by R. D. Brady
“Yes,” Patrick replied. “But they’re reserved for his official church members.”
“That seems a little odd,” Jake said.
“Now that you’ve brought it up, it does,” Patrick said.
“Thanks, Uncle Patrick.” Laney started to disconnect the call.
“Wait.”
Laney paused. “What?”
“When you go to the church, put me on video so I can see it.”
“What? Why?” Laney asked.
Patrick’s voice sounded strained. “I just have a feeling.”
“Care to expand?” Laney asked.
“No,” Patrick said. “But it might help if I can see it.”
Laney nodded. “Okay.” She disconnected the call and slipped the phone back in her pocket.
“What do you think it means that he never posted sermons from here?” Jake asked.
Laney shrugged, looking back at the buildings. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
Jake looked at Maddox and Laney. “You guys have a copy of the warrant?”
Laney nodded, but Maddox jerked his thumb toward the tall blond Chandler operative behind him. “I gave my copy to Jordan. He’s more likely to talk first.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Jordan Witt, Jen’s brother, muttered.
“Are you getting anything?” Jake asked, his voice low.
Laney shook her head. “No. Whoever is in there is fully human. At least I think they’re human. Maddox?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sensing anyone either.”
Laney looked at Maddox’s determined face and said a silent thank you that she had brought him into Max’s life.
“Well, hopefully that’s a good thing,” Jake said.
Laney glanced at the six police officers behind them and the handful of Chandler operatives. The SIA agents hadn’t been able to reach them in time, so they’d had to make do with local cops. The police had been decidedly unhappy when Clark had called them to let them know what was happening in their own back yard.
Laney was worried they might be a little too unhappy, but it was too late to do anything about that now. She leaned over to Jake. “Do you realize this is the first time we’re doing one of these with legal backing?”
Jake nodded. “Feels weird, doesn’t it?”
It was Clark who’d managed to finagle the warrants to search the church’s property. While it was nice to have the legal authority, Laney knew they’d be going in with or without legal backing.
Jake surveyed the group of twelve men and women. He met Maddox’s eyes. “Maddox, your group takes building one. Laney, your group takes two. I’ll take the church.”
Laney nodded.
Jake leaned down. “Be careful.”
She looked up into his eyes. “Same goes.”
Jake nodded and turned back to the group. “Okay. Let’s go.”
They separated, each group heading to their own building. As Laney’s group approached building two, a woman stepped out of it. Her eyes widened when she caught sight of Laney and the men charging toward her, and she dashed back in.
Shit. “Let’s go!” Laney yelled. She ran faster.
One of her men reached the door first and moved in. Laney went in after him. The desk at the front was deserted, but they could hear voices coming from the hall to the right.
Laney gestured for two of the men to head to the left while the other two followed her. There was only one door down this hall, and it was open.
She inched forward. The voices got louder and now she could hear a whirring noise. She peeked her head in. Two women were frantically trying to shred documents.
Laney stepped into the room. “Hands up.”
One woman shrieked, dropping the papers she was holding as her hands flew into the air. The other woman didn’t even pause to look up.
“Stop!” Laney ran across the room, pushing the woman away from the shredder and shoving her up against the wall. “Who are you?”
The woman didn’t wear any makeup and her dress was extremely modest. She glared back at Laney.
“Laney,” one of the Chandler operatives called, pointing to a picture on the desk.
Laney glanced at the picture of the preacher and his family. Then she turned back to the woman. “Beatrice Grayston, where is your husband?”
Beatrice sneered, turning her once beautiful face into an ugly mask. “You’re an agent of evil. You can’t stop the righteous.”
“Where are the kids?” Laney asked.
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “They’re not children. They’re abominations.”
Laney pushed the woman harder against the wall and spoke through gritted teeth. “Where. Are. They?”
Beatrice smiled. “You’re too late.”
CHAPTER 64
Anger soared through Laney. It was taking every ounce of her self-control not to wipe the smug look off Beatrice Grayston’s face. She shoved her toward one of the police officers. “Take her before I kill her.”
“Laney,” Maddox’s voice called through her radio.
Laney pulled it free. “What is it?”
His voice was somber. “I need you to see something.”
No. Laney felt her heart miss a beat. She turned to the Chandler operative at the desk. “Go through the papers. See if it tells us anything about the kids.”
He nodded. “You got it. Go.”
Her legs felt like lead as she walked out of the office, and her heart was trying to pound its way out of her chest. Please let them be all right. Please let Max be all right.
Even with the leaden legs, though, she found herself running for building one.
When she got there, a group of women was being herded out. Laney barely glanced at them as she made her way past. She stopped in the doorway and caught sight of Maddox at the end of the hall. He waved her down.
Swallowing, she took some calming breaths, keeping her eyes focused on Maddox. He looked okay—angry, but okay. Not devastated. She let out a breath. It was bad news, but not what she feared most.
She reached Maddox’s side. He glanced down at her before nodding toward the doorway. “They were here.”
