“The biblical term for Naphtha.”

“Wait … naphtha’s in the Bible?”

“Nepthai was thick water that burned and scholars now think it to be the flammable rock oil called naphtha.”

I put aside my coffee and sat forward; this was getting interesting.

Belafonte wiped to another screen on her tablet and read: “And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for atonement: and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast made an atonement for it, and thou shalt anoint it, to sanctify it.”

“Anoint?” I said. “Altar?”

“And you shall say to the people of Israel, ‘This shall be my holy anointing oil throughout your generations. It is holy, and it shall be holy to you.’”

It hit me. “Anointing oil is olive oil.”

“Sometimes it was fancified with cinnamon, myrrh and so forth, but olive oil was the most common. Now think about sheep.”

I tented my fingers, sat my chin atop them, and did so for a full minute.

“Sheep and lambs are a common biblical theme, Belafonte. Wool is sheep upholstery.”

“Now consider sacrifice,” Belafonte said, tapping the pad. “Genesis 22:7 to 8 – ‘Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”’ Then Abraham answers, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.’”

I felt my heart rate jump; not the coffee, but hope mingled with anxiety. We had a potential connection: Biblical themes and imagery.

“The cross of grass,” I said. “We have to check the other murder scenes.”

Feeling fresh wind, we pulled photos and reports from our towering files, starting with the scene photos from Kylie Sandoval’s lonely stretch of sand. Detritus found by the techs included a Miller Lite can, a Dasani bottle, the butt from a Salem, a crumpled bag of Doritos and a frayed length of boat rope.

No religious imagery.

“Let’s try the video,” I said.

I put the disk in the computer and watched until the removal of the body, gloved techs moving the charred tube to a gurney. Through the sound of wind we heard a whispered one-two-three and the husk was lifted from the sand to a carry board.

“Back up,” I said, staring at the screen, blinking like it would bring it into better focus. Belafonte replayed the segment until I again yelled stop. I traced my finger across the screen.

“There’s a line here, maybe one intersecting.”

She was dubious. I moved to the next series of photos, taken while the photographer was straddling the impression and shooting down.

“There,” I said. “You can just barely make it out.”

We studied the sand where the body had been removed. You had to squint, but it was there.

“A cross,” Belafonte said. “Before it got flattened by the body.”

“Made by a stick, a piece of driftwood. Or just dragging a toe through the sand.”

“Where was the cross with Teresa?” Belafonte asked.

“It went into the water with her and drifted away. We’ll never find it. But if there were two, there were three.”

I went to the window, put my hands in my pockets and looked out into the night sky to recall writing a widely ignored article proposing that religious zealotry was the most dangerous of the psychopathic aberrations.

The non-religious psychopath carries some constraints in the avoidance of capture and imprisonment. The constraints may be few, but they exist. There are no constraints on the religious psychopath. Cornered, they delightedly fight to the death, as it leads to Heaven and the rewards for battling in their god’s honor. Fly planes into buildings, give a thousand followers poisoned Kool-Aid, pull a lanyard that blows a crowded café into shreds and voilà, you awaken in Paradise with God.

It always seems an angry god, needy and tyrannical and demanding unyielding allegiance. And blood. Always the blood.

The ascendant traits of faith, in my mind, were humanizing aspects. Providing awareness of the frailties of oneself and others and viewing oneself as other than the center of the universe. Of giving purpose, or reason. It’s the opposite with religious psychopaths, their version of God sucking away everything alive, leaving only vindictive robots that wander a monochromatic landscape with swords in hand, hacking at all that offends them until the earthly landscape is as empty and desolate as the sword-wielders themselves.

I stared into the night until Belafonte cleared her throat behind me.

“Yes?” I said, not turning.

“The Killer needing to leave crosses,” she said quietly. “That’s not a good thing, is it?”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s quite a bad thing.”

31

“Can you be ready in twenty minutes, Mr Nautilus?” the voice on the phone said.

Harry Nautilus blinked his eyes at the bedside clock: 6.43 a.m.

“I’ll be outside your hotel, Pastor.”

Nautilus was beneath the hotel portico in nineteen minutes, Owsley out five minutes later in a coal-black suit with a white shirt unbuttoned to his chest and carrying three ties as he jumped into the back seat.

“I, uh, can never figure out what to wear with what,” Owsley said, holding up the silken trio. “Celeste usually does that. Do you mind, uh …”

Nautilus turned in the seat. “What effect are you trying for?”

“I’m not quite sure.”

Owsley looked lost. Nautilus said, “Give me two descriptive words, Pastor. What do you want?”

“Conservative and, uh, authoritative.”

Nautilus scrutinized the ties: dark mud, darker mud and darkest mud. He stripped off his own tie, the most conservative in his collection, burgundy, but at least it had color.

Owsley looked dubious. “Don’t you think it’s a bit bright?”

“Not for anyone still breathing.”

Owsley tied the neckpiece as Nautilus drove, shooting glances in the rear-view. This was not the prancing, up-tempo, thousand-watt Richard Owsley. This was an uncertain man. A confused man.

Maybe even a frightened man.

They drove southwest as Owsley pointed out the direction. “To the right, that tall building. We’re to wait for a delivery.”

“Like UPS?”

“A tractor-trailer rig.”

The road was pitted asphalt paralleling a drainage ditch. In the distance the tall cross blazed in the rising sun, below it the apex of the roller-coaster track. Most of the pilgrims were probably still asleep.

A tall cyclone fence appeared in snatches, sometimes beside the road, sometimes lost in the tangle of gnarled trees and scrub vegetation. The fence was new, the clods of dirt at the base of the posts not yet beaten down by rain.

They turned hard left and came to a wooden guardhouse peering from the fencing, its rear end passing through another tall fence topped with razor wire. They were at the structure that had reminded Nautilus of a mine tipple, five or six stories high, fifty feet on the sides and jutting from one end of a rectangular base. Nautilus figured the architect designed it by taping a vertical shoebox atop a horizontal one.

The facility looked hastily assembled, corrugated metal sheets attached to an internal framework, some sheets shiny new, others corroded and miscolored and salvaged from elsewhere, a motley skin over wood-beam bones. A utility building sat to one side, along with elephantine tanks labeled Water and Diesel Oil. Sections of crane boom were stacked behind the tanks and alongside a Caterpillar ’dozer. The hodge-podge construction site reminded Nautilus of a military installation from early Cold War days, a missile stash in a Third World country.

The sole anomaly was the shiny Kenworth semi-tractor rig idling beside the building, on the flatbed trailer a single large crate, twenty feet long and eight wide, loading hooks affixed to the top side.

“What is this place, Pastor?” he asked.