R.Scott Bakker - Disciple of the dog

I had been had. Despite all the goofy precautions I take, all the little anti-social gimmicks I use to remind myself there’s always more than meets the eye, I had willingly jumped into the jaws of what could be a lethal trap. People take things at face value, especially when those things gratify the old ego. So when a cop calls you at 11:38 EM. to say that he needs your help with the latest twist in your case, what do you do? Apparently you leap to your feet like the stooge you are, shout, “Hurry, Watson!” and jump into the back of his police cruiser.

Motherfucker.

“That wasn’t my question, Caleb. I asked you why you never said anything about them?”

But the fact was, he had, only in ways that had made me think he was soft in the head. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I had purposefully antagonized Reverend Nill in the hope of goading him into action. And then, true to form, I had let the prospect of getting laid derail everything. As bad as James fucking Bond, only minus all the class. I mean, with all those references that Nolen had made to bigotry in our first talk… All I had to do was rehearse that conversation and all the obvious questions would have asked themselves. And now here I was, trapped in the back seat of Nolan’s cruiser, with every reason to believe that the turd actually belonged to the Church of the Third Resurrection.

Why else would he have worked so hard to put verbal distance between himself and bigotry that first meeting?

“I don’t understand,” Nolen replied with an oh so phony smile. He braked at one of Ruddick’s few stop lights. I could see Molly covertly trying her door. Locked, of course.

“Well, Caleb, let me put it this way, then. You have this beautiful white girl, named Jennifer, who likes going out dancing with her best friend, who happens to be a handsome black man, at a bar that happens to be frequented by several fanatic members of a white supremacist religion, which is not only run by a cadre of ex-cons but also happens to be actively recruiting in your jurisdiction, and then suddenly, poof, this beautiful white girl disappears, vanishes… “

While I was saying this, I pulled my cell out of my belt clip and handed it to Molly, who snapped it up like a fat kid with chicken nuggets. Caleb didn’t reply at first, so the sound of Molly leaving a “detailed message” for her editor at the Post-Gazette seemed to grate with sham intent…

“Yeah,” she was saying, “so I’m, like, with Chief Nolen right now, Chief Caleb Nolen, and we’re heading to the station…”

I glared into the rear-view mirror with violent intensity, watched Nolen’s face from the angle of out-of-body experiences and guardian angels. His eyes clicked to meet mine once-twice…

“I have a daughter,” he fairly blurted. “Cynthia. She’s seven, more beautiful than… I don’t know. About eight months ago I get this call, an anonymous prowler tip… over on Ross and Maitland. Turned out to be nothing… except that I was almost forty-five minutes late picking Cynthi up from her swimming classes. When I finally arrived at the school, I find out that someone’s already driven her home… her coach’s assistant, a woman who just happens to belong to Nill’s church… “

His eyes flash up to the mirror, and for the first time I glimpsed real fury. “Thirds,” he says, staring at me for a heartbeat. “We call them Thirds… “

His gaze bored on down the road.

“They own this town.”

He pulled up in front of the white-glowing station, dropped the cruiser in park. A call crackled across his radio-some small-town nonsense that he completely ignored. My hackles had smoothed somewhat, but I wouldn’t breathe easy until he cracked the fucking back doors. He had fairly admitted that Nill had leverage, that he was frightened for his family. Maybe that explained his emotional outburst at the motel.

Nolen turned in his seat, continued explaining in a more apologetic tone. After the incident with his daughter he had researched Nill, discovered that he was in fact an ordained minister. Nolen had toyed with the thought of discrediting him before his congregation. But he was a former convict as well, one with connections that ran deep into the Aryan Brotherhood and the Hells Angels. This was why the man leapt to the top of his list when Jennifer went missing.

“I went and talked to him,” Nolen said in defensive tones. “To Nill. He was pious… furious… Said that there’s no one in his church who would dare cross his word. And his word was to keep everything quiet, to express nothing but Christian charity, to do everything they could to see the Thirds grow… “

He turned his face to the white gleam of his station, hesitant and brooding.

“Maybe I was afraid. Hell, I know that I was afraid… And why shouldn’t I be, when both you and I know I’m just a grocery clerk playing cops and robbers.” Even without seeing his expression, I knew that this admission cut him deep.

The upholstery creaked. He turned his face back, glanced at Molly then at me through the slot. “But I believed him, Disciple. I just thought… I just hoped that I could have it, like, both ways, you know? So I believed the lunatic.”

And for my part, I believed Nolen. Well, to be more precise, I believed that he believed what he was saying-which is about as good as it gets with someone like me.

I mulled his words for a moment, thought about how Baars had avoided my question of whether they had any enemies in Ruddick. “And what about the Framers?” I asked. “They would know about the Thirds, wouldn’t they?”

“You would think so,” Nolen said. He stared down into his palms, frowned as if seeing a stain he thought he’d washed away. “But the town they live in is five billion years away.” The Ruddick police force was about the size you would expect for a town of around four thousand souls: a chief, a deputy chief, two sergeants, and about twelve PFCs. But since Ruddick had once been a small manufacturing hub of some twenty thousand, the police station was almost ludicrously oversized-it was like Nolen and his people had set up shop in the corner of an abandoned warehouse.

Nolen waved us past his unblinking duty sergeant and ushered us into a conference room adjacent to his office. I had popped the cork on my memory and was reciting details of every similar ritualistic murder I had seen on A amp;E, Discovery Channel, and so on. The truth was, I had never worked a case remotely like this one before. Murders like this, ones involving intentional as opposed to inadvertent clues, are a bona fide rarity. The vast majority are either simple crimes of passion or involve money and property. If anything, murderers are even more allergic to symbolic abstractions than the general population. There’s nothing quite so literal as blood.

It really is a miracle when you think about it: that there could be so many brains-billions of them buzzing out there-and that so few of them would suffer this kind of glitch. Thank God for natural selection, I say.

It was Molly who asked Nolen if he could pinpoint the locations of the two fingers and the baby toe on a map. He left the two of us blinking in the fluorescent glare for several moments, then returned to spread a large map of Ruddick across the veneer-topped boardroom table.

“So…” Nolen said, scratching his head with a pencil while he found his bearings. It took him several moments peering at street names, but soon he had marked the map with three little-girl-neat Xs. Dancer, I thought. The guy was a dancer.

I tried to make a show of being hard-boiled and wise, but all I could really think about was how gay Nolen’s Xs looked. He should be politicking behind the scenes on the latest Britney Spears tour, not policing.

“What if…” Molly began.