It wouldn’t have been the first time Laura put herself in harm’s way for a case – far from it. She took her job seriously, and she took the duty of saving lives seriously. But she was also breaking FBI protocol pretty strenuously by going in without backup, and there was Lacey to think about. And Amy. And Nate, whose death she still needed to prevent. She couldn’t do that if she was dead, herself.
Laura took a deep breath on purpose, steadying herself. She wasn’t in mortal danger – not yet, anyway. There was no one here. But there had been, and she needed to find them before they found her. That was the best way to keep herself safe. With any luck, Agent Won would listen to his voicemail at some time this century and he would at least know where to find her.
Or her body.
Laura shook her head as if to forcibly rid herself of the thought, the eerie apprehension that seemed to have settled onto her bones since the moment she stepped foot inside the church. It was all around her, like she was walking through a haunted house attraction at Halloween, just knowing that someone was going to jump out at her and make her scream.
She put her hand on top of her gun just to reassure herself and began to look around some more.
The Pastor had told her that he lived here, in a small apartment at the back of the church. That was how he had put it. Laura looked up behind the altar, to where a small door led into the vestry. That was where he had come from, when she was here before. Maybe she could find something there. Evidence, perhaps. Because, she reminded herself, vision or no vision – Pastor Williams was still the best suspect she had managed to find so far.
She walked towards the door on cautious feet, creeping along, doing her best to tread lightly. A couple of the floorboards creaked as she stepped on them, each time making her pause and slow, listening hard for any sign of movement anywhere else in the building. The vestry door was ajar, but she couldn’t see through it; she had no way of knowing what was on the other side.
Laura stepped up beside it and took a breath.
And then she pushed forward, swinging the door open and looking inside, her hand ready to draw that gun if she was going to need it.
The vestry, thankfully, was empty. Only a few items of clothing hung on a peg just inside the door – ceremonial items, by the looks of them. There was a bench which was presumably for the Pastor’s comfort if he needed to dress, and a small desk which contained a Bible as well as a bundle of paper containing a typed-out sermon. Laura glanced over it quickly just in case, but it appeared to be something that the Pastor was working on in preparation for Christmas – nothing to do with candles, or death, or young women.
Laura stood in the center of the room and turned slowly, wondering if she had missed anything. But there was nothing. Just the door she’d come in from and another door that led in the opposite direction, and that one had to be the entrance to the apartment the Pastor had mentioned.
Laura drew her gun, because this time she wasn’t going through that door unarmed. If someone was still in the building, and it wasn’t the Pastor…
She didn’t want to think about all of the possibilities of what she was about to find.
She braced herself against the wall beside the door, listening again. Nothing. But that didn’t mean the apartment was abandoned. She reached out for the door handle, resting her fingers just on it for a moment as she worked herself up to it.
And then she turned it.
The resistance was immediately obvious. Laura pushed again, wondering if she was just at the wrong angle, but the door strained at one particular point not far from her hand. The lock. It was locked.
If the Pastor had locked it before she led him out of the church and drove him back to the precinct, then presumably no one could have got in since then. It was a dead end. At least, for now. Maybe she was better off waiting, seeing if someone else came in. It was entirely possible, according to what she had seen in her vision, that the killer simply hadn’t arrived yet.
But it was as she was turning back towards the door out of the vestry that she saw it. A trap door, the kind that led down into a basement underneath the church. It was uncovered, but she hadn’t seen it on her way in because it was half-hidden beside the desk.
If there was a door, that meant there was something behind it. An entrance or an exit. And if there was something behind it, then someone could be down there.
She wasn’t done exploring yet.