Night Sins

by Tami Hoag

  “Mr. Fletcher?” Mitch called.

  The basement door opened and Albert Fletcher emerged from the gloom. Gaunt and pale, he looked as if he had been held captive down there. His black shirt hung on shoulders as thin and sharp as a wire hanger. A black turtleneck showed above the button-down collar—a reverse image of Father Tom's clerical collar. The dark eyes that met Mitch's were bright with something like fever, but opaque, hiding the source of their glow. They were set in a face that was long and sober, the skin like ash-white tissue paper stretched taut over prominent bones, the mouth an unyielding line that seemed incapable of bending upward. Mitch tried to superimpose this face over the featureless composite drawing of Ruth Cooper's visitor. Maybe. With a hood . . . with sunglasses.

  “Mr. Fletcher?” Mitch held out his hand. “Mitch Holt, chief of police. How are you today?”

  Fletcher turned away to close the basement door behind him, ignoring the pleasantry as if pleasantry were against his personal beliefs.

  “I need to ask you a couple of questions, if you don't mind,” Mitch continued, sliding his hands into his pants pockets.

  “I've already spoken with several policemen.”

  “It's standard procedure to follow up interviews,” Mitch explained. “New questions come up. People remember things after the first cop is gone. We don't want to miss anything.”

  He leaned back against the work island and crossed his ankles. “You can have a seat, if you'd be more comfortable.”

  Apparently comfort was also a sin. Fletcher made no move to find himself a chair. He folded his long, bony hands in front of him, displaying the evidence of his trip to the basement. The deacon looked down at the dirt-streaked backs of his hands, and frowned. “I've been going through some church artifacts in the storage room. They've been down there a long time.”

  Mitch called up a phony smile as he straightened. “Must be quite a basement under a big old place like this. Mind if I take a look? These old Victorian houses fascinate me.”

  Fletcher hesitated just a second before opening the door. Then he descended once more into the bowels of the St. Elysius rectory. Mitch followed, quelling a grimace at the scent of mold.

  The basement was exactly what he'd expected—a chambered cave of old brick and cracked cement. Rafters hung with festoons of cobwebs. Bare bulbs gave off inadequate light. The chamber beneath the kitchen held the water heater, the furnace, the electrical circuit box, and an ancient chest-type freezer. In the next section was junk—old bicycles, a hundred battered folding chairs, a stack of collapsible tables, row upon row of green-painted window screens, a squadron of rusty little wire carts loaded with croquet equipment, a forest of bamboo fishing rods.

  The room Fletcher led him to was crammed with statuary from the days when church icons came complete with human hair and everyone in the Holy Family looked amazingly Anglo-Saxon. The moldering relics stared unseeing into the gloom, their limbs and faces chipped and cracked. An old altar and baptismal font gave testimony to the rise and fall in popularity of cheap blond wood veneer. A jerry-rigged rack hung down from an exposed water pipe and displayed the fashion in clerical vestments through the years, the damp rotting the garments on their hangers. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined three walls of the room. The shelves and all available flat surfaces were stacked with boxes of old church records and curling photographs. Decaying books gave off a musty sweet aroma.

  Albert Fletcher looked oddly at home among the forgotten castoffs of the faithful of generations past. “I've been making an inventory,” he explained, “and moving the old books and records out to properly preserve them.”

  Mitch arched a brow. “That on top of your duties as deacon and teacher? I know you were Josh Kirkwood's instructor for religion class, as well as being in charge of the altar boys. You're very generous with your time.”

  “My life belongs to the church.” Fletcher folded his hands in front of him again, as if he wanted to be ready at any moment to fall to his knees in prayer. “Everything else is secondary.”

  “That's admirable, I'm sure,” Mitch murmured. “I was wondering, Mr. Fletcher, if, as his instructor, you might have noticed any changes in Josh's behavior over the last few weeks?”

  Fletcher blinked, the glow went dark, like a light switching off inside him. “No,” he said, his thin mouth pinching closed into a tight hyphen.

