The loss of Mia made her feel more embittered about any discussion of a benevolent God. If someone said, “She’s in a better place now,” or “Trust in His plan,” she wanted to scream her throat bloody about the facts. She encountered them every day in the wife with the swollen, purpled eye or the kids in week-old diapers or the dead body rotting in a dumpster. The universe was cold. The universe didn’t care whether you lived or died or prayed or raged. If you wanted justice or reward, you had to seek it out yourself. Judgment came with a badge, not a Bible. Her work was her religion and she was committed to finding and stopping the Blind Prophet because she knew he was causing a pain and loss all too familiar to her. She would be his reckoning. She couldn’t save her daughter, but she would save others and damn a murderer and defiler in the process.

So she studied the evidence as she used to study scripture, and she changed the course of the conversation completely when she recognized the simple pattern of geography. Forget about the messaging of the churches and their parishioners for a second and focus instead on the location of the altar itself. Look at where the prophet was choosing to do his work.

The crime scenes had clearly been scouted in advance, and they were all isolated but near roads. She guessed the killer had a job that not only brought him to such places but protected him, cloaked him. He worked alone because his anger and doctrines and—possibly?—a crippling insecurity didn’t allow him to function around others. And he drove something that would go unnoticed.

She noted the common proximity of cell towers, all within a few hundred yards of the bodies. Not only that, but a few phone calls revealed that each of these towers had recently been retrofitted with an omnimetal booster antenna that enhanced its signal range fivefold. She rightly guessed that their suspect was the technician.

His windowless van—with the cell phone company’s logo painted on its side—had been used to transport the bodies. He had killed over thirty people by the time Nora, Chives, and six other officers pulled up, their lights flashing, to a tower he was working on.