a mother to me. I wanted to kill him so many times. I should have. I should have killed him,” he yelled, jumping to his feet.
Rafan looked around. Only the darkest shadows stared back.
“You were her favorite,” Rafan said, only because it was true. Senada had spoken kindly of Bilal, unlike his older brothers.
“You may pray for her,” Bilal said. “You’re safe with me. I’ll be back in two days to stand guard. You can come again then. And I’m so sorry about Basheera. Senada loved her so much.”
The two men stood together at the grave of a woman they had both loved. Rafan laid his flowers on the freshly turned earth. Both men prayed. And beneath the black night and bright stars, both men wept.
CHAPTER 20
Gruesome. The most sickening thing that Forensia had ever seen. Rick Birk, the old reporter taken hostage, was on TV all the time, and you couldn’t miss his thumb. Only it wasn’t attached to his hand. It was pinned to his shirt. A thumb, just hanging there like a bloody brooch, right below his collar. Forensia almost threw up the first time she saw it.
Birk looked like he was in seven kinds of agony, propping up his bandaged hand with his good one while he spoke, yet he was so brave. Somehow he’d managed to keep talking all day. Even though he sounded weary and hoarse, he still joked about his fingers: “One down, nine to go.” But it wasn’t funny, and he was shaking so badly that his thumb looked like it had come back to life.
But that wasn’t the worst part. Oh, God no. She could barely bring herself to look at the worst part. But how could she not? Only one thing poked out of the blood-soaked gauze hiding Birk’s hand—his index finger! The terrorists had clamped those awful wire cutters on it; any second he might clip it off. Any second. The tension was unbearable.
All regular programming had been canceled. Every channel was showing Birk, with lots of close-ups of his bloody thumb and those horrid wire cutters. The shows were calling it “The World Held Hostage” and “Doomsday and Dismemberment,” crap like that, and they were playing special music and running flashy graphics. You’d think people would get tired of it, but not with the gut-wrenching suspense over whether a terrorist would slip into the picture and snip his pointer right off.
But it wasn’t just Birk’s suffering. Those terrorists were hell-bent on pouring enough iron oxide into the ocean to freeze the planet. And if people thought that was seriously scary—and Forensia knew they did because there had been huge runs on winter clothing all over the world—wait till they got wind of the North Korean rockets.
Her eyes were drawn quickly back to Birk. It was like she could see all of the world’s pain and fear in the face of that poor old guy on the tanker, talking about those awful coal-fired power plants and how they should be shut down or the whole Earth was going to get “colder than a witch’s titty.” That was another of his bad jokes, which he probably shouldn’t have said, and which Forensia couldn’t help but find personally offensive. But he really did look and sound kind of delirious. And who couldn’t forgive such a brave old-timer with his thumb hanging from his shirt like a piece of rotten—
Rrrrriiiinnngg.
The doorbell interrupted Forensia’s thoughts. She tore herself from the TV and opened the screen door for Akina, the frail elderly witch from Ithaca who’d presided over GreenSpirit’s memorial service. She’d brought her daughter Magic Margaret, who was as heavy as her mother was light. Sang-mi and Richtor came out of the kitchen to greet them.
They were gathering in Forensia’s small house before heading to a sundown séance, where they hoped to make contact with GreenSpirit. With the twin calamities of the tanker takeover in the Maldives and the North Korean rockets, Forensia and Sang-mi felt like they needed GreenSpirit’s guidance more than ever.
Their first plan had been to conduct the séance at the cabin where their leader had been murdered, but that idea had been squelched when Richtor reported that the crime scene was still cordoned off. He’d seen as many investigators crawling around the place as there had been on the day that Sang-mi discovered GreenSpirit’s mutilated body.
Richtor pushed his lush dreads out of his face and quickly briefed Akina and Magic Margaret on what he’d found.
“Maybe they got a break