Nine times out of ten, the coarse word is the word that condemns an evil and the refined word the word that excuses it (G.K. Chesterton).

The sunset was beautifully understated, and spread out over the western sky like the pale, pastel inside of an oyster shell. But it had been a day, and the oyster was a little annoyed. Sharon Atwater stood at the top of the stairs leading down to the parking lot, and looked out at the quiet evening, peeved. She was peeved, not the evening, although the evening was thinking about it.

At the bottom of the stairs was a local television station truck, big satellite dish on the top, and cords running all over heck. Several cameras were already set up, and it looked like they were about to go live. Car is right on the other side of that mess. I could walk through but they might start asking me questions. Not for Chad. Sharon swiveled and started to walk the long way around.

A few moments later, standing on the other side of her car, she saw the two detectives who had visited her earlier getting out of the car they had just parked right behind hers. Fantastic. They were just standing there, not moving at all. Waiting for me. Great. They found out I was lying and came to arrest me. But I wasn’t lying. Not for Chad. There was nothing to do but keep walking the long way around, so she did.

But the two policemen were not waiting for her. They were standing there for the same reason that Sharon was now going the long way around—the television crew. Only they didn’t know the long way around. Rourke was standing there, with an aggrieved look on his face.

“Why, Bradford, do I always have to deal with News Babe?”

Bradford didn’t know. “Righteous living?”

Rourke just stood there, drumming his fingers on the roof of the car. “If we walk up the stairs, she will see us. And if she sees us, she will jump out at us, all blonde and brassy like. And she will pepper us with questions. I don’t want to talk to News Babe, Bradford.”

“Maybe there is a long way around,” Bradford said, and looking off to the left, saw Sharon Atwater approaching her car. “Well, look at this,” he said. Both detectives stood up straight, and greeted her cordially. “Evening, ma’am.” Rourke said, “Is there a way around this televised blonde pestilence? Without moving our car?”

Sharon, relieved beyond words, silently pointed to the walkway she had just come down, hidden artfully behind the junipers. The detectives did not know the ropes at Camel Creek, and so they were almost a half an hour early for the service. This, in Camel Creek time, was an eternity, and was why the parking lot was almost entirely empty. Most of the expert attendees knew how to shave it just right, surging into the meeting room just minutes before the action started, and skying out immediately afterwards, an hour and fifteen minutes later. Bradford and Rourke were there early enough to rattle around artlessly for aeons. If they had been there fifteen minutes earlier than that they would have had time to join the band and practice several numbers.

They made it to the walkway at the top of the stairs and were headed toward the long row of doors, almost there, when one of the news crew spotted them. He turned to News Babe, and tugged at her sleeve. “Looky there,” he said.

News Babe was strikingly good-looking. She was gorgeous. She was so good-looking that when she first started out in television five years before everyone who saw her simply assumed that she was an idiot, and so she had determined early in her career that she would have to be really aggressive, journalistically imperious, dictatorial to her staff, and merciless to anyone who got between her and the Story. And it had worked. Nobody thought she got her position by her looks anymore, because no one really knew that she was beautiful anymore, except in that mandatory newsbaby kind of way. Well, actually, Rourke’s wife knew she was good-looking because her husband always called her News Babe. She didn’t like it, but there it was. But he had explained a number of times that he was not lusting in his heart, and that she was his mortal enemy. She had no allure; she was charming in the same way that Tokyo Rose had been charming to her grandfather in the middle of the Pacific. She was to him as Moriarty had been to Sherlock, if Moriarty had been blonde, stacked and pushy. Every high-profile case, there she was with the truck, getting underfoot like a toddler on a rainy day. Hmmff, his wife sniffed. Look at that blouse. Three buttons undone. The factory puts them on for a reason, you know.

“Rourke!” News Babe shouted.

Ten feet away from the safety of the front doors, his shoulders drooped, and he turned wearily around. Bradford turned and stood with him, heroically.

She walked briskly up to them, her blouse bouncing provocatively, as much as to say in stereo that we dare you to do anything but look at our forehead. She had a small microphone and tape recorder in a bag over her shoulder. “May I ask you a few questions?”

“Certainly,” Rourke said.

“Why are you here?”

“Worshipping,” Bradford said.

