TCK

Looking somewhat distraught, Paul Bergin came to the temple office of Klaus Hansen and said, “Ruth just called. She said the sheriff and an FBI agent visited our home.”

“What did Ruth say to get rid of them?”

“Get rid of them? She invited them to come inside!”

“Jesus, Paul, what did she tell them?”

“She didn’t tell me that. But she did ask me why the knife block she used this morning was gone.”

“How did you handle that?”

“I said I didn’t know anything about it. The knife block is at the landfill and no one will ever find it, but Ruth said she let them take her fingerprints, and that makes me wish the knife was done away with like the clothes and other stuff.”

“What’s done is done,” Klaus said. “That was the murder weapon and I didn’t know how soon I could get rid of it. But don’t worry, Paul. Even if they found the knife and trace it to Ruth, so what? She had no motive to kill the girl. She probably doesn’t even know her.”

But Paul wasn’t so easily soothed. “What if the sheriff and this FBI fellow come here next?”

“That is a very good question, Paul. So now, I think, is a good time for both of us to be out in Headwater tending to the flock as officers of the Church ever must.”

Outside of the temple they looked down at the parking lot and saw three marked law enforcement vehicles and a rental. They tried to go back inside but Sheriff Walker and Special Agent Mark Felt were already waiting for them on either side of the front door.

“Sheriff, would you do the honors?”

Roddy said, “Paul Bergin, you are under arrest for the murder of Kimberly Zinter. Hold out your right arm.”

Paul was too shocked to move, so Roddy grabbed his jacket sleeve, cuffed his bare wrist, then made Paul face one of the doors. After both arms were cuffed behind Paul’s back Roddy patted him down, re- moved his wallet, and unlatched the carabiner key chain looped to his belt. He handed both of these to Felt, then handed Paul himself off to his deputies who were coming up the flight of stairs leading to the temple.

“Fingerprints, new home, not a word, boys.”

The deputies took Bergin away just as Special Agent-in-Charge Tolson arrived on the with Agent Sullivan in tow. They said nothing about the arrest. Sheriff Walker introduced Hansen to Felt as the Apostle of the Church.

“Prophet of the Church, if you please.”

“I need to talk to you,” said Felt, “but first, we have a court order to search the Temple for evidence pertaining to the murder of Kimberly Zinter.”

Klaus demanded to see the order and Tolson let him read it.

“I will hold you fellows to the absolute letter of this search warrant,” he said. “You may search only in the rooms which are locked with those keys.”

Gabriel Shybear was waiting for them just inside. Agent Bill Sullivan blurted his name. Tolson knew him only from Sullivan’s reports.

“Aren’t you supposed to be on some island shooting Japs right now?”

Gabriel shook hez head and dug out hez draft card. “The Army didn’t think I was man enough, Special Agent Sullivan. Navy too.”

“Gabriel, what are you doing here today of all days?” Roddy asked.

“I’m here every day now, Sheriff. There’s been some changes. I hold a very important office in the Church: Deacon.”

“I thought Bergin was the Deacon,” the sheriff said.

“There’s been a reshuffling. Mr. Hansen is the Prophet and Bergin is the Apostle.”

Walker turned to Hansen. “What happened to Peter Twofeathers?”

“I’ve been given to understand he is dead.”

“Not dead,” said Gabriel. “He lives in Heaven now.”

“Gabriel, are you talking about a homicide?” asked Roddy.

“No, Peter and his wife volunteered to go. So did the Prophet who came after him, if you think about it.”

“Hold your tongue, boy!” blurted Hansen. “No one cares to listen to your addled nonsense!”

With a sudden, awkward silence, Sheriff Roddy Walker caught up on all the required introductions. “Mr. Peter Hansen, Mr. Gabriel Shybear, this is Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and with him are Special Agents Mark Felt and Bill Sullivan.”

Mark Felt said, “Gabriel, would you be so kind as to take the Sheriff through your temple so he can make a note of all the doors that are locked before we get started.”

All of the doors except one along the wide carpeted foyer of A Wing were locked. While Gabriel and the Sheriff ranged through the rest of the temple, the Bureau agents went through Paul’s office like a tornado but yielded nothing. The door to Gabriel’s office was wide open, so the agents could not enter there.

Roddy and Gabriel returned to find the agents going through a large room in A Wing filled with material that appeared to be from an earlier age. After a quick glance at the contents the sheriff offered Felt an explanation. “B Wing is set up like a museum of Church history. Or at least it was when I was a member. This looks like the exhibits that were on display there.”

“This is only the history of the Kuwapi side of the Church,” Gabriel said, “now sitting here gathering dust. We’re in the New Reich.”

“That’s a damned shame,” Felt said, holding up a broken arrow. “Some of the relics were damaged.”

They moved to the hallway that ran around the circumference of the Sanctuary and did a third of a turn to the right, checking some of the doors in Roddy’s notes, before entering C Wing.

The rooms that Gabriel and Dory had cleaned were not locked.

“What’s behind that door?”

“That’s a dry hole, Agent Sullivan,” said Gabriel. “It’s just my broom closet.” Che locked eyes with Klaus.

Nevertheless, Special Agent Felt found the appropriate key. Like Gabriel said, there was nothing inside but cleaning supplies. Felt shook the red cookie tin sitting on a shelf but heard nothing, and opened it to make sure it was empty. Klaus seemed both puzzled and relieved.

