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“Detective Volante?”
They grunted in response, not even bothering to look up.
“I, um, I have a note from the Chief?”
Baile reached out a hand, eyes still fixed on their report, and took the note. Whoever the deliverer was scurried away as soon as they handed it over.
Reaching the end of a paragraph, they unfolded the note. It was printed on official memo paper, interdepartmental heading and all, the message centered neatly on the page with the Chief’s signature beneath it.
Go the fuck home and go the fuck to sleep.
Baile read the note once, then promptly crumpled it up and threw it in the overflowing wastebasket beneath their desk. Never mind that they’d said much the same to their partner hours ago. Seriously, like there was any chance they were going to get any sleep that night. They hadn’t really slept for four years now.
They turned back to their report. Last week’s victim had been the second in as many months. The Messenger had been slowly upping his numbers since Mr. Fell’s attack last year. He’d also been taking a lot more hands and arms since then, as if he wanted to prove that even though someone had managed to survive him, he hadn’t lost any of his ability.
And he hadn’t, that was the worst thing. He was just too damn good at this. Never a fingerprint, never a hair, never a footprint to follow. The best clues they had came from Mr. Fell’s description, but even he hadn’t seen his attacker clearly, only heard him spouting rhetoric about cleansing and holiness and something about an angel. Over four years since the first victim, and they still didn’t know anything. And it was pissing Baile Volante off.
They had just stood up to get another cup of coffee when they heard their name.
“Hey! Beelz, great, you’re still here.” Their partner, Detective Crowley, jogged up to them. The circles under his eyes were almost purple, and his hair looked like he’d taken a leaf blower to it.
“I thought I told you to go home,” Baile said, crossing their arms and giving him a look that made it clear they didn’t care that they were a foot and a half shorter than him.
“I did,” Crowley said.
“I thought I told you to go to sleep.”
“I did!”
“And you just happened to wake up at… two a.m.?”
“I, erg, well, no, no that didn’t happen, but Zira called me and—”
“Crowley, I’ve told you before, I’m probably gonna have to tell you again, and I’m telling you right now, I don’t wanna hear about you and Mr. Fell unless—”
“Unless it’s got to do with the case,” Crowley finished for them, and there was a light in his eyes that told them he was excited.
Baile was more cautious. “You think you have something?” they asked, stepping back towards their desk.
“Yeah, I do.” Crowley waited for them to sit down, then tossed a bulging manila folder on their desk. They opened it. Inside were public police records, newspaper clippings, photos, and flyers, all marked up with pen or pencil. Interspersed were sheets of typed bullet point notes paperclipped to the evidence they belonged to. It was impeccably organized and annotated, and Detective Volante could tell at a glance that the material covered all four years of the Messenger’s killings.
“Where did you get this?” they asked, flipping through the pages.
Crowley leaned back on the edge of their desk, arms crossed. “A woman named Eddie Hartman contacted Zira, told him she might have information on the Messenger. He called me over, and she gave me this.” He nodded at the folder.
“What is she, an aspiring detective? Journalist?”
“Said she thinks a friend of hers joined a cult, and the Messenger is leading it.”
“And this is her proof?” They flipped past a news article written on the one year anniversary of the first attack.
“Yeah, pretty much. She’s been working on it for a while.”
Baile flipped a few more pages, read an annotation on one of their own old reports, skimmed a page of notes. “I need to talk to her,” they declared, standing up and grabbing their coat off the back of the chair.
Crowley scrambled to follow them. “Ah, yeah, about that….” Detective Volante turned and gave him a look sharp enough to cut glass. “She, ah, she didn’t actually want me to show that to you.”
Baile looked down at the folder clutched in their hand. They rewound the conversation to the beginning, and found what had bothered them right at the start. “Why did she call Mr. Fell instead of the tip line?” they asked.
