The Mephisto Club

interior came the nervous bleating of goats, and Jane smelled the gamey scent of damp straw and crowded animals.
    “I’m not sure how much you’ll be able to see right now,” said Mrs. Bongers, aiming her flashlight into the barn. “Sorry I didn’t get your message earlier, when we would’ve had daylight.”
    Jane flicked on her own flashlight. “This should be fine. I just want to see the marks, if they’re still there.”
    “Oh, they’re still here. Used to irritate the heck outta my husband every time he came in here and saw them. I kept telling him to paint over ’em, just so he’d stop complaining about it. He said that’d just make him madder, if he had to paint the inside of a barn. Like he was doing up
House Beautiful
for the goats.” Mrs. Bongers stepped inside, her heavy boots tramping across the straw-covered dirt floor. Just the short walk from the house had winded her and she paused, wheezing loudly, and aimed her flashlight at a wooden pen, where a dozen goats massed in an uneasy huddle. “They still miss him, you know. Oh, Eben complained all the time about how much work it was, milking them every morning. But he loved these girls. He’s been gone six months now, and they’re still not used to anyone else milking them.” She unlatched the pen and glanced at Jane, who was hanging back. “You’re not scared of goats, are you?”
    “Do we have to go in there?”
    “Aw, they won’t hurt you. Just watch your coat. They like to nibble.”
    Now you be nice goats,
thought Jane as she stepped into the pen and latched the door shut behind her.
Don’t chew the cop.
She picked her way across the straw, trying to avoid soiling her shoes. The animals watched her with cold and soulless stares. The last time she’d been this close to a goat had been on a second-grade school trip to a petting zoo. She had looked at the goat, the goat had looked at her, and the next thing she knew, she was flat on her back and her classmates were laughing. She did not trust the beasts, and clearly they did not trust her; they kept their distance as she crossed the pen.
    “Here,” said Mrs. Bongers, her flashlight focused on the wall. “This is some of it.”
    Jane moved closer, her gaze riveted on the symbols cut deeply into the wooden planks. The three crosses of Golgotha. But this was a perverted version, the crosses flipped upside down.
    “Some more up there, too,” said Mrs. Bongers, and she pointed the beam upward, to show more crosses, cut higher in the wall. “He had to climb onto some straw bales to carve those. All that effort. You’d think those darn kids would have better things to do.”
    “Why do you think it was kids who did this?”
    “Who else would it be? Summertime, and they’re all bored. Nothing better to do than run around carving up walls. Hanging those weird charms on trees.”
    Jane looked at her. “What charms?”
    “Twig dolls and stuff. Creepy little things. The sheriff’s office just laughed it off, but I didn’t like seeing them dangling from the branches.” She paused at one of the symbols. “There, like that one.”
    It was a stick figure of a man, with what appeared to be a sword projecting from one hand. Carved beneath it was:
RXX–VII.
    “Whatever that means,” said Mrs. Bongers.
    Jane turned to face her. “I read in the
Police Beat
that one of your goats went missing that night. Did you ever get it back?”
    “We never found her.”
    “There was no trace of her at all?”
    “Well, there are packs of wild dogs running around here, you know. They’d pretty much clean up every scrap.”
    But no dog did this,
thought Jane, her gaze back on the carvings. Her cell phone suddenly rang, and the goats rushed to the opposite side of the pen in a panicked, bleating scramble. “Sorry,” said Jane. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, surprised that she’d even gotten a signal out here. “Rizzoli.”
    Frost said, “I did my best.”
    “Why does that sound like the beginning of an excuse?”
    “’Cause I’m not having much luck finding Lily Saul. She seems to move around quite a bit. We know she’s been in Italy at least eight months. We’ve got a record of ATM withdrawals during that period from banks in Rome, Florence, and Sorrento. But she doesn’t use her credit card very much.”
    “Eight months as a tourist? How does she afford that?”
    “She travels on the cheap. And I do mean cheap. Fourth-class hotels all the way. Plus, she may be working