After that the sheriff and the three Bureau agents headed down the wide carpeted stairs to the basement cafeteria. The Prophet, lagging behind, asked Gabriel, “You moved the Relic. How did you know they would search?”

“I didn’t know, Mr. Hansen, but my newlywed wife, the one you didn’t kill, she did. Robyn truly is a prophet. She knows all and she sees all.”

There wasn’t much of interest to the FBI downstairs, which was open and airy, even in the kitchen, but the supply room on the north wall was locked and everyone gravitated to there.

“Is this the room from your report?” asked Tolson.

“Mecca,” Sullivan said.

Tolson gestured for Felt to pop it open.

Mecca turned out to have the same broken piano, hymnals, mason jars, and stacks of Green Dome coloring books that Gabriel had seen before when he took Robyn and Hunky and Dory into the supply room. Bill Sullivan pointed at the plywood board at the back wall. “Flashlights, gentlemen.”

The board was moved aside, and presently the three G-men were standing around the rock cairn that formed the uttermost summit of Green Dome.

Tolson said to Sullivan, “If the kids were in such a hurry to clear out when Paul caught them why are all the stones back in place?”

“Special Agent Tolson, that is a very perceptive question,” Sullivan said. He began looking for the easiest stone to move.

Felt didn’t like how the murder investigation had suddenly veered into an area where he hadn’t been briefed. Tolson’s agenda was intruding now. A stone fell and Tolson went inside the cairn.

Felt heard Tolson utter an oath that was most unbecoming of an FBI agent, followed by, “There’s nothing here!”

After the search under the altar fell through SAiC Tolson left the temple and took Sullivan with him. Special Agent Mark Felt was fine with that. Conflicting agendas were never productive.

That left only the B Wing of the temple to search. It was set up as a historical museum, although under the new management of Prophet Hansen the Kuwapi contribution to the Church of Green Dome had been stripped out. Some of the more valuable pieces were missing entirely. But something about B Wing stayed with Mark Felt for the rest of his life. Perhaps it was the variety of genuine articles dating back to the Civil War. Perhaps it was the way Sheriff Walker explained what he was looking at. Agent Felt found the experience profoundly immersive.

Deputy Bill came back from the station, after helping Bob book Paul into his new home. He showed Felt and the sheriff pencil tracings of the tire tread from the two civilian trucks in the temple parking lot, together with the photos of the tread in the snow they took the day before at the murder scene. One of the photos was already labelled “Paul Bergin” from his licence plate.

“Other than our own rigs, sir,” Bill said, “there are no other vehicles parked in the lot.”

Mark Felt turned to Gabriel hovering nearby and asked him, “Son, do you drive a truck.”

“No sir. But my cousin Dory drives Peter Twofeather’s station wagon and she takes us wherever we need to be.”

“Interesting.” Felt found Klaus Hansen’s office, which was also in B Wing, and walked right in.

This prompted an angry objection from Hansen. “You’re in violation of the judge’s orders, Felt. You know you can only search those rooms which are locked.”

Sheriff Walker held up his notebook and said, “Ah yes, but this room was locked at the time we served the warrant. If anything, your mere presence here amounts to interfering with a murder investigation.”

Walker and Felt searched every corner of the office and found nothing of interest. Then Felt upended the waste basket on the floor. A large book with a green cover fell out. “What have we here?”

Sheriff Walker thumbed through the pages and saw that it was the text of the Green Book, holy writ for the Church of Green Dome, entirely written by hand. He said, “Agent Felt, this is called the Printer’s Manuscript. It’s the sacred scriptures of the Church, penned by the hand of the First Prophet.”

Felt said, “Gosh, you would think something irreplaceable like this would be considered priceless. Yet somehow it ended up in the trash. I wonder why.”

Then it was Felt’s turn to pour through the pages of the manuscript. When he saw the pages in the very front of the document he said, “Now that’s cute. This is like a kind of baby book for the Church. All the important decisions and events are recorded here, like this entry from 1931 marking when Klaus Hansen became the Apostle. Mr. Hansen, would you please write your signature in the sheriff’s notebook so I can see if they’re the same?”

“Special Agent Felt, I assert my Constitutional right against self-incrimination.”

“I see. Oh, it says here, on the same day, October 9, Prophet Twofeathers created the office of Deacon, and Paul Bergin is recorded as the first one to hold that office. He’s not here, but Sheriff, I suppose we can ask for his signature later.”

“What if he doesn’t want to cooperate either, Special Agent Felt?”

“I’m thinking one of the two perpetrators is going to the electric chair, and the other one is probably only going to get life in prison. I’m also thinking that assisting our investigation will go a long way toward determining which one will be which.”

Hansen didn’t budge.

Felt continued reading. “So the next day, Twofeathers wrote a decree that only the death or resignation of a Church officeholder can vacate that office. I suppose that would prevent the Prophet, whoever he was, from just firing an Apostle or Deacon, which would be important because earlier it says if the Prophet is Red, he has to choose a White Apostle, and vice-versa. And also the office of Deacon alternates races. And that takes us to the very next entry, eleven days ago now, which says Klaus Hansen resigned as Apostle.”

“That’s a lie, I never tendered my resignation.”

Gabriel, who had been listening quietly, now chimed in. “Prophet Peter said if you become an officer in another church you can’t be an officer in this one.”

“Were you there when he said that, Gabriel?”

“Yes sir, in my role as Extraordinary Lay Minister of the Last Rites.”