Crowley hedged for a moment, then sighed and gave up the game. “Look, Beelz, you gotta keep in mind, this is her best friend she’s been tracking. And if she’s right, Hayley—that’s the friend—Hayley’s in this deep. Eddie doesn’t know what’ll happen to her if the Messenger finds out she knows something. She’s fucking terrified.”
“So why didn’t she want me to see this?”
Their partner sighed. “She said—and, seriously, these are her words, but she said that… that you’ve been on this case for four years, and… you know, haven’t….” Crowley spread his arms in a “what are you gonna do” kind of a gesture.
Baile felt it low in their gut, like they’d been kicked. It wasn’t a sharp pain, though. It had been dulled by repetition. They’d heard this enough before. “She doesn’t trust me to catch him.”
Crowley shrugged. “She’s scared, Bee. She doesn’t act like it, but she wouldn’t have done all this work if she wasn’t really afraid of what might happen if we don’t get her friend out of this.”
They stood there for a moment. Baile looked down at the folder, wondering (they would not consider hoping) if it really might be the key to catching the Messenger. They thought about that first victim, back when they’d only been a beat cop, the way the bible verse scratched into the cement paving where the person’s leg should have been had echoed in their head for months after. Then the second, clutching a scrap of paper between the two remaining fingers. And the third, a piece of embroidered cloth shoved in her mouth in place of her tongue. Every time another verse, another body part taken, another family to inform. They gripped the folder hard enough to press a handprint into the side. “Is she still at Mr. Fell’s?” Crowley nodded. “Let’s get moving, then.”
***
Baile had been to Zira Fell’s apartment once, in the aftermath of his attack. They had only come by to drop off some paperwork for Crowley, who had been staying there to take care of the reporter while he recovered. They weren’t at all sure why the couple still hadn’t moved in together even a year afterwards. But the apartment was almost exactly as they remembered it, maybe a little more cluttered than before, a few more books crammed on the shelves in the hall, a new picture of Crowley and Zira hung on the wall.
“Thank you for letting us do this so late,” Baile said as they and their partner stepped into the hall. They didn’t always see eye to eye, but Zira was a nice man, and they liked him for Crowley.
Mr. Fell gave a small smile. “It’s no trouble,” he said. “Anything for a lead.” Baile nodded.
A lot of the other detectives on the force didn’t seem to get just how invested Zira Fell was in the Messenger case. Even after the journalist himself had been a near victim of the serial killer, they saw him as just another reporter looking for just another scoop, and Baile knew that more than a few weren’t thrilled about Crowley, one of their own, dating a member of the press. Not that anyone was going to say anything, especially not since Baile had put the fear of god into Officer Ligur. The man had the gall to suggest that the attack on Mr. Fell had been staged, as though anyone would willingly have their hand chopped off for a publicity stunt. Suffice to say that he had regretted the comment. Greatly.
But even ignoring Zira’s personal stakes in the case, he’d been in the thick of it from the beginning, since before even Crowley had been assigned to it. Baile still remembered how pale he’d looked at the end of the alley that first time, about to be sick but determined to get a strong picture first. The case may have been the making of his career, bringing him up from a beginner photographer to a respected reporter with a long list of by-lines, but it had also become his stalling point. Crowley had told Baile that Mr. Fell had turned down promotions, more than once, because taking them would have given this case to somebody else. Zira didn’t just want to tell this story. He wanted to see it to the end.
“She’s in here.” Mr. Fell opened the door to the living room and Baile followed him through.
The young woman on the couch looked up when they came in. She had on faded jeans and a grey-green button up over a grey t-shirt, and wore her hair cut at the shoulder, the top half pulled back, a sweep of bangs across one side of her face. Baile noticed her jaw harden when she saw them behind Crowley, but she didn’t say anything. “You must be Eddie,” they said, holding out a hand. They had long since learned that one of the best ways to handle an upset informant was total professionalism.
