by Paul Cleave
“Actually no. You haven’t seen the best I can do, but you will. Come on, Phil,” she says, turning to her cameraman, “let’s go.”
“Wait,” I say.
She turns back toward me. She gives me such a dark look I’m sure she’s trying to cut me open with it. “What for?” she asks.
“Your source. Who is it?”
“Are you that stupid? You think I’m going to tell you?”
“Just tell me this,” I say. “Is it a cop?”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“Is it a cop?” I ask, and this time I yell it at her.
She takes a step back, and the cameraman swings his camera back up and starts to film me again.
“I suggest you back down, Tate.”
“And I suggest you think about what you’ve got yourself into,” I say. “This source of yours, if it’s not a cop, then who can it be, huh? Who else can possibly have fed you all that bullshit about the murder weapon, huh? There’s only one possibility. You’re being played, Horwell, and you’re too stupid to know it, and when you figure it out you’ll be too arrogant to admit it. But you’re responsible for anything that happens now, you get that? If you keep that name to yourself and it turns out to be the guy who killed those girls, and he kills again, then that’s on you. You get that? You keep your mouth shut and don’t go to the police, you’re as good as helping him.”
“Fuck you,” she says. “You don’t know a damn thing. You’re some washed-up private detective who thinks he can do what the hell he wants and get away with it, just because his daughter got herself killed. You think you’re the only person in the world to have lost somebody? You think her death is going to keep people feeling sympathetic toward you even after all of this? You’re the one who’s arrogant and stupid, Tate. Your career is over and I’m going to make sure of it. You’re a piece of shit murderer who isn’t going to keep getting away with it. And you’re going to see me every single day of your trial and I’m going to expose you to the world as the man you really are.”
I feel like jumping on her and slapping her until she gives up the name of her source, but that’s not going to happen, especially with the cameraman standing here probably hoping I do. I just have to trust that the tapes and the statements will tell me what she won’t.
I move past her and get inside and shut the door on the world. I stand in the hallway, my heart rate up, feeling angry at her and also angry at myself for letting her get to me. I go into my office and sit down, but I can’t focus on anything. I leave the tapes and the bank statements on my desk and I head out to the lounge. I switch on the CD player and turn the music up and walk around my kitchen, opening up cupboards looking for something to eat, wanting to do something to calm myself down, to find a distraction. I open the fridge, and there it is, the final glass waiting for me, full of liquid that can, for a brief moment, make me feel better.
I close the fridge door. Instead I make myself some coffee. I need something to calm me down, and I decide coffee isn’t it, and I let it sit on my counter and watch it go cold. The anger starts to fade. I do what I can to push Casey Horwell from my thoughts, and when she is far enough in the background I go back to the office and sit down with the bank statements.
I reckon the original statements would have changed color and style as the bank updated its logo and even its name from time to time, but the printouts all look identical. I start adding up the amounts, comparing them against the logs Father Julian kept. Over the years he has taken in almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in deposits. He has made the exact same amount in withdrawals. The deposits are from the people on the tapes who didn’t know their Bless me, Father, for I have sinneds weren’t the first steps up to salvation, but steps down into Father Julian’s world. The logs go back twenty-four years. So do the bank statements.
The logs and statements and tapes all add up to blackmail. There really isn’t any other way to see it. Over the course of twenty-four years Father Julian blackmailed more than a hundred people. The amounts are different, and this probably reflects two things—the amount the victim was earning, and the amount the victim had to lose if his or her secret was found out. Maybe those being blackmailed never knew who had their secret. Could be they suspected, but people with secrets might be paranoid enough to believe someone more than just their priest knows. For almost a quarter of a century Father Julian played with fire. He must have known it would eventually burn him. Or perhaps it burned him the entire time. He was taking the money and using it to put out smaller fires.
In the end the fire got him. He recorded somebody who wasn’t willing to pay, and that somebody knew I was following the priest and would be an easy target to frame. It wouldn’t have been hard. Just flick on the TV and there I was, covered in blood one night and accused of murdering the caretaker, and two months later accused of stalking the priest.
But that’s only a theory. And if that’s the way it went down, then Father Julian’s death wasn’t related to the girls dying. Still, it would be a hell of a coincidence, although one that is entirely possible. Does that coincidence allow for the fact Henry Martins was the manager of the bank where Father Julian kept his tapes?
Julian must have selected his victims carefully, blackmailing only those he knew were non-threatening, those who for a price could have it all go away. He never tried to blackmail me, but I’m sure he recorded the session. Maybe he was scared of what I would do to him if he tried. I’d already confessed to one murder. He knew I was capable of another.
