SixteenThe afternoon passed slowly in the community house. Chief Cross, looking sicker and more pallid each moment, was still on his feet, moving back and forth between the Reverend Snow and Hilda, questioning each repeatedly, but gaining no ground. The minister was eager to talk, but only in frenetic bursts of biblical verse that may or may not have meant anything to anyone. Paul considered it all to be babbled fiction. Angela, not a disbeliever, still found it fairly scattered and unintelligible. Cross thought it all crap. Captured perps shoveling crap was nothing new to him. Hilda, for her part, offered nothing at all. She merely stared. Paul's repeated offers to venture out and look for Arthur and or check on the Harpers (though he'd never met one and wouldn't know one if they bit him)
