His mind got caught in a loop speculating about it, and he finally got out of bed and opened up his laptop and looked up the most religious states and the most violent states. Turns out the six most religious states, as determined in one major study, were also among the ten states with the highest murder rates. The six least religious states were among the ten with the lowest.

He found that depressing, turned off the computer, and lay awake thinking about other demographic characteristics that could account for the overlap. Perhaps the most religious people lived in the parts of the country that were also the poorest and that accounted for the crime rather than religiosity? But, then, was religiosity related to poverty or were the two unrelated?

What would happen if the most religious places legalized weed?

He was still speculating about that when he drifted off.

—

When he woke the next morning, he had a text from Bea Sawyer that said “We were at the scene until 2 a.m. Got a motel room in Albert Lea. Not much new. Don’t call early.”

Virgil got up, shaved and showered, contemplated his store of T-shirts and picked a white “Larkin Poe” shirt that showed a snake wrapped around an apple. After dressing, he walked over to Mom’s Cafe, where he had two of the worst pancakes of his entire life, which made him wonder how, exactly, a cook could screw up something so simple. The pancakes tasted as though the flour had been cut with sawdust, while the syrup had the consistency of tap water.

Done with breakfast, he walked down to Skinner & Holland, where he found a tall, rugged-looking Catholic priest, in a black suit and clerical collar, standing on the sidewalk, eating an ice-cream cone, and talking with Holland.

When Holland saw Virgil coming, he said to the priest, “Here he is.”

Virgil walked up, and Holland introduced him to the priest, George Brice, who said, “I think we have a mutual friend.”

He mentioned a St. Paul priest that Virgil had met through his father, and they talked for a moment about one of Virgil’s earlier cases that had involved a Lutheran minister who was an international criminal, a fake but politically explosive archaeological find, a variety of gunmen from the Middle East, and a secret American intelligence organization that Virgil wasn’t even supposed to dream about but occasionally did anyway.

“There’s been a murder now. Wardell tells me you think it’s related to the two church shootings,” Brice said, bringing the conversation back to the present. “Is that correct?”