“I called Mark Norman at the FBI—I’ve had contact with him before—and asked him to cut through the red tape for me. He got back to me pretty quickly, but it was a hard no, though he wasn’t sure why. So I contacted both of our senators, explained the situation, asked them to weigh in, but no luck there, either. Word got back to me through the grapevine that I should lay off, so I had my staff do a little digging. Turns out The First People’s Bank has contributed rather heavily to all of the senators on the finance committee, including one of our own. That probably wouldn’t make that much difference ordinarily, but they were also big contributors to the president’s election campaign, and the president, as you know, controls the FBI. I’m not alleging some big conspiracy—we’re too disordered here in Washington to pull off any big conspiracies—but the bank bought themselves some friends who have apparently not only freed them from regulations but freed them from investigations.” Brad could almost hear his shrug over the phone. “Sometimes the god of money demands sacrifices.”

It was the second time today he’d heard a version of that phrase, and he didn’t like it. “Apparently that sacrifice is justice,” he said and hung up on the congressman.

The god of money.

The phrase stayed with him the rest of the day, through one false start after another, and though he had a difficult time falling asleep that night, eventually he nodded off, and he dreamed of a god who was a legless armless rectangle, like a dollar bill, and whose face in an oval opening in the center of its body had to be fed with the sacrificed corpses of the poor.

4

Sitting on the low wall by the band room, Nick and Aaron ate their lunches in silence. They’d told no one about what had happened with Victor—

V.J.

—but that Saturday was with them, even when they didn’t talk about it, and the encounter at the bank weighed heavily on them both.

At least Aaron had not seen Victor’s parents. Well, technically Nick hadn’t either, but he’d been there when their bodies had been discovered, and he’d heard enough of his dad’s and the sheriff’s conversation to be able to conjure details of the scene in his mind. Aaron had been lucky enough to have been spared that.