Eddie shook their hand, meeting their gaze firmly. There was a faint redness in her cheeks and smudges on her glasses. Baile thought she might have been crying a while ago. “Have you looked at it?” she asked, nodding to the folder.
“Yes.” Baile had made Crowley drive with the interior light on so that they could read the file more carefully on the way over. “I have a few questions.”
Eddie shrugged and sat back on the couch. “Everything I’ve got’s in there. But I’ll help if I can.”
Baile nodded and sat down across from her. Crowley propped himself over the couch behind them, and Mr. Fell took the place next to Eddie. All four of them leaned forward over the file.
“First off,” Baile started, looking right at Eddie over the closed folder. “Tell me about yourself. What do you do?”
To her credit, Eddie didn’t get flustered by the change of subject. “I’m a student. Work part time at Tesco.”
Baile tilted their head to the side. “You’re a little old for a student.”
“I took a few years off to save up. I’m working on my MFA, now.”
“An MFA in what?”
There it was, a little flash of indecision, almost hidden behind the glasses. “Art history,” she said.
“Hmm,” Baile murmured, leaning back against the couch. “That’s interesting.”
“It is,” Eddie said, totally nonchalant again.
“Right.” Baile looked at her for another moment, then leaned down and opened the folder. They turned to a flyer for a church youth group, the meeting times circled in blue ink. “Where did you get all this?”
“It’s all public record,” Eddie answered.
“Mhm.” They kept flipping through. “Detective Crowley tells me this all started about three months ago?”
“That’s when I started to think something was up.”
Baile looked up and met her eyes. “You did all this in three months?”
There was no hesitation this time. Nothing but earnest passion. “This is my best friend we’re talking about.” Eddie met their gaze head on, eyes flashing with an emotion they couldn’t quite place. “I can’t get her out of this on my own, but I’m doing everything I can. I have research skills, I used them.”
They held eye contact for another moment, each weighing the other, measuring out how they could be of help to their own causes.
“Tell us about your friend Hayley.” Crowley broke the silence. “What makes you think she joined a cult?”
Eddie gladly jumped into business. She reached forward and shifted through the pages a moment before pulling out a sheet of yellow legal pad paper covered in hand-scrawled notes. “She was in a really bad place last spring. Mental health, family shit, work, it all got really rough, and she… wasn’t handling it well.” She went on to explain how Hayley had left town shortly after to live with family in Manchester. She hadn’t disappeared or anything, they had stayed in contact the whole time. Then, out of the blue, she was back in London, back in her old apartment, back to her friends. She had quit her job before she left, but said she was thinking about going back to school.
Baile interrupted, wanting to get into the details of it. “So up to this point, you didn’t think anything was wrong?”
“No,” Eddie said. “She seemed fine, she was happier than she’d been in years. Everybody thought she’d pulled through it.”
“So what was the first clue something was up?” Crowley asked from behind Baile.
“So she left for months, right? She fully moved to Manchester, but when she got back she was in the same apartment she had before.”
“And she lives in London?” Mr. Fell clarified. Eddie nodded.
“It’s a nice place, too. Should have been snapped right up. I thought her landlord must have held it for her. It would have been odd, but he’s always been nice, so I didn’t really question it until one night I was waiting for her and I ran into him. And I mentioned something about her moving back in, and he had no idea what I was talking about.”
Baile looked up from the file. “She never left.”
Eddie shook her head. “She never left. Never went to Manchester in the first place. I think she just holed herself up, dug herself in deeper with the cult while we all thought she was gone.”
The discussion continued like that for some time. Baile asked after every detail, leaving no metaphorical stone unturned. After the first hour, Zira got up and brought back hot cocoa for everyone, balanced on a tray across his stumped arm. Only he remembered to drink it. As the story unfolded, Baile felt a knot in their gut tighten, slow and painful. This might actually be it. Eddie had been thorough. There was an answer to every question, and a page in the file to vouch for every answer. In the rare instances where she wasn’t sure about something, she said so, but usually had a plausible explanation ready anyway. The whole thing felt practiced, almost rehearsed. Almost perfect.