The anger kicks in and suddenly I wish Father Julian was still alive just so I could do something to him—I don’t know what exactly, surely not the kind of Quentin James something, and I try not to let my mind drift there. I’d hurt him. Hurt him a lot. The bastard refused to tell me about the confessions he had heard from the man who killed those girls—and, what’s worse, he must have known who those girls were. He found within himself the ability to blackmail people, to break the confessional vow he had with God in order to make money, but he couldn’t bring himself to save those girls. How could a man with such mixed-up priorities live with himself?
Maybe blackmailing was still a step away from actually revealing the sins he’d heard in secret. Could be he never shared any of the confessions, and never planned to. Does that mean he wasn’t breaking the confessional seal? I figure it’s a technical question that could only be answered by a man caught up in the dilemma it poses.
I wonder if he knew the fire was coming for him. Part of me thinks he did, part of me is sure he accepted it.
I go through the logs and bank statements, looking at the payments Father Julian was making. He doesn’t pay anybody for longer than sixteen years, but he pays some of them for less. Some considerably less. Most of the names are here, but not all of the people in the photographs are, and the number of names suggests there are more children out there than Father Julian had photos for. And there could be more children out there who aren’t on these lists—children Father Julian fathered and was unable to take responsibility for. I wonder which names line up with the Simon and Jeremy I found on the backs of the photographs, and suspect I’m only a few phone calls from finding out.
These are Father Julian’s child payments for the children he had in secret. The question is how many people could have known? I don’t know, but I’m pretty certain Henry Martins did.
CHAPTER FIFTY
The logs are chronological and well detailed, and there are far more confessors here than there are victims of Father Julian’s blackmailing. Before going any further, I head back two years into the dates and I find my name. Seeing it there brings everything into focus, as though any doubts I’ve had, or wanted to have, are peeled away, exposing the reality and grounding me to it. I find the correct tape. I put it into the machine, not sure that I’m prepared to hear myself from so long ago, not prepared to hear the man I used to be. I cue it up to the time stamp Julian listed. I’m not sure, either, where I stand
on my belief of God, or where I stood on the matter two years ago. Part of me didn’t believe in God, another part hated Him, and a third made me sit inside that confessional booth with the need to tell somebody what I’d done. Since then I have learned to live with my own secrets.
I catch the last few seconds of somebody else’s confession, there are a few moments of silence, and then my voice. It sounds different. It sounds emotional, which comes as a surprise. At the time I thought I was completely detached.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
I close my eyes, and for a moment I’m back there, back in the confessional, dirt beneath my fingernails and a shovel in the trunk of my car. The gun I used was stripped down and buried out in the forest too. Father Julian’s voice plays from the tape and at the same time I remember his words, voicing them in my mind a moment before I hear them. He sounds calm. We could have been talking about anything, and at the time I remember being curious about what might have been the worst confession he’d ever heard. Was mine going to be it? Or would mine be tame? And if Father Julian was listening to the confessions of cold-blooded killers, why in the hell wasn’t he doing something about it?
“What does it make you, Father, when you commit a sin and feel nothing?”
“I think that—”
“Does it make me human? Am I still a man, Father Julian, or am I a monster?”
“The fact you are here answers your question,” he said. “However, what you do next also counts.”
“I’m not going to the police.”
“You need—”
“He killed her, Father,” I say. “He killed her and he probably would have killed others.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“But it doesn’t make it wrong either.”
I press stop and the voices shut off. If I could go back in time, would I do the same thing again? I don’t know. I think of Patricia Tyler and her request of a promise—Make him pay, she told me. Make it so he can never hurt another girl ever again.
I eject the tape and start unspooling the thread, not needing—or more accurately not wanting—to hear the rest of what I had to say. I can learn nothing from it. All it can do is make me hurt.
I carry the tape outside and touch a match to it. It shrinks and melts and the recorded memory burns away. Father Julian never blackmailed me and I figure he never blackmailed anybody else who was confessing to murder. It would have been too dangerous for him. I think of him coming around to my house. I think of him sitting on the porch with me as we spoke about my wife. He knew of the anger building up inside of me. After my confession he never came around again.
I sit back down inside. I start drumming my fingers, and then I go back into the list of names. I scroll through them, looking for something else, and soon I find Sidney Alderman’s name. I check the date. It’s a week after his wife died. I hunt out the tape and cue it up, interested in what he has to say, hoping he is going to say something that will help me.
“I guess you would call it a sin,” Alderman says. His words are slurred. He’s been drinking. “Does that make us even?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“Drinking? Yeah, and why the hell not? She’s gone. I need something to keep me company.”
“You still have your son.”
“My son? You mean your son, don’t you?”
There is a pause that stretches out long enough for me to think the rest of the tape is going to be blank, but then Father Julian’s voice cuts back across the speaker and the conversation continues.
“She told you,” Julian says.
“Part of me always knew. Or at least suspected.”
“I’m sorry, Sidney.”
“That’s it? You don’t want to give me an excuse? You don’t want to tell me you accidentally fucked my wife and got her pregnant?”
