Divine Evil

recognize. She even took a step back before she shook off the feeling and reached for the doorknob.
    “Dad?” She prayed she wouldn't find him slumped over his desk, snoring drunk. The image made her take a firmer grip on the knob, angry all at once that he would spoil this most perfect evening of her life with whiskey. He was her father. He was supposed to be there for her. He wasn't supposed to let her down. She shoved the door open.
    At first she was only puzzled. The room was empty, though the light was on and the big portable fan stirred the hot air in the converted attic room. Her nose wrinkled at the smell-whiskey, strong and sour. As she stepped inside, her sneakers crunched over broken glass. She skirted around the remains of a bottle of Irish Mist.
    Had he gone out? Had he drained the bottle, tossed it aside, then stumbled out of the house?
    Her first reaction was acute embarrassment, the kind only a teenager can feel. Someone might see him-her friends, their parents. In a small town like Emmitsboro, everyone knew everyone. She would die of shame if someone happened across her father, drunk and weaving.
    Clutching her prized elephant, her first gift from a suitor, she stood in the center of the sloped-ceilinged room and agonized over what to do.
    If her mother had been home, she thought, suddenly furious, if her mother had been home, he wouldn't have wandered off. She would have soothed and calmed him and tucked him into bed. And Blair had gone off as well, camping with his jerky friends. Probably drinking Budweiser and reading
Playboy
by the campfire.
    And she'd gone, too, she thought, near tears with theindecision. Should she stay and wait, or go out and search for him?
    She would look. Her decision made, she moved to the desk to turn off the lamp. More glass crunched under her feet. It was odd, she thought. If the bottle had been broken by the door, how could there be so much glass here, behind the desk? Under the window?
    Slowly, she looked up from the jagged shards at her feet to the tall, narrow window behind her father's desk. It was not open, but broken. Vicious slices of glass still clung to the frame. With watery legs she took a step forward, then another. And looked down to where her father lay faceup on the flagstone patio, impaled through the chest by the round of garden stakes he had set there that same afternoon.
    She remembered running. The scream locked in her chest. Stumbling on the stairs, falling, scrambling up and running again, down the long hall, slamming into the swinging door at the kitchen, through the screen that led outside.
    He was bleeding, broken, his mouth open as if he were about to speak. Or scream. Through his chest the sharp-ended stakes sliced, soaked with blood and gore.
    His eyes stared at her, but he didn't see. She shook him, shouted, tried to drag him up. She pleaded and begged and promised, but he only stared at her. She could smell the blood, his blood, and the heavy scent of summer roses he loved.
    Then she screamed. She kept screaming until the neighbors found them.

Chapter 2
    C AMERON RAFFERTY HATED CEMETERIES. It wasn't superstition. He wasn't the kind of man who avoided black cats or knocked on wood. It was the confrontation with his own mortality he abhorred. He knew he couldn't live forever-as a cop he was aware he took more risks with death than most. That was a job, just as life was a job and death was its retirement.
    But he was damned if he liked to be reminded of it by granite headstones and bunches of withered flowers.
    He had come to look at a grave, however, and most graves tended to draw in company and turn into cemeteries. This one was attached to Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church and was set on a rambling slope of land in the shadow of the old belfry. The stone church was small but sturdy, having survived weather and sin for a hundred and twenty-three years. The plot of land reserved for Catholics gone to glory was hugged by a wrought-iron fence. Most of the spikes were rusted, and many were missing. Nobody much noticed.
    These days, most of the townspeople were split betweenthe nondenominational Church of God on Main and the First Lutheran just around the corner on Poplar, with some holdouts for the Wayside Church of the Brethren on the south side of town and the Catholics-the Brethren having the edge.
    Since the membership had fallen off in the seventies, Our Lady of Mercy had dropped back to one Sunday mass. The priests of St. Anne's in