All the Sinners Bleed

Titus asks the other officers to investigate some of the churches that used the phrase “Our salvation is his suffering” (149). He heads to Second Corinthian and interviews Reverend Wilkes, who claims they put the phrase on their sign at the suggestion of a congregant named Maggie Scott, who is now deceased. He also claims that nobody in his church has been acting suspiciously. Next, Titus drives across the bridge to Piney Island, where the Holy Rock of the Redeemer church is located. The pastor’s name is Elias Hillington, and he has a snake collection, eight kids, and a wife named Mare-Beth. Their congregation only contains white people, and the church isn’t very large because it’s located on Piney Island and deviates from the more mainstream denominations of Christianity practiced by the county’s other residents. Unlike the local Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran churches, Holy Rock of the Redeemer is nondenominational and involves different theatrics such as snake-handling.

Elias confirms that he put the phrase on his church’s sign, and that it came from one of the first sermons he ever gave. However, he claims that nobody from his church has been acting suspiciously and staunchly maintains that nobody from his church could ever commit such evil crimes.

The narrator briefly leaves Titus and focuses instead on a man named Paul Garnett, who takes his dog, Rider, for a walk one morning. When Rider runs off to chase a squirrel and returns covered in blood, Paul follows him to discover a dead body. The narrative then switches back to Titus, who arrives to investigate the dead body: a white man whose face has been removed. The corpse’s lungs have also cut out of his body to look like wings, and his body has been strung up between two trees in an angelic or Christlike pose. Davy recognizes the man’s tattoo and identifies the murder victim as Cole Marshall. Based on the appearance of the body and the scene, Titus believes that only one person murdered Cole. By extension, he reasons that the murderer had to have been strong enough to handle Cole, who is large and muscular. Also, the absence of a struggle suggests that Cole trusted the murderer and met up with them willingly. Although Davy recognizes the tattoo, they can’t definitively identify Cole and must send the body to Richmond for analysis. Cole worked at the fish house, like Latrell. Meanwhile, Dr. Kim has identified the first of the dead children as Tavaris Michaels, a 17-year-old from Baltimore.

Scott Cunningham comes to question Titus about Cole Marshall’s death, but Titus states that he works for the people, not for Scott. Scott is concerned that the murders will hurt tourism and profits. Later, Titus drives to Baltimore to inform Yasmin Michaels that her son, Tavaris, is dead. She seems to have already known this because he has been missing for years. She is still upset by the news and wants to know who killed him, and Titus promises to find out.

Titus arrives home and recounts that Tavaris was last seen near Inner Harbor, an area full of restaurants and bars for college students and tourists. Tavaris apparently admired college students and wanted to hang out with them. Titus looks up Latrell’s death online and discovers that some people are supporting his deputies’ actions with problematic rhetoric, whereas others are accusing his department of exhibiting signs of racism. Titus is discouraged by these developments and reflects that he has not been able to improve the system.

Carla investigates the fish house. She discovers that Latrell had a friend named Darnell Posey and avoided certain coworkers: Eddie Franklin, Carolyn Chambers, and Dayane Carter. However, Latrell was neutral toward Cole Marshall. Darlene calls Titus and confesses that she no longer feels safe living in her hometown. They meet up later that night, and Titus laments the state of Charon as well as his mother’s death. Later, Titus goes downstairs in the middle of the night and finds his dad looking at some moonshine without drinking it. Albert’s friend, Gene Dixon, who helped him to run the church garden, has died. Titus and his father drink and talk together. Then Titus gets a call from Pip and learns that Darnell Posey dropped a box off at the station and tried to leave. Darnell is now in a holding cell. At the station, Titus learns that the box contains a piece of skin with a quote from a William Butler Yeats poem written on it: “I Am the Beast Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (184). Additionally, the remnants of Cole Marshall’s face are in the box.

The narration shifts to an omniscient perspective in order to discuss Charon County and small Southern towns in general. The narrator argues that such towns, like their citizens, contain many secrets. While main streets may appear inviting, friendly, and beautiful, back roads often reveal the harsher realities of such places. For example, the third killer is still out in Charon County, hiding in plain sight. People like him are willing to commit violence to avoid revealing their secrets.

Titus learns that Darnell was unaware of the contents of the box. Darnell claims that he found the box on his doorstep along with $500 and a note stating that Darnell could keep the money if he delivered the box to the police. Titus asks about Darnell’s relationship with Latrell, and Darnell admits that they used to hang out occasionally, but Latrell never mentioned Jeff Spearman or their activities together. The last time Darnell saw Latrell was about a week prior, at the Watering Hole. Latrell was receiving a package (presumably drugs) from Jasper, to deliver to someone outside of town. Latrell overheard that Jasper had been paying an officer on Titus’s force for information to avoid being raided or caught for illegal activities. Titus makes a mental note to identify the corrupt officer later, because Marquis also thought he might have a corrupt officer on his hands. Meanwhile, Darnell shares that when he was in high school, he needed rides home after basketball practice, so Mr. Spearman offered to help him but then tried to molest him. Darnell didn’t tell anyone at the time because he thought that nobody would believe him, since he is Black while Mr. Spearman was a popular white teacher.

Titus sends Steve to the fish house to interview more people, such as Cole’s girlfriend. Titus shares that he believes Mr. Spearman and the third killer used Latrell as bait to lure young Black teenagers into their clutches. Because Latrell was experiencing problems with mental health and never received proper treatment, he went along with this plan. Titus tasks Trey with investigating bank records to determine which of his officers has been receiving strange deposits. (He hopes to find out whom Jasper is bribing to keep tabs on when police raids are planned.) When Titus tries to interview Elias again, he finds that the church is locked. A woman in her 60s named Griselda Barry is sitting nearby and speaks to him. She wishes that Titus would shut Elias’s church down. She clearly dislikes Elias and his church, so Titus keeps talking to her. The parents of Griselda’s late husband, Otis, attended Elias’s church, and before her husband’s death, Griselda and Otis went with them once years ago. At the time, Griselda could tell that the youngest of Elias’s children had not been biologically born to Mare-Beth because she was not recently pregnant. She surmised that the boy was secretly adopted, but Elias and Mare-Beth denied that the boy was adopted. They abused him heavily and treated him differently from their other children. Elias’s brother, Henry, also abused the child. According to Griselda, the child had both Black and white ancestry, but Elias and Mare-Beth tried to hide this fact. Griselda stood up for the boy a few times, but nobody did enough to save him from the abusive situation.

One day, Henry was found locked in an outhouse and bitten by several snakes. They didn’t catch who locked him in there or threw the snakes in, but Griselda theorizes that given the adopted boy’s past, he would probably want to kill more than just one person (Henry). The chapter implies that the adopted boy raised by Elias and Mare-Beth may be the third killer that Titus is searching for.