“That’s just his placeholder,” Morganstern said.
“Steven told us Philip wanted the school to rise out of the map like a 3-D architectural drawing, and then the map would dissolve,” Colin said. “I would’ve called you, but I wasn’t sure it meant anything.”
“It contradicts any notion that Philip wanted the map in order to sell it,” she said tartly, clicking off the video again. “I wish you’d mentioned it.”
“Er . . . Steven also said the map’s not worth very much.”
“Excuse me?”
“He seems to think it’s a much more recent reproduction. He’s kind of a savant about antiques.”
“And when were you going to disclose that little fact? Or did you prefer to keep the theory of a stranger robbing you, since it shines the light away from your school?”
He put as much contrition into his voice as he could. It wasn’t hard − Philip’s murder had stripped his confidence. “I planned to tell you today, Lieutenant. There’s been rather a lot going on. And I have no idea whether Steven’s assessment is even accurate.”
She shot him a look of reproach and restarted the video.
Adriana appeared, or at least Adriana’s face, merged on to scratchy old footage of Amelia Earhart waving from a biplane. “Lost?” Colin murmured. But even as he spoke, Adriana-Amelia’s hair lightened and grew, swept up on top of her head, and the leather aviator’s jacket dissolved into a low-cut ivory satin gown. “Who’s that?” he asked.
“Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons.”
“Oh.”
She jotted a phrase in her notebook, no doubt a reminder to grill him later about that single, knowing syllable. The video had already moved on − to Jimmy as Peter Pan. Colin couldn’t help but smile; the characterisation fit. Then Peter flitted up into the clouds and reappeared as Oscar Wilde.
‘Funny,’ Colin thought. ‘That’s who I would have chosen for Philip.’
“Is this accurate?” Morganstern asked.
“Jimmy’s more preppie than flamboyant. But if you’re asking whether he’s gay, probably so.”
“The love that dare not speak its name, then?” Morganstern spoke softly.
“He might be ashamed, that’s true. His family’s Irish-Catholic, conservative, wealthy.”
“And whom does he love?”
The chair’s tubular frame was pressing into the sore muscles beneath Colin’s shoulder blades, and he eased away from it. “No-one, as far as I know.”
She watched him for a minute, saying nothing. Then she turned back to the laptop. “Let’s go on.”
By the time the video reached Father Charron, Colin didn’t have enough energy left to wonder how Philip had learned about the exorcism. Francis was superimposed over Max von Sydow as Father Merrin in the movie version. What shook Colin more was Francis’s slow, inexorable transformation into Marlon Brando, crazed, holding court in the Cambodian jungle. Francis must have shown signs of imbalance before Philip’s murder. What had triggered it?
“I’ve got to get back,” Colin said, standing before she’d even turned off the laptop. He had too much to process, and he couldn’t do it in this airless room.
“Oh, no, you don’t. We have a deal. You need to explain these images.”
“Adriana was having an affair with Philip’s father,” he said, talking fast to get through it. “Before that, yeah, she was probably a little lost, emotionally. She’d been through a rough time.”
“The accident?”
“Yes,” he said, trying not to show his surprise. How had Morganstern learned about that? “Jimmy, we talked about. Father Charron − you’re familiar with the movie The Exorcist? He assisted the real one.” At that she did look startled. “The intensity of that experience . . . left a few scars. Not exactly Apocalypse Now, just a certain wariness. For him, Satan is, understandably, very real.”
“Tussling with the devil himself . . . I can see how that would recast everyday evils.” She reached over and closed her laptop. “Anything else I need to know Father? This would be the time to tell me.”
“No, but I do have a question. Where do you start, when you’re looking for a motive strong enough for murder? Sarah and I even ran through the seven deadly sins, but it wasn’t much help.”
Morganstern smiled. “I only look for three: pure hate, twisted thinking, or some kind of desperate wanting − usually either sex or money. I’ve never had a homicide that didn’t spring from at least one of those motives.”