“Is that another office of the Church?”

“Not officially, sir. At least, it wasn’t at the time. But the duties have been rolled up into those of the Deacon, as you’ll soon see.”

Felt read on. “Oh, now this is interesting, Sheriff Walker. On the same day, a Miss Kimberly Shybear was made the Apostle of the Church. You share the same last name, Gabriel. Can you tell me who that is?”

“She was my wife, sir, formerly Kimberly Zinter.”

Roddy Walker was astonished. “The deceased was your wife?”

Gabriel nodded in the affirmative.

This visibly annoyed the sheriff. He said, “Why isn’t anyone actually sad this girl was killed?”

Gabriel said, “When this mortal shall have put on immortality, then she be brought to pass the saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory, O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory?'”

Walker threw up his hands in disgust but Felt didn’t want to get sidetracked. He said, “The next line claims that Deacon Paul Bergin resigned on January 10 of this year.”

“Twofeathers used the same line of reasoning as Hansen’s resignation,” Gabriel said, while Klaus Hansen merely glared at him.

Felt continued to read. “Oh, Gabriel, here it says you replaced Paul as Deacon. Is that your signature?”

“Yes sir, and I’m willing to prove it.” Sheriff Walker offered his notebook and Gabriel entered his chop. “And Special Agent Felt, you’ll see that Two Feathers quit right after that, but when he quit it really was a plain vanilla resignation, with his own signature in the Green Book.”

Felt saw that everything was just as Gabriel claimed. He said, “I guess what happened next is obvious. It says Kimberly Shybear became the Prophet, which of course vacated the office of Apostle, so someone named Hashmal Doriel filled in.”

“That’s my cousin Dory.”

Felt said, “What follows, about a week later, is two decrees that seem to pertain to the administration of the Church, something about a sacred relic, and something about who can get married. But what follows is most interesting, Gabriel. It has your cousin Dory resigning as Apostle, yesterday, on the very day your wife was murdered. Were you present when this entry was made?”

“Yes sir, Special Agent Felt.”

“Do you remember about what time of day it was?”

“It was about eight o’clock in the AM, sir.”

Sheriff Walker wrote that in his notebook.

Felt said, “Gabriel, I may need you to testify in court under oath to the same effect. Now let’s see who replaced Doriel as the Apostle. Why look, it’s Klaus Hansen again! And he signed it. Gabriel, did you witness Klaus Hansen making this signature?”

“Yes sir.”

“So let’s back up a bit to an entry made in 1866. It says if the Prophet dies or resigns, the Apostle becomes the new Prophet. So here’s Klaus Hansen as the new Apostle, with the Prophet having only an hour or two left to live. Please Gabriel, tell me, what happened immediately after Klaus Hansen became, once again, the Apostle of the Church.”

“He has his own breakaway Church down at the bottom of the hill, with only white folk there. He said we should go meet with them and announce the division in the mother Church was healed. So Paul left with Kim, but Klaus took me separately in his own truck.”

“Did he say why?”

“He wanted me to bring the sacred relic, which we call the Golden Gift, and I told him I didn’t want Paul to know where I had hidden it because he was no longer an officer of the Church. But on the way down we got into a heated argument over racism or something like that, and he just pulled over and made me get out before driving off. So I walked back up to the temple where Dory was waiting.”

Felt said, “The reason I’m asking, Gabriel, is there’s three final entries here, one declaring Kim to be dead, one making Klaus Hansen the Prophet, and one making Paul Bergin the Apostle. Did you, as the Deacon, witness any of those entries being made?”

“No sir.”

“I’m trying to ascertain the time.”

“Dory said no one returned to the Temple before I did, and that was about nine thirty in the morning. It was about ten when they returned, and they told me Kim was dead.”

“Sheriff, what time did old Tashunka arrive at your station and report the murder?”

“It was just about noon.”

“I’m going to need to corroborate this with Dory, and I want to speak with Tashunka, but what we have now is Klaus Hansen affirming, in writing, that Kimberly Zinter, or Kimberly Shybear if you will, was dead approximately two hours before Tashunka discovered her corpse. Mr. Hansen, do you have anything to say before you are placed under arrest for murder?”

He said, “I will say this exactly once, Special Agent Felt. From here on out I will speak only to your superior officer, Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson.”

True to his word, Klaus Hanson had nothing more to say at the sheriff’s station and even Paul Bergin declined to make his phone call to a lawyer or anyone else. FBI Special Agent Mark Felt was content to let them both stew in the county lockup overnight and he called it a day.

The sheriff dropped him off at the library on 17th and V. After he stepped out of the truck Felt said, I want to bring Doriel and Tashunka to the station tomorrow to tidy up a few more things on the case.”

“I’ll track them down and let them know.”

When Felt wasn’t active in the field he slammed to the full reverse and became a man of precise routine. His ritual at the end of the workday was always to sit in a library, summarize the events of the day, and mail it to Dotty back in DC. Somehow the young lady named Robyn the sheriff spoke to the day before, on the afternoon of the 20th of January, knew this.

Felt thought the day just concluding had been more eventful for him than any day since Quantico, and it took Felt longer than usual to summarize all the pertinent events for Dotty on the stationary Robyn had provided. Before he was even half finished, Felt spotted a book on the table with a note taped to it, inked in a neat feminine hand.

