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legs and a grim look on his face.
    McGill sighed. “My pop always used to say, God don’t need no preachers, he needs servants of the people . And that is where we faltered. We preached a lot but helped too little.”
    “What happened?” Alexa asked softly, her hand on her throat.
    “My wife and daughter had disappeared for two days. Then the mass-suicides happened. A week later, the police found shallow graves in the commune. Ruth and Mary’s bodies were buried amongst a dozen others.”
    “How did you manage to handle such a…tragedy?” Alexa asked, unable to control the emotion in her voice.
    McGill shrugged, eyes narrowed. “I went after the bastard. Jordan had disappeared. So I started looking for him in the rainforest.” He cast them a stony-faced glare. “There was no way I was going to let that bastard off the hook. It took me three months, but I finally found him with the help of some of my loyal parishioners.” His shoulders slumped. “And I killed him.”
    Neil grunted. “Good for you.”
    McGill closed his eyes and sucked in a deep, long breath. “Unfortunately, he was friends with some very senior officials in the communist government. They didn’t take kindly to me murdering the man who persuaded a huge amount of the population to vote for them. I was jailed until a democratic government was voted into power.”
    “How long?” Neil asked.
    “Twenty years.”  
    Neil whistled softly.  
    McGill lifted his hands and dropped them on his thighs. “Tell me about Eden Calloway. How did she die?”
    Neil studied the man for a moment. “Straight answer?”
    McGill nodded.
    “Her abdomen was slit open and her bowels removed. Her eyes and tongue were cut out and her eyes and mouth stitched closed.”
    “And Mika?”
    Neil nodded slowly. “Same way.”
    McGill pursed his lips and then put his hands to his face. They could see his shoulders shake as he cried. After a minute he looked up, his cheeks shiny with tears. “She reminded me so much of my Ruth.”
    Alexa stood up and placed her hand on his shoulder. He opened his arms and she bent down as he hugged her, sobbing. He held her back by her shoulders. “It’s happening all over, Captain.”
    “Call me Alexa,” she whispered. “What’s happening all over?”
    “There’s a cult operating in Vegas. Mika tried to persuade some members not to join. I wanted to help, but I was so damn scared,” he sobbed.
    Neil kneeled in front of the man, touching his knee. “What are they called?”
    He looked up, his lower lip trembling. “Illumenex for short. It stands for the Illuminated and Exalted Church of Isis.” He sucked in a raspy breath. “Their leader is a man called Joe Di Mardi.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

    Salt Lake City, Utah

    Father Warren Garland opened his eyes and pinched them closed again, blinked a couple of times as he tried to focus. His sight was assaulted by a blinding light, and his body was shivering uncontrollably. He was loosely bound by his hands and feet, when he tried to move, he could hear the clink of chains connecting the shackles around his limbs to the cold table he was laying upon.
    “Ah, I see you are awake,” he heard a silky voice say.
    He lifted his head onto his chest, but he shrieked, almost blacking out, as a jolt of pain exploded in his back.  
    “Please lay still,” the voice said smoothly. “I was afraid that you were going to bleed to death.” The man spoke in a smooth tone, no pitch or lilt to the voice, with an almost imperceptible Italian accent.
    Garland gasped, blinked a couple of times, trying to focus through tears of pain. He turned his head. A man dressed in black, wearing a clerical collar, sat at a table clipping his nails. He slipped an emery board into a nail grooming kit and folded it closed before slipping it into his jacket pocket. The priest strutted to a basin in the corner of the room, casually, inspecting his nails and then he washed his hands. The man slowly counted to sixty and