The flash of recognition left Colin dizzy. He hadn’t expected their worlds to overlap this neatly. “Desire, hatred, delusion,” he recited. “That’s the order we learned them in seminary. They were the three ‘selfish’ emotions.”
“Makes sense,” she said. “Nothing’s more selfish than murder.” She undid her cardigan and tugged the ends even. “The problem with this case,” she said, as she rebuttoned, “is that we have too many motives. And yours, Father, is the strongest of all.” She looked up. “Philip’s video could have hurt the school, and Matteo Academy is your baby.”
Colin stared, trying to register what she was saying. Surely she didn’t suspect him? “Philip didn’t want to hurt the school, I’m sure of that,” he said quickly. “He would have made us all sit through that video, hoping it would jolt us out of our ruts and spill our secrets. But he wasn’t destructive.”
“That might depend on how you define it. Being open about your own secrets is endearing, but being open about other people’s secrets?”
He looked her straight in the eye. “I didn’t kill my student, Lieutenant.”
She stared back, her gaze level. “I haven’t charged you, Father.” She paused. “Not yet.”
*
Rattled, Colin took a long detour on the way back to Aberdeen, curving up north along the river to The Institute of Jesuit Sources. A publishing and retreat house, it sat on the sprawling grounds of the old St. Stanislaus seminary, tucked between an apple orchard and a grove of walnut trees. The institute’s director, Father John Padberg, was one of the most courtly, urbane men Colin had ever met. He’d spent years in Paris and Rome studying the church’s intellectual history, and he knew enough about its politics to outmanoeuvre a pope. If he’d craved power, he would have been a deadly strategist. Instead he had a scholar’s gentle temperament, so he watched, often amused, from the sidelines.
When Colin asked for five minutes, Padberg led him into a sunroom, its windows lined with the previous summer’s hibiscus and begonias, and motioned him to a cushy glider-rocker.
Colin sat forward, feet planted, not letting the glider move. “I need to know what you’re hearing about Matteo Academy. Before all hell broke loose, I mean.”
“That you are doing a superb job.”
Colin waited.
“That precisely because your school is so promising, the archdiocese had no real intention of subsidising poor kids to go there.” Padberg laced his fingers. “This is a chance to forge new loyalties with wealthy parents, and they don’t want to risk introducing crime and violence.”
Colin gave a hollow laugh. “And what are they saying now?”
“A great silence has come over the land.”
“Will they try to shut me down?”
“No, I don’t think so. They’ve closed or merged quite a few diocesan schools. They need the prestige your academy can bring, and Ehrlich’s smart enough to ride this out. But you might have to rethink your ratio.”
“That ratio’s the whole point,” Colin said, slamming his hand on the glider’s wooden arm. “Anybody can admit a few kids, make a show of symbolic generosity. I want a balance, so nobody’s a minority. Without that, we’ll be just one more fancy private school graduating kids who still have no clue about the world.”
Padberg nodded. “I’ve read all the same books you’ve read, Colin. Still, you may have to let your plans ride for the time being. Lord knows, you’ve got enough going on already. Why do
n’t you fill me in?”
Colin hadn’t put it together in a single narrative before, and it sounded lurid and improbable − a young sociopath, a missing map and a ritual murder? But Padberg looked thoughtful. “Quite a few collectors would kill, if you’ll pardon the expression, for any version of Ricci’s Impossible Black Tulip. Its fame reaches well beyond Jesuit circles. And then you have the collectors of Jesuit artefacts. An original manuscript by Petrus Canisius hammered at $2 million at Christie’s a few years ago. A gentleman in England paid even more for Teilhard de Chardin’s grad school geology notes.”
“Would St. Louis antique dealers know the map’s value?”
“Hard to say. Selkirk’s would. But a smaller dealer who knows his stuff would take it to an international auction house, because their prices are triple what a Midwestern audience will bid.” Removing his frameless glasses, he polished them methodically with a felt cloth. “It pains me to think of that map bouncing from hand to hand. If it lands with someone who doesn’t know its value, they’re liable to laminate it for a kid’s room.”
