Divine Evil by Nora Roberts Page A

was just a phase. A new high priest was what was needed, and though he wasn't a brave man, he had attended two secret meetings on that particular problem. What was not needed was a flare of panic because Jack Kimball's daughter was back in town.
    “She can't tell the sheriff what she doesn't know,” he insisted. He wished to hell he'd never mentioned the fact that Jack had gotten stewed one night and babbled about Clare watching a ritual. In the back of his mind, he was afraid Jack had died as much for that as for the shopping center deal.
    “We might just have to find out what she does know.” As he crushed out his cigarette, he studied her. Not a bad looker, he decided. Even if her ass was on the bony side. “We'll keep an eye on little Clare,” he said and grinned. “We'll keep an eye right on her.”
    Ernie Butts spent most of his time thinking about death. He read about it, dreamed about it, and fantasized about it. He'd come to the conclusion that when a person was finished with life, they were just plain finished. There was no heaven or hell in Ernie Butts's scheme of things. That made death the ultimate rip-off, and life, with its average seventy-odd years, the only game in town.
    He didn't believe in rules or in doing good deeds. He'd come to admire men like Charles Manson and David Berkowitz. Men who took what they wanted, lived as they chose, and flipped society the finger. Sure, that same society locked them up, but before the bars shut, these men had wielded incredible power. And, as Ernie Butts believed, they continued to wield it.
    He was as fascinated by power as he was by death.
    He'd read every word written by Anton LaVey, by Love-craft, and Crowley. He'd pored over books of folklore and witchcraft and Satan worship, taking out of them all that he understood or agreed with and mixing them together into his own messy stew.
    It made a lot more sense to him than sitting through life being pious, self-sacrificing, and humble. Or, like his parents, working eighteen frigging hours a day, sweating and scraping to make loan payments.
    If all you were going to end up with was six feet of dirt, then it was logical to take whatever you could get, however you could get it, while you were still breathing.
    He listened to the music of Motley Crüe, Slayer, and Metallica, twisting the lyrics to suit his needs. The walls of his once airy attic room were lined with posters of his heroes, frozen into tortured screams or smiling evil.
    He knew it drove his parents crazy, but at seventeen, Ernie didn't concern himself overmuch with the people who had created him. He felt little more than contempt for the man and woman who owned and operated Rocco's Pizza and were forever smelling of garlic and sweat. The fact that he refused to work with them had fostered many family arguments. But he had taken a job at the Amoco, pumping gas. Reaching for independence was what his mother had called it, soothing his baffled and disappointed father. So they let him be.
    Sometimes he fantasized about killing them, feeling their blood on his hands, experiencing the punch of their life force shooting from them at the moment of death and into him. And when he dreamed of murder, it frightened and fascinated him.
    He was a stringy boy with dark hair and a surly face that excited a number of the high school girls. He dabbled in sex in the cab of his secondhand Toyota pickup butfound most of his female contemporaries too stupid, too timid, or too boring. In the five years he'd lived in Emmitsboro, he'd made no close friends, male or female. There wasn't one with whom he could discuss the psychology of the sociopath, the meaning of the
Necronomicon
, or the symbolism of ancient rites.
    Ernie thought of himself as an outsider, not a bad thing in his estimation. He kept his grades up because it was easy for him, and he took a great deal of pride in his mind. But he rejected outside activities like sports and dances that might have forged some bonds