It wasn’t until a beam of sunlight broke over the windowsill and hit their face that Baile realized just how long they had been there. In the morning light, they could see the bags under Eddie’s eyes, evidence of prior sleepless nights. They were sure they had ones to match.
“Right,” they said, tapping their knuckles on the coffee table. “I think we can leave it there for today.”
“You sure?” Eddie asked, and Baile was sure that the woman would have continued the discussion if she were asked to. They weren’t so sure what that might mean.
“Yes.” They started to pull papers back into the folder. “Go home, get some rest. We can meet up again when we aren’t all exhausted.”
Mr. Fell showed them to the door, and Baile, Crowley, and Eddie all piled into the elevator. They made the trip in silence, each too exhausted to even think about making small talk. Not that any of them were much for small talk at the best of times.
Just as Eddie moved to walk towards the bus stop and Crowley towards the car park, Baile put a hand on the woman’s arm. “If anything new happens,” they said, handing over a card, “call me. This is my number, not the tip line; it’ll come straight to me.”
Baile wasn’t particularly happy, or entirely surprised, when Eddie refused the card. “I don’t want to carry any evidence I’ve been talking to you. I don’t know what he might do to Hayley if he finds out. But I have Mr. Fell’s number.”
Reluctantly, Baile agreed, and watched as Eddie walked down the street.
“Beelz?” Crowley called from where he was leaning against the car. “You good?”
Baile turned on their heel and strode to the car, determination in every line on their face. “Let’s go get this bastard.”
***
“We… there may be a problem.”
“Oh? What kind of a problem?”
“There’s been a tip.”
Silence, for a moment. Then, “Is it any good?”
A shuddering breath. “Very good.”
“Hmm.” There was silence again. Longer this time, leading towards something dark that didn’t bear thinking about. “Tell me more. We may need to do something about this.”
“Last time—”
“Last time turned out fine. I mean just look at where we are now! I’ll admit it was a blow at first, having an… escapee. But it turned out for the best, really.”
“But now—”
“Hush. Everything’s going to be fine. I know. It’s all just part of the Great Plan, after all.”
***
Detectives Volante and Crowley spent the next day hunched over their desks, reading and crosschecking and making notes of their own on Eddie’s theories. Baile was loath to admit it, but the file had done everything they hadn’t been able to do in four years. Four years of evidence was a lot to go through, but Eddie drew connections between victims they and Crowley had only briefly considered, brought out evidence they had never noticed.
It didn’t take much before they were convinced that Eddie was right; the Messenger was heading a small cult of followers, and her friend Hayley was one of them. The game was no longer a matter of finding the Messenger as much as it was one of catching him. They needed to figure out where he would be when, and use that information to stage an ambush.
When they met up again that evening, it was to make a plan. Eddie offered early on to go undercover into the cult, but that was shot down immediately. It was much too dangerous, Zira said. Not worth the risk, Crowley said. Too likely to spook the bastard, Baile said. (They didn’t mention that they had pulled the woman’s record from the precinct to look through later.)
So they reverted to more distant methods. Eddie would try to get a rough schedule of Hayley’s meeting times. Once they had that, Crowley would attempt to track her and find out where the meetings were taking place. Baile would hang back, looking for evidence of other followers and ready to jump into action if anything went south. Zira was relegated to morale officer. As Baile put it, she couldn’t rely on Crowley to do more than trip over his own feet and fall on his ass if he was worrying about Zira’s six instead of his own. The reporter accepted his duties begrudgingly, and went to go get them all more hot cocoa.
The afternoon after they solidified their plan, they were once again gathered in Mr. Fell’s living room. Eddie had nothing new to report yet, and nothing else would begin until she had something, but Baile wasn’t about to let out the leash on their only source in four years, so they met anyway.
