The Circuit Rider (28 page)

“H
is name is Toby Raines,” Bird told Burgoines. She could read his face and knew that he was trying to figure out whether or not he should believe her.

“And how do you know it was him?” Burgoines said. Bird caught the undercurrent in the man’s voice. She knew he was suspicious of her already.
Well, the hell with him
, Bird thought. She was here to get information, not to give it.

“He left a message after he killed a girl in Nevada,” she said. “Even signed his name and said he was going to San Francisco.”

Burgoines wrote something down on a sheet of paper, then leaned back in his chair and looked at Bird.

“Now, why would a man do that?” he said.

Bird shrugged her shoulders. “I have no idea. Men do a lot of dumb things. It’s a quality of their gender.”

“You’re probably right about that,” he said. “Well, what I can do is send word to the other stations to be on the lookout for a man with that name. We might hear something.”

“Do you have any other leads? Any other information?”

Burgoines smiled at her. “No. And even if I did, I’m not sure I would share it with you at this point. Let me think about it, though. If something comes up, maybe I’ll look you up. Are you staying here in town for a while?”

“Most likely,” Bird said.

“Where are you staying?”

“Haven’t picked a hotel yet. Can you recommend one?”

“If money is no object, the Palace Hotel is brand-new, the best hotel in San Francisco. And it’s just down the street. It would be convenient if I needed to contact you.”

Bird got to her feet.

“So that’s where you’ll be staying?” Burgoines said. He still had a pencil in his hand and wrote something down on the paper.

“I believe I will,” Bird said.

She turned to leave.

“Stop by when you get a chance, Detective,” she said. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

T
ower shut the door behind him. The room was empty save for a bed, a night table, and a single wooden chair. He pulled the chair into the middle of the room and sat down.

He let his eyes roam over all of the drawings of pentagrams. Collectively, they gave the impression of sheer and unadulterated insanity.

Tower’s mind initially refused to accept what he was seeing. How could they be here? How could this be happening, now, with a man who served as an accountant for the church? The pentagram was the symbol that he had seen carved into Bird’s chest.

Tower remembered the time he had been awakened with Bird on top of him, her gun to his head. Accusing him, or someone within the church, of collaborating with Toby Raines.

Now he wondered if she had been right all along.

Tower stood, walked to the night table, and opened the drawer. It was empty. He knelt down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there.

There had to be something here, something that would point him in the right direction. He had a feeling that if he could find Bradley Kirner, he would find all the answers he was looking for.

As well as the answers Bird was looking for.

A door to the right opened to reveal a small closet with a single row of shirts hanging from a wooden pole. Tower checked each of the shirt pockets. Nothing.

He went back to the middle of the room.

Something was nagging at the back of his mind. He was missing something. When he had been an investigator for the detective agency, he had learned to depend on hunches. But what? What was he missing?

And then it hit him.

A Bible.

A young man who volunteered for the church and was in some capacity an employee of the church would have a Bible in his room. Tower looked around the room again.

He went to the bed and lifted the single pillow.

Underneath it lay a Bible.

Tower picked up the book and looked inside the front cover. There was no name or address there.

A bookmark was placed near the back. Tower looked at the page. It was the book of Romans, and a line in the passage entitled “Sin and Death” was underlined: “We know that the law is spiritual, whereas I am weak flesh sold into the slavery of sin.”

Tower turned more pages but saw nothing else marked. He looked at the inside back cover of the Bible. Nothing.

He was about to put it back down on the bed when he went back to the page with the bookmark. He pulled the bookmark out. It was a thin strip of paper, blank on the front. He turned it over.

There was a single line of text.

New Divinities Revival.

Tower slipped the bookmark into his pocket, took down one of the pentagrams from the wall, folded that, and put it into his pocket as well.

He left the room, shutting the door behind him, and walked back into the tobacconist’s shop.

He waited for a customer to finish his transaction with Mr. Giovanni, then approached him.

He handed him the key.

“Do you happen to know of a place around here called New Divinities?” Tower asked.

Giovanni shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

From behind them, someone spoke.

“Did you say ‘New Divinities’?”

Tower turned. It was the customer who had just made a purchase.

“Yes,” Tower said. “Do you know of it?”

“Sure, it was a church group. Just a few blocks from here.”

“Was?” Tower said.

“Yes,” the customer said. “Two days ago it burned to the ground.”

B
ird had never seen anything like the Palace Hotel. It was seven stories tall, with a huge, open lobby covered with thick carpets and packed with regal furniture. Men sat in plush chairs, reading the paper.

Each floor formed a U shape around the lobby and featured a white railing. From above, natural light flooded the entire space.

Bird went to the front desk, paid for a room for two days, and was directed to an elevator, or a “rising room,” as the front desk attendant called it. She rode it to the fifth floor and found her room.

Inside, the room was the best she’d ever had. Her own bathroom, plus a balcony looking out over Market Street. The front desk had told her there was a button you could push and ask for anything you wanted. She thought she would give it a try.

She pressed the button and set her gear on the room’s bed. Within a minute or so, someone knocked on her door.

Bird held a gun in her hand as she opened the door.

