It was near the hour when night, that slow and patient monarch of our firmament, begins its reluctant abdication to the pale ambassadors of dawn, yet the world still lingered beneath that dim and funereal half-light wherein shapes grow ambiguous and even the most innocent of structures appear invested with a sinister shape, as though the very mode of creation had grown uncertain of its allegiance to godliness.

  Gabriel rode shotgun, his body folded inward like a man attempting to occupy less space within the universe than his grief demanded, while the blood-soaked scrap of verse rested within the inner pocket of my coat like some malignant scripture whispering quietly against my ribs.The church spire stood beyond town like a black thorn embedded in the side of heaven.

  Before a man walks knowingly toward the mouth of the hell, he must first gather whatever poor companions fate has left him, and so we turned down the road that led toward Henry’s home office

  Henry had worn the badge in New Haven since before the despair had properly settled on the town’s first cemetery plot, and in the intervening decades he had become something less like a man and more like an aging fixture of the civic landscape. He is a forgotten institution, like courthouse clocks or weather-beaten hitching posts, whose continued existence is accepted with such habitual certainty that no one bothers to consider what will become of things once they finally disappear.

  I drew the engine down into silence and let the machine expire beneath my hands with the weary cough of a creature that had carried us farther into the night than any honest engine should rightly be asked to travel.

  For a brief interval neither of us stirred, as though the cessation of motion had rendered our limbs temporarily uncertain of their duties; Gabriel remained seated beside me with his eyes fixed through the windshield into that vague grayness which lies between night and dawn, wearing the hollow and inward-looking expression of a man who had already begun the long and lonely walk toward the grave where his wife now lay waiting.

  “We don’t have time for this,” he muttered at last, the words escaping him with the dull heaviness of Timmy falling down the well.

  “We don’t have the luxury of going alone,” I replied, my voice carrying the quiet arithmetic of a man who has already calculated the cost of failure and found it too large to pay twice.

  When I raised my hand and rapped my knuckles against the door the sound traveled inward through the station with the same solemn authority of a magistrate’s gavel striking oak in some dim, unmerciful court of law. For a time none answered. The house lingered with silence which suggested not absence but contemplation, as though the structure itself were considering whether the business we had brought with us ought rightly to be admitted. At length the latch shifted with a weary metallic sigh.

  Henry stood before us wearing yesterday’s shirt and the exhausted countenance of a man who had not slept properly in a great many years, while the lantern behind him cast a dull amber glow that gathered in the deep hollows beneath his eyes and stretched his shadow across the floorboards like the silhouette of a much younger and far more formidable lawman who had long since departed this earth.

  “Well,” he rasped, his voice dry and brittle as the husks of autumn corn rattling in a field abandoned to windfall, “you boys look like the devil himself just handed you a bill.”

  I stepped inside without ceremony. “Six dead.” The words fell into the room with the blunt and graceless finality of a hammer striking stone. Beside me Gabriel’s breath caught violently in his chest like a rope snapping beneath sudden weight. Henry did not answer at once. Instead he closed the door behind us with deliberate care, leaned his shoulder against the wood as though requiring its support, and released a long and weary exhalation which carried with it the resignation of a man who had long suspected that the world was preparing to grow worse before it had any intention of getting better.

  “I figured as much,” he uttered quietly.

  Gabriel’s head snapped upward with the startled violence of a man suddenly struck. “You figured-”

  Henry lifted his palm outward. “I figured,” he repeated, tone neither defensive nor proud but merely tired, “the devil rarely stops halfway through a sermon.” A thick, oozing silence followed those words and settled over the room. The clock upon Henry’s station wall ticked with slow and dreadful patience.I reached into my coat and withdrew the blood-darkened page, placing it carefully upon the table between us where it lay like some obscene relic salvaged from a ruined altar. Henry regarded the paper with the cautious resignation of a man who had already opened far too many letters whose contents he would rather not have known. His lips moved faintly as he read. When he finished he slid the page away from himself with two fingers, the motion curiously reminiscent of a gambler pushing an unlucky card across green felt.