The note said:

Dear Special Agent Felt, Well done on the bust, but one of the two men you’ve put away has (or rather he will have) an unexpected ally within the Bureau. You may already suspect this. I advise that you defer any objection that you may rightly have, at least until things play out. Be assured that all will be well. Meanwhile, to compensate for the unfortunate renovation of B Wing at the Temple, I bring your attention to this excellent account of the Red Wing’s part in the origin of the Church of Green Dome. I believe it will explain the odd behavior of your supervisor. Enjoy!

Felt glanced around the library to see if Robyn was watching. How did she know to leave the book at just that table and not another one? It was a mystery, and one sufficient to break Felt out of his rigid routine.

The title of the book was “Island in the Sky: The Life of the Kuwapi People” written in 1925 by Jashen Shybear and it was rather thick.

He learned that the Oglala Sioux were so named because the word means “They scatter their own” and he learned the Kuwapi were the ones they cast out to earn that name.

He learned of the massacres at the hands of the US Army, and the extended war that was fought over the Black Hills, which the whites wanted to mine, but the Lakota held to be sacred, and how the Army gnawed away at the problem until, with few exceptions, they ground all the plains Indians into submission.

He learned of how the Bureau of Indian Affairs classified the Kuwapi as part of the Oglala tribe, making them eligible for settlement in a reservation, but the Kuwapi declined, because they had fallen in with a group of white settlers from Pennsylvania who baptized them and formed a single congregation of believers.

As he read, Mark’s attention was drawn to something called the Golden Gift, a religious artifact the Kuwapi people believed to have been given to Chief Wanica by the Great Spirit himself, Wakan Tanka. He noted that even the white members of their united faith assembly believed this, and he recalled a line written in the front matter of the Printer’s Manuscript that he had dismissed as irrelevant at the time. It had read thus:

“The Sacred Relic shall remain in the possession of the Deacon of the Church, who shall be minister of the Last Rite.”

Felt saw the artifact was associated somehow with how the Church dealt with the end of a believer’s life. But he didn’t yet guess the Golden Gift was the focus of Tolson’s obsession with Headwater.

Opening the book had been a mistake. He drowned in the text, and before he even knew it, the librarian came around to inform him the branch was closing and he had made not the slightest effort writing his report. He did note the Dewey number on the spine of the book so he could find it again, then spent the last fifteen minutes finishing out something for Dotty.

At roughly the same time that evening Dr. Wahkan received an honored guest in his office. The visitor said, “Dory told me you found something on Kim’s body and hid it from the police.”

“Yes, Teacher, certainly,” said Dr. Wahkan, and he retrieved a small object from his desk. It was rubbery on one side, and looked like one end of the Purple Cable on the other. He gave it to Yeshua.

Yeshua asked, “Does anyone else know about this?”

“No one saw it, Teacher, and I didn’t write it up in a report. Dory was very specific about that.”

“Thank you, Doctor. This device doesn’t really belong in this time and place, you see. It comes from about fifty years from here, after a great many changes occur that you would find difficult to fathom.”

“Teacher, may I ask what it does?”

Yeshua smiled gently. “It has two purposes, Doctor Wahkan. This side looks like a big brown mole because that’s easier to explain than an electrical connector coming out of your head. But it’s also very much like a radio transmitter.”

“How wonderful,” said Wahkan. “I don’t believe I’ve seen a single tube smaller than that gadget.”

“Yes. Vacuum tubes are useful now, but in only one generation they will seem as quaint as whale oil lamps. I gave Kim this ‘gadget’ so I could capture all her experiences, even to the very instant of her death. It was a promise I made to her when she agreed to be killed.”

Felt had been standing in the cold outside of the closed library for ten minutes before Agent Bill Sullivan swung by to pick him up as previously arranged. He apologized for being a little late and blamed it on the difficulty of breaking free of Tolson. “He’s got his investigatory teeth into another steak.”

He started driving toward the FBI trailer north of Greendome where they would stay overnight.

“Tomorrow, Bill,” said Felt, “if you please, I’d like to see the town’s cemetery before we go back to the sheriff’s station.”

“That little thing? I’ve seen it. It’s on the side of Mt. Motorcycle down where the railroad loops around back on itself. You know, Felt, Headwater is a small town, but it’s not that small, and it’s almost eighty years old, so you’d think their local version of Boot Hill would be bigger, but no, it’s only about the size of any single lot in town. Maybe forty plots.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“So did Tolson. He already ran it down. None of the faithful get buried here. It turns out that little cemetery is only for the heathens, for folks who weren’t a member of the Church of Green Dome and committed the unthinkable faux pas of dying here.”

Dory was an early bird, so after Roddy Walker summoned her and Tashunka by phone to drop by his office for questioning sha was the first to arrive. Felt introduced himself and mentioned that he had a few questions for har.

In his opening gambit Felt said, “You are not under any obligation to answer, but I do have a few questions remaining to tie off this case and your help would be greatly prohibited. I only warn you that making a false statement to a federal agent is a crime. Do you understand, Miss Hashmal Doriel?”

“My friends call me Dory. Hashmal is an…honorific. And yes, Special Agent Felt, I do understand how serious this is.”

“What was your relationship to the deceased?”

“She and I were classmates at the Church parochial school. For a time, we were officers of the Church. And also we were very close friends.”

“Where were you two days ago, on January 20?”

“I spent the entire day either in the Temple, or in the Temple parking lot, or at my house, or on the road between the Temple and my house.”

“What time do you first arrive at the Temple.”