They had only been there an hour, barely begun, really, when Eddie’s phone started to buzz. She moved to the corner of the room to take the call.
The others continued looking over the evidence and notes in the file, but Baile was listening to Eddie’s side of the conversation with slightly more attention than might have been automatic.
“Hey, love. You okay?” the woman asked, then a pause. “Yeah—hey, hey, it’s okay, what’re you…. What do you need me to do? No, I can…. Sunshine, I promise I’m not doing anything, what do you need?” There was a longer silence as Eddie listened to the voice on the other end of the line. “Of course. Where are you? …. I can meet you wherever, sunshine, where are you? Yes, I can do the park. Saint James, yeah. Right by the lake. I’ll be right there, just give me a few minutes, okay? I… I’m gonna put you on mute for a minute, okay, just for a moment, I’ll be right back. Yeah, I promise. I’m right here. Just one minute.” She pressed a button on the screen and turned back to the group. “I have to go.”
“Who was that?” Zira asked as Eddie grabbed her bag off the couch and headed for the door.
“A friend. She’s in a state, I need to go see her. I’ll call you later, tell me if anything happens your end.” The door swung closed behind her.
“I do hope everything’s alright,” Zira said, frowning in the direction of the door.
“She said she’ll call,” Crowley reassured him. “It’s not like she hasn’t done enough for us already.”
Baile didn’t say anything. After a moment, the room settled back into quiet calm as they all continued combing through the file. Baile turned the page and found a screenshot of a text conversation between Eddie and Hayley. Eddie had marked a comment about an apology, linking it to a bible verse the Messenger had used less than a week later. But Baile was suddenly more interested in the nickname listed at the top of the screen.
“Hey Beelz?” Crowley asked. “What’re these?” He was holding a small stack of papers they’d left on the floor next to them.
“More notes,” they said, not looking up.
“Mind if I take a look?” Baile grunted a negative, and Crowley retreated to his seat on the other couch, next to Zira.
Baile kept staring at the screenshot in front of them. They hadn't paid attention to the nickname before; everybody had inside jokes and strings of emojis in their phone contacts anymore. Once, they’d gotten a glimpse of the one Crowley had for Mr. Fell. This one was positively mundane in comparison.
“Beelz.” Crowley’s voice sounded harder now, making Baile look up. He was staring at one of the open folders, and they immediately realized which one. “Why do you have Eddie’s record here?”
Baile sighed. They weren’t in the wrong and they knew it, but they still didn’t want to have this discussion. “She’s an informant. I just did some basic checking.”
“You pulled her records!”
“They’re public, Crowley. I just wanted to make sure we knew what we were getting into.”
“You don’t trust her?” Zira asked rather quietly. There was something in his tone, something… not quite like remorse there.
“I do now,” Baile replied. Usually they made a point never to lie to a journalist, but nothing here was on the record, so they let it slide. They reached across and took the file back from Crowley, then stood up. “I need to return this to the precinct before the records office closes up.”
“Hey, Beelz, I didn’t really mean—”
“I know, Crowley. You’re fine.” They picked up their coat and headed for the door. “I’ll call you tomorrow, set up another meeting.”
Crowley still looked a little unsure. “Okay. Have a nice night, then.”
“You too.” Baile left the apartment, pulling on their coat as they went. As soon as the door closed behind them, they broke into a run, heading for the steps and taking them two at a time down to the car park.
They had a bus to catch up with.
***
It took longer than they wanted to get to the park, but very little time to realize Eddie wasn’t there. Even if she and her friend had left the waterside, there were only so many places suitable for calming down a distraught friend—if that was what was actually happening. Baile was pretty sure they knew who had called Eddie. And they were very sure that whatever was going on, the Messenger had a hand in it.
They decided to do another scan of the lakeside, taking a closer look for any sign Eddie had been there at all. They were halfway around the lake when they noticed something under an empty bench.
They leaned down to investigate, and found a cell phone.