Laney stepped in and felt the world tilt. Children’s toys were scattered around the room, along with some articles of clothing. She turned to Maddox. “Bodies?”
Maddox shook his head. “No.”
Laney grabbed on to the back of a chair and took several deep breaths. The oxygen flooded her system.
Maddox gestured around the room. “But we know they were here.”
He led her across the room to a poster of two kittens in a basket. He lifted it up. Underneath, the words “please help us” were scrawled in crayon. And beneath that were fourteen names.
Laney’s heart nearly stopped when she reached the last name on the list: Max. She looked up at Maddox. His face was expressionless, but Laney could read the anger in his eyes.
She looked around, trying to shove her emotions away so she could concentrate. “Any blood? Drugs? Signs of violence?”
Maddox shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But I have men searching the yard.”
Laney nodded, swallowing hard. She closed her eyes. Looking for graves. She opened her eyes again. “But if Max was here, that means we missed them by less than twenty-four hours.”
Maddox nodded.
A day. They’d missed them by a day. “Goddamn it.”
“Laney?” Jake called through the radio.
Laney yanked the radio off her belt. “Yeah.”
“I need you and Maddox to join me in the church.”
Maddox’s eyes stared intently. Jake sounded frazzled, and she’d never heard him frazzled.
“What’s wrong?” Laney asked.
“I—” Jake went silent. “I think you need to see this.”
Laney’s mouth was suddenly dry. “Is it the kids?”
Jake’s words rushed out. “No. No. It’s not that. Sorry. No.”
Laney closed her eyes. She wa
s going to have a heart attack before the day was done.
“So what is it?’ Laney asked.
“You have to see it for yourself. It’s something…” Jake paused. “Unexpected.”
CHAPTER 65
As Maddox and Laney headed toward the church together, neither of them said a word. What could they say? They had just shared a moment where they thought all of the children were dead. They both needed a little time to come down—or, more accurately, up—from that moment.
Some of the members of Jake’s group stood outside the church, looking shaky.
What’s in there that could be so bad? Laney looked at Maddox, but he just shook his head.
A sign out front said the church had first been erected in 1832. While it could use a paint job, it looked like a thousand other churches strewn across the nation: white, a tall steeple, a set of brick stairs leading up to the front door.
Jake stepped out the front door and waved them in, his face grim. Laney steeled herself as she headed up the stairs. When she stepped into the church, her jaw dropped.
Maddox’s reaction was a little more vocal. “Fuck me.”
Two chandeliers made entirely of bones and skulls dangled from the church rafters. More bones were used as decorations on the walls, and the entire back wall of the church was covered in skulls.
Laney moved forward on automatic pilot, taking in the macabre scene. Skulls capped the end of each pew, lining the main aisle.
“What the hell is this?” Maddox whispered.
“It’s a church of bones,” Laney answered.
Jake stepped up. “I don’t have your archaeological background, but I’d say these bones are old.”
Laney nodded as she walked over to the wall decoration nearest her. Four skulls were arranged together in the center. Like the spokes on a wheel, six arm bones were arranged around them, with a smaller bone positioned at the end of each. A kneecap, maybe? Then femurs were used to create an outer circle. Almost all of the bones had turned brown in color, and a few looked extremely fragile.
Laney looked back at Jake. “I think you’re right.”
“Who does something like this?” Maddox asked.
“Believe it or not, this is not the first church of bones I’ve seen.” Laney said. “There’s a very famous church of bones in the Czech Republic: the Sedlec Ossuary.”
“It’s a church?” Jake asked.
Laney nodded. “Yes. Back in the thirteenth century one of the priests went to the Holy Land and allegedly brought back dirt from Jesus’s burial place. He spread the dirt across the cemetery, which turned the cemetery into a very popular place to be buried. But by the sixteenth century, they were out of room. So the priests began digging up the oldest graves. Then, in the nineteenth century, an artist decided to use the bones to decorate the church.”
“But… why?” Maddox asked.
Laney shook her head. “I don’t know. But the Czech church is considered to be the most beautiful ossuary in the world.”
“And they still use it as a church?” Jake asked.
Laney nodded. “Yes, a Christian one.”
“And there are others?” Jake asked.
“Yes,” Laney said. “They’re not cults or associated with Satanism, despite how macabre they appear. Usually it’s just a matter of doing something creative with an overabundance of bones.”
Jake paused. “Do you think that’s what’s happening here?”
Laney shook her head. “I doubt it. But we should check local cemeteries just to make sure they’re not missing anybody.”
“Lovely,” Maddox muttered.
Jake pulled on one of the skulls from a nearby church pew; it came up easily. He glanced inside. “Laney, you want to look at this?”
Laney made her way over to him and glanced inside the skull. On the inside of the cranium was a sticker, with numbers printed on it in faded ink. She looked back at him, feeling her eyes grow wide. “Someone catalogued this skull.”
“What does that mean?” Maddox asked.
