“What?” Pastor Elias Hillington said when he opened the door. Titus didn’t need to go too far out on a limb to assume Pastor Elias hadn’t cast a vote for him during the election. Elias Hillington and his congregation made no secret about their political leanings. In between the fire and the brimstone, Pastor Elias railed on in onerous tones about gay marriage, the liberal agenda, and how all lives mattered. The congregation of Holy Rock didn’t wear hoods and they hadn’t burned a cross in anyone’s yard, but Titus had no illusions about their thoughts about him and people like him. It came off them in waves, like the rot from a gangrenous wound. A putrefaction of the soul.
“Pastor Elias, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions,” Titus said. He used his pleasant voice. He would slip into his cop voice if Elias gave him any undue insolence. If he got nasty, well, then he’d go full-on Charon and see what happened.
“I’m feeding the snakes. You can come on out back and ask your questions there if you want,” Elias said. He turned on his heel and walked back down the center aisle of the sanctuary without uttering another word. Titus followed the tall, slim scarecrow of a man through the sanctuary and past the pulpit, past the stairs that led to the second floor of the church, and into a back room lit by a pale indigo grow light that flickered overhead like mini–lightning strikes. Against the back wall of the back room were twelve aquariums on four metal shelves. Three glass boxes per shelf. To the right there was a large utility sink and a short counter made from a rippling sheet of Formica over a piece of plywood supported by stained cinder blocks. The counter was full of plastic containers that tittered and squeaked. Pastor Elias reached into one of the containers with his bare hand and snatched a white mouse from his comrades. He went to one of the aquariums and opened the lid and tossed the mouse inside.
Titus watched as a speckled brown serpent slithered over a fake tree limb and struck the mouse with startling speed. As the mouse writhed on the floor of the aquarium, the snake began to swallow it whole.
“Ask your questions, Sheriff,” Elias said as he reached into one of the aquariums and pulled a snake from it, putting it in a separate container with tiny holes punched in the lid. He took the aquarium and placed it in the sink and began to clean it. Elias stood at the sink with his back to Titus.
“A man who don’t look you in the eye when you talk to him is a man that don’t respect you,” his father had told him the week before he’d left for UVA. Albert Crown was full of homilies, but that particular one had proven to be true more than once.
“Pastor Elias, are you going to talk to me out the back of your head?” Titus asked.
Elias’s shoulders tensed. When they relaxed, he shut off the water and turned to face Titus. His clean-shaven face was folded into wrinkles that resembled the bellows of an accordion. He tried to lock eyes with Titus, but he saw something there that extinguished his truculence.
“What are your questions, Sheriff? Don’t you have your hands full with them there children they found under that there tree? Why you come all the way out to the island to harass us?” Elias asked.
“Pastor, I’m not here to harass you. I just want to ask you who put the phrase ‘Our salvation is his suffering’ on the church sign out there in your parking lot. Just answer that and I’ll let you get back to handling your snake,” Titus said. Elias frowned. Titus didn’t know if he got the joke and that had elicited the frown, or if it had gone over his head and his frown was the only way he knew to respond.
“I did. It’s from one of my first sermons. I put it on the sign once a year to commemorate when we built this here church. When we broke ground all those years ago. God’s righteous people spreading his real Word. Not that watered-down version that makes them there folks feel good about their sins. No, sir. We preach the divine Word of God here at Holy Rock. His suffering is our salvation. Jesus the Christ died on that there cross for his people. His righteous people protected by his Father’s archangels, Michael, Uriel, Gabriel, and Raphael. He purchased that protection for us on that there cross. Through his suffering we are saved. And when it’s time for us to join him, Azrael comes to collect our immortal souls,” Elias said.
Titus watched as his slack face was slathered in sweat and animated like he’d taken a hit of some pure crystal-clear crank.
“Who are his people, Pastor?” Titus asked. He had other follow-up questions, but he wanted to see how far Elias would go with his definition of who qualified as God’s chosen people.
“The righteous. The incorruptible. The pure of heart. The holy anointed.”
The white? Titus thought.
“Pastor, the reason I’m asking is because that phrase has come up in our investigation of the murders of those children you mentioned. Is there anyone in your congregation who has been acting … strangely since news of the murders broke? Anyone who has stopped coming to church or said anything fatalistic?” Titus asked.
Elias’s frown transformed into a snarl. He opened the plastic container with the snake and pulled it out of the plastic box. He let it wrap itself around his left arm.
“Sheriff, I told you my congregation is full of the anointed. We are God’s children, full of his grace and his supernatural piety. No one who walks through that there vestibule and gives themselves over to the power of the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost could ever do there what you say. ‘For they shall take up serpents and not be bitten, and they shall drink poison and it will not harm them,’” Pastor Elias said as he raised his left arm and extended it.
“Pastor, I’m not here to pass judgment on your congregation. I’m looking for a killer. A killer who took the lives of young boys and girls. And just for the record, Mark, chapter sixteen, verse eighteen doesn’t say anything about not being bitten or not being harmed by poison. You fixed that to say what you wanted it to. And since that’s a king snake, not a coral snake, a bite from him won’t mean much,” Titus said.
Elias’s face bloomed scarlet. He had that befuddled look most self-righteous people got when someone they considered a heathen could quote the Bible more accurately than they could.
Elias took a step toward Titus.
“But only the sinners bleed, Sheriff,” Elias said.
“Pastor, like I said, I’m not here to judge you. But you come any closer to me with that snake, I’m going to send him to hell on a bullet,” Titus said.
Elias stopped, turned, and put the snake back in the plastic container. He resumed washing the aquarium.
“Like I said. Nobody who comes to this here church could do what you say. If that’s your question, I’ll thank you to leave me to my work,” Elias said.
Titus sighed. He thought back to a movie he’d seen once where a character said if you can’t be respected, be feared. Elias may not have respected him, but he could see he feared him. It wasn’t a win, but it wasn’t exactly a loss either.
“If you think of anything, Pastor, give me a call at the sheriff’s office. Anything at all. Those children deserve justice and I’m going to do my best to get it for them,” Titus said.
Elias didn’t respond.
Titus left him among his serpents.
THIRTEEN
Paul Garnett had a secret.
He liked to grumble and complain about walking the husky his wife had brought home a year ago without asking if he wanted a goddamn husky. The kids loved the dog, his wife fed the dog better than she fed him, and everyone down his road thought the dog was friendlier than he was.
They were right.
But the secret he kept close to his heart, the lie he kept alive, was that despite his protestations to the contrary, he loved the dopey-ass furball. The kids, his two sons and his daughter, had named the dog Rider, and as names went that wasn’t a bad one. Paul worked nights at the flag factory, so it had fallen on him to walk the dog first thing in the morning after his wife had left for her shift as an ED nurse and the kids had climbed on the school bus. Once he was sure the coast was clear, he’d get a handful of treats and put Rider through a series of simple tricks before taking him down the road for his daily constitutional.
Paul knew that if he ever admitted how much he loved Rider, neither his wife, Holly, nor his kids Kent, Chad, or Nikki would look at him any differently. They wouldn’t think of him as less of a man because he loved a seventy-pound ball of slobber and barks that liked to sleep at the foot of the bed he and Holly shared. He knew this, yet he still kept up the act. By now it was just a part of his daily routine. He was pretty sure his oldest, Kent, knew it was all a performance. Little ass had caught him petting Rider one Saturday morning when Paul had thought everyone was still zonked out from a cookout the night before. But he didn’t say anything. It had become a part of his routine to pretend he didn’t know his father thought of Rider as his third son. They shared the chicanery. In a strange way it made Paul feel close to the boy. God knows they didn’t share many other interests.