Ethan was barely keeping it together. The boy had been shot in cold blood right in front of his eyes. He’d climbed the wall but kept going, putting as much distance between him and the trailer park as possible. This was their backup rendezvous spot. The Food City at the corner of Southern and South Seventh Street. When she came, he hurried across the parking lot and into the Magnum just in time to begin hyperventilating.
This panic attack was worse than the one back in Boulder.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and made shushing sounds.
He wasn’t crying or sobbing. Instead, he was imagining and reimagining the final seconds of the kid’s life as the mystery gunman took him down. Although Ethan had seen plenty of death and destruction on television, the reality of it—the closeness of it—had sent a bolt of fear through him a mile long.
It was ten minutes before he’d calmed down enough to speak. When he did, he told her everything that happened. She had to wait, because at first he was speaking so fast she couldn’t understand him. Eventually, by breathing deeply and realizing that the man with the gun wasn’t sitting right behind him in the back seat, Ethan returned to what he could only call the new normal—fearful yet excited and curious.
“I heard sirens when I headed this way.”
“The place is going to be crawling with cops.” His eyes widened. “I left my hoodie beneath the trailer.”
“This isn’t like CSI. They’re not going to be able to get trace amounts off the fabric and search a database for your DNA.”
“Are you sure?” Ethan asked.
She gave him a level stare. “Is your DNA in any database?”
He thought about it for a moment. “Well, no.”
“Then stop worrying.”
A vision of the kid getting shot slammed through his mind. He swallowed and blinked. “Know what I think?” he asked. “I think Matt left a clue for us. Maybe something he didn’t put in the document.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The kid said that Matt had left a message with him for Steve, my dad.”
“Did he tell you what it was?” she asked.
“Wasn’t any time. The man with the gun was just there.”
“Clearly he was waiting,” she said. “I’m sorry, Ethan. I was wrong. I thought the man would have left.”
He shook his head. “How could you have known? The kid did tell me one thing. He mouthed the word church.”
“Think it’s that church by the trailer park?”
“It will have to be. If not, I have no idea where to look. But knowing it’s the church doesn’t necessarily help. I mean, what do we do, sneak in?”
“I say we knock on the door and ask,” she said.
“Just like that?”
She nodded. “Just like that.”
They decided to put some distance between them and the crime. Shanny found I-17 and headed north until they took the exit for the Metrocenter Mall. They parked the Magnum and walked across the street to a used-car dealer. After a half hour of haggling, they settled on a 2002 primer-gray minivan with an interior that had been beat to hell, probably from a thousand trips to soccer practice and cheer practice and whatever else practice kids were doing these days. The major selling point was that the engine seemed fine and it had dark-tinted windows, like pretty much every vehicle did in Arizona. They drove it back to the mall, transferred all their gear, then left the Magnum with the keys in it to be found by whoever was looking for them.
They searched for a place for lunch and settled on Baja-style fish tacos. After they ordered, they drove to a park and pulled beneath the shade of several large trees. They ate in silence as they sipped Cokes from large cups.
To keep from thinking about the dead kid, Ethan focused on the relevance of the Hodge conjecture to the problem at hand, sinking into the precise language of mathematics. The idea that interdimensional shapes, or manifolds, were present to represent problems was an idea that, once grasped, seemed simple. It was the initial understanding that stymied most people. Especially trusting in a mathematical idea that couldn’t be proved.
“Why should we believe in the Hodge conjecture, given the almost complete lack of evidence of its truth?” a visiting professor from Caltech had once posed as his opening for a lecture on the Millennium Prize Problems.
Of course no one was about to answer the question, so the professor had gone on. “The main evidence for the Hodge conjecture is the Lefschetz hyperplane theorem, which is a precise statement of certain relations between the shape of an algebraic variety and the shape of its subvarieties. Together with the hard Lefschetz theorem, this also implies the Hodge conjecture of cycles of dimension one. These results are part of algebraic geometers’ good understanding of line bundles and codimension-one subvarieties.”
The very idea that something existed that couldn’t be proved rattled against Ethan’s idea of precision. But it had been this way since the first man had postulated the first theorem to prove something that existed beyond his ken. Not too dissimilar to the problem set at hand. If only there was a math problem to prove…
He let his mind trail off as he realized that he didn’t know what they were trying to prove. Was it that giants existed and not angels? Was it ultimately to disprove the existence of God? An idea struck him hard enough to make him stop chewing and blink. Or could it be to seed the earth with enough evidence to make people disbelieve what they should believe? What if there was a God and there were angels, and someone—perhaps the Council of David—had been spending the centuries promoting the very idea that giants exist.
“You look constipated,” Shanny said, breaking his concentration.
He resumed chewing, finishing the last of his second taco. “Sorry, thinking about math and this situation we’re in.”
“Can math solve it?”
He shook his head. “Too many unknowns.” Then he shrugged. “But it does help me organize my thoughts. Math grounds me. It’s a realm within which I feel comfortable. Where kids don’t get gunned down in trailer parks.”
They finished their lunch and stuffed the remains into the bag, then Ethan found a trash can to put it in. He switched places with Shanny and got behind the wheel.
