The Mephisto Club

THIRTY

Mrs. Cora Bongers leaned her considerable weight against the barn door and it slid open with a tortured creak. From the dark interior came the nervous bleating of goats, and Jane smelled the gamey scent of damp straw and crowded animals.

“I’m not sure how much you’ll be able to see right now,” said Mrs. Bongers, aiming her flashlight into the barn. “Sorry I didn’t get your message earlier, when we would’ve had daylight.”

Jane flicked on her own flashlight. “This should be fine. I just want to see the marks, if they’re still there.”

“Oh, they’re still here. Used to irritate the heck outta my husband every time he came in here and saw them. I kept telling him to paint over ’em, just so he’d stop complaining about it. He said that’d just make him madder, if he had to paint the inside of a barn. Like he was doing up House Beautiful for the goats.” Mrs. Bongers stepped inside, her heavy boots tramping across the straw-covered dirt floor. Just the short walk from the house had winded her and she paused, wheezing loudly, and aimed her flashlight at a wooden pen, where a dozen goats massed in an uneasy huddle. “They still miss him, you know. Oh, Eben complained all the time about how much work it was, milking them every morning. But he loved these girls. He’s been gone six months now, and they’re still not used to anyone else milking them.” She unlatched the pen and glanced at Jane, who was hanging back. “You’re not scared of goats, are you?”

“Do we have to go in there?”

“Aw, they won’t hurt you. Just watch your coat. They like to nibble.”

Now you be nice goats, thought Jane as she stepped into the pen and latched the door shut behind her. Don’t chew the cop. She picked her way across the straw, trying to avoid soiling her shoes. The animals watched her with cold and soulless stares. The last time she’d been this close to a goat had been on a second-grade school trip to a petting zoo. She had looked at the goat, the goat had looked at her, and the next thing she knew, she was flat on her back and her classmates were laughing. She did not trust the beasts, and clearly they did not trust her; they kept their distance as she crossed the pen.

“Here,” said Mrs. Bongers, her flashlight focused on the wall. “This is some of it.”

Jane moved closer, her gaze riveted on the symbols cut deeply into the wooden planks. The three crosses of Golgotha. But this was a perverted version, the crosses flipped upside down.

“Some more up there, too,” said Mrs. Bongers, and she pointed the beam upward, to show more crosses, cut higher in the wall. “He had to climb onto some straw bales to carve those. All that effort. You’d think those darn kids would have better things to do.”

“Why do you think it was kids who did this?”

“Who else would it be? Summertime, and they’re all bored. Nothing better to do than run around carving up walls. Hanging those weird charms on trees.”

Jane looked at her. “What charms?”

“Twig dolls and stuff. Creepy little things. The sheriff’s office just laughed it off, but I didn’t like seeing them dangling from the branches.” She paused at one of the symbols. “There, like that one.”

It was a stick figure of a man, with what appeared to be a sword projecting from one hand. Carved beneath it was: RXX-VII.

“Whatever that means,” said Mrs. Bongers.

Jane turned to face her. “I read in the Police Beat that one of your goats went missing that night. Did you ever get it back?”

“We never found her.”

“There was no trace of her at all?”

“Well, there are packs of wild dogs running around here, you know. They’d pretty much clean up every scrap.”

But no dog did this, thought Jane, her gaze back on the carvings. Her cell phone suddenly rang, and the goats rushed to the opposite side of the pen in a panicked, bleating scramble. “Sorry,” said Jane. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, surprised that she’d even gotten a signal out here. “Rizzoli.”

Frost said, “I did my best.”

“Why does that sound like the beginning of an excuse?”

“’Cause I’m not having much luck finding Lily Saul. She seems to move around quite a bit. We know she’s been in Italy at least eight months. We’ve got a record of ATM withdrawals during that period from banks in Rome, Florence, and Sorrento. But she doesn’t use her credit card very much.”

“Eight months as a tourist? How does she afford that?”

“She travels on the cheap. And I do mean cheap. Fourth-class hotels all the way. Plus, she may be working there illegally. I know she had a brief job in Florence, assisting a museum curator.”

“She has the training for that?”

“She has a college degree in classical studies. And when she was still a student, she worked at this excavation site in Italy. Some place called Paestum.”

“Why the hell can’t we find her?”

“It looks to me like she doesn’t want to be found.”

“Okay. What about her cousin, Dominic Saul?”

“Oh. That one’s a real problem.”

“You’re not going to give me any good news tonight, are you?”

“I’ve got a copy of his academic record from the Putnam Academy. It’s a boarding school in Connecticut. He was enrolled there for about six months, while he was in the tenth grade.”

“So he would have been-what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“Fifteen. He finished up that year and was expected to come back the following fall. But he never did.”

“That’s the summer he stayed with the Saul family. In Purity.”

“Right. The boy’s father had just died, so Dr. Saul took him in for the summer. When the boy didn’t return to school in September, the Putnam Academy tried to locate him. They finally got a letter back from his mother, withdrawing him from the school.”

“So which school did he attend instead?”

“We don’t know. Putnam Academy says they never got a request to forward the boy’s transcripts. That’s the last record of him anywhere that I can find.”

“What about his mother? Where is she?”

“I have no idea. I can’t find a damn thing about the woman. No one at the school ever met her. All they have is a letter, signed by a Margaret Saul.”

“It’s like all these people are ghosts. His cousin. His mother.”

“I do have Dominic’s school photo. I don’t know if it does us much good now, since he was only fifteen at the time.”

“What does he look like?”

“Really good-looking kid. Blond, blue eyes. And the school says he tested in the genius range. Obviously he was a smart boy. But there’s a note in the file, says the kid didn’t seem to have any friends.”

Jane watched as Mrs. Bongers soothed the goats. She was huddled close to them, cooing to them in the same shadowy barn where, twelve years ago, someone had carved strange symbols on the wall, someone who could very well have moved on to carving women.

“Okay, here’s the interesting part,” said Frost. “I’m looking at the boy’s school admission forms right now.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s this section his father filled out, about any special concerns he might have. And the dad writes that this is Dominic’s first experience at an American school. Because he’d lived abroad most of his life.”

“Abroad?” She felt her pulse suddenly kick into a faster tempo. “Where?”

“Egypt and Turkey.” Frost paused, and added, significantly, “And Cyprus.”

Her gaze turned back to the barn wall, to what had been carved there: RXX-VII. “Where are you right now?” she asked.

“I’m at home.”

“You got a Bible there?”

“Why?”

“I want you to look up something for me.”

“Let me ask Alice where it is.” She heard him call out to his wife, then heard footsteps, and then Frost said, “Is the King James version okay?”

“If that’s what you’ve got. Now look at the contents. Tell me which sections start with the letter R.”

“Old or New Testament?”

“Both.”

Over the phone, she heard pages flipping. “There’s the Book of Ruth. Romans. And there’s Revelation.”

“For each of the books, read me the passages for chapter twenty, verse seven.”

“Okay, let’s see. Book of Ruth doesn’t have a chapter twenty. It only goes to four.”

“Romans?”

“Romans ends at chapter sixteen.”

“What about Revelation?”

“Hold on.” More pages rustling. “Here it is. Revelation, chapter twenty, verse seven. ‘And when the thousand years are expired, Satan’”-Frost paused. His voice softened to a hush.-“‘Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.’”

Jane could feel the pounding of her own heart. She stared at the barn wall, at the carving of the stick figure wielding the sword. It’s not a sword. It’s a scythe.

“Rizzoli?” said Frost.

She said, “I think we know our killer’s name.”