“Please, Sidney, I didn’t mean anything to happen.”
I press stop. Just what kind of man was Father Julian? How many marriages did he end? This man, this man who would come and see me, who would tell me everything was going to be okay, who would tell me everything was part of God’s plan. What kind of man was he? I press play. Both men are dead, one because of me, and perhaps the other because of me too. The two ghosts of Recent Past carry on talking. Neither could know they would end up sharing more than just Lucy Alderman, that they would share a similar fate.
“Yeah, well I didn’t mean anything to happen either,” Sidney Alderman says.
“What are you talking about?”
“Bruce . . . He’s, well, he’s different now. I see him differently. He’s not my son and I don’t know what to do about it. One thing I do know is, I don’t want you anywhere near him.”
“Are you going to leave?”
“Leave? No. I’m not going to leave. See the thing, Father,” he says, almost spitting out the word Father, “is this. She’s dead because of you. And I want you to know that. I’m going to be here every day for the rest of my life and you’re going to see me around, and you’re going to remember.”
“What do you mean she’s dead because of me?”
“Come on, Father. You can figure it out. You read the papers, right? That guy who killed her, he said she stepped out from nowhere. Well that ain’t quite true. She was pushed out from nowhere.”
Silence for a few seconds. Not just from the tape, but from my house. I can’t hear anything. I realize I’m holding my breath.
“You pushed her?” Father Julian asks.
“I hated her. She lied to me. She cheated on me. She kept the same fucking lie all those years. Were you still screwing her, Father?”
“You killed her?”
“You can’t do anything about it except see my face every day. I want that guilt to kill you. It’s killing me. Does that make us even?”
“I . . . I don’t . . .”
“I thought it would make me happy,” Alderman says, “but the funny thing is, it doesn’t. In fact I feel worse. I love her so much. I blame you, and I want to kill you, but I don’t have the courage.”
“Sidney, you need to—”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do! You know, I even bought a gun. I was going to use it on her and then on you. But I can’t. What happened to Lucy, well, that will hurt you more than what I could ever do.”
“What about Bruce?”
“Don’t you dare tell him any of this. Any of it.”
I press the stop button. The caretaker’s grief is ten years old, but it still sounds fresh. Two months ago he told me he always thought about what I’d done after my daughter was killed and wished he’d had the courage to do the same thing to the person who killed his wife.
I think about what he did and I wonder if it justifies what I did to him. I wonder if there is some symmetry there—him lying on top of the coffin of the woman he loved, the woman who betrayed him, the woman he killed.
I decide that it does. At the very least it makes me feel better. It makes me look up from the bottom of the abyss. There is a way out of this.
I eject the tape, put it back into the plastic cover and set it aside. I go through the rest of the log, looking for names that will stick out, knowing there has to be something here though I can’t think what. That’s part of the problem: all I’ve been doing is thinking, and suddenly I’m hitting a wall. There’s an answer somewhere in this list of names, it’s in these tapes, but I’m so involved in it all that I can’t see anything for what it is.
What am I missing?
I get up and walk out of the room. I leave it all behind me—the names, the numbers, the tapes, and the dates, knowing that I need to clear my head so I can at least . . .
The dates!
Of course!
I head back into the room and I look at the time line I’ve created. If the killer confessed, then presumably he did so on the same day or in the days immediately following the girls’ disappearances. The first date I look at is the day Henry Martins was buried. Th
e log says there was a confession that night. The log says the confession was made by Paul Peters. I find the corresponding tape and jam it into the machine. I wind it forward. Suddenly I feel more apprehensive about what I’m about to hear than I did of the other two confessions. This could be the recording of a man who did nothing more than steal his neighbor’s apples, or it could be the confession of a monster. I press play.
It’s the monster.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“I know who you are.” The voice sounds a little familiar, but I can’t place it.
“Do you have something to confess?”
“You killed her, you know.”
“What are you talking about?” Father Julian’s voice has a rushed quality, as if he has just entered the confessional after running from the rectory.
“As if you strangled her yourself. What you do in life has consequences, wouldn’t you say, Father?”
“Yes, of course, but what you’re talking about doesn’t make sense.”
“All our actions have consequences, don’t they, Father. For all of us.”
“We need to be aware and responsible for our actions, yes, that’s true.”
“Even you, Father?”
A pause, and I can imagine Father Julian looking confused right here. “Do you have something to say?”
“Are there others?”
“Others?” Father Julian asks. So now he’s looking confused and shaking his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Other children. Like me. Are there others like me.”
“We’re all children of God, no matter what our actions,” Julian says.
“I’m not talking about God.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m talking about you, Father Julian. I’m talking about your children. Are there more of us?”
“Oh my God,” Father Julian says, and now he’s no longer shaking his head. Instead he has a hand up to his mouth. All the confusion is slipping away. I imagine this moment was very real for him. As real a moment as any other.