Eddie’s cell phone.
Picking it up, Baile checked the screen. It was cracked badly, which they were sure it hadn’t been earlier, but what showed on the lock screen was enough to put a ghost of a smile on their face.
The phone was running a voice recording.
Baile listened as they ran back to the car. Most of the file was just passersby and bird calls; only the first five minutes were actual conversation, followed by a loud thunk and crunch of gravel and crack of glass. And in those first five minutes, buried in a comment about a youth group flyer, was an address.
***
Baile restarted the voice recording in the car, listening to make sure they weren’t missing anything. Something had gone wrong with Eddie’s meeting, that much was obvious just from the dropped cell phone, but the sound wasn’t clear enough to tell exactly what had happened. There was that location, though, said by a voice slightly higher Eddie’s alto, and they sped towards it as fast as their car could manage.
A little piece of their mind started to rebel as they drove, saying how there was no way to know, that address might be a mistake, they could be completely wrong and headed towards nothing at all. Or maybe nothing had gone wrong with Eddie’s meeting. Maybe everything was going to the Messenger's plan, and they were walking right into it. They did their best to ignore the feeling. It wasn’t going to stop them.
They arrived at the recently abandoned church before the recording had run a third time through, and got out of the car more cautiously. It all looked quiet, but they could see a dim light through the blinds on the second story. Someone was here. Maybe not who they were looking for, but someone.
They checked the front door. Unlocked. They took a deep breath, readying themselves for everything or nothing behind that door. Then they went in, gun out, up, and ready.
That little piece of their mind that had been screaming they were wrong died as soon as they were inside. They had not been wrong. And that was a very good thing, because Eddie was standing at the back of the room with a knife to her throat.
“Ooo, clever thing. I didn’t think you’d find us.” The lone ceiling light, not bright enough to be seen from the street, glinted on the teeth bared next to Eddie’s head, a horrible grin looming out of the gloom. “He did, though. He always knows.”
The slightly shorter, slightly slimmer woman behind Eddie shifted forward enough to be seen in the light. Baile recognized her face from the pictures in the file. Hayley’s left hand held a vice grip on Eddie’s hair, and the in the right was the knife, already dripping blood. Eddie’s own hands were bound behind her, and it was horribly clear where the blood on the knife had come from. As if the sheet of drying blood over the left half of her face wasn’t enough, Hayley’s grip on her hair gave Baile a perfect view of the patch of raw skin where Eddie’s ear used to be.
Baile fought to keep their breathing even, keep their gun even, aiming at Hayley’s head. “Let her go,” they said slowly, “and we can talk about this.”
Hayley shook her head and tilted it to the side, brushing her jaw against Eddie’s cheek. “I don’t think so. See, if you shoot me, I’ll kill her. So I guess we’re stuck!”
She sounded cheerful. Holding a bloody knife to her best friend’s neck and a gun aimed at her own head, and she sounded cheerful. It was sick. It was sick like Baile had always known the Messenger would sound, but they knew this wasn’t the real monster. Hayley was just a follower, as much a victim as any of the bodies they had found over the years. But whereas those victims had lost a limb or a digit before their deaths, the Messenger had taken something else from Hayley.
“Beelz.” They shifted their attention, keeping the gun trained on Hayley while they looked Eddie in the eye. “I’m okay,” she said. She certainly wasn’t, but there was something in her eyes besides fear and pain. Some spark of light they had seen before, when they’d first met, but hadn’t recognized. “I’m okay,” Eddie repeated, and she flicked her eyes up behind Baile’s shoulder, looking at something behind the detective, then meeting their eyes again. Baile shifted her position slightly to take a glance over her shoulder. There was a staircase in the corner, leading up to the second floor. The room with the light on.
Suddenly Baile knew exactly what that light in Eddie’s eyes was. It was anger. And they knew that whatever Eddie’s motives were, whatever lies she had told them, this had not been part of her plan.
