Chapter 80 - The Descent into St. Jude
St. Jude’s parish sat at the base of the eastern ridge, a crumbling Gothic revival relic that had stood abandoned since the diocese shuttered its doors in the late 1970s. Its twin stone spires rose into the stormy sky like jagged teeth, dark, windowless, and surrounded by an overgrown churchyard choked with dead ivy and leaning gravestones.
The cruiser died three hundred yards before the gates, its radiator pierced by a ricochet from the skirmish at the reservoir. We walked the remainder of the way, Tyler supporting my weight on the left while Julian guarded the rear, his empty service weapon tucked back into his holster, now armed with a shotgun he had liberated from the cruiser’s rack.
The sanctuary doors were sealed with rusted chains, but Tyler led us around the north transept to a subterranean coal delivery hatch half-buried under frozen leaves.
"Donald gave the church ten thousand dollars a year until the day he died," Tyler explained, kicking the rusted iron hatch until the frozen hinges gave way. "Everyone thought it was charity. It was rent."
We descended into the pitch-black crypt beneath the sanctuary. Julian clicked on the patrol car’s heavy-duty emergency lantern, illuminating a cavernous room of hand-carved limestone arches and empty brick niches where priests had been buried a century ago.
At the far end of the crypt stood an unadorned stone altar dedicated to St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
Tyler walked directly to the third flagstone to the left of the altar steps. He pulled a folding knife from his boot, jamming the blade into the mortar joint and prying upward with all his strength. The stone shifted, grinding against the bedrock until it lifted away, revealing a sealed lead-lined lockbox resting in a pocket of dry sand below.
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"This is it," Tyler breathed, his hands trembling as he lifted the heavy box out of the earth. "The 1961 registry. The original county seal before Donald Mercer had it erased."
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