Mary Nealy - Ten Plagues

He believed it. He believed wholeheartedly in God. But he still had to admit defeat and get up and throw the dead bolt. While he was up he doubled-checked the windows. Then he touched his cell phone and the spare Keren had left.

He said to the empty room, “Where are you, Pravus?”

The silence of the room mocked him.

In despair, he whispered, “Who are you killing tonight?”

So they took soot from a furnace and stood before Pharaoh. Moses tossed it into the air, and festering boils broke out on people and animals .

Pravus closed his father’s special Bible, the slim one still written in the ancient Latin. Pravus couldn’t read the words, but his father had told him what it said. He remembered everything.

He went to the woman, taped securely to the high table. Pravus looked at the gown hanging beside her. Eamus meus natio meare. Pestis ex ulcus.

Then he looked at her.

Boils.

He’d used burns. It was close enough. The reverend said he was like the magicians copying Moses’ tricks. He’d used that cold, hard policeman voice, and Pravus nearly choked on hate.

Pravus wanted fear.

The reverend had become less afraid in the last few days. The beast whispered that it was because Pravus had abandoned his path of choosing victims to maximize the reverend’s pain.

He’d have to fix that. He’d gotten so involved with the pleasure of the kill and the hunger for more, he’d forgotten his search for freedom for his people.

Pravus waited for full dark, then he left his plague of boils to be found later. It was getting more difficult to dump the bodies.

The police were out in force in the area around the mission. The park was staked out around the clock. He knew from police questioning that the car had been identified, and unless it was an emergency, he kept it out of sight in the underground parking lot beneath a condemned building.

Everyone was watchful. Pravus thrilled at the challenge.

When he had relieved himself of the burden, he wandered about with his typical aimless stroll, walking like he was a weakling, which covered the corded strength he’d gained by hours of exercise. He needed the strength to carry his victims so he could present the plagues to the reverend.

He went into his building determined to change and emerge a new man. Clean and well dressed. The beard that so completely changed the shape of his face, unglued and left behind.

It didn’t happen, though. He couldn’t shave. His hand shook too badly. And the beast pushed him, prodded, prowled, and gnawed.

He needed a new cell phone. But he didn’t have the patience to follow an older couple or search a car in a parking lot or an unlocked garage.

Instead he went to a store and bought one of those phones you could buy minutes with. There was no record of who bought those—the number wasn’t connected to his name, since he paid cash. Untraceable, Pravus was sure.

When he had it ready, he had a few more things to do, then he’d get back to his true purpose—his need to punish the reverend.

“So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?” O’Shea settled his ample backside in his desk chair and talked around a mouthful of meatball sub.

Keren kept her head down by sheer force of will. She was seeing double from hours of going over Caldwell’s phone records—the phone records of the six cell phones he’d stolen so far—his bank records before he cleaned out his accounts, and the videos taken of the crowds at the park. She knew the exact time she’d felt the demon there and she checked her time against the videos. But all the suspects were there and they all walked away together right at that time. It made her even more certain it was one of them, but there was no way to eliminate anybody.

The task force had met again. They’d traced the car to Murray… who had reported it stolen. Fingerprints of three of the men—the ones they could catch up with—had turned up nothing interesting. Dyson had come up with a new profile, but the man seemed real cranky about the generalizations. They’d heard every detail of what Higgins had found about Francis Caldwell’s childhood. Which wasn’t much. His parents were both deceased. Nothing about either death had raised red flags at the time, but now Keren had to wonder.

She made herself very busy fussing with a stain on the report in front of her. It needed to be cleaned up immediately.

She rose from her seat. “I’d better get a damp cloth. We don’t—”

“Sit,” O’Shea barked.

Keren didn’t sit. “You don’t give me orders, Mick.” They’d received a sketchy report that couldn’t be confirmed of a homeless woman, known on the street as Lupe, being snatched. Paul hadn’t been in. There was no report of a phone call. No threat to blow something up. Keren missed talking the case over with him, but she couldn’t stand dragging him back into the investigation.

“Sure I do.” O’Shea smirked. “I’m senior officer around here, and you’re just a little baby girl cop.”

The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t need to look up and see double of O’Shea. And she sure wasn’t going to answer his snoopy questions.

Keren resisted the urge to slug him. O’Shea was trying to distract her with his obnoxiousness so she’d quit watching her mouth. “You’re not senior when it comes to asking me questions like that.”

O’Shea took another huge bite of his sandwich and chewed. Way before all the food was swallowed, he asked, “You know what I think?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Keren enjoyed the tiny flash of caution in O’Shea’s eyes. He’d heard that sweet tone before. He knew his potential for becoming a victim of assault and battery was high and increasing by the moment.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite scared enough. “I think you’re hot for each other.”

“Mick!”

“What?”

“Don’t talk like that. Hot? He’s a man of the cloth for heaven’s sake! And what about me? You know I don’t… I mean no man’s gonna… I mean… oh, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” O’Shea held up both hands to defend himself, one clutching the half-eaten sandwich. “Okay, pick another word.”

“Well, I’d say we’re…” Keren caught herself. She’d spent plenty of time with O’Shea in the interrogation room, and she knew how good he was. He could make people admit to crimes they’d just thought about committing. Sometimes the lawyers, who were sitting in on the questioning, broke down and confessed to crimes they’d committed, unrelated to the case at hand. He didn’t usually use his talents on her, though.

She switched to attack mode just to even the playing field. “What’za matter, Mick, your pathetic life so boring you have to entertain yourself by making stuff up about me?”

O’Shea nodded, studying her like she was a menu at Burger King. “Good girl, I almost got you, but you recovered. So…” He returned to his sandwich and the beginning. “What’s the deal with you and the preacher?”

Keren rolled her eyes. She decided the statute of limitations was up on O’Shea’s order to sit, so she plopped back into her chair. “There’s no deal.”

“C’mon, honey, give. This is your old buddy Mick talking. I’ve seen the way you look at each other when you think no one is watching.”

“How does he look at me?” Keren caught herself again. Man, he was good. “I mean, not that you’re right, but tell me, just so I know what you’re imagining.”

O’Shea laughed.

Keren’s cheeks heated up.

O’Shea had, in many ways, stepped in and become a father to her since her own parents had started going to Fort Lauderdale for the winter and traveling extensively in a Winnebago year-round—except she’d have never talked so rudely to her father.