25.

Caxton was brought into the main hall of the huge building, an echoing cavern with marble floors and high columns. A spiral staircase in wrought iron rose from the rear of the hall while massive fireplaces on either side roared with heat and light. The only other illumination in the room came from standing candelabras. There didn’t seem to be any electric lights in the hall. Caxton wondered if the place was even on the power grid.

Her silent guide led her toward a door set in one side of the hall. The girl knocked once, hesitantly as if afraid of making too much noise, then stepped back quickly. She turned and smiled at Caxton again, with lots of teeth.

Someone beyond the door called, “Enter.” Caxton shrugged and pushed the door open, then walked into a small but pleasant little office. The walls were lined with crowded bookshelves, except where they were pierced by a broad window that looked out on the lawn and another, if much smaller, fireplace that crackled merrily. Behind a massive oak desk a young woman was seated, dressed in a severe black dress and with a white cloth over her hair.

“You’ll be Trooper Caxton, then,” the woman said, rising from where she sat to hold out one gloved hand. Caxton shook it. “Welcome to our little sanctuary. Raleigh has told us about you. I’m Sister Margot.”

“Sister?” Caxton asked. “I didn’t realize this was a convent. I guess I should have guessed from the—the clothes.”

“This place was a nunnery once, but it’s moved on with the times. The staff remain under holy orders but we’re purely nondenominational. As for this outfit I’m wearing…it’s commonly called a habit,” the woman said. “We like to say it’s the last habit we ever want to take up. Please, please sit down. Can I offer you something to drink?” She turned to where a plastic cooler sat next to the window. It looked distinctly wrong in the room, which otherwise might have been furnished in the previous century and never renovated.

“I’d love a Diet Coke,” Caxton said. It had been a long, thirsty ride.

“Sorry. We don’t take stimulants. How about apple juice?”

“Sure.” Caxton took the proffered bottle and twisted off its cap.

“It’s vital to stay hydrated.” She offered a bottle of water to the silent girl standing in the doorway. “You’ve already met Violet, but of course she didn’t introduce herself.”

“Pleased to meet you both. I guess you know why I’m here.”

“Of course,” Sister Margot said. “Sister Raleigh will be down in a while. She’s currently engaged in a group therapy session that can’t be interrupted. In the meantime I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. We may look as if we’ve turned away from the world, and we have,” she giggled—behind Caxton Violet bubbled with mirth as well—“but we believe in hospitality as well, which includes cooperating with the authorities whenever we must. We also pay our taxes, quite regularly.”

“Good to hear it, though that’s not my department. Nice place you have here, by the way. All women, from what I hear. Must be very peaceful. So are you a Moravian? I never heard of Moravian nuns before.”

“Oh, no,” Sister Margot exclaimed. “There is no religion within these walls. When I want to pray, I actually step outside. We’re very careful not to exclude anyone.”

“Except men,” Caxton suggested.

Sister Margot shrugged. “They can be a distraction to the work we do here.”

“I see,” Caxton said, although honestly she was pretty confused. “What kind of work would that be? I’m afraid I don’t know as much about Raleigh as I thought I did.”

“This is a place of refuge. The girls who come here have all met the dark side of life, one way or the other. They need a place they can go far away from the temptations and stresses of modern life. We provide counseling and therapy, but mostly our work is to provide a different way of life. A simpler way.”

“So this is a halfway house?”

Sister Margot’s smile dimmed, but only by a fraction of a watt. “More like a retreat. A shelter from the storm. Trooper, we try to provide an oasis from all distractions, that’s all.”

“It’s, uh, Special Deputy. Not Trooper. So religion is one of those distractions. But you’re a believer yourself, aren’t you? I mean, you’re a Christian or something.”

Margot’s smile faded a few degrees. “I have taken certain vows, yes. I am required by those vows to wear this habit. The building we’re in was once consecrated to a holy order, as well. In the past it was a home for wayward girls—unwed mothers, to be exact. In recent years we’ve broadened our scope and also our outlook. The work we do here is vital and it must be completed in an atmosphere free of judgment and prejudice. The girls who come here have all made bad mistakes in their lives. The last thing they need is authority figures—like God—to remind them how they’ve failed.”

“Mistakes?” Caxton asked.

“Some became addicted to drugs or to less material pursuits. Some are just lost. What you would call mentally ill. I started out here myself, years ago. I suffered from schizophrenia and delusions of grandeur. This place helped me immeasurably.”