News Babe turned a baleful eye on him.

“Don’t mind my colleague,” Rourke said. “We are here for the same reason you are, and we don’t have anything to share with you just yet. If we ever do, I am sure you will be the first with the story.”

“Is that a promise, Rourke?”

More like fate, he thought. “Promise,” he said.

They turned back to the front doors, and when they were inside, Rourke said to Bradford. “And if that happens, you’re doing the interview. You’re young. Your marriage is resilient.”

The two men rode silently and alone up the seven escalators. A few official-looking people with electronic thingies hanging off them were scurrying around the lobby area at the top of the escalators, but the congregation was yet to arrive. Outside the doors of the auditorium they could hear the slapping and thumping of a hopping bass-line, and opened the doors just as the rehearsed number had the plug kicked out of it.

“No, no, three measures in. Then hit it.” The worship leader with a head set on was gesturing at one of the guitar players.

“Got it,” the guitar player said.

Bradford looked around him, and as the King James version he read while growing up would have put it, he was astonied. The auditorium was like a gigantic version of a college classroom, only there were cushioned theater seats there for ten thousand. The seats were in a huge semi-circle, in two tiers. In between the tiers was an open sound booth that looked like it had about fifteen sound engineers in it. Two giant screens were hanging on either side of the stage, ready for a multi-media presentation. The band was in the middle, and a stool sat off to the side for the pastor.

They were about halfway down the tier closest to the stage, and both stood there kind of disoriented. But newcomers always came early, and so an usher was there to greet them inside a minute. “It’s great to serve the King,” he said. “First time here?” he asked. They both nodded, and he showed them to a nearby seat, and gave them both a program.

“A program?” Rourke asked.

“We do worship differently here,” the young man grinned.

They sat down and tried to kill some time reading over the program. But as programs go, this one was in the minimalist school. Just enough information to make sure people could always figure out how much time was left, and not enough to figure out what was actually going on. The program had five words on it—worship, clips, worship, share, and reachout. But if reachout is actually two words that would affect the total count, making it six words.

But there was more to read on the back of the program. There was a place to fill out name and email address, along with boxes to check next to any felt needs that the visitor might have that the trained readers of the checked boxes might be able to help the visitor with. Underneath the blank for the name was the word optional. Bradford brightened when he saw that, and got out his pen. “I bet we will learn a lot about their approach to sinners this way,” he said, and began to check boxes. When he was done, he handed it to Rourke, who looked it over solemnly.

“They are going to think you are one screwed up puppy,” he said finally.

“Yes, but they will have no choice but to send me their information, in all the following areas. And the beauty of it is I don’t have to give my name. All I have to do is create a new email account when I get home.”

“Turdinthepunchbowl@hotmail.com”

“Exactly. They will think I have low self-esteem and will be very kind to me.”

“You checked the boxes next to bulimia, obesity, porn addiction, sex addiction, dysfunctional family, marriage counseling, anger management, and substance abuse.”

“Yes, but it is not true. This is kind of like undercover work.”

While they had been talking, the auditorium was filling up, efficiently and quietly. Promptly at five minutes before the time of the service, the band broke into a hot little jam, no vocals. People began taking their seats, and the detectives looked around curiously. It was a mid-week service, and so the upper tier, up behind the sound booth, was empty. The lower tier, however, was almost full.

At 7:30, on the dot, the lights went down, and the words of a song flashed up on both screens. The band moved seamlessly from their jam into the new song, as tight as a back-up band for Springsteen on a good night. The assembled congregants began to sing, or so the two men guessed from the fact that words were on the screen, and people’s mouths were moving, but the amplified music from up front had all of them buried. Bradford had been to one or two concerts like this in his life before, but Rourke felt like he was under an acoustical rock pile.

There was no break between songs, each one moving aside when its time was done, and allowing another to merge flawlessly to take its place. The whole thing was like a superbly engineered six-lane highway with two lanes merging from the right. But after four songs, the screens suddenly changed, and the band fell suddenly silent. A montage of clips from news shows, sitcoms, and movies suddenly filled the screens on the next beat, and the voice-over began to ask a series of penetrating questions. “What are we to make of the postmodern anguish? How can the church address it if the church refuses to hear the postmodern voice—raw, uncensored, honest, full of integrity? When will we share that integrity and partner with it?”

