TCK

K0

"Ruth asked me  why  the  knife block  was  gone," Paul  Bergin told Klaus Hansen  at the  temple. "I told her  I didn't  know anything about  it. She said  she let  this FBI fellow  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. Bloody clothes I could explain. A bloody knife I could not."

"What if the sheriff and this Agent Felt come here next?"

That made Hansen ponder a  bit. He said, "Now maybe is  a good time for both of us to be tending to the flock."

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.

Roddy said, "Paul Bergin, you are under arrest for the murder of Kimberly Zinter."

Paul was frozen in shock, so Roddy grabbed his jacket sleeve and cuffed his bare wrist. Then he made Paul face one of the doors. After both arms were cuffed behind Paul's back Roddy patted him down, removed his wallet, and unlatched the carabiner key chain looped to his belt. He handed both of these to Felt, then turned Paul over to  his deputies  who were  coming up  the flight  of stairs leading  to the  temple. "Fingerprints, new home,  not a word to anybody, boys."

The deputies took Bergin  away just as  Special Agent-in-Charge Tolson arrived on the with Agent Sullivan in tow. Sheriff Walker introduced Hansen to Felt as the Apostle of  the Church. Hansen was indignant. "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. Then he said, "I will hold you to the absolute letter of this search warrant, as though it were sacred scripture. You may search only in the rooms which are locked with those keys."

Gabriel Shybear was waiting for them just inside. K1

"What are you doing here today of all days?" Roddy asked.

"I'm here every day now, Sheriff. There's been a reshuffling. I hold a very  important office in the Church:  Deacon. Mr. Hansen is the Prophet now, and Paul Bergin is the Apostle."

Sheriff  Roddy   Walker  caught   up   on   all  the   required introductions. "Mr. Klaus Hansen, Mr. Gabriel  Shybear, this is Special Agent  in Charge Clyde  Tolson of the Federal  Bureau of Investigation, and with  him today 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  it yielded  nothing. The door to Gabriel's  office  was  wide  open,  so  the  agents  could  not enter there. 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?"

Klaus and Gabriel exchanged a  glance, but the meaning  of this was lost on the sheriff and the FBI agents.

"That's a dry hole, Agent Sullivan," said Gabriel. "It's just my broom closet." Nevertheless, Special  Agent  Felt  found  the appropriate key. Like Gabriel said, there was nothing inside but cleaning supplies.

Klaus said "lucky" to Gabriel  and left  the party for  his own office. After that the  sheriff and  the  three Bureau  agents headed down the wide carpeted stairs to the basement cafeteria. 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?" Tolson asked Special Agent Bill.

"Mecca," Sullivan said. K2

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.

Felt didn't  like how  the  murder  investigation had  suddenly veered. Tolson's  agenda  was   intruding  now. Stones were haphazardly torn away from  the cairn  and Tolson  went inside. Then 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 something in the way  Sheriff Walker explained  what he was  looking  at. Agent Felt  found  the experience  profoundly immersive.

After that Felt found Klaus Hansen's office, which was also in B Wing, and he 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. In fact, you presence here is interference with a murder investigation."

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

Walker thumbed through the pages and saw that it was the text of the Green Book, holy writ  for the Church, entirely  written by hand. He said,  "Agent  Felt, this  is  called  the  Printer's Manuscript. It  is said to have  been copied in the  other world from what they call the White Scroll." K3

Felt  said,  "Gosh,   sheriff,   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,  look  Gabriel,  it says  here  Doriel resigned  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!  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 had 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,  and Klaus  took me  separately in  his own truck. But  on the way down  we got into a  heated argument over race 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." K4

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, but  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?"

"You can't tie  the  murder weapon  to me.  You  can't tie  the footprints to anyone.  All you have is the word  of an aggrieved husband."

"You had motive. 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 is the new  Prophet had more common  sense than the old one did."

"Ah, yes, but that ruling left the original  marriage in place, til  death  do  they  part.  And 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.

"So you admit you were both there, and you deliberately made the case federal to get the  FBI's attention. Well, now  you indeed have the FBI's attention, Prophet Hansen. The floor is yours." K5

“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.”

Klaus Hansen hobbled into the interrogation room with his ankles cuffed. He said he  would  only speak  with  Tolson, so  Clyde consulted a brief Felt had put together for him before he spoke.

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

“With tire treads, Clyde? How many different kinds  of tires does town as small as this have?”

“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.”

"I am the Prophet, Clyde, as you  just said. If you  keep me in custody Gabriel Shybear  will hold Last Rites for his  wife in a private ceremony and you will never  see the Golden Gift. But 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 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 or at the least get his conviction overturned on appeal.

Sheriff Walker responded the way  Felt initially wanted  to do, "You can't be thinking of letting him go. We've got him cold for conspiracy to commit murder at the very least."

Felt said, "Sheriff, I'm  dying to discuss  this with  you, but this is not 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  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." K6

"Excellent, Felt. Then let  us go forward  and see  what shakes out. Prophet  Hansen, 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."

At the Last Rites 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 about Solomon's heart being  turned away from  the LORD  by his foreign wives, and the  "sin" of inter-marriage  between races, until the Bunners  were frantic,  desperately wishing  he would stop. Eventually he ran out of scripture.

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  understood 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, who  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?"

Special Agent 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. K7

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 the  congregation. "I'm Sofie Krause. Kim was my age. Most of you know that she and her momma have had a pretty lousy time  of it lately. Kim's father died in the mines about nine months back. 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 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 you have  just heard. Thanks for coming here and doing that for us today, Robyn. Me and my friends had dreams of pressing a swing record with her, but now they're dashed flat and that's a terrible waste!"

Then Sofie fell silent and stepped back from the lectern but she remained standing next to Gabriel on the chancel. She wasn't a good enough actor to summon up any teares.

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. Things had already gone overlong with Hansen's sermon, and che did  not want 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, 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. So now  let us bow our heads in prayer.

"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." K8

"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 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 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  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, and prodded by four different men. K9

Some members  of  the  congregation  began  to  stream  out  of the  temple. Others remained in  their pews  like the  sheriff, bewailing that they had come to  full belief only after  it was too late. Some who had seen the Last Rites before shouted angry oaths at Klaus Hansen for  permitting outsiders to  witness and hence defile the Sacred  Relic. This was the  Abomination That Makes Desolate predicted in  scripture. The Temple was defiled beyond redemptipon and the Church existed no more.

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, finally even 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. Felt 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 came up behind him  and cuffed his hands  behind his back before  he had time to offer any resistance. 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. Save him the trouble of doing it himself. He glanced at Sullivan,  then dropped  the corner  of carpet he was holding. Sullivan followed suit. Tolson 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."

Gabriel and Sofie were thrown into separate but adjoining cells. They spoke no  words  to  their captors. Instead they put  on implacably  stony  faces and  conversed  with  Robyn by  way  of Doryphone. 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. Dory and Robyn were  pulling up in  the woodie. Sofie looked  back  and  saw  how  the  holes  were  carved  as silhouettes of of people, as  though she and Gabriel had escaped by running right through the wall like  Merrie Melodies cartoon characters frequently did. 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.