Divine Evil

over his ears and the collar of his shirt. His face was long and lean, and now the moonlight accented the fascinating shadows under his cheekbones and made her seventeen-year-old heart flutter. In Sally's opinion, he had the sexiest blue eyes-dark and deep and a little broody.
    “Are you going to call in the FBI?” she asked him.
    “We'll take it under advisement.” God, to be seventeen again, he thought, then immediately: Unh-uh, no thanks. “Thanks for your help. The next time you want to make out, go someplace else.”
    Sally blushed prettily. The night wind ruffled her hair around her guileless face. “We were only talking, Sheriff.”
    And heifers jump over the moon.
“Whatever. You go on home now.”
    He watched them walk away, among the headstones and markers, over plots of soft, sunken dirt and clumps of wild grass. Hip to hip, they were already talking in excited whispers. Sally let out a squeal and giggle, and glanced over her shoulder once to get a last look at Cam. Kids, he thought with a shake of his head as the wind flapped a loose shingle of the roof of the old church. Don't know a damn thing about ambience.
    “I'm going to want some pictures of this, Bud. Tonight. And we'd best rope it off and post a sign or two. Come morning, everyone in town will have heard about it.”
    “Can't see grave robbers in Emmitsboro.” Bud squinted his eyes and tried to look official. The graveyard was a pretty creepy place, but on the other hand, this was the most excitement they'd had since Billy Reardon had hotwired his father's pickup and gone joyriding around the county with that big-breasted Gladhill girl and a six-pack of Miller. “Vandals, more like. Bunch of kids with a sick sense of humor.”
    “More than likely,” Cam murmured, but he crouched by the grave again as Bud walked to the cruiser to get the camera. It didn't feel like vandals. Where was the graffiti, the senseless destruction?
    The grave had been neatly-systematically, hethought-dug up. The surrounding headstones hadn't been disturbed. It was only this one small grave that had been touched.
    And where the hell was the dirt? There were no piles of it around the hole. That meant it had been carted away. What in God's name would anyone want with a couple of wheelbarrow loads of dirt from an old grave?
    The owl hooted again, then spread his wings and glided over the churchyard. Cam shuddered as the shadow passed over his back.
    The next morning being Saturday, Cam drove into town and parked outside of Martha's, a diner and long-standing gathering place in Emmitsboro. It had become his habit, since returning to his hometown as sheriff, to while away a Saturday morning there, over pancakes and coffee.
    Work rarely interfered with the ritual. Most Saturdays he could linger from eight to ten with a second or third cup of coffee. He could chat with the waitresses and the regulars, listen to Loretta Lynn or Randy Travis on the tinny jukebox in the corner, scan the headlines on the
Herald Mail
, and dig into the sports section. There was the comforting scent of sausage and bacon frying, the clatter of dishes, the murmuring drone of old men at the counter talking baseball and brooding over the economy.
    Life moved slow and calm in Emmitsboro, Maryland. That's why he had come back.
    The town had grown some since his youth. With a population of nearly two thousand, counting the outlying farms and mountain homes, they had added on to the elementary school and five years before had converted from septic tanks to a sewage treatment plant. Such things were still big news in Emmitsboro, where the park off thesquare at Main and Poplar flew the flag from sunup to sunset daily.
    It was a quiet, tidy little town that had been settled in 1782 by Samuel Q. Emmit. Tucked in a valley, it was ringed by sedate mountains and rolling farmland. On three of its four sides, it was flanked by fields of hay and alfalfa and corn. On the fourth was Dopper's Woods, so named because it adjoined the Dopper farm. The woods were deep, more than two hundred acres. On a crisp November day in 1958, Jerome Dopper's oldest son, Junior, had skipped school and headed into those woods with his 30-30 over his shoulder, hoping for a six-point buck.
    They'd found him the next morning near the slippery banks of the creek. Most of his head was missing. It looked as though Junior had been careless with the safety, had slid on the slick carpet and blown himself, instead of that buck, to kingdom