Skinner kissed her good-bye, left her on the couch, and crept out the back door. Dark as a coal sack outside, except for the stars, which were bright and plentiful. With the incriminating pack of paper under his arm, he went back to Fischer’s house, snuck in again, and lay in her bed until dawn, reading the emails.

By first light, he was convinced that the Van Den Bergs were up to something illegal, sending shipments of illegal somethings all over the country. Had to be the Legos. Could have been drugs, the way they talked in code, but they weren’t making enough money to be drug dealers.

It occurred to him that if a legitimate seller of Lego kits could find an off-the-books source that only cost, say, half of the normal wholesale price, he could make a killing. Wouldn’t even have to pay taxes on the profit. The Lego company would supply the advertising, and if you bought even a small number of kits from the company . . . you’d have the perfect cover.

“Sweet,” Skinner said. “Crooked but sweet.”

Shortly after dawn, he heard the back door rattle and was seized by the sudden fear that Larry had come home unexpectedly; but then Fischer called out, “Skinner? You still here?”

“Back in the bedroom,” he called.

She appeared in the bedroom doorway and posed there, one hand on the jamb. She had, he thought, a weird glow in her eyes.

7

Three people shot, one of them dead, all possibly tied to the Marian apparitions.

As Skinner and Fischer were sneaking into Van Den Berg’s house, Virgil was in bed; he’d spent a few minutes thinking about God and His religions and wondered why religions were so often tied to violence. When he was in college, years earlier, during the usual late-night weed-fired discussions of sex, politics, and religion, he’d decided that religions and political parties were quite alike, except that religions dealt with morality, primarily, while political parties dealt with economics.

In other words, they were both dealing with people’s deepest feelings about how the world should work. Differences could escalate to physical clashes, as they might have even in the late-night weed-fired college discussions, except, of course, for the weed: “You’re so full of shit, dude. Pass the joint.”

Now, lying in bed all these years later, he still wondered why religions, since they dealt with morality, shouldn’t shun any form of violence to others? Then again, he thought, maybe they did. Maybe the connection between religion and violence was Fake News.