“About a quarter to eight, in the morning, as was my habit. I was still the Apostle of the Church on that morning.”

“Can you tell me if anything of note happened after you arrived at the Temple?”

“The former Apostle of the Church arrived, Special Agent Felt. A Mr. Klaus Hansen. He came with Paul Bergin, who used to be the Deacon, until both of them stormed out and started their own church in some barn. It wasn’t the first time they’d been back to the Temple since their first temper tantrum. I guess they thought throwing a temper tantrum was a good negotiating technique. They stormed out last Monday after Kim and Gabriel flashed their wedding rings and told they they would never get a divorce. Then on Wednesday they came back and said we had one more chance to put the Church back together. Can you be believe that? They said we had one more chance.”

“What were their conditions?”

“They wanted their old positions back, both Apostle and Deacon, as though nothing had happened. Gabriel told ’em to go pound sand, so they made as though they were leaving again. I was bored of that whole cycle so thought I would break the logjam by resigning my own position. Offer ’em half of what the arrogant fools were demanding, at any rate.”

“Then what happened?”

“Klaus took the deal, natch, because at least he got his job back, and Paul’s pretty much his lapdog anyway. Then they talked Robyn and Gabriel into going down to their barn and patching things up with the White Wing. I’m Red Wing so I wouldn’t be welcome there anyway. I stayed in the Temple cleaning the rooms we reserve for out-of-towners.”

“Were you alone in the Temple after that, Dory?”

“As far as I know, yes. As you may know, it’s pretty big. But the only vehicle in the parking lot was Twofeather’s Woodie.”

“Did he give you that?”

“Yes, and his house, and everything in it. You can’t take it with you, as everyone knows.”

“Did anyone come to the Temple during the rest of that day?”

“The next one back was Gabriel, about an hour later, he said he walked halfway up the mountain from where Hansen kicked him out of his truck. About a half hour after that Hansen and Bergin came back too and I thought it must have been a pretty short reunion ceremony. Hansen booted me out of the Temple because I wasn’t an officer of the Church anymore, I guess, and he said he only wanted to see me there on Wednesdays with the rest of the Red Wing. So I got in my station wagon and drove home.”

“Thank you Dory. That’s all the questions I have. But I believe my associate Special Agent Bill Sullivan has a few more. Please remember, the same rules apply.”

Sullivan asked, “What is your relationship with one Sophie Krause?”

“It is precisely the same as my relationship with one Kimberly Zinter, we are classmates and friends, except that I presume Sofie is still alive.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“What does this have to do with the murder case.”

“It has to do with the fugitive case.”

“You know, Special Agent Sullivan, I still haven’t seen one piece of paper signed by a judge that says to arrest Sofie for what-have-you. What do you think she’s done to make her a fugitive?”

“She broke quarantine.”

“What quarantine? I haven’t seen that piece of paper either.”

“I’m asking the questions here.”

“And under the rules laid out by Special Agent Mark Felt, which he subsequently affirmed also apply to your line of questioning, I’m under no obligation to answer.”

With that she walked briskly out of the sheriff’s station.

By that time Tashunka had checked in. He was appraised of the same set of conditions that Dory had been given, and said he was ready to speak.

Felt said, “The sheriff tells me, sir, that you’re even older than the town of Headwater.”

“I was a boy of nine when they platted out the town,” Tashunka said. “There was no roads back then. There were no houses, no Temple, not even state borders. They say you’re here because Kimberly’s body lay across three states, but imagine what a small thing that must seem to me compared to the underlying fact, which is that a girl is dead.”

“How did you find her?”

“I live on the same dirt road that passes near the tri-state marker, out where it wanders into what they tell me is the edge of Wyoming, but that doesn’t mean much to me either. I was making for the Temple to see Gabriel about getting more of those half-dollars he never seems to run out of and that’s when I saw her.”

“Did you draw near to the body?”

“Only near enough to see her breath didn’t make clouds in the cold air and so I knew she was dead. I knew she was in the Church by looking at her hair. And when I got closer I knew she was Kimberly Zinter.”

“This is very important, Tashunka. What time was it when you found the girl?”

“I don’t have a clock in my truck, but it was early in the eleven o’clock hour because soon after that I saw a clock on a wall at the sheriff’s station that said 11:20.”

“And how long did it take for you to get from the murder scene to the sheriff’s station?”

“About fifteen minutes. I know it’s not that far, but I drove slowly because the road was icy and I knew the girl was dead and there really wasn’t any need to hurry.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Mark Felt. “You’ve been very helpful, and those are all the questions I have for you today.”

“But I have a few more questions,” said Tolson, who had been listening, but perhaps not so intently. “I’m Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson, and my questions will run more to the deep background. For instance, are you the same Tashunka who stayed with Chief Wanica when his son rode down the river with Lieutenant Wells hard on his heels?”

“I was that boy,” Tashunka said. “I see you have read the Green Book, Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson. That’s very flattering.”

“Thank you. My question to you is, how did Wanica deal with Morrison and Smalley and the two other calvarymen, really? How did the bodies of all those soldiers and their horses disappear, really?”

“Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson, now that you have read the Green Book, it will save both you and I much time if you to realize what sort of book it really is.”

“And what sort of book is it, really, Tashunka?”

“It is not a book of religious poetry, Special Agent in Charge Clyde Tolson. It does not veer into metaphor or allegory. Everything contained within that book actually happened, exactly as it was written. And that is all I have to say about that.”