  “Had he been unusually quiet or had he mentioned any problem, anyone who might have been bothering him?”

  “The children come to me for instruction, Chief Holt. They go to Father McCoy for confession.”

  Mitch nodded. Pretending interest, he touched a tarnished chalice, brushed a finger over an old brass collection plate. “Well, do you have any personal observations about Josh? Do you think he's a nice kid, a troublemaker, what?”

  “He is generally well behaved,” Fletcher said grudgingly. “Although children these days seem to have no grasp of respect or discipline.”

  “He's Dr. Garrison's son, you know.” Mitch fingered the dusty brass plate on the old baptismal font that read GIVEN IN MEMORY OF NORMAN PATTERSON 1962. “You know Dr. Garrison, don't you?”

  “I'm aware of who she is.”

  “Wasn't she your wife's doctor?” Mitch asked, watching Fletcher's reaction through his lashes.

  The eyes narrowed slightly. “Doris saw her on occasion.”

  “I was of the understanding Dr. Garrison actually drove your wife to the Mayo Clinic once to see that she had tests run. Above and beyond the call of duty, don't you think?”

  Fletcher offered no reply. Mitch could feel anger vibrating out from the rigid body.

  “Dr. Garrison is a remarkable woman,” he continued. “She's dedicated her life to saving lives and helping people. It's a tragedy that someone so good has to go through something like this.”

  The mouth tightened into a sour knot. “It's not our place to question God.”

  “We're looking for a madman, Mr. Fletcher. I'd hate to think he's doing God's work.”

  Albert Fletcher made no comment. He didn't even bother to feign sympathy or offer the platitudes people unaffected by a tragedy mouth out of a sense of decency. He stood rigid before a statue of Mary, the Holy Mother reaching a hand out over his head as if she couldn't decide whether to give him her blessing or a karate chop. Mitch would have rooted for the latter. For a man so devout, Albert Fletcher seemed awfully short on the more popular Christian virtues. Father Tom had said he lacked compassion. Mitch wondered if he lacked a soul as well.

  “Terrible what happened with Olie Swain, isn't it?” Mitch said. “He might have been able to end this whole nightmare for us if he hadn't killed himself. Did you know Olie?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I guess we have to hope he finds some peace in the next world, huh?”

  “Suicide is a mortal sin,” Fletcher informed him piously, the knuckles of his clasped hands bone-white from the tension of his grip. “He damned his own soul to hell.”

  “Let's hope he deserved it, then,” Mitch said tightly. “Thank you for the tour. It's been . . . enlightening.”

  He made his way out of the storage room and back to the stairs. Fletcher followed like the shadow of doom. Mitch turned back toward him, one hand on the stair railing.

  “One last thing,” he said. “We had a report of a prowler in your neighborhood last night. I was wondering if you had seen anything suspicious.”

  “No,” Fletcher said flatly. “I was out until after ten, and when I got home, I went straight to bed.”

  “After ten, huh?” Mitch forced a conspiratorial smile. “Kind of late for such a cold night. Seeing someone special?”

  “The Holy Mother,” Fletcher said, deadpan. “I was praying.”

  As he walked back to his truck, Mitch wondered why Fletcher's admission left him feeling queasy instead of comforted.

  11:00 A.M. -20° WINDCHILL FACTOR: -46°

  ignorance is not innocence but SIN

  i had a little sor
row, born of a little SIN

  my emanation far within

  weeps incessantly for my SIN

  The messages burned in the back of Megan's mind as she walked up and down the time line Mitch had taped to the long wall of the war room. At the end of the room the messages from the original notes had been copied in red ink against the white board. Urgent red. Bloodred.

  She stared at the time line, looking for a key, looking for something they had missed the first few hundred times they had looked at it. Looking for anything that should have given them a name. It was there somewhere. She wanted to believe they were close, they weren't just seeing something they needed to see, something just around the corner, teasing them, taunting them, waiting for them to pick up the one key piece of information that would unlock all the doors and lead them to Josh.

