The book was still on the side table: the Good Book. His Good Book.

Raised by superstitious Aunt Norma—who was actually his mother's good friend, not a blood relative—he'd grown up believing in angels and demons and the eternal fires of Hell that awaited him if he chose to step off the straight and narrow path.

These days he considered himself more an agnostic than a lapsed Catholic. Either way, he no longer believed in Aunt Norma's fairy tales. If pressed, he couldn't pinpoint an exact incident that led to this change of heart, nor if it had been a conscious decision at all. The countless childhood hours spent dreading an Omnipotent Man in the Sky, who saw and heard everything, knew everything, even his darkest secrets and thoughts—at some point in his life between then and adulthood, he'd decided he no longer had the need nor fear of a God.

The Bible he kept on a bookshelf with technical manuals and his old encyclopedias was for research. It came in handy in his dealings with serial killers, particularly James Barclay. Checking for bibles in motel rooms was a holdover from his youth, before he and Norma had settled down in Connecticut, a habit he often wondered if it was ironic or superstitious.

Now here was his own bible on the entry table, opened to Deuteronomy.

And there were the same three passages underlined as the Gideon in the Firefly Motor Court: son, sorcerer, dead, abomination.

3

Witch Hunter

MARTIN DIDN'T CALL the police. He called Sheila Tanner.

He buzzed her up to his condo a little over half an hour later. While she cabbed from Manhattan, he washed off the stink of fear sweat and threw on a plush robe. He was half drunk when he opened the door. Her overcoat was much too thin for such a brisk night, her high cheekbones flushed from the cold. She was beautiful and unattainable and looked him over briefly with a scowl.

"Don't say it," he said.

She grinned, flipping her long, dirty-blond curls off her shoulders to remove her coat. The many bangles on her wrists jingled. "You know me too well." He took her coat and threw it on a hook. "Well?" she said. "Where is it?"

He tipped his head toward the entry table, where the King James Bible lay opened to the page Barclay had marked. Sheila knelt to study it. She knew better not to kneel in front of him, particularly when he was half-naked. It almost felt like a dare.

"Uh-huh. This is exactly his style." She reached to flip the page. Martin snagged her arm. She tensed, throwing an anxious, upset look up at him.

He let her go, shrugging. "They've already got one set of prints to rule out. Better not make it two."

She let her arm relax and returned her gaze to the table. A ballpoint pen lay in the change dish. "Was this pen here?"

"I think so. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's in the kitchen."