"I hope so. This is Lieutenant Martin. Do you have anybody free to take some fluid samples at Nineteenth and Main?"
"What kind of fluid samples?"
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"Blood, it looks like."
"Is this a crime scene?"
"I don't know. To tell you the truth, I have no idea what happened here."
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He dreamed that he was running through the briars again, barefoot. The fires were much closer now, and he could feel the heat on his back, like an open furnace. Sparks were showering over his head and dropping onto the underbrush up ahead of him, so that he had to fight his way through bushes that were already blazing.
"Muster at the plank road, boys!" somebody was shouting, his voice hoarse with smoke. "Muster at the plank road!"
He kept his left elbow raised to protect his eyes from thorns and branches and to shield his cheek from the heat. A spark settled on his shoulder, eating through his shirt. He swatted it off, but it was still painful, and he could smell scorched cotton and burned skin.
He had a rough idea that the plank road was off to his left, about a quarter of a mile, but the woods in that direction were burning fiercely and he could hear men screaming as they were overtaken by the flames. Instead, he headed off
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to the right, hoping to be able to circle around the fires and reach the road a little farther up. He tried to hurry, but the underbrush was even thicker here, and he had to leap and scramble like a hare.
What was even more frightening than the approaching fire was the feeling that somebody was catching up with him, hurrying through the thickets as black and fluid as a shadow. And he knew that this somebody was intent on killing him—not angrily, but cold-bloodedly, and gruesomely, inflicting more pain than anybody could imagine.
He quickly turned his head. He could see a silhouette only a few yards behind him. A tall silhouette, with flapping wings. Its coattails were snagged by the briars, but that didn't seem to slow it down at all, and he could hear its boots crackling through the bracken. Oh, Jesus. He simply didn't have the strength to jump any farther. His clothes were tangled in the bushes and his hands and feet were ablaze with thorns.
He stopped, gasping, and the silhouette rushed into him, knocking the breath out of him. He found himself in suffocating darkness, in a cage of bones, struggling desperately to get himself free.
"Can't breathe!" he screamed. "Can't breathe!"
He found Father Thomas in the diocesan garden at the back of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, his sleeves rolled up, weeding. Father Thomas stood up as he approached, a plump, pink-faced man with a bow wave of white hair.
"Lieutenant Martin! My goodness! It's been quite a while since we saw you!"
Decker looked around. "This is some garden, isn't it?" The flower bed that Father Thomas was tending was bursting with cream and yellow roses, and their fragrance was so heady that it was almost erotic.
"We do our best. . . . I always think that to keep a beauti‑
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ful garden is like saying a thank-you to God, for granting us such earthly delights."
Decker had come to the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart at least twice a week in the days after Cathy had been killed. He had knelt for hours inside its cool, echoing interior, under its high gold-relief ceilings, and tightly closed his eyes and prayed that it was still January, and that her murder had never happened. Oh, God, can't you just wind back the clock?
The cathedral was unusual in that it had been financed and built entirely by one man, Thomas Fortune Ryan, the founder of the American Tobacco Company. Richmond had very few Catholics, but it was here that they could turn - for hope and encouragement, a grand Romanesque building that proudly proclaimed the Church Militant—the Lord God and His angels in their eternal struggle against Satan and his devils.
Decker said, "I guess I got disillusioned with God. My fault. I asked Him for something impossible."
"Don't worry." Father Thomas smiled. "I can assure you that God isn't disillusioned with you. And who's to say what's impossible and what isn't?"
He propped his hoe against his wheelbarrow and said, "Why don't you come inside and have a drink?"
"Sure. It's hot enough, isn't it? There's a couple of questions I need to ask you."
"Of course. Always pleased to help the forces of law and order."
He led Decker through to a brown-and-white-tiled kitchen with a large oak table and windows that were glazed with muted yellow glass. He opened up the icebox and took out a frosted jug of lemonade. "Sorry we don't have any tequila."
"You remembered," Decker said, taking off his sunglasses. "Well .. . let's say there was more than one occasion
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when the condition in which you came here to pray owed more to the cactus spirit than the Holy Spirit."
He poured them each a tumbler of lemonade, making sure that there were plenty of lemon slices floating in them. Decker said, "What can you tell me about Saint Barbara?"
"Saint Barbara? Is there any specific reason for this?"
"I don't know yet. That's why I came to see you. I mean, you're the expert on patron saints, aren't you?"
"I like to think so. Saint Barbara, well . . . Saint Barbara was removed from the Roman calendar sometime in the late 1960s and her cultus was suppressed. But there are still many who are devoted to her, especially in the military, and those who work with explosives, such as armorers and gunners and bomb technicians.
"She's the patron saint of fire, you see, and lightning."
Decker said, "I've been having this nightmare . . . I'm running away from a brushfire. The first time I had it, I had another dream right afterward. I saw Cathy, and Cathy said that she wants to protect me from Saint Barbara."
Father Thomas raised his eyebrows. "I can't think why you need protection from her, particularly if you were trying to escape from a fire. Saint Barbara is honored by firefighters and by anybody working with fireworks or explosives. That's always assuming that your dream has any real significance, of course, and that it isn't just a fragment of something that you accidentally picked up during the course of your day's work."
"Cathy said, 'Saint Barbara wants her revenge.' She said it as clear as if she were standing right next to me."
"That's very strange. Saint Barbara was supposed to have been very beautiful and gentle and forgiving. It was said that she lived in Thrace, in the third century, and the story is that she was locked in a high tower by her father,
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Dioscorus, for disobedience. While she was imprisoned she was tutored by a whole variety of philosophers and orators and poets. From them, she learned that the worship of many gods was nonsense, and she converted to Christianity.
"Her not-so-loving father denounced her to the local authorities, and they ordered him to kill her. She escaped, but her father caught her, dragged her home by her hair, tortured her, and cut her head off. But he got his just desserts. He was instantly struck by fire from heaven, and killed.
"Because of this, people used to ask Saint Barbara to protect them against fire and lightning and any other kind of death from the sky. You often used to see her image on fire stations and powder magazines and military arsenals, in a white robe, holding the palm of martyrdom in one hand and the chalice of happy death in the other.
"However, the official view today is that Saint Barbara is only a legend, and that somewhere along the line a pious fiction was mistakenly interpreted as history. So the likelihood is that your dream was nothing more than a dream."
Decker said, "The trouble is, it didn't stop at a dream. Saint Barbara's name was written on the wall of my apartment last night, in what looked like blood, and underneath it somebody had left incense burning. Don't ask me who. There was nobody there, and nobody in my apartment building saw any strangers entering or leaving."