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He placed a call to Coolidge. As he was leaving a message, the man picked up, his tone professionally warm. “Good to hear from you, David. How’s your investigation going?”

“We’ve made some interesting discoveries. Which is why I’m calling you. I want to get in touch with Marcel Jordan’s wife. I was hoping you might have a number for her.”

“Ah. Well.” Coolidge hesitated. “I don’t believe Tania is willing to speak to anyone in law enforcement—which is how she’d view you, regardless of how independent your relationship with officialdom might be.”

“Not even if she could be helpful in solving her husband’s murder—and possibly revealing the complicity of people in law enforcement?”

There was a pregnant silence. “Are you serious? That’s . . . a possibility?”

“Yes.”

“Let me get back to you.”

It didn’t take long.

Coolidge called back in less than ten minutes to inform Gurney that Tania declined to speak to him on the phone but that she’d be willing to meet with him at the church.

Forty-five minutes later Gurney was pulling into the lot at Saint Thomas the Apostle. He parked and took the path through the old churchyard.

He was almost to the building’s back door when he saw her, standing very still among the moss-stained gravestones. A tall, brown-skinned thirtysomething woman in a plain gray tee shirt and sweatpants, she had the lean body and wiry arms of a long-distance runner. Her dark, suspicious eyes were fixed on him.

“Tania?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m Dave Gurney.”

Again she remained silent.

“Would you prefer to talk out here or inside?”

“Maybe I’ve decided not to speak to you at all.”

“Is that true?”

“Suppose it is.”

“Then I’ll get back in my car and go home.”

She cocked her head, first one way then the other, with no discernible meaning. “We’ll talk right here. What did it mean, what you said to the pastor?”

“I told him we’ve made some discoveries concerning your husband’s murder.”

“You told him police might have been involved.”

“I said it looked that way.”

“What facts do you have?”

“I can’t reveal specific evidence. But I suspect that your husband and Virgil Tooker, as well as the two police officers, may all have been killed by the same person.”

“Not by the Payne boy or them Gort lunatics?”

“I don’t believe so.” He studied her impassive face for some reaction but saw none. Behind her loomed the marble angel on whose wing Coolidge a few days earlier had extinguished his cigarette.

“The man you’re calling my husband,” she said after a pause, “was really more my ex, though we never got divorced. We were living in the same house, for the economies of it, but we were separated in our minds. Man was a fool.” Another pause. “What do you want from me?”

“Your help in getting to the truth of what happened.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You could start with why you say Marcel was a fool.”

“He had a weakness. Women loved him . . . and he loved them back.”

“That’s what ended your marriage?”

“It created situations that were a pain to my heart. But I tried to live with the weakness because there was so much strength in him otherwise. Strength and a true desire for justice—justice for people who have no power. He wanted to stand up for those people—to do what he could to take some of the strife and fear out of their lives. That was his vision for the BDA.”

“How did he get along with the other two BDA leaders?”

“Virgil Tooker and Blaze Jackson?”

Gurney nodded.

“Well . . . I’d have to say that Virgil wasn’t really what you’d call a leader. He was just a good man and happened to be close to Marcel, and Marcel pretty much pulled him into that position because he trusted him. The man had no huge talent, no huge fault. He just wanted to do the right thing. That’s all Virgil wanted. To be helpful.”

Gurney was struck by the echo of Mark Torres’s goal as a police officer.

“And Blaze Jackson?”

The first sign of emotion appeared on Tania’s face, something hard and bitter. When she spoke, her voice was almost frighteningly calm. “Blaze Lovely Jackson is the Devil incarnate. Ain’t nothing that bitch wouldn’t do to get what she wants. Blaze is all about Blaze. Fiery talker, loves to be onstage, loves the attention, people looking up at her. Loves to lay it down hard on the corrupt police and stir up the crowd. But all the time she’s got her evil eye on what’s in it for her—what she can take from someone else.”

“Was she the reason for your separation from your husband?”

“My husband was a fool. That was the reason for our separation.”

A brief silence fell between them.

Gurney asked if she’d seen Marcel or Virgil at any time in the forty-eight hours before they were killed. She shook her head. He asked if she’d seen or heard anything before or after their murders that might relate to them in any way.

“Nothing. Only the fact that Blaze is now the sole leader of the Black Defense Alliance, a position which the bitch surely loves.”

“She likes being in charge?”

“Power is what she likes. Likes it way too much.”