A man in a crisp white suit stood before her.

“You rang, madame?” he said.

“What are the two finest brands of whiskey you have here?” she said.

He told her.

“Great. Send up one of each, please.”

Bird had barely begun to put away what little gear she had when the man returned. He gave her the bottles and told her the total would be added to her room charge. She tipped him and shut and locked the door.

She got a whiskey glass, heavy leaded crystal that held about four full shots of whiskey, and filled it up.

Bird sat down in a chair and put her boots up on a finely upholstered ottoman.

The whiskey went down so smooth she almost cried at its luxury.

She was home.

In addition to it being the most luxurious hotel room she’d ever been in, it was also the quietest. She couldn’t hear a thing. So strange after the trail, where there was always some sound. Wind. Birds. Animals.

Bird found the bottom of her whiskey glass and refilled it.

Her body was warming with the liquor and she took off her boots, her shirt, and her hat. She even shrugged off her gun belt and set it on the bed.

She went into the bathroom and poured herself a hot bath, then went back to the chair, sat down, and drank more of the fine liquor.

Bird thought of Tower then. Wondered what he was doing, pictured him holed up somewhere in the church, praying for forgiveness for all of the things that had happened on the circuit ride. Things that God had nothing to do with but that people who believed in such things loved to act like were all part of some master plan.

What a pile of cow chips.

She sank back into the chair, noticed her glass was empty again, refilled it, and registered that the first bottle was already empty.

How did that happen so fast?
she thought.

Mike Tower. What an interesting man
, she thought. She figured no other preacher in the world had his background. A Civil War spy. A private investigator. And then a preacher. Carrying a Bible instead of a gun.

Never in my lifetime
, Bird thought. They would have to pry her guns from her cold dead hands before she went anywhere without them.

The pistols were her twin saviors.

And the six bullets they each carried?

Her twelve apostles.

Bird smiled and opened the second bottle.

She carried it into the bathroom, took off the rest of her clothes, and sank into the hot water. She cleaned herself, even doused her blonde hair and scrubbed her face, then drank directly from the bottle.

She sat up straight and ran her finger along the raised edge of the pentagram that Toby Raines had carved into her flesh so many years ago.

She closed her eyes. Images of Mike Tower, of Toby Raines on his horse, dragging her, of the dead men left in her trail, flashed across her mind.

She slept, and when she woke, the water was cool.

Bird took a long drink from the bottle.

She was drunk, she knew. But she felt rested.

And she felt a burn in her belly not from the whiskey, but from the knowledge that Toby Raines was probably here in San Francisco.

She got out of the tub, put on clean clothes, and strapped on her guns.

As grand as her room was, she was not going to spend much time in it.

It was time to find Toby Raines.

T
hough there were no flames or residual smoke, only the stench of charred wood remained.

All that remained of New Divinities was a few resolute interior walls, now black with creosote. Piles of burned wood fragments were mounded in several places on the building’s lot.

Tower stood before the ruined space.

It sat on the street between an empty lot and a schoolhouse.

Next to the burned-out shell, someone had scraped together a large pile of the debris. Tower spotted something white underneath the mess, and he walked over and nudged a burned board over with his foot.

Several sheets of paper, singed at the edges, were stuck together and still soggy from whoever had tried to put out the fire.

He picked up one of the sheets.

The top of the paper read, Religious retreat.

The date was scheduled for the day of the fire.

And at the bottom was the name of a church.

With an address.

It took Tower nearly an hour to find the church, thanks to a variety of people who offered him directions. It was a very small and humble structure, just one room really, with a few benches.

Tower walked toward the altar and saw a man placing a goblet into a wooden tabernacle.

“Excuse me,” Tower said.

The man turned, and Tower introduced himself, told him about the sheet of paper he’d found at the burned-out wreckage of New Divinities.

“Impossible,” the man said. He had told Tower his name was Hallebeke. “I personally told that young Kirner fellow to cease any mention of my congregation with that group.”

“Why did you tell him that?”

The priest shrugged on his white robe and put a simple wooden cross hanging from a strand of leather around his neck.

“Because I had gotten several complaints from a young woman who had chosen to go on one of those retreats.”

Tower knew he was close.

“And what happened?”

“She wouldn’t say exactly, but I could tell it had been a bad experience. It is my hunch that she was given some sort of drug, perhaps an opiate. Because she had trouble remembering exactly what happened.”

“Did you go to the police?”

The priest shook his head. “I wished to, but the family involved asked that I not.”

“So what did you do?”

“I forbade the young man to ever try to recruit any of my parishioners for his religious retreats. I allowed him to continue to attend service here, but after our very frank discussion, he never did.”

Tower got to his feet.

“Thank you very much for your time, Father,” Tower said.

“I only wish I could have been more of a help. Did you talk to the young man’s supervisor?”

Tower, already at the door, stopped and turned back to the priest.

“The young man’s supervisor?”

“Yes, one time the young man came with his supervisor, an older man affiliated with the church. It was my impression that he was the organizer of the retreats and that the young man was more of a recruiter.”

“Did the supervisor have a name?”

The priest thought for a moment, then answered.

“Silas.”