Then Tashunka got up and following the example of Dory he departed the sheriff’s station with no more words.

Next up was Klaus Hansen, who hobbled into the interrogation room with his ankles cuffed so he had no illusion he could get up and walk out like Dory and Tashunka just did. Tolson consulted a brief Felt had put together for him before he spoke.

“Mr. Hansen, we placed your vehicle at the crime scene.”

“With what, Clyde, tire treads? How many different kinds of tires do you think there are in a town as small as this?”

“Gabriel Shybear is willing to testify that you declared the girl dead before her body was found by the old Indian, who, by the way, immediately notified the sheriff while you did not.”

“But you can’t tie the murder weapon to me. You can’t tie the footprints to anyone. So all you have is the word of an aggrieved husband.”

“You had motive in that you led the White Wing out of the Church over the marriage of Gabriel and Kim, and only returned when such a marriage was made forbidden as an article of canon law.”

“All that means, Clyde, is the new Prophet had more common sense than the old one did.”

“Ah, yes, but that ruling left the original marriage in place, to be dissolved by any means necessary. And finally, you cannot account for your whereabouts between the time when you left Gabriel on the side of the road and the time you returned to the Temple, which also happens to bracket the time of the murder.”

“The girl was already dead when I got down there,” Hansen said.

“Paul Bergin is a small fellow,” Tolson said. “Even Kim loomed over him, and that makes the murder puzzling because killing someone who doesn’t want to die is harder than you think. Yet somehow she was slaughtered and her body hoisted onto that marker. You just admitted you were both there, and I know you deliberately made the case federal to get my attention. So now you indeed have it, Klaus. The floor is yours.”

“If you keep me here in custody Gabriel Shybear will hold Last Rites for his wife in a private ceremony and you will never see the Golden Gift. If you swear to drop the charges, I’ll make her Last Rites public services. At the end you and your agents can descend on Gabriel and scoop up the Golden Gift at your leisure.

Mark Felt gave a start, but the advice Robyn left for him in the library the previous night served him well here. He knew the Director would never tolerate letting Hansen go free. No judge would instruct a jury to ignore the other set of footprints, but even if one did, Bergin’s defense team would argue for a mistrial. Failing that, they would certainly get his conviction overturned on appeal.

Sheriff Walker responded the way Felt initially wanted to do when he said, “You can’t be seriously thinking of letting him go. We’ve got him cold for conspiracy to commit murder, at the very least.”

Mark Felt said, “Sheriff, I’m dying to discuss this with you, but this is neither the time nor the place.”

Tolson found that remark interesting. “Where are your thoughts trending, Felt?”

“Sir, when the Director sent me here he told me the case would be independent of your DECON work, and my reports were to go directly to him, but unfortunately here’s a situation where the two investigations have run right into each other. The Director’s orders to me were to, quote, ‘mesh with Tolson where practical’ so I will look to the senior agent on site for guidance.”

“Excellent, Felt. Then let us go forward and see what shakes out. Klaus, you have my word as a federal agent the Bureau will not charge you with the murder of this girl. But if this is just a big bait-and-switch operation, if I don’t have the Golden Gift in my hand at the conclusion of all this, you will be right back in here and all bets are off.”

“I understand.”

Tolson instructed the sheriff to remove the shackles from the prisoner’s ankles. After he was done Felt caught Walker’s eye and gestured to meet him outside.

When they were both out of earshot, the Sheriff said, “There’s no need to explain, Special Agent Felt. I get it. Operational deception. Even the sheriff of a ramshackle town like this knows the FBI doesn’t actually charge perps with crimes, they leave that to the US Attorney or a Grand Jury.”

The funeral for Kim Zinter was the first opportunity for the new Prophet of the Green Dome Church to preach to the flock in his new role. On paper, the services were intended to mark the great restoration of Church unity after the schism. In reality, the only member of the Red Wing to attend was Gabriel Shybear, and that was only by necessity, as he was the sole minister of the Last Rite. So it was simply the barn operation of Hansen’s “reformed” church all over again, minus the tongues and the sawdust.

Klaus had absolutely nothing to say about Kim at all. He never mentioned her parents. He never mentioned how she had gone missing for the last two months, and how she had been in quarantine for six months before that. Hansen didn’t know the girl, he didn’t know her family, nor her friends, nor their families. He had no feelings for her what- soever, other than the fact that he hated her with an abiding hatred for marrying Gabriel Shybear and thus, in his view, she ripped apart the One True Church. So instead of giving anything like a decent eulogy, Klaus embarked upon a particularly malicious Bible study.

He said, “Friends, please join me in turning in your Bible to the book of First Kings chapter eleven, verses four through eleven.”

Gabriel Shybear stood in front of Klaus in a white robe, but one step down from the elevated chancel platform, holding a large Bible open for the Prophet to read. The Temple Bible was marked with colored tabs. Even arranged this way, some members of the congregation still couldn’t see Hansen’s face because Gabriel was so tall.

Hansen said, “For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father. For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burnt incense and sacrificed unto their gods. Wherefore the LORD said unto Solomon, ‘Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy servant.'”

After this the people in the congregation hoped the Prophet was finished, but then he continued, to their dread. “Now turn, please, to the book of Nehemiah chapter thirteen verses twenty-three through twenty-seven.”