  Ignorance and sin. The words suggested feelings of superiority and piety. Albert Fletcher had a grudge against Hannah. A grudge three years old. Revenge is a dish best served cold. That was not among the quotes on the message board, but it could have applied.

  There was Paul Kirkwood with his violent temper and his secrets. He hadn't told them about the van. What else might he be hiding? He played the martyr for the television cameras, then turned on his own wife in rage and contempt. Could he have turned on his own son? Why? What could possibly have driven him to do such a thing? To have taken Josh and then put on the elaborate show of the grieving father would take a soul as black and cold as obsidian. But Megan knew it happened. She had read files of other cases, cases with details that had made her physically ill, where parents had harmed their own offspring in the most hideous ways, then covered their tracks with grief.

  Kirkwood would have to come in today to give them his fingerprints so they could check them against prints found in the van. Megan's stomach rolled at the thought of the stink he would make. If he chose to play the persecuted innocent for the press, the heat from the resulting furor would be enough to melt badges and fry careers—namely hers.

  Ignorance and sin. The words throbbing in her mind, she walked slowly backward along the time line, from that day's date back, reading the notations, the most significant details in red, the peripheral events in blue. The discovery of the jacket. Olie's suicide. Olie's arrest and interrogation. The phone call to Hannah. The discovery of the duffel bag. The first report of Josh missing.

  She stood at the far end of the line. Day one. Ground zero.

  5:30—Josh leaves GKM Arena after hockey practice.

  5:45—Hospital calls GKM to notify Hannah will be late.

  5:45—Beth Hiatt picks up Brian Hiatt at GKM. Brian last to see Josh.

  6:00–7:00—During this time period Helen Black sees boy getting into light-colored van in front of GKM Arena.

  7:00—Josh no-show at St. E's religion class taught by A. Fletcher.

  7:00—Hannah calls Paul at work. NA. Leaves message.

  7:45—Hannah reports Josh missing.

  8:30—Olie Swain questioned at GKM. Did not take call from hospital regarding Hannah being late.

  8:45—Josh's duffel bag found on grounds of GKM with note: a child vanishes, ignorance is not innocence but SIN.

  They had reduced the crime down to a timetable. What they didn't have was the itinerary of the criminal. What time, what day was it when he first decided to take Josh Kirkwood? What did he do that day? Whom did he see, talk to? Who could have stopped him? If the guy ahead of him at the convenience store had decided to buy fifty lottery tickets and held up the line for another ten minutes, would Josh still be with them today?

  Timing is everything.

  And ignorance is not innocence but sin.

  Tension gripped Megan by the temples like a pair of ice tongs. Tighter and tighter.

  “I'll see it,” she muttered. “I'll see it and I'll nail your ass.”

  A sharp rap on the door preceded Natalie's appearance. She stepped into the room with a sheaf of files and papers in her left arm and a steaming coffee mug in her right hand. Behind her big red-framed glasses, her dark eyes were bleary and bloodshot, reminding Megan she wasn't the only one losing sleep over this case.

  “Girl, you need coffee,” Natalie announced, plunking the mug down on the table.

  Megan lifted it and breathed in the aroma as if it were smelling salts. “I'd take it intravenously if I could. Thanks, Nat.”

  Natalie waved off the gratitude with a cranky snort, a trio of colorful wooden bead bracelets clacking together on her arm. A matching necklace that looked like Tinkertoys on a rope rode the slope of her bosom. She looked like a fashion ad for larger women in a rich mocha tunic over a matching calf-length broomstick skirt. Megan felt like the Before photo. She had dozed off at dawn, overslept, and jumped into the first clothes that had come to hand as she stumbled out of bed—a pair of gold corduroy pants with diagonal wrinkles from having been thrown haphazardly over the back of a chair and a hunter green sweater Gannon had used for a bed. She picked off a cat hair and flicked it away.

  “The way my phone's been ringing off the hook, I figure you need all the friends you can get,” Natalie said, sitting in one of the chrome-and-plastic chairs. “The tabloid shows have offered me big bucks if I could give them evidence you and the chief been doing the wild thing in his office.”

