Page 91 of Brimstone Hollow

Gavin steps up beside him, nods to me, and then looks inside. He says, “I thought he was dead. We all did.”

“I think it was Nathaniel Nickels they buried,” I say. “I think it was his body that Thelma and Will found on Saturday morning.”

“You call the coroner?” Dishman asks Gavin.

Gavin nods and says, “On his way.”

Dishman gives him a curt nod and then looks at me and says, “How the hell did this happen?”

I explain to him what I’d uncovered, pieced together, and guessed so far. That Ezra King had been playing his congregation from the time he traded his gambling addiction for the thrill of fringe fundamentalism. That he’d likely been working with Joel for years, using the tent revival circuit as a way to move weed, but he’d recently branched out with Billy Shepherd, selling hard stuff on the side, and that his womanizing habits—feeling up Dean’s girlfriend in the Cherry Dairy parking lot—had finally pushed his trusted lackey over the edge.

“So, Dean’s finally had enough of him,” Dishman says, as I come to the events that led up to Ezra’s supposed death on Friday night. “And rats him out to Joel Shepherd.”

“Yes, I think so. It was a domino effect from there.”

Dishman heaves a sigh, his big swimmer’s shoulders rising and falling as he looks past me into the church.

“Where’s the congregation?” Dishman asks.

“Still up on the mountain, I guess. Probably waiting for Ezra’s miraculous return.”

He runs a hand over his face pulling at his temples as if to wake himself up from a bad dream. He asks, “Do you think Crystal was in on all this? She’s the one who said he’d be up there.”

“I sort of doubt it,” I answer. “I think it’s more likely that she’s a fantasist who trusted a bad guy. But I’ve been wrong before.”

To Gavin he says, “Call Coroner Bradley again. Tell him to get his ass over here. And then start taping the church off. This whole damn place is a crime scene.”

Gavin nods and jogs back toward the cruiser.

“Come on,” Dishman says. “We need to see what we can find.”

He puts on a pair of gloves and hands a second pair to me. Then, I follow him inside the church and watch as he searches Ezra’s pockets and pulls out a wad of cash totaling a couple hundred bucks. He bags it and hands it back to me. From the other pocket, he removes a cheap pay-as-you-go phone. He tries to open it but it’s locked. The screen demands an eight-digit code.

“We’ll have to send this up to Frankfort,” he says.

“The crowd is on their way back down the hill,” Gavin says as he steps into the church. “And I just talked to Coroner Bradley’s wife. She said he left a few minutes ago, should be here soon.”

Still looking down at Ezra’s body, Dishman nods and says, “Call Mike and Jeanine. We’ve got to get more manpower down here, check every car. Ezra got here somehow and I’m betting the car he drove is still out in the parking lot.”

Gavin nods and starts to move when Dishman adds, “And find Crystal Snodgrass. I want to talk to her, too.”

“I’ll find her, Chief,” Gavin says, and jogs away.

“He was the same build as Nathaniel Nickels,” Dishman mutters. “Tall, thin, pale.”

We both look down at Ezra’s body. Now completely drained of life, his flesh is already gray and waxy.

“Yeah,” I say. “All Ezra would’ve had to do was chop off Nickels’s hair and color it black. Then he dressed Nickels in his own clothes and gave him his own ID, keys, phone. And with his body swollen… It’s exactly what you’d expect to find if Ezra had been bitten by one of his snakes.”

“What’s going on?” a voice says.

We turn and see Will standing on the other side of the newly strung police tape.

“What happened… Oh my… Is that Brother Ezra?” His voice is thin and high, strangled with tears. He wobbles on his feet, gripping the door frame with white-knuckled fingers.

I rush to the open double doors and catch Will before he collapses, easing him down to the cool concrete just as Thelma Worley arrives with her nephew. The police tape falls with Will and, caught between us, it flutters like a streamer in the morning breeze.

“What’s going on?” Thelma asks from the bottom of the steps. “I heard someone’s died in the church.”