“I should have kept it in the safe,” Colin said, his voice almost inaudible.
“What’s done is done.” Padberg leaned back. “How’s Charron doing with all this?”
“How well do you know him?”
“We were both at Bellarmine College in Rome when he had his nervous breakdown.”
“So you can imagine. He’s decided Graham is possessed.”
“Good Lord, you do have your hands full.” Padberg shook his head. “It’s a shame. I’ve known maybe five men in my life as bright as Francis Charron. He had the sharpest wit of any of us; nothing was ever lost on him.”
“How much time went by after the exorcism, before he broke down?”
“At least a decade. But I suspect it was building in him. I don’t know whether it was power of suggestion or some kind of group psychosis, but Francis was terribly convinced by whatever happened in that room. They all were.”
Padberg’s voice was grave. For a minute, the two men just looked at each other. “Was he changed after the breakdown?” Colin finally asked.
“It didn’t blunt his intelligence; his scholarly articles were just as fine. But it stole his resilience. He’s comfortable in the classroom, nowhere else. He’s been sensitised to evil − to cruelty, sin, the presence of anything dark − and he has no practical way of fighting it.”
Colin understood that sense of helplessness. It was why he’d wanted a school. “It’s just hard to see how somebody as rational as Francis can be so irrational,” he said.
Padberg’s smile was wry. “I’ve often had the same complaint about the world itself.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Steven’s room looked like the attic of a French chateau, crammed with broken stone cherubs, lion-pawed chairs, and moody oil portraits of long-nosed men in lace collars. Glad he hadn’t turned her away, Sarah perched on the edge of his bed with her laptop. He’d hate a stranger sitting on his bed, but not nearly as much as he’d hate her breaking an antique chair.
Kneeling on the floor, Steven stroked Simon’s paws while he waited, as promised, in case she had technical difficulties. Sarah knew she shouldn’t be confiding in him, but Colin was right − she couldn’t imagine him capable of killing. He was at once too sensitive and too detached.
Besides, she needed the help. So far, he’d busted every username and password − Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and now email. “He used whatever he was listening to at the time,” Steven had explained. “So I just kept trying song titles from his last playlist.”
“How’d you know his playlist?”
“He sent me the new one every month. He called it Project Cool. He said I should listen so I knew what was going on. Anyway, Instagram’s directioner. Twitter’s getlucky. You know, Daft Punk.”
“Mmm.”
“And his email’s Lorde.”
She looked up from the screen. “Like Jesus?”
Steven’s laugh was more of a bray, unpractised and, once he started, almost uncontrollable. She raised her hands in a what-do-I-know shrug and waited it out.
“L-O-R-D-E,” he spelled out. “I already entered it. Just click on his in-box.”
She clicked. “It comes up empty. Maybe he’s got another layer of password protection.”
Steven took the laptop from her, clicked a few times, then looked up, blinking rapidly. “Somebody’s purged it. Every email’s been deleted − from Trash, from Sent Mail, from Junk . . .”
With a groan, Sarah flopped back on the bed. “Did Philip delete them, or somebody else?” She sat up again. “There’s no way to get them back? The police have his school laptop, so we’d have to do it from the cloud . . .”
She was still talking when Steven got up and left the room. “Where are you going?” she called, not really expecting an answer. Scrambling to her feet, she followed.
Outside Philip’s door, Steven hesitated for a second, then pushed it open. Thank God the police took down the crime-scene tape, Sarah thought. He went over to the dresser and started opening the lower drawers.
“Wait,” she stage-whispered from the hall. “We shouldn’t be messing around with his stuff. At least, not any more than we already are.”
He ignored her and kept rifling. The tingly funk of body odour wafted from the mussed T-shirts still in the drawer. These boys needed laundry lessons.
Steven pulled out a plastic three-pack of undershirts. Pulling up the plastic flap, he reached between the undershirts and slid out an iPad. “He used this as backup.”
