Linda stood on the steps leading down to the den. "Are you going to have any breakfast?"

Denton looked up from his papers. "Yeah, in a bit."

She started crossing the room, but he put down the well-worn Moleskine notebook in his hand and met her halfway.

"Whatcha doing?"

"Just looking over some old notes. Last night, I had a new idea for a project I was working on awhile back."

"Didn't get too much sleep, I see?" She smoothed out some stray hairs above his ear, where strands of gray mixed with the dark brown.

He shrugged. "Just a little run down. I think I may be coming down with that cold that's going around."

"You better not be." She let out a resigned laugh that bordered on being a sigh. "You're such a hypochondriac."

Denton didn't like misleading her, but the last thing he wanted was to have to explain to her what was keeping him awake at night. He knew she'd be ready to believe that he was imagining yet another illness. Ever since the time he had thought he had come down with meningitis, Linda was convinced all of his ailments were in his head.

"Well, Gabriela's going to be here any minute," she said, letting him know she had to leave.

During good weather, Linda rode her bike to work. In the rain and during the winter, she got a ride in with Gabriela, who lived down the street and worked at the Savings & Loan.

"Don't get too distracted. You don't want to be late for class." Thursdays he had a nine o'clock lecture.

"I won't," he said. Then he kissed her goodbye.

It was the same as every morning: two small pecks followed by one long kiss, then two more pecks. It was a routine—their routine. They had done it so many times, it was taken for granted, but it was unimaginable that they would part without those five tender kisses.

When she was gone, and he'd heard the front door close, he went back to the notes he'd made about the shack in the woods.

On the ride back to the Ranger's Station, he had scrawled them down in the book, while he had sat in the back seat with the window open, getting fresh air. Going over the scribbles, Denton couldn't remember if they were written in such a trembling scrawl because the dirt road had been bumpy or because his hands had been shaking.

According to his summary, there had been no eights. Nothing had been written on the walls. There was no clear number of organs on the ground. They were decayed and splattered into pieces on the dirt floor.

His notation on the bull sculpture read: "Four feet high, about one foot wide, crudely carved, one horn pointy, one blunt, with what appears to be kidneys nailed to each eye."

It had sat on an altar, which was made out of four old crates covered in shiny black tar paper. Also on the altar were three other items: a vodka bottle containing a dark liquid, likely blood; a child's action figure; and a crucifix made from bones, tied with a black ribbon.

On the next page, he had the notes he made later at home. These were in a steadier hand and reading through them, he remembered the progression of his investigation.

"The building demonstrates resourcefulness but lack of skill. The carving also shows no skill," the first line read. These were straightforward facts. The shack was too makeshift to indicate any experience with construction or carpentry. But there was no easy access to the site. Most of the pieces would have had to have been transported there over trails.

The statue also hinted that the person was not familiar with woodworking. It was most probably a log that was found and hacked at until it bore a passing resemblance to a bull.

The next few lines were about the action figure. Denton had spent hours researching it on the internet. He had finally identified it as the hero of a popular science-fiction movie from eight years earlier. It was a toy likely owned by a boy, who would presently be a teenager. But initially there was no indication that the original owner was the same one who had placed it there.

He had speculated that the bones that formed the cross were from a bird. Considering the size, he had guessed a chicken. The black ribbon had confounded him. In one rambling passage, he had written: "Nothing was placed there randomly. Is black for evil or maybe death? A black ribbon might be worn during mourning. Why grieve over a bird? Or do the bones represent something else?" At first, he had dismissed the bottle of blood as a food offering.

He had theorized that the organs and the blood were offered up as nourishment to the god, or spirit, or demon, or whatever it was that the subject thought he was worshipping. Denton was vaguely aware some cultures offered food to the dead at altars and it appeared that a similar ritual was going on in that shack.

A smile grew on his face while he remembered the moment when he had made the connection—the epiphany that unlocked the riddle of the three objects.

He had been reading about cults and pagan practices on the Web. There was almost too much information to sort through. Out of frustration, he had gone to his bookshelves to look for his antiquated volume of Frazer's The Golden Bough.

Might as well start at the beginning.

As he scanned over the spines, the dull golden cross of his Bible had caught his eye. While he had stared at its leather binding, the answer floated out of his subconscious: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The vodka bottle wasn't important for the blood it contained.

The bottle of spirits was a literal representation of the Holy Ghost. The toy was for a child and represented the Son. But so should the crucifix. How could it be the Father?

He had brooded on that question for days, as he filled in the other details. Such a literal mind suggested an immature psyche.

This began to point to the likelihood that whoever built that altar was young. A picture of the perpetrator had begun to form.

It wasn't until he had stopped thinking about it as bones wrapped in a ribbon, and started looking at it as a religious symbol and a ribbon, that he worked out why they represented the Father.

In the report Denton had given to Bill, he had told him that the person he was looking for was male, in his mid to late teens, with a deceased father. The father had been a highly religious Christian, perhaps even a member of the clergy. The suspect lived in the area, with easy access to the State Forest.

When he handed over the document, his stomach fluttered nervously. He was no longer sure whether its content was scientific or just a bunch of educated guesses, or worse, wild stabs in the dark. The skeptical look on Bill's face, as he skimmed through it, didn't help ease his doubt either.

"Okay, thanks Dent. We'll check it out," was all he said at the time. A few days later, Denton got a call from Bill. They'd made an arrest. It was on the news the next day, but because the accused was a minor they didn't release any details about him. It was only on the weekend that Bill confided in him that he had been dead on.

The boy that they'd picked up was seventeen years old. He and his mother lived in an old neighborhood near Westfield. Not far from their home was a bike trail that led into the park. His father had committed suicide eight years before and had been the reverend at the local Methodist church. In the tool shed, they found a backpack filled with bloody clothes and knives.

Bill Stahl had been impressed.

Much later, Denton had learned that there had never been a trial. Instead, the boy's mother had agreed to commit him to an asylum out of state.

He had planned to write the whole thing up as an article for publication. He would use it to publicly vindicate his theories. But without access to the psychological assessment done on the boy, there was a huge hole in his conclusion.

There had been no eights, he thought to himself again for reassurance, as he put the notebook away and locked the desk drawer. The two cases weren't linked; it had just been a feverish dream.

Denton walked through the quiet house to the kitchen and started preparing a bowl of cereal.

There was still something tugging at his thoughts. He couldn't help feeling there was some connection. Something about the two cases were similar.

He poured the milk and thought about the altar and the strange acts of devotion carried out there. Then the train bridge came back to him, with the giant red eight. The man called Ray sat in front of it and stared at it day after day, before he was killed.

The answer came to him: just like the bull head, the eights were a symbol of worship.