Page 109 of The Rut in the Road

I had the feeling he didn’t mean that in the conventional sense.

“Oh, be still my beating heart,” Hart drawled, coming over and taking a set of evidence bags from him. “Wha’d you bring us?”

“A pen from the cup holder, a receipt for gas, and a rosary that was hanging off the rear-view.”

Both Raj and Hart frowned at that.

“What?” Maza asked, looking between them.

“Rosaries aren’t usually an evangelical thing,” Raj replied.

“I didn’t ask his specific denomination, but no,” Maza agreed. “Rosaries are pretty Catholic.”

“Our perps are evangelical,” Raj said, still frowning. “This might not be one of ours.”

Maza pulled out a small tube next. “Well, you can run this through your fancy FBI lab equipment a lot faster than I can getthe state lab to do jack shit, so you can tell me if it really is deer blood on there or if the uniforms got it right.” He held it out, and Raj stepped forward and took it.

“We’ll do that,” he said.

I reached out a hand, and felt everyone’s eyes on me. “Give me the pen,” I said. People played with pens, especially pens in the cup holder. It was most likely to have something useful.

Hart handed me the bag, and I pulled it out myself, then tried to search back through time, looking for flashes of thoughts that would put me at around the right time.

Looking for night-time, warmth, earlier in the fall.

Then I found it.

The pen madea satisfying tapping sound as he teetered it between his fingers, waiting. Waiting for the opportunity that he knew would come. Preacher Dale had promised it would.

“It’s him,”I said, dropping the pen back in the bag.

Maza’s jaw dropped.

“You’re sure?” Raj asked me, and I shot him a look that I very much hoped conveyed how little I appreciated him questioning my abilities. His cheeks darkened slightly. “You’re sure,” he said again, although this time it wasn’t a question.

20

He let out a relieved breath,the smoke from the sage embers in the small stone bowl pushed away from him by the force of the exhaled air.

“Let’s never do that again,” Beck said, and when he turned to look at her, her eyes were wide and there were actual hairs out of place on her forehead. That, if nothing else, was testament to how absolutely hellish this banishment had been.

“Agreed,” he replied, using the long end of his sleeve to wipe sweat off his own face. He could feel the deep not-quite-ache of exhaustion in his body, and he was looking forward to going home and going to bed. After eating a giant plate of whatever Mason was cooking.

I resistedthe urge to go back farther, to find out what or who it was that had made both Beck and Ward tired. I definitely didn’t want to encounter a spirit—or spirits, I supposed—that had the capacity to make both Beck and Ward sweat.

I set the small stone bowl—about which I had been curious as to its use—into a giant rubbermaid bin.

It was the Friday just before Halloween—two days before—and we had a gig that had been giving Raj nightmares all week. Literally.

I’d had to pull him out of two of them.

All of us were on edge.

I knew we were hoping that the size of the party and the large police presence would keep things from getting too out of hand, but even I suspected that going through with this gig was probably stupid. Ward was refusing to cancel on principle, and part of me wondered if he wasn’t making a bad decision just to spite the fact that Raj had asked him not to.

It was a Dance with the Dead block party, and they’d booked both Beck and Ward. They would also be getting me, for whatever that was worth. Vi had also insisted on coming with us. Last year, Mason had come, too, but this year, he was staying home with the kids, because if things went badly, one parent had to still be safe and able to take care of them, and Mason couldn’t contact the dead.

I almost suggested that he and Raj should spend the evening together, but then realized that compounding their collective worries probably wouldn’t actually be productive.