The passenger door of the Tahoe opened to a gust of damp air. “Shit.” Doyle handed Wolgast the keys and swiveled in his seat to look at the cruisers as they passed. “You think that’s about us?”
Wolgast angled his head to watch the cruisers through the side-view mirror. They were doing at least eighty, maybe more. It could have been something ordinary, a wreck or a fire. But his gut told him it wasn’t. He counted off the seconds, watching the lights recede into the distance. He had reached twenty by the time he was certain they were turning around.
He turned the key, felt the engine roar to life.
“That’s us all right.”
Ten o’clock, and Sister Arnette couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t even close her eyes.
Oh, it was awful, just awful, everything that had happened-first the men coming for Amy, how they had deceived her, deceived everyone, though Sister Arnette still didn’t understand how they could be both FBI and also kidnappers; and then that terrible thing at the zoo, the shouts and screams and everyone running, and Lacey holding on to Amy the way she had, refusing to let go; and the hours they’d spent at the police station, the whole rest of the day, not treated like criminals exactly but certainly not spoken to in a way that Sister Arnette was accustomed to, all of it vaguely accusing, the detective asking them the same questions over and over again; and then the reporters and camera trucks lined up on the street outside the house, huge spotlights filling the front windows as the evening wore on, the phone ringing nonstop until finally Sister Claire had thought to unplug it.
The girl’s mother had killed someone, a boy. That’s what the detective had told her. The detective’s name was Dupree, a young fellow with a prickly little beard, and he spoke to her courteously, a bit of old New Orleans in his voice, which meant he was probably Catholic, calling her dawlin’ and cher; but wasn’t that what Sister Arnette had thought of the other two when they’d appeared at the door? Wolgast and the younger, good-looking one? Whose faces she had seen again on the grainy video Dupree showed her, from someplace in Mississippi, taken when-she guessed-they thought no one was looking? That they were nice men because they looked nice? And the mother, Detective Dupree told her, the mother was a prostitute. “A prostitute is a deep pit; she hides and waits like a robber, looking for another victim who will be unfaithful to his wife.” Proverbs, chapter 23. “For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell.”
Hold of hell. The very words made Sister Arnette shudder in her bed. Because hell was real, that was a fact; it was a real place, where souls in torment writhed in agony forever and ever. That’s the kind of woman Lacey had let into their kitchen, who had stood in their very house not more than thirty-six hours ago: a woman who had hold of hell. The woman had ensnared this boy somehow-Arnette didn’t want to imagine that part-and then shot him, shot him with a gun in the head, and then given her girl to Lacey while she made her escape, a girl who had who-knew-what inside her. For it was true: there had been something… unearthly about her. It wasn’t nice to think it, but there it was. How else to explain what had happened at the zoo, all the animals running and making a ruckus?
The whole situation was awful. Awful awful awful.
Arnette tried to make herself sleep, but this accomplished nothing. She could still hear the thrum of the vans’ generators, could see, through the veil of her closed eyes, the ravenous glow of their spotlights. If she turned on the TV she knew what she’d find: reporters with their microphones, speaking in earnest tones and gesturing behind them toward the house where Arnette and the other sisters now attempted to sleep. The scene of the crime, they’d call it, of the latest development in this breaking story of murder and kidnapping, and federal agents somehow involved-though Dupree had forbidden, absolutely forbidden the sisters from talking about this part to anyone. When the sisters had returned home in the police van that had carried them back from the station, all of them wordless with exhaustion, to find the TV trucks, at least a dozen, lined up at the curb in front of the house like a circus train, it was Sister Claire who’d noticed that they weren’t just the local Memphis network affiliates but came from as far away as Nashville and Paducah and Little Rock, even St. Louis. As soon as they’d turned into the driveway the reporters had swarmed the van, pointing their lights and cameras and microphones and barking their furious, incomprehensible questions. These people had no decency. Sister Arnette was so frightened she began to shake. It had taken two police officers to move the reporters off the property-Can’t you see they’re nuns? Whaddaya wanna go bothering a buncha nuns for? All of you just back it up, right now-so the sisters could walk safely into the house.
Yes, hell was real, and Arnette knew where it was. She was in it, right now.
After that they’d sat together in the kitchen, none of them hungry but still needing to be somewhere-everyone except Lacey, whom Claire had taken straight upstairs to her room to rest. It was odd: of all of them, Lacey seemed the least shaken by the events of the afternoon. She’d barely uttered a word for hours, not to the sisters and not to Dupree, either, just sat with her hands in her lap, tears rolling down her cheeks. But then a funny thing had happened; the officers showed them the videotape from Mississippi, and when Dupree froze the image on the two men, Lacey stepped forward and looked, hard, at the monitor. Arnette had already told Dupree that that was them, she’d had a good look and there wasn’t a single doubt in her mind that the men on the screen were the same two who had come to the house and taken the girl; but the expression on Lacey’s face, which was something like surprise but not exactly-the word Arnette thought of was astonishment-made them all wait.
“I was wrong,” Lacey said finally. “It isn’t… him. He is not the one.”
“Which him, Sister?” Dupree asked gently.
She lifted a finger to the older of the two agents, the one who’d done all the talking-though it was the younger one, Arnette recalled, who’d actually taken Amy and put her in the car. In the image, he was looking straight up at the camera, holding a disposable cup in his hand. The time signature on the bottom right corner of the screen said that it was 06:01 on the same morning the two of them had come to the convent.
“Him,” Lacey said, and touched the glass.
“He didn’t take the girl?”
“He most assuredly did, Detective,” Arnette declared. She turned and looked at Sister Louise and Sister Claire, who nodded their assent. “We’re all agreed to that. Sister is just upset.”
But Dupree was not deterred. “Sister Lacey? What do you mean he’s not the one?”
Her face was shining with conviction. “That man,” she said. “Do you see?” She turned and looked at all of them. She actually smiled. “Do you see? He loves her.”
He loves her. What to make of that? But these were the only words Lacey had offered on the matter, as far as Arnette was aware. Did she mean to imply that Wolgast actually knew the girl? Could he have been Amy’s father? Was that what all this was about? But it didn’t explain what had occurred at the zoo, a terrible thing-a child had actually been trampled in the chaos and was in the hospital; two of the animals, a cat of some kind and one of the apes, had been shot-or the dead boy at the college, or any of the rest of it. And yet for the remainder of the afternoon at the station, in and out of various offices, telling their story, Lacey had sat quietly, smiling that strange smile, as if she knew something no one else did.