She glanced around the church. There were easily thousands of bones. “It means that some of these were part of a collection—probably a museum’s, although we can’t rule out a private collection.”
She focused on one of the chandeliers. The work was exquisite, in an incredibly creepy kind of way. Her eyes once again roamed the room. It would have taken a long time to arrange all these bones, not to mention collect them in the first place. A museum would be the most likely source. But why wouldn’t they notice them missing?
Although, she mused, if they were taken from a large enough museum, their disappearance might go unnoticed. She thought of the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History. She’d gone there with her uncle once to visit a colleague. There were storerooms upon storerooms in the basement, rooms that no one had visited for years.
In fact, all large museums had far, far more relics and artifacts stored away compared to what they had on exhibit. Were all of these bones from a large museum? One that wouldn’t even notice the theft for years, if ever?
Laney’s attention was drawn to a giant candleholder up where, in a traditional church, the altar would be. She squinted at it. That’s not right.
She walked over and looked at it. The base was constructed of a few small bones, but the pedestal was made up of two large bones placed back to back.
The longer bones had to be femurs. But as Laney stood next to them, she saw that they rose as high as her chest. Even minus the height of the base, that meant they were almost four feet long, more than double the size of most femurs. And that, in turn, meant that whoever these bones came from was over nine feet tall.
Laney glanced across the raised area at the front of the church. There was an identical candleholder on the opposite side.
“Laney? What’s wrong?” Jake asked.
She gestured to the candleholders. “These bones. I think they’re human femurs, but they’re the wrong size. They’re way too big. To have a femur this size, a person would have to be about nine feet tall.”
Maddox walked up to her. “Laney, there’s no one that tall. The tallest man on record was, what? Eight feet?”
Laney nodded. “Eight foot eleven. Robert Wadlow, and he only survived to age twenty-three.”
“Okay. But still, there’s only been one of him.”
Laney looked at Jake, and she knew he was also thinking about their discussion of ancient giants, and the bones that had gone missing from many of the finds.
“I’m not sure about that,” he mumbled. He pointed to a skull in the middle of the back wall. It was noticeably larger than the others.
Laney walked over and inspected it. From its size, you would guess maybe it belonged to a gigantopithecus. But it was obviously human. She walked back down the aisle. Now that she was looking for it, she realized that most of the bones were at least a little larger, if not a lot larger, than normal human bones. Where had they all come from?
Remembering her uncle Patrick, she pulled her iPad out of her backpack.
“What are you doing?” Maddox came to stand next to her.
“I promised Uncle Patrick I’d show him the church.”
She quickly connected with her uncle. “Hey, Uncle Patrick. We’re at the church.” She paused. “It’s an ossuary. Is that what you were expecting?”
Patrick jolted before shaking his head, his expression grim. “No. I thought it might clue us into Nathaniel’s goals, his view. But a church of bones? That, I wasn’t expecting.”
“Well, prepare yourself.” Laney began to pan around the room.
“Laney, come look at this,” Jake called.
Maddox held out his hand. “Give it here. I’ll show Patrick around.”
Laney nodded and handed over the iPad before hurrying over to Jake. He was standing in between the two candleholders. “What is it?”
Jake pointed down. “Look. There was something here before.”
Laney crouched down and ran her hand al
ong the floor. Sure enough, there were holes in the floor where something had been bolted in. Her gaze roamed the floor, finding three other spots where nails had been.
She looked out at the pews and then back. “There was an altar here, and someone removed it.”
Maddox stepped over to them, with Patrick’s face leading the way.
“It was taken recently,” Jake said.
“But why?” Laney asked, looking around.
“I think I may know,” Patrick said quietly.
CHAPTER 66
Unfortunately, the signal cut out on the iPad before Patrick could explain what he meant. Laney, Maddox, and Jake headed outside to get a stronger connection. Laney was perfectly fine with that. She didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary in that creepy church.
As they walked, Laney mentally created a list of experts they would need to call in to examine the church. It was a long list, and it was going to be time consuming. Time the kids didn’t have.
Jake flipped open the iPad cover, but before he could reestablish the connection, Jordan jogged across the grass to join them. “We’ve rounded up eighteen members of the ministry. All women.”
“All?” Jake asked.
Jordan nodded. “And they won’t say where the rest of the church members are or where the minister is.”
“What about the kids?” Maddox asked. “Have they said anything about them?”
Jordan nodded. “One of them let it slip that the kids were alive a few hours ago.”
“All of the kids?” Laney asked, prepared for the worst answer.
“Yeah. But then one of the other members yelled at her and she clammed up. We’ve pulled her to the side and are trying to get more information, but to be honest, I don’t think she knows much more than that.”
“What about the paperwork in the office?” Laney asked.
“Still going through it, but so far nothing helpful. Most of it has to do with administrative duties. Some sermons.”
“Sermons?” Laney asked.
Jordan nodded. “They look like drafts, mixed in with some drafts for his website.”
“Could you have someone grab those? I think we should take a look at them.”