Which made her as much of an ally as they were likely to get for the moment.
“You’re not going to kill her,” Baile said, tone even but forceful.
Hayley tilted her head to the other side. “Maybe not,” she said, sounding contemplative. “If you don’t shoot me and don’t move, no, I won’t.”
“Hayley,” Eddie said, pulling a little against the grip on her hair, trying to look her friend in the face. “Hayley, listen, d’you remember that time at the—agh!” she cried out, as a new patch of blood erupted below her right ear—her only ear.
Baile froze in her tracks. They’d barely lifted a foot off the floor and Hayley had noticed.
“Let’s not play this game, shall we?” Hayley asked sweetly. “You’re not going to distract me, so either let’s get this over with or wait quietly for the Archangel to come back.”
“The arch…?” Baile muttered under their breath, but they didn’t dare to move again.
The light, the anger in Eddie’s eyes had only grown brighter. She kept flicking her eyes up over Baile’s shoulder and back again. They were sure she was telling her what was up there, but how could they get there without sentencing Eddie to an immediate death at the hands of her best friend?
Then a floorboard creaked behind them and they saw Hayley’s eyes shift from them to something over their right shoulder. “Beelz,” Crowley said in greeting as he slid into his usual spot next to them, his gun trained on Hayley as well. “Eddie. Hayley, nice to finally meet you.”
To Baile’s slight satisfaction, Hayley’s confidence wavered a moment, the spell seemingly broken. But then it was back, along with the too-wide grin and the saccharine voice. “That doesn’t change anything. I’ll still kill her, even if I get shot with two bullets.”
“Why though, Hayley?” Eddie asked quietly, no longer trying to look her in the face.
The grin stretched impossibly. “Because it’s part of the Great Plan! It’s the only way to—”
“No,” Eddie said. “No, not why do this, why get shot?”
Hayley looked confused, like Eddie had asked a question so stupid she wasn’t sure she’d understood it properly. “So that… the Plan will go as He said?”
“It doesn’t have to, though.”
“The Plan must—”
“No, no not the Plan. You don’t have to get shot for it.”
“But if they move….”
“D’you remember when we were at the history museum last year? We went to see that little exhibit on old spy stuff. They had some of the suicide pills they used to carry around in case they got captured?”
“I—you will not distract me!” Hayley yelled, the sweetness leaving her voice and face all at once.
“I’m not, I’m not trying to distract you, sunshine, just try to remember, do you know what you said?”
“No!”
“You said that it was stupid. That it was a waste for them to die when they could live and keep working.” Suddenly Baile understood what Eddie was doing. It wasn’t another distraction; it wasn’t even a doomed attempt to rescue Hayley’s mind. It was cleverer than that. “You could live, Hayley. Wouldn’t that do more for His Great Plan than your death?”
“You’re useful to him,” Baile jumped in. “Four years he’s been doing this, has he ever given someone else the knife?” That was a risk, but the look on Hayley’s face proved it a good one. “It took him months to get you… on his side, do you want him to have to do all that over again?”
“No,” Hayley murmured to herself, a new shade of madness creeping into her eyes.
“You’ve already taken what you want from her,” Crowley pointed out Eddie’s missing ear.
“Isn’t your life, alive, more use to Him than both of our deaths?” Eddie made eye contact with Baile again, glancing at the staircase once more.
Hayley’s face dropped back into a glare. “They’re going to shoot me.”
“No,” Crowley said hurriedly. “We won’t, not unless you hurt Eddie.”
Something new occurred to her. “But they’ll put me in jail.”
“But eventually you’d get out,” Eddie countered quickly, “and be able to keep working. Working on the Plan. Isn’t that better than to stop working on it right now, forever?”
The two detectives watched the wheels turn in Hayley’s head with bated breath. After an eternity, they looked on as the knife dropped—not all the way, but far enough for Eddie to breathe comfortably.