“Oh,” Caxton said. She turned in her seat to look at the girl behind her. “What’s Violet in for?”

The mute girl grabbed her throat and simulated strangulation.

Sister Margot explained. “She attempted to commit suicide by drinking drain cleaner. It was only through an act of great blessing that she survived, though as a result she’ll never speak again or eat solid food.”

Violet shrugged, her smile returning as bright as before.

“I take it some people stay here longer than others,” Caxton suggested.

“As long as they need to. Some of our patients never leave.”

What on earth, Caxton wondered, had Raleigh done to get herself sent to a place like this? “It’s important I see Raleigh as soon as possible. Before dark, at the very least. How much longer is her session going to last?”

“Another fifteen minutes or so. She’ll be brought to you the second she’s done. I want you to know, Trooper, that you are perfectly welcome here, for as long as you must join us. I’d be less than honest, however, if I said that your prolonged presence here was desirable. I worry that you’ll make some of the girls uneasy. A number of them have histories with law enforcement that were less than…convivial.”

“I promise, I’ll be as quick as I can. Where can I talk with Raleigh?” she asked.

Sister Margot looked to Violet. “Please find a room where they may talk and prepare it with candles and fire.” The mute girl bowed her head and ran off without looking back. “In the meantime, can I offer you a quiet place to wait?”

Caxton checked her cell phone. She got lousy reception in the office, and she hadn’t checked in with Glauer in a long time. “Maybe some place with a phone?”

Sister Margot’s smile dropped for a moment. “There’s only one telephone in the building, and that’s here, in my office. If you’d like to use it, I’ll just go wait out in the hall.”

Caxton started to protest, but the nun didn’t give her a chance. She headed out the door and left Caxton all alone. Whatever, Caxton thought, and reached for the woman’s phone. She called in to HQ and got Glauer, who had some information for her.

“You asked the members of the SSU to start looking for potential lairs,” he said, and she got excited for a second. “They’ve turned up sixty-one possibles, from Erie all the way to Reading.”

“That’s good,” she said, though the number was surprisingly large. The cops who worked part time for the SSU must have tagged every abandoned farmhouse and disused factory in the state. There was no way she could investigate all those leads on her own, though. “Get Fetlock in on this. Tell him—scratch that, ask him politely, he’s a little sensitive—to get his people to run all these down. Get as many of them as possible checked out before nightfall. You know what we’re looking for. Places that haven’t been used for years, but have signs of recent activity. They can rule out the places the local teens go to drink, and anywhere clearly visible from a main road. That should narrow the search.”

How awesome would it be, she thought, if they turned up the lair in the next hour? Knowing Jameson, his lair would be well guarded and probably booby-trapped. There were ways to deal with that sort of thing, however. If she could get to the lair by daylight, if she could find Jameson and Malvern inside, still in their coffins—it would be the work of a few minutes to remove their hearts from their bodies. To destroy the hearts. To end this.

Then she could go home. Go to bed for a week.

Then she could be alone with Clara, for a long time. She could fix everything. Everything that was wrong with her life.

She knew with a depressing certainty it wasn’t going to happen that way.

“Jameson’s smart,” she said. She said it so often it had become a mantra. “He’s not going to be anyplace I think to look for him, is he?”

“We might get lucky,” Glauer said.

She snorted a response and ended the call.

In the silence that followed—she could hear nothing but the crackling of the fireplace—she sat back in her chair and sipped at her apple juice. She thought about what could have made Raleigh come to such a place, to cut herself off from the world altogether like this. It was not, she had to admit, without a certain attraction. Tell everyone to go to hell. Run and hide from all her problems. She’d love to.

But no.

The only reason a place like this repurposed convent could exist was that there were people out there in the real world, people who fought and bled to protect Sister Margot’s right to be safe and immune from danger and harm. Caxton knew a lot of old cops—her father had been one, and so had all his friends—and she remembered back in the seventies they’d had a certain way of thinking, a metaphor for what they did. The modern world with all its crime and drugs and violence and crazies was a trash can, a big, bulging trash can too small to hold everything inside of it, always threatening to burst, to run over and spill out onto the streets. As cops, they were paid to do nothing more than sit on the lid.

Now that was her job.

There was a knock on the door. It was Sister Margot. “Raleigh’s ready for you now,” she said.