In their photographs, the male members of the Swift Sword of the Savior looked a lot like farmers or tradesmen. They wore blue jeans, baseball caps, T-shirts with long-sleeve shirts over them, and usually some kind of work boot. Leah had seen a number of photographs of Lee Wolf and the accomplices arrested for helping him with the bombings, arsons, and murders—both surveillance shots and mug shots. The photographs had not included any women.

She had decided that the women wouldn’t be wearing overly conservative, modest clothes. If a woman was up to no good, she would want to look like the majority. Leah also didn’t believe that the motivation for any group that would include Lee Wolf could be religion. Their record of arson and murder proved it wasn’t Jesus because they thought like Jesus; it was Jesus because saying the group was Christian meant “You’d better look just like me.”

Leah Hawkins watched and listened in six towns on the average day, mostly near the border between Arkansas and Missouri, but nothing led her closer to the place where the three killers were hiding.

At night Leah sat in her hotel with her laptop on, trying to find her way onto the site that was being used by the Swift Sword of the Savior. Each night she gave it another try. She had gotten into the dark web through Tor and tried finding the site by typing in the group’s name, all the subjects she could remember that white militias liked to talk about, various names for the region, and even scrambled letters made from the name of the group. Nothing worked. Finally, as she became more impatient, she looked at the date on her computer.

She typed “September 30,” and then scrolled through long lists of posts, sites, updates on things she had no time to identify, and then stopped. She clicked on something that said, “Today’s Subversive Thought,” posted August 21.

There was a male voice. “It’s getting to be the tail end of summer, and you know what that means. It’s the time of year when most of the country’s kids go back to school. I understand that in some places like California, a lot of them have started already. The whole idea is to get another great big dose of propaganda to socialize the kids.”

“Is that you?” Leah whispered. “It sounds like you.” Only a few weeks ago she had spent a nightmarish evening listening to his voice.

“They learn to love their neighbor, regardless of which sex he is, and do unto others, and share. I guess you could see that as all one lesson.”

Yes, it was definitely Lee Wolf.