Formidable was a word that came to mind at first glance; when he had still been a uniformed officer, just plain scary tended to be the more accurate description.

He was looking back at me with dark, questioning eyes that peered out of angularly defined features and natural reddish-tanned skin-unmistakable visual evidence of his full-blooded Native American heritage. His large hand was tucked beneath a shank of collar length, jet-black hair, and he was slowly massaging the back of his neck. This was a common mannerism of his, and it told me that his mind was doing far more behind those eyes than simply waiting for me to say something.

I said something anyway. “Was there a Bible?”

While an outside observer might have found the question somewhat odd, it was something I was certain he had expected me to ask.

“Yeah, that’s what they said when they called,” he told me, giving a short nod to the affirmative as he spoke. “Bookmarked and highlighted.”

“Passage?”

My friend stopped massaging his neck long enough to thumb through a small notebook then read his shorthand back to me, “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. Deuteronomy seventeen, six.”

“He’s working from his list again…” I muttered. “When you ID this guy, he’ll be someone that one of the original victims knew.”

“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “That’s kinda what we figured.”

The “he” I referred to was, of course, Eldon Andrew Porter. The list was exactly that, a list.