Reck chuffed a small breath, and then a strange little smile tightened his lips. He pushed off the desk and moved toward the door. “You can go. We’ll have some follow-up, so keep yourself available.”

“Is that what you tell all the boys?”

Reck just kept moving.

“You told me you’d answer my question.”

At the door, Reck paused, his hand on the knob. He didn’t look back. But he said, “I don’t know anything about Matty Fennmore. Never heard of him.”

“That’s all I get? Fuck you, asshole.”

“But I have done some reading on a guy named Matthew Fennley.”

In the vast quiet that had fallen over Hog Hollow Hocks, Reck’s shoes made muffled clicks in the sawdust. Then silence. And then Reck was out the door, pulling it shut behind him.

North pulled out his phone. He pulled up Missouri’s Case.net. He plugged in Matthew Fennley.

Matthew Fennley, Kansas City, December 2012. Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Six days’ jail. Matthew Fennley, Liberty, May 2013. Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Four weeks’ jail. Three hundred dollar fine. Matthew Fennley, Independence, November 2013, Sexual misconduct in the second degree. Six weeks’ jail. Matthew Fennley, St. Louis City, March 2014. Prostitution. Eight months’ imprisonment.

North’s hands were shaking as he went back to Google. He typed in Matthew Fennley again. Nothing.

He typed in Matthew Fennmore. He pulled up the RiverChurch page. He found Matty’s picture and searched the image on Google. And there it was, on a 2011 playbill for the Kansas City Greater Community Theater’s production of Oliver!: Matthew Fennley in the role of the Artful Dodger.

His hands were shaking so badly now that he could barely type, but he managed to get RiverChurch into the search box. The page Matty had directed them to came up immediately. But North scrolled down, viewing other results. A church in South Dakota, in Ohio, in Texas. A slight variation for a congregation in Saint Charles, Missouri. But nothing else about the RiverChurch supposedly pastored by Matty Fennmore’s father. And how hard was it really, North thought, to make a webpage? You pay a hundred bucks, click a few buttons, type a few paragraphs, and voila, there’s an official RiverChurch website with your picture and a whole bunch of horseshit about how you’re a youth pastor.

And then, all of a sudden, North’s hands were still. Everything inside him had stilled. It was a kind of molecular cold that had frozen everything down to atomic vibrations. It made it difficult to think, like the gears wouldn’t turn or shift. But one thing glittered, icy and clear, in that stillness.

North was fairly sure he was about to kill Matty Fennley.

Chapter 26

I can walk upstairs,” Shaw said as they navigated the steps to Shaw’s rooms above the Borealis offices. As though to prove the point, Shaw took two quick steps, escaping from North’s hand on the small of his back. He tripped on the next step and crashed.