“Where to now?” she asked as she buckled her seat belt in place.
“To find out what clues Matt left for us.”
They drove in silence. Every time a cop passed them going the other way they tensed, then checked the rearview mirror to make sure the patrol car wasn’t turning around.
Ethan figured they were about as invisible as they could be. They had no phones. They had a new car that hadn’t been registered with the DMV yet and wouldn’t be registered for another few days, thanks to an extra two hundred dollar donation to the used-car salesman. They were driving on a temporary tag registered to the used-car dealer. They were staying away from cameras that could be using face-recognition software. And for all they knew, the Council of David, the Six-Fingered Man, and anyone else after them still thought they were tooling around in a red Dodge Magnum.
Three hours had passed since the murder of the kid by the mysterious man. It was four in the afternoon, and the parking lot of the Way of Life Church was half-full. Maybe they were having an afternoon service. It could have been almost anything.
Ethan had thought of a lot of ploys he could use, but he’d dismissed them all. The trick was to play this straight, just as Shanny said. So he parked the car and both of them got out and headed for the front door. As they arrived, an elderly Hispanic man and his wife opened the door. Ethan held it for them and exchanged a quick pleasantry. Once they were past, he and Shanny entered the small foyer.
Inside was a table with several different flyers about the church. A bulletin board was near the door, announcing several events, including a teen-only rafting trip down the Salt River for the upcoming weekend. Low voices came from around the corner.
No sooner had Ethan headed that way than he almost walked into a young man in a powder-blue shirt with a priest’s collar. He was Asian and couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
Ethan blinked. He didn’t know what he’d expected.
The pastor smiled. “Is it my age or my Asian?”
Ethan caught himself and chuckled. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”
“Someone old. Probably white or Mexican.” The pastor’s voice was low and easy. He held out his hand. “Pastor Wesley Chu. Come in and join our fellowship.”
Ethan shook the pastor’s hand and introduced himself and Shanny as Frank and Ally.
“Are you new to the neighborhood?” Pastor Chu asked as he began walking into a nearby room.
Ethan and Shanny were forced to follow him.
Pastor Chu poured two glasses of sun tea and passed them over. “This is unsweetened.” He gestured at a bowl filled with various sweeteners. “If you need something, you can find it here.”
Ethan and Shanny both mumbled thank-yous and took a drink. Ethan glanced around the room and counted thirteen people of what appeared to be all ages, ethnicities, and social classes, standing around and chatting.
“Are you new to the neighborhood, Frank?”
It took a moment to realize that the pastor had repeated his question and that he was addressing him.
“Fairly new,” he said. Ethan had planned on not having a ploy, but he’d blown that idea when he’d given fake names.
The pastor checked his watch. “We have about five more minutes before we start the meeting. Feel free to mingle.”
The sound of a mop bucket being rolled down the hall made them turn. An older man with a shaved head pushed it past the doorway. He glanced at them but didn’t stop.
Ethan felt completely out of his element.
When the pastor left them to greet another couple, Shanny whispered, “Meeting?”
Ethan shrugged.
They stood together that way until the pastor went to the front of the room.
“If everyone will be seated, we’ll get underway.”
The sound of chairs scraping against the floor replaced conversation. Ethan watched as anyone still standing found chairs and turned them to face the pastor. He and Shanny did the same, glancing at each other as they sat. What were they in for?
“I’d like to thank everyone for their fellowship and for joining us. Before we begin, let’s have introductions around the room.” He grinned and pointed to an African American lady in a yellow sundress.
Her name was Eve Dupont.
Then the next person introduced himself, then the next, until it was Ethan’s turn.
He stood, just like all the others had. He took a deep breath and was prepared to introduce Frank and Ally, when he realized that he couldn’t continue the charade… at least not in front of these good people.
He shook his head and stared at the floor. “I’m sorry, Pastor, I made a mistake.”
The pastor cocked his head. “Oh?”
“I should have been up front with you, I—”
Shanny popped out of her chair. “It’s just that you were so polite and nice that it threw us off.”
The pastor spread his hands. “Being polite and nice is what I do. It’s not supposed to throw you off. What is it you need?”
Here came the tricky part. Ethan cleared his throat. “I’m checking to see if an old friend of the family left something for me.”
The pastor’s eyes narrowed. “Left something for you?”
“Yes, it could have been anything. A book or a fob or even a piece of paper.” He began talking faster and faster. “I’m not sure what form it would be in, but it might be in a box or an envelope or something similar directed to Steve McCloud.” He stopped and held his breath.
It took a few seconds for the pastor to answer. “Who was this family friend of yours?”
“Matt, I mean Matthew Fryer. He would have left something for my father.”
When the pastor shook his head, Ethan’s heart sank. Without this lead, he had nowhere else to go. He might as well find an abandoned house in the middle of the desert and live the rest of his life off the grid. Any other choice would put people with guns after them.
“He didn’t leave anything for you,” Pastor Chu said. Then he pointed toward the door. “But if you want to ask him yourself, you can. He’s right down the hall.”
Ethan stared at Pastor Chu.
“What do you mean?” Shanny asked breathlessly.
“Matt Fryer is our maintenance man. You saw him earlier.”