Page 20 of Wrong Way

"I've been expecting someone to come," he said. "I just didn't know who."

"We're sorry for your loss," Vic said. "We'll try to keep this brief."

Gladding nodded. He held his coffee cup in both hands and looked at the desk surface for a moment. "I've known Derek since he was seventeen years old. His mother started coming here, and she brought him, and he sat in the back with his arms crossed for about six months, and then one Sunday, he didn't."

"What do you mean?" Vic said.

"He stopped resisting," Gladding said. "He had a lot to resist at that point. He was already drinking pretty heavily by then. Seventeen. His father had left, his mother was working two jobs, and Derek was filling the time with whatever he could find. By eighteen, he was drinking every day, and by nineteen, he'd added whatever pills he could get." He paused for a moment, and Miles could see he was struggling.

“Pastor…are you okay to go on?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. It’s…it’s fresh, you know? I’m still not quite able to fully grasp that he actually died, if that makes sense.”

“It does,” Vic said.

“Anyway…the poor guy had his first DUI at nineteen. His mother called me the night it happened, not knowing what to do. I went to the jail and sat with her while they processed him, and when Derek came out, he looked at me like he was waiting for a speech. I didn't give him one. I just asked if he was hungry and we went and got breakfast." Gladding turned his coffee cup in his hands. "He got worse before he got better. That's almost always how it goes. He overdosed when he was twenty. His mother found him. He was in the hospital for three days, and when he came out, he was different. Not fixed, that takes years, but different. He called me from the parking lot of the hospital the day he was discharged. He said he didn't know what he was supposed to do next. I told him to come here, and we'd figure it out together." He picked up his coffee cup and set it back down without drinking. "He came in the next morning at eight o'clock. He was shaking…just out and out trembling, you know? He sat in one of those pews out there for about an hour just being quiet, and then he came into my office, and we talked for most of the day."

"What did he talk about?" Miles asked.

"Everything. His father leaving. The drinking. What it felt like when he couldn't stop and what it felt like when he tried to. He talked about the kids he'd grown up with, the ones who were doing the same things he was doing. He said he felt like nobody had caught him. Not his mother, she tried, but she was stretched too thin. Not his school. Nobody." Gladding shook his head and sighed. "He asked me what I thought he should do. I told him what I genuinely believed, which was that he understood something most people didn't. He knew what it felt like to be unreachable. And that was going to be useful to someone, someday, if he let it be."

"That's when he decided on youth ministry?" Vic asked.

"Not immediately. It took another year of recovery, some setbacks. He went to a community college for a while. But yes, that conversation was where it started. The idea that his experience wasn't something to be ashamed of, that it was actually part of what made him effective with young people." Gladding stopped and was quiet for a moment. "He was extraordinary at it. The kids trusted him because he didn't pretend the hard things were simple. He'd been there."

The office had gone eerily quiet. Somewhere further in the building a door closed, and someone coughed softly.

"He provided guidance," Miles said, not quite directing it at either of them.

"Yes," Gladding said. "That's exactly what he did. Real guidance. Not false hope. He was careful about that. He'd say, I can't promise it gets easy, but I can tell you it gets possible."

Miles sat with that word. Guidance. He had seen it recently, applied to Celestine: the Yelp reviews Sarah had pulled, the descriptions from the community around her shop. Spiritual guidance. The killer's manifesto had called her a charlatan, but the people who came to her had used that same word with evident sincerity. And now a youth pastor, a man who by any credible measure had provided something real to vulnerable kids, had been killed alongside her.

The manifesto's language came back to him. False light. Manufactured warmth. People who projected something they didn't possess. The killer believed he was distinguishing between authentic guidance and counterfeit guidance, but he was drawing that line according to some internal framework that had nothing to do with the actual people he was selecting. A fortune teller and a sober youth pastor who ran karaoke nights for troubled kids were not the same thing by any reasonable measure. But they were the same thing to this killer and understanding why required information he didn't yet have.

Without understanding the framework, they couldn't predict the next target. Without the next target, they had a growing body count and a partial picture. The killer would move again before they got ahead of him, and somewhere in that next move would be information they didn't have yet, and someone was going to pay for that information.

He was aware of his irritation building as he thought it through, a low, pressurized feeling he recognized and didn't try to talk himself out of. It was not useful anger, because there was nothing to direct it at. The investigation was where it was. But knowing that didn't make it easier to sit with.

“Miles,” Vic said quietly from beside him. “Hey…”

Miles snapped out of his reflections, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry. I sort of went somewhere else for a second.” He smiled and got to his feet before Vic was fully aware of what was going on.

“Pastor Gladding, thanks so much for speaking with us,” he said.

He found himself suddenly very anxious to get out of the church. Because as his mind continued to simmer the ideas it had just considered, he felt that familiar anger rising up within him, sitting heavy in his chest like something waiting for a direction.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The parking lot of Crossroads Community Church was mostly empty, a strip of cracked asphalt with a low concrete curb separating it from the lawn. Miles and Vic walked across the grass toward their car without speaking, giving the conversation with Gladding a few moments to settle. But Miles felt like his brain was burning with the new theory he had put together in the pastor’s office.

He stopped near the front bumper and looked back at the church. The frosted plate glass caught the afternoon light and threw it back in a flat, diffuse way that gave off an uneasy feeling. But he was no longer looking at the glass as his thoughts once again started to churn.

"Both of them," he said. "Celestine and Song."

Vic looked at him from the other side of the hood. She studied him for a moment as if he had just told a riddle. Which he sort of had. "What about them?" she asked.

"They both provided guidance. Spiritual guidance, comfort, something in that territory." He pulled his keys from his pocket but didn't unlock the car yet. "Celestine's reviews were all about how she listened. And then Song being a youth pastor…a guy who hung out at bars not to drink but to look for so-called lost people…it’s all the same. Gladding just described twenty years of Song doing it for troubled kids. That's not incidental. That's the through line."