“You mean the emails could still be there?” she squeaked, forgetting to keep her voice down.
“That depends on how he had things configured. From what I can tell, his messages were being downloaded using POP, not IMAP. So deleting the messages on the server would have no effect on messages already downloaded somewhere else.”
“Yesssssss!” When she pumped her fist in the air Steven stepped back, alarmed by her exuberance. “Come on,” she urged. “Bring the iPad, and let’s get out of here.”
Back in his room, he plugged the iPad in and opened the email. “Everything he sent that Gmail considered ‘important’ is still here. It got archived.”
“I wonder if Google prioritises drug deals,” she said dryly.
“If it was somebody he emailed often, it would.”
Sarah smiled to herself. That exquisite brain could scan centuries of art and slice through layers of technology, but it couldn’t bend to sarcasm.
Taking the iPad from him, she glanced at the in-box, and a subject line caught her eye.
“Debut piano solo by Colin McAvoy.”
*
Graham stretched out full length on his bed, kicking his physics book to the ground. It was exactly one year ago that she’d gotten sick. Every afternoon after school he’d go to the hospital to give his dad a dinner break, but he could never remember the room number. His brain just wouldn’t let it stick. So he’d walk down the long white corridor, peering through each door like some kind of perv. That last day, he saw a woman who’d kicked off the sheets and rolled over, rolls of back fat and a sad, saggy backside exposed by the gown. Even comatose, his mom would never allow that.
Inside the next doorway, he saw his dad standing at the end of the bed, talking low on his cell phone. The flash of relief lasted until his dad shifted and Graham saw his mother’s pale face, tubes still looping from her nose. Somehow he kept thinking he’d show up and she’d be real again, sitting up with pink cheeks and her hair all frazzled, asking if he’d done his homework.
Stepping closer to the bed, he reached for her hand, then remembered they’d bound her wrists to the bed to stop her from ripping out the crinkled blue oxygen tube that was stuck to a hole in her throat. As lightly as he could, careful to keep his balance while he bent forward, he kissed her forehead. Her face looked smooth, like an artist had finally gotten the sketch right and gone
back to erase all the extra pencil lines. He stroked her hair, lifting a piece that was trapped beneath her head. “Gotta get you well for your crazy people,” he murmured.
The numbers on the monitor were okay, not great. He’d taught himself to read them. Oxygenation was good − how could it not be, when a machine was doing it? Her heart rhythm seemed a little jittery. Yesterday’s nurse had warned that the white cell count was high − maybe the Legionnaire’s, maybe some new infection on top of it − and that might begin to weaken her.
His father laughed. He was still on the phone. Graham gestured that he should leave the room, but Bryan just waved it off.
Graham rolled over and pulled his knees up, remembering what came next.
*
His head still full of video images, Colin tackled Monday’s stack of mail, slit by Connie, checks already attached to the utility and phone bills he refused to pay online. A large envelope, addressed in a big, rounded hand that sloped downward, held an application form and an impassioned letter. A mother, saying her son was really smart but had gotten caught up in the Ferguson protests. Now his grades were slipping, and he was out late every night and she didn’t know the kids who kept calling his cell. Her night job was cleaning offices, and her boss was Catholic and had mentioned a new school. She couldn’t pay much in tuition, but was there any chance Matteo Academy would accept him before it was too late?
“Yes,” Colin called, as he walked out to Connie’s desk holding the envelope. “Yes, we will accept him. Whether the archdiocese supports us or not.”
She grinned. ‘Thought you’d say that!’ she wrote. ‘I’ll write her.’ New line. ‘Mr. Grant’s secretary called. He’s coming after work to pick up Philip’s things.’
Great. And between now and then, Colin had to call Mrs. Portel. Well, he might as well face everything at once. “What’s the count today, Connie?”
She winced. ‘Three more parents pulling kids end of semester.’
“Right.” Closing his office door so he could concentrate, he cleared his throat and picked up the phone.
A Circumstance of Blood Page 22