Excerpt from Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Still alive?"

"I don't know that either. I'm sorry."

"It's all right. Anything else you can tell me about them?"

The priest frowned, mentally ticking off the pathetically few scraps of information he possessed about the Kleinfeldts. "They were retired, of course, at their age. Both in their seventies, as I recall. Very devout, in their own way more than God's, I'm sorry to say. And very solitary. I don't think they trusted a living soul, including me, and I always thought that was very sad. I suppose that isn't an uncommon trait among the wealthy."

Halloran looked doubtfully at the shabbily dressed corpses. "Land poor?"

Father Newberry shook his head. "They tithed a precise ten percent. December thirty-first every year they'd send a check and a financial statement from their accountant to prove it was exactly ten percent, as if I would question it."

Halloran grunted. "Weird."

"They were . . . unusual people."

"So what were they worth?"

The priest looked up, found his memory on the ceiling. "Over seven million, I believe, but that was last year. It would be considerably more now."

Behind them the church door opened and closed and a wave of cold moved up the aisle, Bonar in its wake. He stopped next to Halloran. "We got nothing from the neighbors. State forensics is just pulling in." His eyes narrowed on Halloran's face. "What? You got something?"

"Motive, maybe. Father tells me they were worth millions."

Bonar glanced up the aisle at the bodies. "No way."

"It isn't exactly a motive, Mike," the priest interjected. "Unless you consider me a suspect. They left everything to the church."

Bonar elbowed Halloran. "I told you the padre did it."

Father Newberry almost smiled; stopped it just in time. "Lutherans," he muttered instead.

Up in the front of the church Doc Hanson stood abruptly. "Oh shit." He shot a quick, guilty glance back at Father Newberry. "Sorry, Father. Mike, you want to come and take a look at this?"

Beneath the black coat that Doc Hanson had started to unbutton, Mary Kleinfeldt's once-white blouse was saturated with the red-brown of coagulating blood. The smell of it filled the pew.

"She was shot in the chest, too?" Halloran asked.

Doc Hanson shook his head. "Not unless they brought along a cannon. Head hole looks like a .22, and this is way too much blood for anything that small." He unbuttoned the soggy blouse and opened it. The two deputies watching both took a quick step backward.

"Jesus," one of them whispered. "Looks like someone started a do-it-yourself autopsy."

Mary Kleinfeldt's slip and bra had been sliced in half and peeled to each side, exposing blue-veined skin that had never seen the sun. A vertical gash ran down the center of her chest, exposing the sternum. Another gash ran horizontally, so deep that the lower half of her breasts hung inside out.

Halloran stared at the old woman's chest and felt a new kind of fear he couldn't put a name to yet. "That's not an autopsy incision," he said softly. "It's a cross."

From Monkeewrench by P.J. Tracy. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Penguin Putnam, Inc.