They circled the structure and called up with a bullhorn, telling him to climb down. He did not respond for the longest time, only watched them from a height of some two hundred feet. She secured a pair of binoculars and glassed him from below. Her colleagues had been wrong about his profile. There was nothing special about his appearance. He didn’t have wild eyes or long stringy hair or devil’s horns or face tats or burn marks or scarring or anything that distinguished him. He was in his forties, brown-haired, beginning to bald, soft around the edges from too many cheeseburgers. Completely unexceptional. She knew something terrible roiled inside the man, but she didn’t know the source. His lips were moving, not constantly, but intermittently, as if he were in conversation with someone, something.

“Please climb down now,” the sarge shouted through the bullhorn. “Climb down or we’re coming up after you.”

Crotter’s lips stilled. He nodded and hesitated only another moment before jumping. Nora pulled the binoculars away from her eyes just as his body momentarily eclipsed the sun and threw a cool shadow over her face during his few, long seconds of flight.

He landed with a meaty smack. The ground was grassy and marshy enough that he lived. But he fractured his spine and fissured his skull. The ambulances didn’t arrive for twenty minutes and she spent that time kneeling over him, talking to him, trying to keep him alive, because she wanted an explanation. “What is the door?” she asked him over and over and over until a single bloody tear escaped his eye and the corners of his mouth trembled and he said, in a whispery voice, “The door . . . is opening. And God is waiting on the other side.”

Then his eyes fluttered shut and he descended into what the doctors referred to as a vegetative state.

This was one year ago. He now spends his days drooling in a chair or a bed, overseen by both guards and nurses, at the Black Creek Correctional Facility’s geriatric unit.

The door opens and Chives enters the room, giving a low whistle. “Look at that.” He picks up a photograph showing Romans 6:6–7 scratched into the flesh of a rib cage and tosses it back onto the table. “What are you going to do when the department goes digital? Can’t do this with a laptop.”

She readjusts the placement and squares the lines of the photo he just dropped. “I will remain stubbornly analog.” She stations herself at the center of the table and scans the whole of it. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit.” And indeed his breath wheezes. “You going to talk to Ashley?”

“That’s what I’m getting ready for. And I was planning on you coming with me, but maybe you should go home? Have you even taken any medicine?”