Baile glanced at Crowley. “Keep her covered,” they said to their partner. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Turn your earpiece on,” he said, not moving his eyes off Hayley for an instant. “Thought I’d have a heart attack on the way over when you didn’t answer.”
Baile nodded and reached up to activate the device in their ear, giving them a connection to Crowley. “See you soon,” he said as they backed towards the staircase and began to climb.
***
Upstairs, Baile found themselves in a kind of attic space, with old, rotting cardboard boxes and a smell of mold. There was one door, leading towards the room with the light on, and they headed for it, gun still up and ready.
There was a sign on the door that had once read “Reverend’s Office,” but someone had taped over the “Reverend” and replaced it with “Archangel” in a messy, childlike scrawl. They took a deep breath, and shoved through the door.
“Ah, finally,” said the man at the desk. He was sitting with his back to her, reading a newspaper, and did not turn when Baile came in. “I’ll be with you in just a moment, sunshine.”
Baile felt her teeth grind against one another involuntarily at the calmness, the peace in that voice, the way he twisted the pet name, once lovingly typed with a string of emojis at the top of a text conversation. It sounded exactly like what Mr. Fell had described of the man who had cut off his hand.
“Messenger,” they gritted out, gun pointed perfectly steady at his head. He turned, looking slightly surprised, and they finally came face to face with the man they’d been hunting for four long years.
“Oh,” he said, curiosity coloring his tone. “Detective Volante.” He looked at the floor, as though he were trying to see through to the story below. “Interesting.”
“Put your hands where I can see them,” Baile said. There weren’t going to be any surprises. Not when they’d finally gotten this close.
The Messenger complied without a fuss, lifting his hands up and holding them in the air by his face. “I wasn’t expecting to see you just yet,” he said, like they had just run into each other at the damn grocery store.
“You’re done,” Baile spat at him. They usually didn’t go in for that kind of taunting, but this was a special occasion. “This is it for you. It’s over.”
The Messenger clucked his tongue as though they were a child who had said something very silly, but sweet nonetheless. “I’m afraid it’s not, actually. Great Plan and all. You know how it is.”
Baile felt their stomach turn over. It was one thing to imagine the nonsense that must fill this man’s head, but to hear it said in such a convinced, matter-of-fact tone was absolutely sickening. He was talking about killing people, maiming and murdering, and he acted like it was all nothing.
“Anyway,” the man said, either oblivious or indifferent to their discomfort. “I’m sorry to say I have you at an advantage here. I know your name, you should know mine.”
“You’re the Messenger,” Baile spat.
“I am,” he said gleefully. Then he sat up straighter and filled himself up with importance and status. “I am also the Archangel Gabriel, Messenger of the Lord and Her Servant upon the Earth.”
“You are a madman and a murderer,” Baile countered. The man—Gabriel—looked almost disappointed.
He looked like he was about to say something more when there was a shout from downstairs and the sound of a car door slamming outside.
“Crowley,” Baile said into their earpiece, forcing calm into their voice. “What’s happening?”
“She threw the damn knife at me,” their partner said, making no attempt at calm.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah, she missed, but she’s making a run for it. She’s still got Eddie, I’m going in pursuit.”
Baile’s teeth gritted again. They stared the Messenger in the face and hated it, hated how calm he was, hated how they were somehow sure he had heard every word coming over the earpiece, and was pleased with the situation. They especially hated that they knew why. “Negative,” they spat into the earpiece.
“What?” Crowley said.
“Negative. Get back here. Do not pursue.”
“Beelz, Eddie’s in that car.”
Baile hated themselves. Hated every bit and every inch. Their voice was calm over the earpiece, and they hated that most of all. “Priority is the Messenger. We need to bring him in.”
“Beelz….”
“We’ll track them down once he’s in a cell.” They looked the serial killer in the eye, avoiding the abhorrent, cruel little smile he wore and making sure he heard every word they said. “We’re taking down the Messenger tonight.”