  Megan closed her eyes and groaned, sinking down onto the next chair.

  “I told them they could take their dirty money and give it to the volunteer center. It's none of my business what goes on with folks behind their own closed doors and it's none of theirs, either.”

  “Amen.”

  “Personally, I'd like to see Mitch find someone who could make him happy. God knows, we've all been trying to find that someone for him ever since he moved here. Poor man's had more blind dates than Stevie Wonder.”

  She gave another snort as Megan managed a weary chuckle.

  “I appreciate the support,” Megan said, “but I don't think I'm that someone. We're at each other's throats half the time.”

  “And the other half you're at something else altogether. Sounds like love to me,” she said as matter-of-factly as if she'd been diagnosing a common cold.

  Megan didn't want to think the situation was so transparent. It wasn't that simple. It was never as simple as loving someone. They had to love you back.

  “Well,” she said, “the way things are going with the case, I won't be here long enough to unpack my bags.”

  Natalie shook her head. “I pray to God and then I swear at Him and then I pray some more. I want a miracle and I want it now,” she said, thumping her fist on the table.

  “I'd settle for a clue,” Megan admitted. “Is Mitch in yet?”

  “No, but Professor Priest is here looking for you. Should I send him this way?”

  Megan glanced around the war room with the time line and the messages written out and the chalkboard for brainstorming with names and motives and question marks. It wasn't the place to bring a citizen, but the urge was strong. Maybe what they needed was someone with a computer brain like Christopher Priest's to walk in cold and analyze the whole mess. Someone to walk in cold . . . like a new agent.

  “No,” she said, shrugging off the thought and pushing herself to her feet. “I'll see him in my office. Thanks, Natalie.”

  “Anything for the cause. And don't you scratch Mitch off your dance card yet, girl. He's a good man . . . and you're okay,” she said, the twinkle in her eyes betraying her grudging admission. “You'll do.”

  The professor listened, wide-eyed and attentive, as Megan laid out the situation with Olie's computer booby traps. He had shrugged off his black down jacket to reveal a blue Shetland wool sweater he must have inadvertently tossed in the dryer. The sleeves hit two-thirds of the way down his forearms, showing too much of the white oxford shirt beneath it.

  Megan felt a certain amount of frustration at the thought that the case might not be solved by sweat and grunt police work, but by a pencil-necked computer nerd. But solved was solved,
and Megan would take Josh back any way she could get him. If she had to resort to psychics and séances, she would pay for the crystal balls out of her own pocket.

  “I understand Olie was auditing computer courses at Harris,” she said. “We're hoping you might be able to get past these traps he'd set up. If we can find out what information he kept on those computers, we might find a clue as to his involvement in Josh's kidnapping.”

  “I'll be glad to help in any way I can, Agent O'Malley,” the professor said, his eyebrows lifting into a little tent of concern. “I have to say, I have a hard time believing Olie was involved. He certainly never gave me any indication . . . I mean, he worked hard in class, never bothered anyone . . . I never would have imagined . . .”

  “Yeah, well, John Wayne Gacy dressed up as a clown and visited sick kids in hospitals.”

  “‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?' ” the professor quoted, murmuring the words almost to himself.

  “If we knew by looking, the prisons would be overflowing and the streets would be safe,” Megan said. “Do you have any idea what Olie was doing with all those machines?”

  “He liked to tinker with them. Upgrade the boards, augment the memories, then write his own programs to perform various functions. He had an old Tandy model when he first approached me about auditing classes. It wasn't good for much besides word processing. I told him where he might be able to get a better machine for little or nothing. I guess he turned that into his hobby.”

  “If we're lucky, his hobby might lead us to Josh. We might even find out if he had an accomplice, but we have to get into the computers first.”

  “As I said, I'll help any way I can, Agent O'Malley,” Priest reiterated, rising from his chair, tugging on the bottom of his too-small sweater that had crept up to his waistband. “I can't make any promises, but I'll do the best I can.”