“She hasn’t been here in a long time. Three years maybe.” The man flicked a nervous glance at Leo, who was still holding out the wilting flyer.
“Can we come inside, Pastor?” Kjel said. “Kinda wet out here. Water’s dripping down the back of my neck, see.”
Reluctantly, the pastor opened the door wider to admit them. He shut and locked it behind them. “Come through this way. We don’t open up for the kids until six sharp in the evenings, when we offer a volunteer soup kitchen. While we generally have enough food, thanks to volunteers and donors, we never have enough beds for all of them, so we run a nightly lottery while they’re eating, and the ones who don’t win—we have to put them back out into the cold.”
He led them into a mess room with a kitchen. The walls had been strung with paper-chain Christmas decorations, the kind Kjel had once made in kindergarten. An ornamental Christmas tree decorated with odds and ends brightened up a corner near an empty hearth, and a banner above a serving table blared:
REPENT AND YE SHALL BE FORGIVEN
THE LORD LOVES ALL HIS CHILDREN
A selection of religious pamphlets were fanned out on a shelf beside copies of today’s newspapers. Leo continued to let Kjel do the talking while he ambled around the room, hands in pockets, checking out the religious slogans on the walls.
“What happened to Faith?” the pastor asked again, and Kjel caught the fast dart of the man’s eyes toward the newspapers as he spoke.
“You read the morning news, Pastor?”
The man swallowed, looking ill. “She ... she wasn’t the ... the one found in the Gorge, was she?”
“Yup. Naked. Wrapped in plastic. Big-ass tattoo—a Medusa head with serpents for hair—inked right over her shaved pelvis.” Kjel made a circular motion with his hand near his groin.
The pastor reached for the back of a chair, and Kjel figured the man had either seen Hocking’s tattoo himself, or he’d heard about it.
Leo snagged a pamphlet off the religious pile. “What denomination is this place, anyway?” He glanced up at the pastor.
“We’re an ecumenical, Christian-based volunteer organization. In addition to providing the lost with a hot meal and a bed where possible, we also open to them a route unto the Lord. Some have chosen that path and come clean. Left the streets.”
“But which isyourchurch?” Leo paused, those clear blue eyes steady, intimidating. “Pastor.”
The man cleared his throat. “I worship at Fairfield United—my wife and I do.”
“Worship? Not preach or administer or whatever it is that pastor persons do?”
“Technically, I’m not exactly a pastor. The kids just call me that. And they have for years, ever since I first started volunteering here.”
“And when would that be?”
“Eight years now.”
While Leo was taking his turn needling Pastor Markus, Kjel walked over to a corkboard that was pinned chock-full with photographs that had clearly been taken over the years. Various seasonal and religious holidays. Several of the pastor laughing or engaging with kids, his arm around them in some images. Nearly all the street kids on this board were female. Young. There was one with a young woman sitting on his lap where the “pastor” was dressed as Santa. Then one photo in particular caught Kjel’s eye. His pulse quickened. He peered closer.
“You like the girls young, don’t you, Pastor?” he said quietly.
“Excuse me?”
Kjel moved away from the board, picked up a newspaper. Him and Pallorino on the cover. Him looking like a freaking tweaker himself. Thing about meth is that people who did it long enough, even when they did quit, they were left so damaged that they retained the characteristics of a tweaker for the rest of their lives. Fidgety, darty. Paranoid.
“All on the streets are vulnerable, boys and girls, both.”
“But the girls, they’s ... special.”
“In our society, unfortunately it’s the females and the young who are especially vulnerable and at most risk, and in need of safe sanctuary—”
“So, you likes to save them?” He nodded at a slogan on the wall:SINNERS SHALL BE REDEEMED. “You gets them to renounce Satan and all that.”
“What do you want from me?” The pastor shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his loose brown cords, his neck muscles showing tension.
“Faith Hocking. I want to know where she went after she used to stay here.”