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  “The church,” he murmured. “He’s waiting there.” Henry rubbed his eyes slowly with the thick and weathered fingers of a farmer who had spent too many years wrestling stubborn soil from an uncooperative earth. “Then go get him,” he said with ultimate finality.

  Gabriel stepped forward. “You’re coming with us.”

  Henry let out a short and humorless laugh which possessed about as much warmth as frost upon a gravestone. “Son,” he said, “I’m about as useful in a gunfight these days as a hymnbook in a hurricane.”

  “That man killed my wife.” The sentence broke from Gabriel with the violent inevitability of rapture. Henry looked at him then, truly looked, and something subtle shifted within the old lawman’s expression, like an ancient door trembling uneasily upon its hinges when a wind long absent begins once more to move through.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said with stark sincerity.

  Gabriel’s voice quivered with restrained fury. “She deserves justice.”

  “And she’ll get it. Julius-”

  “No,” Gabriel replied, the tremor leaving his voice as resolve hardened within it, “not unless you help us.”

  Henry shook his head slowly, the gesture carrying with it the weary reluctance of a man who has already buried too many friends. “You boys don’t get it.”

  I leaned forward and rested both hands upon the table, the wood cool beneath my palms. “Five women died before Cheryl,” I said softly, “five women who no longer possess any one soul in this world to demand justice on their behalf. Five, while you sat and did nothing.” Henry’s gaze hardened and drifted toward the window. Beyond glass the first diluted gray of morning had begun creeping into the sky like ink thinned with water. “It’s time to stop waiting,” I continued, but the old man had no answer.

  Something about his silence irritated me. Perhaps it was exhaustion of the night, perhaps the lingering image of Cheryl lying butchered upon her own floorboards, or perhaps merely the quiet fury that rises in a man’s chest when he sees another surrender to despair before the contest has even begun. “Henry,” I said at last, my voice sharpening with the slow precision of a blade being drawn across a whetstone, “you’ve worn that badge longer than I’ve been breathing, and if you’re telling me now that you’re too tired to stand up when a monster begins carving crosses into the women of this town, then perhaps the badge ought to seek itself a younger chest.”

  The words remained suspended in the air between us, heavy and unforgiving. Henry’s shoulders stiffened. For a brief moment I half expected the old lawman to strike me. Instead he lowered himself slowly into the chair behind the table with the quiet collapse of a building whose foundations have finally surrendered to time. “You think I’m weak,” he murmured.

  “I think you’re hiding, but I can’t figure what from.” My reply carried finality.

  Henry stared at the floorboards for a long while. Then something inside him finally gave way. “You want to know why I said I hadn’t seen anything like this since before you picked up a badge?” he asked hoarsely. Neither Gabriel nor I spoke. Henry lifted his head, and what I saw there was not anger, but grief. “Last time,” he said quietly, “I lost my boy.” The room became very still. “There was another man, must be another” his voice trembled faintly beneath the slow and terrible pressure of memory. “Ten years back. Called himself a preacher. Said the human body was flawed. Said God had made mistakes.” A cold knot tightened in my stomach. “I chased him halfway across this desert,” Henry said, “believing I could stop him.” His hands trembled faintly upon the table. “But monsters don’t always hunt strangers.”

  Gabriel spoke barely above a whisper. “Your son…”

  Henry nodded. “He took him.” The old lawman closed his eyes. “I… I was too late.”

  No one spoke for some time. At last Henry rose. He crossed the room to the coat rack beside the door and lifted the old revolver belt that hung there like the relic of some forgotten war whose veterans had all since gone to ground. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said quietly as he fastened the holster around his waist. “I’m afraid of failing again.”

  I shifted forward and grabbed his hand, holding it tight to my chest. “Henry, the hour isn’t too late for justice. If that preacher’s ghost thinks he can finish what the devil started…”

  Henry slid the revolver into its holster with a soft mechanical certainty. “…then I suppose it’s time old law paid heaven a visit.”

  Outside, the first pale fingers of dawn had begun climbing the eastern horizon, and somewhere beyond the slumbering roofs of New Haven, the church spire waited patiently for the hour when the rising sun would lift itself above the sanctuary and place the unblinking Eye of Heaven directly overhead.