He woke feeling worse for the few hours of restless sleep.
There was an over-exposed fuzz over part of her face in one of the photographs. Nothing precise, but something peculiar. It could have been dirt on the lens or from the window, there had been enough glass between them, but then the smear would have been on all of the shots.
He took the contact sheet down from the washing line and used a fisheye lens to magnify the girl.
Her long lashes, thick with mascara, guarded her eyes. He saw it then, the substance in the haze, the body and form of the illusion, melting into her left cheek, the mark of the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the simple rendition of three from one carved into her cheek...
A body with a foetus carved where a stomach should be, the pair surrounded by a bloody nimbus that was mark of the ghost…
Quickly, Gabriel checked the single shot of the dead preacher. There was something on the dead man’s cheek, amid the swirl of cuts, but it was too still too small to be certain.
It could be anything, he told himself but even as he thought the thought, he knew exactly what he’d find there if he made an enlargement:
The mark of The Trinity.