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“What did you think when you couldn’t find Adam?” Shaw asked.
Kingston shrugged. “I thought maybe he was working, and he told me not to bother him at work.”
“Were you worried?”
After a slow breath, Kingston said, “He worked nights sometimes. It was normal.”
Which wasn’t really an answer, but Shaw decided not to press it.
“What did Pastor Moss say when you called him back?” North asked.
“He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he told me to get out there. No please or anything. So, I drove out there. They were all scared because of the break-in, and I can’t say I blamed them. Pastor Moss asked me some more about Adam, where he might be, what he might be doing, if he was hanging out with some friends. I told him Adam had to be at work or he’d answer the phone, and I swear, I thought Pastor Moss was going to blow his stack. Then he calmed down, kind of, and asked me to hang around. For security, he said. They’d had that break-in.”
“And then?”
“I was there that night. And the next day, before I went home, he asked me about Adam again. Where is he? If he was in trouble, where would he go? That kind of thing. I asked him what was going on, and he said Adam had made some bad decisions and needed help, and then he asked me again. But I didn’t know where Adam was. That’s what I kept telling him, and that was the truth. I didn’t—I didn’t learn about the stuff at the jail ’til I went home.”
“Were you ever able to contact Adam?” North asked.
Kingston’s eyes went to an apple-cheeked Jesus on the wall; he looked like he was water-skiing, and although Shaw had to admit he wasn’t an expert on the Bible, he didn’t remember that part. He thought he might have liked it more if he had. “He called me. I didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer at first, but then he sent me a text. He had a burner phone. And he said I couldn’t tell anybody where he was.” His voice broke, and he rubbed his jaw. The faint sound suggested stubble so blond it was all but invisible. He dried his other hand on his trousers. “He said he was all right, but he was going to send me something. If anything happened to him, I was supposed to take it to the police.” His eyes screwed up, and he started to cry again. “I didn’t know.”
That, more than anything else, confirmed what Shaw had suspected. “When did you tell Pastor Moss where Adam was?”
For a few moments, the only answer was the sound of thick, snotty breathing, interrupted by little bleats of distress. “He was so worried. He told me things had changed. He told me they had to talk to Adam, please. It was the ministry, now. There were bad men involved, dangerous men who wanted to destroy Pastor Moss’s work. And if I could help him find Adam, it could save the ministry.”
Bad men, Shaw thought. Boogeymen. Jed hadn’t needed to be more specific—there were always dark powers fighting against the forces of light, and for Kingston, that had been enough.
“You knew where Adam was,” North said.
“There’s a place,” Kingston said. “A lake. Our dad used to take us there, but nobody goes out there now. Nothing around it for miles.”
North sat back and rubbed his eyes. To Shaw, the chain of events was also clear: Kingston spilled the beans, Jed—or someone else in the Moss family—sent someone out to clean up the mess, and Adam Ezell got gunned down in an abandoned bait shop. Never mind that North and Shaw had almost gotten killed too.
“Why didn’t you take the video to the police?” Shaw asked.
Kingston started to cry again—softer, this time, but in some ways, harder to watch. Grief cleaved his face, and Shaw knew this was more than the loss of a brother.
“Did you watch the video?” North asked.
“Someone came and told me about Adam.” He was crying harder now, and the words emerged in fragments. “A deputy.”
“What was on the video?”
“It was my fault.”
“Kingston, what’s on the video?”
He dried his face with his sleeve, fumbled in his pocket, and produced a phone. He tapped the screen a few times and passed it over. It was a smartphone, but only barely—slow to respond, the screen still black as it loaded the video. Shaw didn’t recognize the brand, TCL. Then the video began, and he forgot about the phone.
The scene was familiar: one of the interview rooms at the jail, with nothing more than a table and a few chairs. Shaw had seen this before—the same room, the same table, the same chairs. The same camera angle, even. Because this looked exactly like the video they’d found in Adam’s house, the one where Gid had sex with a female inmate. Probably not, Shaw thought, the first full-service ministry in the history of the world.
This video was different, though. Gid was fully clothed, as was the woman. And it only took Shaw a moment to recognize Ambyr Hobbs. She was the woman Auggie and Theo had tracked down. She was the other potential witness, the one who could have identified someone at the Cottonmouth Club. And she had hanged herself in the prison laundry.
Or that’s what they’d been told.
Now, Shaw watched as Gid strangled the woman to death. He used some sort of improvised noose—a bedsheet, it looked like. The video seemed to go on for a long time: the struggle, Ambyr flailing, clawing, drumming her heels against the floor. A part of Shaw was already going down to the labyrinth, to those forking paths. What had she been thinking in those final moments? What had she felt before, as she was ushered into the room? Had she known Gid? Had she seen his face and understood she was about to die? What had she felt on the long walk from her cell—
North took the phone. His fingers bit into Shaw’s thigh, the pain like a red gravity that settled Shaw—for the moment, anyway. The last thing Shaw saw before North angled the phone away from him was Ambyr’s body going limp. She’d lost one shoe, and Shaw thought with unreal clarity, Where’d her shoe go?
