wasn’t much else to chase down. Whatever he was doing seemed to die with him.”
“But Julian may have disagreed?”
