I hoped I wasn’t pushing my luck, assuming that my pastor’s landline was open. After all, she was connected to some of the Freedom Center’s programs and might be getting the same federal scrutiny the nuns got. But I called my answering service, anyway, and found it had been deluged again with media calls, everyone wanting to interview the private eye whom the police badly wanted to question.

My clients were more squeamish. I spent almost an hour persuading two law firms to stay with me. A third wouldn’t return my calls, and I didn’t blame them. Until I could come out of hiding, I was a pretty sorry excuse for an investigator.

Bernardo, the big orange cat, appeared and decided I was better than no company at all. He began following me, winding in between my legs, so that I had to be careful not to trip over him. He jumped up onto the table next to the sofa bed while I was stripping the sheets off it and converting it back to a sofa and started sniffing my Smith & Wesson.

When I snatched the gun out of the way, he began exploring Miss Claudia’s Bible. My attention was on the gun, checking the safety and putting it in my tuck holster, so I didn’t see his leap, just Miss Claudia’s Bible flying off the table.

“Bernardo!” I cried. “That book took a beating last night. It doesn’t need you throwing it around. We’re holding it in trust.”

The spine, which had cracked during the flight through the laundry, split completely with the fall. I didn’t want to try to tape it together, which would damage the fragile leather, but I could put a rubber band around it and leave it at Karen’s until I had time to glue it properly.

The fall had opened the binding along the spine and pulled the leather away from the front cover. It was when I started to press the leather around the edges of the buckram cover boards underneath to hold the leather in place, that I saw the negatives poking out from beneath the endpaper. I sucked in a breath and sat down slowly, as if I were balancing a crate of eggs on my head.

I carefully peeled the endpaper back completely. There, between the buckram and the paper, were two strips of negatives inside a folded sheet of onionskin. I risked putting my battery back in my cellphone long enough to use the camera, shooting the strips the way I found them in the Bible under the endpaper, then shooting my own fingertips pulling them out. Each strip had twelve exposures on it. On the onionskin wrapping, in faded block letters, Lamont Gadsden had printed PICTURES TAKEN IN MARQUETTE PARK, AUGUST 6, 1966.