After ten minutes of “clip,” the music jumped in again, and Rourke found he was actually getting used to it. But this second segment was made up of top-40 songs, which meant that Bradford knew some of the words. It also meant that the church was listening to some raw postmodern anguish, full of integrity, which seemed to be mostly about boyfriends who don’t call anymore. But after fifteen minutes of that, the time that the program had called share came up.

A spotlight fell suddenly on the stool they had seen earlier, and both detectives were startled to see Chad Lester sitting there. Martin had been slated to do the mid-week, which Chad almost never did anymore, but a decision had been made earlier that day that because of the scandal, Chad should get out there in front. Show of confidence. No blood in the water here.

“Speaking of partnering with integrity . . .” Bradford whispered.

The two policemen had thought Lester was smooth when they were talking with him in his office earlier that day. But now . . . his voice was mellifluous and constant. Whenever he paused, always at just the right moment, sincerity oozed out of the silences and puddled on the floor. He sat on the stool easily, at peace with God and man. His hair, gray in all the appropriate places, bespoke experience and accumulated wisdom. His blue polo shirt was gracefully unbuttoned at the neck, and his slacks were as crisp as they come. He hit his consonants perfectly, and the vowels did not betray his regional origins.

“When we speak of the emergent church, leaving certain things behind, we are only rejecting that which is tired and worn out. We retain the best that our fathers have left for us, and we retain it with gratitude. But we are still resolved to meet the challenges of the contemporary world around us, and to enter into a truly creative dialogue with it. And this is where we must learn a little humility . . . for dialogue will not be truly creative if we are not willing to listen and learn from what our discussion partners have to say. Why should the church not learn from some of the best secular thinkers today on positions for women in the church, for example?”

The two men were not swayed, but they were agape. But when Chad got to that unfortunate phrase “positions for women,” the spell was broken for both detectives. Each of them suddenly had unsavory questions arise in their minds about what other meanings Chad might be entertaining for the phrase “positions for women,” which, had he been thinking would have been “position of women.” And those unsavory questions involved things that had nothing to do with equality, dignity, or acceptable public summaries. The moment of resumed clarity was for them not unlike that time when Wormtongue pitched the Palantir off the tower of Orthanc.

Chad was good, really good, no question. But Chad was also on cruise control. The panic he had felt earlier in the day was still romping around inside him, still robust and still showing no signs of coming down off its manic high. Not only did he have a panic party going on down there, but it was a bipolar panic party on the up side of things and no meds in sight. Chad had noticed the trouble phrase “positions for women” too, and if he had not been so distracted, he never would have said anything like that, especially in the middle of a sex scandal. Of course, the fact that the scandal was all about a bimbo named Robert meant that it was probably okay. But still, focus, focus. Guys aren’t bimbos. What would that be, anyway? Bimbus?

At the same time, spectacularly, on top of his flailing and increasingly rambunctious panic below, the flow of words continued smoothly, effortlessly, cogently, compellingly. “This means that the emergent church today poses a threat to powerful interests in our day, interests who know how to retaliate.” This was his one reference to the scandal, understood instantly by everyone in the auditorium. Understated perfectly. No self-pity here. Shrewd insight. Political savvy. Courage. The tennis ball right in the sweet spot. Angela plays tennis. Angela lives right next to the country club. You are free-associating, Chad. You have a talk to finish. Which he did, right on the money.

The band kicked in perfectly, and the reachout postlude jam began the same moment that the spotlight on Chad’s stool cut off. The two detectives stood up and stretched. Everyone else was standing, and it appeared the accepted protocol was to visit for just a moment and then head for the escalators. Bradford dropped his program in a box designated for “felt needs requests,” and they rode down the escalators without speaking.

They sat in the parking lot for about ten minutes, waiting to get out. Bradford found KING on the radio, which they were both listening to absently. “You said you didn’t understand these people, boss. How about now?” In reply, Rourke made a strange, whistling sound in his teeth. When they finally made it up to the feeder road that would take them down to the interstate, a small red Ferrari came from around the back of the church, buzzed in front of them along that feeder road, and headed off to Angela’s.