“But you’re alone,” Rudy said. “My god is here.”

“He doesn’t seem to be helping you much.” The Vincent leaned close. “Where did the printer come from?”

The man said nothing.

The Vincent said, “I’ll track it down eventually, but you could save me a lot of time. Was it the cartel? Have they branched into desktop drugs?”

The Vincent watched the hood for movement. The man seemed strikingly calm. Breathing deeply, but without the ragged gasps of someone under duress.

“Rudy, you’ve been put in an unfair position. The people who gave you that hardware knew that sooner or later someone like me was going to come around asking questions about it. They knew that you’d tell me eventually.”

The Vincent pulled the hood from the pastor’s head. Rudy’s face was covered in sweat, and he blinked to keep it from running into his eyes.

The Vincent said, “I can tell that you’re a good man, trying to do the right thing. But no one but you expects you to keep all this secret.”

Rudy looked to his left, as if someone had just stepped into the room. The Vincent couldn’t stop himself from glancing in that direction. Of course no one was there.

“I think it’s time we move on to the next phase,” the Vincent said. He walked to his carry-on bag and unzipped it. He took out a pair of pliers, a serrated knife, a roll of duct tape, a punch awl, a plastic bottle of lighter fluid, and a box of kitchen matches. Set them on the floor in a row. They were all new, picked up from the Walmart soon after he’d landed in Toronto.

He made sure Rudy was watching this presentation of the props. The interrogation was, after all, a theatrical performance. You had to engage the victim in the narrative, a story that followed the classic structure: The hero (our victim), faced with a dire situation, overcomes adversity, and achieves his goals. Well, one goal, really: survival. But it was important that that modest happy ending seemed within reach, right around the corner. The Vincent’s job was to inspire not only fear, but hope.

The Vincent picked up the awl. “Rudy, I need you to tell me where you got the printer. It’s not like anything I’ve seen. Was it given to you, or did you buy it? Who did you get it from?”

Rudy shook his head.

“Just one name,” the Vincent said reasonably.

“I’m not going to tell you that,” Rudy said.

“Why not?”

He opened one eye, squinting. “I’m not going to point you toward another brother or sister.”

“So you got it from someone else in the church. One of the members.”

“Not this congregation,” Rudy said. “Not this building.”

“So if I looked for other congregations of—what do you call it? The Church of the Hologrammatic God—I could ask them. Maybe do a few more pastoral visits.”

Rudy said nothing.

“I’m going to level with you,” the Vincent said. “I’d rather not go to all that trouble. But you’re putting me in a corner. If you don’t give me some information that I can take to my employer, then I’m going to have to talk to other people in your church, as I’m talking to you now.”

Rudy glanced to his left again, a gesture that was getting tiresome. The man just wasn’t scared enough. And the Vincent couldn’t just start slicing skin and breaking bones. Pain at that level was counterproductive, not only because of the well-documented willingness of prisoners to say anything to stop it, but because of the opposite: Many victims discovered that their tolerance was higher than they expected. And death threats were worse than useless; hold a gun to a victim’s head, or a blade to his throat, he might start to think he was going to die no matter whether he submitted or not. The Vincent had seen this happen during an interrogation of a poppy farmer in Afghanistan. The army had botched the job, and the farmer shut down completely. He almost seemed to be at peace. By the time the Vincent had arrived at the scene, there wasn’t enough time to win him back. Another human resource, unexploited.

No, it wasn’t death threats that motivated his victims to cooperate, or pain, but fear of pain. And this man, Pastor Rudy Gallo Velez, seemed to have an extreme deficit of fear.

If he was drugged—and his employer said that he’d be dealing with criminals and users, starting with the addict Lyda Rose—it was no drug the Vincent had seen before. The Vincent had a bad thought: What if his own medication was interfering with the job? Maybe if he had some of the emotional sensitivity that he possessed when he was off duty and off the meds, then he could figure out where Rudy was vulnerable. But off the meds, the Vincent wouldn’t have the stomach for the job at all.

It was a conundrum.

Maybe he could grab somebody off the street—an innocent, a little girl, perhaps—and torture her in front of the pastor? But that was crazy. Where was he going to find a little girl at this time of night? The black kid with the beard could have been leverage, but it was too late for that.

The Vincent said, “So what’s it going to be, Rudy?”

The man shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” He sounded genuinely apologetic. “I made a vow.”

Even on the meds, with his empathy reduced to a trickle, the Vincent could detect the sincerity in the pastor’s voice. Rudy was determined to keep his promise.

The Vincent put a hand on the man’s neck. Three small dots surrounded the “13” tattoo, representing Prison, Hospital, and Cemetery, the gangster stations of the cross. “Just a first name,” he said. Asking, even though it was futile. “Or the initials.”

Rudy said, “It’s not too late. It’s never too late. God can forgive you. Even after you do what you’re about to do.”

The pastor stared at the floor. He was already gone, gone as that Afghan farmer.

“What are we going to do with you?” the Vincent asked.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ollie and I rode in the backseat, Bobby alone up front. During the ride to the strip mall she held my hand, running her thumb up and down my wrist. Her fingers were no longer trembling. She directed Bobby to drive around the back.

She pulled my face to hers and kissed me fiercely. “For luck.” She jumped out of the car and jogged up the steps beside the loading dock. She looked twice as big in the camo jacket.

I hopped out after her, then leaned back in to the passenger window. “Keep the car running,” I told Bobby. I’d always wanted to say that.

Ollie took something out of her jacket pocket and inserted it in the lock of one of the doors. I whispered, “How long will it take to—?”

She pushed the door open and stepped into the dark.

“Okay then,” I said.

Ollie turned on a thin flashlight. She played the light around the wall adjacent to the loading dock doors and finally settled on a small white box at eye level. My eye level, anyway—the box was positioned just over Ollie’s head. The lid hung loose. She reached up and popped it off.

“Huh,” she said.

“Problem?” I still had my hand on the door.

“The alarm’s already disabled.”

I closed the door. Ollie flipped a light switch. I winced against the light, turned to face the room—and my body jerked, then froze—the microseizure of the life-endangered mammal.

In the middle of the warehouse, a figure lay curled on the floor, his back to us. I flashed on the body of Francine, sprawled on the tile of the NAT bathroom, and knew this to be another corpse.

I stepped forward, and Ollie put a hand on my shoulder. “We have to get out,” she said. “Now.”

I ignored her and walked toward the body. He was naked, or nearly so. His hands were clasped behind him. His neck was straight, supported by something small, so that his head hovered over the floor. Blood had pooled beneath it, then spawned a rivulet that meandered a few feet to a drain.

I moved around his feet to see his face. It was the pastor. His eyes were open, his lips slightly parted. I crouched to see what he was resting on. I touched his shoulder, and he tipped onto his back.