“Only Allah,” said the taller one. Parvez nodded knowingly.
“A man such as you, living on a small island, he could use help,” the shorter man continued. “Is this not so?” He smiled again.
“I am humbled by your offer,” Parvez said.
“We must move fast,” the taller man added, glancing around. But no one was listening, and the jingly-jangly sound of a CD smothered their softly spoken words. The music annoyed Parvez. Someday music would find its proper place in the Maldives, and it would no longer distract serious men from serious tasks.
They made plans with careful words, and then the tall man bowed his head and said, “We will pray together soon, and our prayers will be heard around the world.”
We worship Allah in all kinds of ways, Parvez reminded himself after the men left. Sometimes we pray in the silence of our souls. Sometimes we pray with the shattering screams of the unforgiven.
* * *
Forensia hurried back from the barn to check on Bayou, resting on a blanket in Dafoe’s expansive country kitchen. She flipped aside her black braids and bent over to see if she could get him to eat. Poor dog could hardly get around. Not that they wanted him to. “Make him rest,” Dr. Berkley had ordered, “even if you have to coop him up in a dog crate.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary; Dafoe had trained Bayou so well that when Forensia commanded him to “stay,” he never moved. Now, she coaxed precious bits of cooked lamb into him.
The border collie loved lamb, but had to labor to swallow the meat. At least he could eat. And he is recovering, Forensia assured herself. At times like this, when he gazed at her with his big marbly eyes, she could hardly believe that he’d lived through the coyote attack. Or that her savagery had been the sole instrument of his survival. But she had no regrets: She’d saved him, and no matter how she parsed it, the fact that he lived felt great.
But the torn-up dog, still bandaged and stitched, couldn’t herd, so Forensia would have to take over the rest of his chores as well as his master’s.
“Let’s go,” she called to Sang-mi. Her friend was curled up on the couch, looking almost as frightened as she had in the minutes after she’d found GreenSpirit’s mutilated body. “I’ve got to move those cows to pasture and it’ll take a while.” She knew that the other woman wouldn’t want to stay alone in the house for more than a few minutes.
Sang-mi slipped a barrette into her short black hair and almost ran to Forensia, edging past Bayou without so much as a warm glance or word. She didn’t care for dogs—a cultural quirk, apparently—but Forensia knew she felt a deep affection for her tall American friend. Last night, they’d sat up talking after Richtor and the others had gone to bed, and Sang-mi had told Forensia about a long-developed North Korean ecoterrorism plot that might dwarf any nightmare in the Maldives.
Forensia was still trying to figure out what to do with this horrifying news, but right now she had to turn her attention back to the more immediate threats they were facing.
She picked up Dafoe’s varmint gun and stepped onto the porch, eyeing every tree, shed, and fence post like they were hiding GreenSpirit’s murderer.
Forensia missed having Bayou’s eyes and ears on full alert out here. There were never surprises with him on duty; he’d even warned her of the attack that had taken him down. Richtor had insisted on loaning her his big lumbering Newfie, but Forensia didn’t think the one-hundred-sixty-pound ball of lazy black fur had shifted a single inch since claiming a spread of shade on the porch.
Not an hour went by without Forensia remembering the threat that Jason Robb had shouted at her after the initiation. And she wasn’t the only one strongly suspicious of the high school quarterback: This morning she’d glanced at the local news online only long enough to learn that Sheriff Walker had asked anyone with knowledge of Jason’s whereabouts to come forward. If the sheriff was making that plea, Forensia figured that Jason’s buddies weren’t talking; it was widely known that his parents had refused to cooperate with the sheriff, the New York State Police homicide detectives, or the FBI. She did feel sorry for his folks; one son died in Iraq and the other had turned into a killer.