“How many posts have you been tracking?”
“Over forty thousand.” When Vox’s eyes bugged she said hastily, “Not personally—I’m using the Merlin pattern-search software from the DMS.”
Vox grunted. “I didn’t know Deacon let you have Merlin.”
“He didn’t. Grace did.”
“Is it any good?”
“Well, it’s not MindReader, but it’s better than what we have.”
“What else is popping up?”
Circe adjusted her glasses. “Some of the names may be randomly chosen from a grab bag of goddess names. But there are some that seem to have a political connection. Asherah, Anath, Astarte, and Ashima all show up as usernames. There is some evidence that that the Hebrew faith may have been polytheistic and those names are possible female counterparts of Yahweh. If that’s true, then they were later removed as the culture became more male centric. Lilith also shows up. As does Ba‘alat Gebal or Baaltis, who is essentially a pan-Semitic goddess. And Eris, Greek goddess of discord. That’s ‘Discordia’ in Greek, which ties into the chaos concept. And—”
Vox held up his hands. “Okay, okay, I get the picture. Lots of goddess references. Tell me what you think about them. Is this the same ‘goddess’ you’ve been tracking?”
“Not sure yet. If so, Hugo, this is the first time the Goddess has made specific threats against Islam. Her usual rant is against what she frequently calls the ‘sin of complacency.’ Those are anarchical references supporting chaos as the natural path for spiritual growth.”
“Which is horseshit.”
“Well, arguing for an ongoing state of chaos is self-contradictory. But these new posts are clearly political, and they suggest that action should be taken, which gives them a whiff of militancy.”
“A militant goddess cult? Is there precedent?”
“Not recently, but historically? Sure. There were goddess cults all over the world, and some of them have been quite violent.”
Vox took a big bite of his doughnut and chewed noisily. “Okay. Write your report. Good work, kiddo. Keep at it.” He pushed the box of doughnuts across the desk. “Keep the carbs. You earned ’em.”
He heaved his bulk out of the guest chair and left, sketching a wave with his coffee cup.
Circe watched him go and then looked down at the documents on the screen. She chewed her lip for a moment, wrestling with some of the same doubts that had plagued her since she first noticed this pattern. Was it there? Or was the Merlin software simply too good at finding patterns in everything?
She bit a piece of a cinnamon doughnut, sipped her coffee, toggled over to Twitter, and dove back in.
Interlude Seven
Hate Crimes
May Through July
Michael Hecht was not a Jew. None of his friends were Jews, and except for the accountant at the hardware store in which he worked part-time, no one he knew was Jewish. None of his uncles or grandparents had fought in Europe during World War II, and he had no connections to anyone who had been interned or murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. He had never been to Israel and did not know anyone who had. Michael Hecht did not even particularly understand politics. He had an I.Q. of 86 and had a C average in school. He never watched any debates and could not with any degree of certainty name anyone in state politics.
Michael Hecht also did not personally know any Muslims. None of them were among his friends, family, or co-workers. No Muslim had ever been rude to him, physically attacked him, done harm to people he knew or loved.
All of this information came out during Deputy Sheriff Jaden Glover’s interview of Hecht following the twenty-two-year-old’s arrest. Glover had known Michael all his life; he’d once dated Hecht’s oldest sister, Maryanne.
“Why’d you do it?” Glover asked.
Hecht shrugged. He sat on a metal chair, his wrists cuffed to a D ring on the table. Another deputy stood by the door. Hecht had been Mirandized at the scene and again here in the station. He’d waived his rights both times.
“C’mon, Mike. You drove thirty-seven miles; you stopped to buy gasoline. You brought half a dozen of your mom’s Mason jars with you. And rags. You even brought a lighter and you don’t smoke. You had to have planned this.”
Michael Hecht shrugged again. His face was smudged with soot and he had some tissue stuffed into his nostril to stem the bleeding from where the building caretaker, Kusef, had punched him.
“You went to all that trouble,” said Glover, “and you put firebombs through all the windows. You burned the whole damn thing to the ground. What was in your head, boy? You upset ’cause Milt Ryerson’s boy lost his leg in Iraq? This some kind of personal vendetta?”
Michael Hecht did not know what a vendetta was. “Shit, I didn’t know Tommy lost his leg. Damn … that’s fucked up.”
Glover cut a look at the other deputy, who arched one eyebrow.
“You didn’t know about Tom Ryerson?”
“Nah … I ain’t seen him since graduation.”
“Then why’d you set fire to the mosque?”
Hecht looked confused. “What’s a mosque?”
“What’s a—Judas priest, boy, that’s what you just burned the hell down.”
“It wasn’t no mosque. It was a church. A raghead church.”
“That’s what a mosque is. A church for Muslims.”
“Fucking ragheads.”
“Do you have a reason to hate Muslims, Mike?”
“They’re fucking sand niggers.”
“You ever met a Muslim, Mike?”
Hecht looked away for a second. “No.”
“Then why did you want to burn down their church?”
Hecht was silent for a long time, his face contorting as he tried to think it through.
“Come on, Mike … I’d like to help you here, but you got to be straight with me.”
Michael Hecht leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, man … I don’t know. They’re just fucking ragheads, y’know.”
That was all they managed to get out of him. When the county detectives made a thorough search of Michael Hecht’s house, they also searched his e-mail accounts and backtracked his Internet usage. Hecht was subscribed to hundreds of message boards. Over forty of them were devoted to the Goddess. The most recent posting Hecht had been to was the last in a series of linked messages on Twitter. The first one read: The Chosen will not tolerate the impure touch of the Muslim. The intervening posts escalated up from there in racial hatred, culminating with the one that had, apparently, sent Michael Hecht out into the night.
Fire purifies.
Michael Hecht was charged with one count of arson and fourteen counts of murder. His state-appointed defense attorney tried to build a case on diminished capacity, but by the time the matter went to trial the attorney knew that he was trying to sell a sympathy verdict in what had become a landmark hate crime case. The jury deliberated for fourteen minutes. Michael Hecht was convicted in a Powell County Kentucky court and sentenced to death. He remains on death row to this day.
IN NEW YORK City, a flaming whiskey bottle was thrown through the front window of the 117th Street mosque during evening prayers. Several congregants suffered minor burns, and only the swift and combined actions of Azada, a teenage girl, and three of her friends, who grabbed fire extinguishers, prevented loss of life.