I pulled into Louden just before sunrise and parked the van in the lot of a semideserted strip mall with a Laundromat and a shabby looking dollar store. I secured the doors, double-checked the ties of the canvas partition and slid into the back, where I dug into a huge pile of the Hudson Herald and the Louden Times. The butler had followed March’s instructions to a tee, loading up over a week’s worth of the two publications. It was tempting to just start at the date of Nathan’s possession and work forward, but med school had taught me better. Cutting corners always comes back to bite you in the end.

I’d read about some fairly innocuous local occurrences: the opening of a new Wal-Mart, an eighty-six-year-old rancher caught growing marijuana in his basement. I shifted my “read” pile away from my “to be read” pile, and there, on the top of the stack, in letters as long as the palm of my hand, was the word Fire!

I scanned the page frantically to find the date. Three days before I lost Nathan.

“St. Anne’s Catholic Church burned down early Saturday morning, and three parishioners are missing.”

Unbidden, the image from my dream flashed through my brain. Two dead, covered in blood. I’d thought it a premonition, when really my stressed brain was just having a field day inundating me with horrific imagery. The article went on to list the missing persons—a priest, a nun and a parish secretary presumed to have wandered into the desert—and an ominous warning about record temperatures making their chances of survival slim. And the missing persons had made no effort to contact authorities when the fire broke out. That struck me as a bit fishy.

I sat back on my heels, unsure what I should read into such a news item. For a sleepy town like Louden, a big fire was big news.

That there were three people wandering the desert when they should have been resting in a county morgue’s cooler made it a piece of interest. If the Fangs were in town, what were the chances the victims never called the fire department because they were dead already? It would be just like the Fangs to trash a church.

I read on, searching for any other unusual news stories until I couldn’t stay awake anymore, then fell asleep with my head cushioned by the local girls’ volleyball scores. I don’t know how long I’d been out when my phone rang.

“What the hell kind of brothel did you send me to?” I hissed after I hit the connect button. “A male prostitute tried to steal my blood yesterday!”

“Um…this is Max.”

“Oh.” I’d been expecting Byron to call and gloat or give me another travel tip. “How are things in Michigan?”