“You’re stuck on this point, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Patrick. Maybe they were very vain men. Maybe they were covering up crow’s feet.”

“With white Pan-Cake?”

“Maybe they were mimes. Or clowns. Or goth freaks.”

“Or KISS fans,” I said.

“That, too.” She hummed a bar of “Beth.”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“The connection’s there,” I said. “I can feel it.”

“You mean to the makeup?”

“Yes,” I said. “And the connection between Hardiman and EEPA. I’m certain. It’s staring us in the face and we’re too tired to see it.”

She shrugged. “Let’s go see what Bolton has to say at his debriefing. Maybe that’ll make sense of everything.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t be a pessimist,” she said.

Half Bolton’s men were working this neighborhood for information, others were staking out Angie’s place, Phil’s apartment, and mine, too, so Bolton had gotten permission from Father Drummond to gather in the church.

As it usually did in the mornings, the church bore the burnt aroma of incense and candle wax from the seven o’clock mass, a stronger scent of pine solvent and oil soap in the pews, and the sad smell of wilting chrysanthemums. Mottled dust spun in the pewter shafts of light that slanted through the east windows over the altar and disappeared in the middle rows of pews. A church, on a cold fall morning, with its smoky browns and reds, its whiskey-hued air and multicolored stained glass just warming to a frigid sun, always feels as the founders of Catholicism probably intended—like a place cleansed and purified of earthly imperfection, a place meant to hear only whispers and the rustling hush of fabric against a bending knee.

Bolton sat on the altar in the gilded red priest’s celebrant chair. He’d moved it forward a bit to prop his feet on the chancel rail while agents and several cops sat in the front four pews, most holding pens, paper, or tape recorders at the ready.

“Glad you could make it,” Bolton said.

“Don’t do that,” Angie said, glancing at his shoes.

“What?”

“Sit on the altar in the priest’s chair with your feet on the rail.”

“Why not?”

“Some people would find it offensive.”

“Not me.” He shrugged. “I’m not Catholic.”

“I am,” she said.

He watched her to see if she was joking, but she stared back so calmly and firmly that he knew she wasn’t.

He sighed and got out of the chair, placed it back where it belonged. As we headed back for the pews, he crossed the altar and climbed into the raised pulpit.

“Better?” he called.

She shrugged, as Devin and Oscar took their places in the pew ahead of us. “It’ll do.”

“So glad I’m no longer offending your delicate sensibilities, Ms. Gennaro.”

She rolled her eyes at me as we took seats in the fifth pew and I once again felt an odd flush of admiration for my partner’s faith in a religion I had long ago abandoned. She doesn’t advertise it or announce it at every turn, and she has nothing but scorn for the patriarchal hierarchy that runs the church, but she nevertheless holds firm to a belief in the religion and ritual with a quiet intensity that can’t be shaken.