At last, at nearly midnight, the hospital staff assured me that Calvin was stable and that I could head home. “There’s nothing you can do for him right now. Let him sleep,” the doctor told me, “and get some rest yourself.”

At home, I found Christie waiting up for me.

“You know how I’m not supposed to discuss anything related to my cases with you?” I said. “Well, tomorrow you’ll hear about this on the news: We lost an agent. A DEA agent. We believe she was forced to kill herself. Her suicide was filmed and aired online.”

Christie covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh, Pat.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t know that there is anything to say.”

“How are you?”

“I’m okay. But pray for her family, will you? And for Calvin. And pray that I find the people I need to before anyone else gets hurt.”

Gets killed, I thought, but let myself stick with the less telling phrase.

Dr. Williams’s sermon came to mind, and the Scripture verse he’d read to us about the Spirit making intercession “with groanings which cannot be uttered.”

I could certainly identify with that right now. The soul-stifling language of pain—one that God must know all too well if he knows us at all.

“Listen,” I said, “at the restaurant, I had the sense that there was something you were trying to tell me. We were talking about love and truth—if it’s right to protect someone with a lie. We were going to pick up the conversation later, when we saw each other again.”

++++

Christie took Pat’s hand.

“None of that matters right now,” she told him. “It’s nothing. Not the turtles. Not the polar bear. They’re just stories from my life, just stories to help you understand me better.”

“What is it you need me to understand?”

She was quiet.

“You can trust me,” he said, “Whatever it is, Christie, let me in.”

“We don’t need to talk about me tonight. I want to pray for your friend. And for the family of the woman who died.”

++++

Sometimes there is no elaborate plan, no criminal mastermind who’s always one step ahead of the authorities, who’s playing a twisted game of Catch Me If You Can with the cops.

Sometimes there’s just senseless pain and death, just tears and inexplicable evil. You want it to make sense, but it doesn’t. You want morality to come out ahead, but instead you find only the merciless swipe of the Reaper’s scythe and blood spraying in its wake.

And another corpse lying on the ground.

That was all I could think of, despite how hard I tried to join Christie in her earnest and heartfelt prayers.

STAGE V

Acceptance

Called off the house. Inside the parking garage.
“Help my lack of love.” The man behind the curtain.

61

Tuesday, November 6