There was more page flipping, but it was much less eager this time. Hansen said, “In those days also saw I Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab: And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people. And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, ‘Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves. Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among many nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his God, and God made him king over all Israel: nevertheless even him did outlandish women cause to sin. Shall we then hearken unto you to do all this great evil, to transgress against our God in marrying strange wives?'”

The Prophet went on and on for an hour, quoting favorite parts of the scriptures having to do with the “sin” of inter-marriage between races, until most of the Bunners were frantic, desperately wishing he would stop.

For hez part Gabriel merely smiled, thinking the White Wing was getting the hell they deserved for all their own sins. And it was only getting started because Michael was yet to dish out some of hyz own justice.

When the Liturgy of the Word finally gave way to the Final Rite everyone in the pews seemed to be greatly relieved.

The temple organist took her place at the edge of the raised chancel and began to play a Bach chorale prelude, “I Call You, Lord Jesus Christ”. The congregation sang the hymn in the original German from the words printed in the hymnal, though very few members still under- stood German anymore. The singing was therefore pretty lousy, but the underlying music was gorgeous.

Mark Felt, sitting in the pews, took note of the musician and remarked that the organist looked remarkably like the deceased.

Sheriff Walker told him the girl playing was Kim’s twin sister Robyn, whom he once interviewed on the afternoon of the murder but he had not been able to contact her since. “Shall I hold her after the services?”

Felt replied, “No. I think, Sheriff, that any need to question her further has been entirely overtaken by events.”

Wearing white robes in hez role as the Minister of the Final Rite, Deacon Gabriel Shybear stood behind the embalmed body of Kim, which lay face up on the altar, also clothed in white.

Sofie Krause came out of the audience to stand next to him. She was wearing her green school uniform, like she always did when she went to Temple, since it was the most feminine garment she owned. Perhaps it was the only feminine one.

Special Agent Bill Sullivan gave a start. “Sir, that’s the girl I’ve been looking for! Sofie Krause!”

Someone behind him snickered. The way he put it sounded hilarious.

Tolson restrained him with a hand on his arm. “Don’t move unless she tries to walk out of the temple. Oh yes, we have her, but my top priority is the artifact.”

“Most of you know me,” Sofie told them. “If you don’t, I’m Sofie Krause. Kim was my close friend. We were the same age, we went to the same expensive school, we went to the same church. Most of you knew her too, and most of you know that she and her momma Claire have had a pretty lousy time of it lately. Her father died in the mines about nine months back. There was some trouble in the Church over that. There’s no use rehashing the particulars, except to note there are no more coal mines now. And if you ask me that’s not going to do the town a heck of a lot of good from here on out. After that me and Kim both got sick and we were stuck in quarantine for six whole months over in Wyoming, near Cody, and not only were our family and friends unable to visit us, they didn’t even know where we were.”

Sophie saw Tolson sitting out in the pews and locked eyes with him. “I think it was a gross injustice, and it demands a comeuppance, but for right now that’s neither here nor there. It was Kim, mostly, who got us out of that jam, but that’s what she always did. That’s who she was. In school Kim always called me a scrub, but she never, ever turned me away when I told her I needed help with my class work. Somehow she had a way of explaining things to me better than the teachers did, and that, at least, kept me in D territory. Maybe, if she lived, she would have been a teacher herself one day. You already know she had a voice like an angel, and she could play the piano and the organ. I mean she could really play. It turns out her twin sister Robyn can play pretty good too, as all of you have heard. Thanks for coming here and doing that for us today, Robyn. Me and some of Kim’s other friends in band class had dreams of pressing a swing record with her, but now they’re dashed flat and that’s a terrible shame.”

Sofie paused to sharply sob just then. When she recovered she said, “It’s even more terrible when you think about why it came to be. It didn’t have to be this way. What a terrible, terrible waste!”

Sofie stepped back from the lectern, with tears rolling down her face, but she remained standing next to Gabriel on the chancel.

Gabriel did not follow up with a eulogy of hez own, though he longed to express the love che had for his wife, or even to mention that she had been his wife. But things had already gone overlong with Hansen’s sermon, and besides, this was a tough crowd. Gabriel knew any mention of Kim as his wife would simply antagonize the congregation even more than Klaus Hansen’s sermon did.

Instead che said, “On the surface this would seem to be a time of sorrow. But upon reflection, we see how that sorrow is really a sign of a deeper love. If Kimberly were a stranger to us, if she had no one among us who cared about her, we might feel, despite the Lord’s commandment to love our neighbors, only a kind of indifference. Certainly not bereavement. And that, brothers and sisters, is the second most-important purpose of the Last Rite. We gather together in sorrow to recognize and celebrate the love that underlies our grief.”

Gabriel then offered a prayer before beginning the heart of the actual Rite.

“Bless us, O Lord, as today we have come together to commit the body of our beloved sister in faith, Kimberly Anne Zinter, directly into your hands. Sown in corruption, let her body be raised in incorruption. Sown in dishonor, let her body be raised in your glory. Sown in weakness, let it be raised in power. Sown a natural body, let her be raised a spiritual body as we eagerly look for the life to come when she receives again the many years that were taken away from her on Earth. In the name of your only son Yeshua we pray.”

The crowd muttered scattered amens.

“Do you believe, as I believe, that when Prince Melchizedek first came to Father Abraham, he unveiled our most holy relic as a sure sign of our Lord’s divinity?”

Some scattered members of the crowd, who knew the correct way to answer the Call and Response of the Last Rite, said, “I do.”

Gabriel produced the self-same relic then, and held it high for all to see. Clyde Tolson leaned forward in his pew.

“Do you believe, as I believe, that when the Lord our God was made manifest on this very spot, the Island in the Sky, Chief Wanica took possession of our most holy relic, which we name the Golden Gift?”

A more robust response of “I do” came from the congregation. They were catching on.

“Do you believe, as I believe, that when the Kuwapi people were united with the pilgrims led by our first prophet, Mark Lange, the bodies of four fallen warriors of the People were committed into the hands of our God by the Golden Gift as a sign of their everlasting union?”

A very hearty “I do!” erupted from the rest of the church.

Then, before the eyes of everyone in the sanctuary, Gabriel ignited the Golden Gift and used the hissing black shaft to make every scrap of Kim’s body disappear. He even took shallow swaths of the concrete altar along with it, although Gabriel was usually much more careful not to do so. Periodically a new altar surface had to be poured and cured. Che knew such measures wouldn’t matter anymore after this last Last Rite.

Clyde Tolson was frozen briefly as he took in this astonishing sight, but he quickly recovered and gave the signal to go.

Sheriff Roddy Walker, however, did not recover. He sat transfixed, realizing his lifetime of unbelief had been entirely misguided. But that, after all, was the number one most important purpose of the Last Rite.

The sanctuary of the Green Dome Church was constructed as a hexagon, with aisles forming six spokes. Clyde Tolson, Bill Sullivan, Mark Felt, Dr. Trochmann, Deputy Lurz and Deputy Holsinger descended toward the altar, each man descending his own aisle, making straight for Gabriel, who saw them and quickly made the Golden Gift disappear into his little ready pocket of space-time.

Clyde Tolson was the first to reach Gabriel, and he tackled him, flipping the young nephil face down.

“Where is it, you son of a bitch?”

Gabriel was cuffed, poked, prodded and rolled over and over by four different men.

Some members of the congregation began to stream out of the temple. Others remained in their pews like the sheriff did, bewailing that they had come to full belief only after it was too late.

The ones who had seen the Last Rite once before shouted angry oaths at Klaus Hansen for permitting unbelieving outsiders to witness and hence defile the Sacred Relic. This was the Abomination That Makes Desolate predicted in scripture. The Temple was defiled beyond any redemption. The Church existed no more.

Gabriel had orders from Michael on what to do next: multiply the Golden Gift until each one of the B’nei Elohim were armed with one of their own. But carrying out that order would have to wait.

After the Sheriff recovered and rejoined his deputies they arrested Gabriel and Sofie and took them away.

Tolson and Sullivan knocked over the massive altar in their search for the Golden Gift. They looked for any trap doors in the floor of the chancel where Gabriel might have tossed it. Ultimately they even resorted to tearing up the chancel carpet.

Mark Felt didn’t seem eager to help them. He looked at Robyn sitting at the organ, who winked at him. He remembered how she had written a note to him that everything would turn out fine. Now he sensed the search would be futile and Tolson would not get what he was looking for. He also saw Klaus Hansen standing there with his mouth wide open in shock at how things were turning out. Felt cuffed his hands behind his back before he had time to offer any resistance and with that Hansen’s shock was doubled.

“Hey, jerk!” Hansen screamed at Tolson. “We had a deal.”

Tolson ceased from his labors to look at Hanson and saw how Felt had already cuffed him. Good. Saved him the trouble of doing it himself. He glanced at Sullivan, then dropped the corner of carpet he was holding. Sullivan followed suit. Tolson gave a sigh of resignation and said, “We did have a deal, Klaus. And I don’t have the Golden Gift. That means all bets are off, just like I told you.”

“Give me five minutes alone with the kid and I’ll beat it out of him.”

“He’s a pretty tough kid,” Felt said. “You already tried that with a whip, remember? Gabriel’s buddies mightn’t like it.”

Gabriel and Sofie were hauled down to the station, strip searched, and even body-cavity searched with nurse Ella Fader drafted to do the honors for Sofie. Tolson learned that Gabriel was a hermaphrodite, having the genitalia of both sexes. But the Golden Gift was not found on the person of either one.

After that Gabriel and Sofie were thrown into separate but adjoining cells. They spoke no words to their captors despite every attempt to intimidate them. Instead they put on implacably stony faces and conversed with Robyn by way of Doryphone.

In the middle of the night, at an hour selected by Robyn, Gabriel produced the Golden Gift and cut hez way out of his cell through an exterior wall of the sheriff’s station. Once che was outside che cut Sofie out too.

She looked back and saw how the holes were carved as silhouettes of of people, as though she and Gabriele had escaped by running right through the wall like the cartoon characters did on Looney Tunes. Her own escape hole was in the shape of a girl in pigtails and a dress. “Very funny, Gabe.”

It would, in fact, amuse Mark Felt to no end when he saw it in the morning.

Dory drove up in her station wagon just then to pick them up, with Robyn riding shotgun. Dory rolled down a window, pointed over her shoulder and said, “Look!”

Gabriel and Sofie saw the summit of Greendome was on fire, as though it was a volcano. The flames seemed to light up the whole night like a slowly flickering orange moon. Sofie asked, “What does it mean?”

“It means Michael has unleashed a certain B’nei Eloah we haven’t met yet,” Robyn told her. “One Ricky Morrich, from about thirty years up the timeline. He goes by the nickname Pyro because he likes to play with fire. And the Temple is bye-bye.