Charisma

  “I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “What I’m getting at is, would it ruin your theory if it turned out that the man who was killing the ex-nuns was just picking them up off the street, seeing them and just knowing they used to be nuns.”

  Pat jerked his head around, away from the traffic, away from everything he ought to be looking at. He nearly ran into the back of a city bus.

  “How the hell could he do that?” he demanded. “How the hell could it be possible?”

  Susan Murphy sighed. “I’m not saying he did do it,” she said, “but trust me, with an ex-nun of a certain age, or an ex-nun from a certain kind of order, it would be easy.”

  2

  He took her to George and Harry’s. Partly he took her there because he knew it, it was close and convenient. Partly he took her there because it was the kind of place he’d always dreamed of going when he was young—a Yale place, for rich Protestants. What all that meant now, he didn’t know. What he did know was that George and Harry’s didn’t look so exotic, or so rich, now that he’d reached the exalted position of chief of Homicide.

  He let the waitress sit them down in a booth, ordered himself a Perrier, and ordered Susan something called a Rusty Nail. He didn’t know what was in it and he didn’t ask. He just waited until she got it and then he said, “All right. Tell me all about it. How could this man know a woman was an ex-nun just by seeing her on the street.”

  Susan had her cigarettes out again. “It would have to be more than just seeing her,” she said. “He’d have to follow her for a while. But you’ve got to understand, Pat, that traditional formation practice—”

  “Formation practice?”

  “The process of turning a twentieth-century teenager into a model of sixteenth-century sanctity.” She grinned. “It’s not that bad, really. It’s not that stupid, either. There are a lot of orders these days that have chucked traditional formation altogether, right along with traditional habits and the rule of silence. If a woman had entered one of those in the last ten or fifteen years and come out, he wouldn’t have been able to tell. There wouldn’t be any difference. But most of the women you’ve found have been older, haven’t they?”

  “Three out of the four.”

  “Then no matter what order they were in, they were all trained the same way. That’s the key. What about the young one? What order was she in?”

  “Franciscan,” Pat said.

  Susan threw her hands in the air. “There are probably five hundred orders of nuns in this country with ‘Franciscan’ in their names somewhere. What kind of Franciscan?”

  Pat hesitated, then reached behind him for his jacket and the notebook he kept in the inside breast pocket. It took a while to find what he was looking for. His notes on these two cases were all jumbled up and overexamined. He found the reference and dropped the notebook down on the table.

  “Franciscan Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus. Does that help?”

  “Very much so. Was she at least thirty years old?”

  “Thirty-three.” That was in the notebook, too, right under the name of the order.

  “Did she enter her order when she was younger than, say, twenty-two?”

  “She was,” he had to search for that one, “nineteen.”

  “Wonderful,” Susan said. “FSH has gone completely over to social gospel lunacy by now, but they were late starters. When your young one entered, they were still trying to train real nuns. Excuse me. It’s extremely bad form for those of us on the traditional side to admit that we don’t consider those of us on the modernist side real nuns.”

  “I won’t report you. You still haven’t told me how he could have known.”

  “Okay. Guess what I’m doing right now. With my feet. Under the table.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m keeping them flat on the floor. Absolutely flat. Have you ever seen a woman who isn’t a nun do that? Unless they’re too fat, they cross their legs. If they’re too fat, they sit with their knees jutting out. My knees are together. Do you know what I do when I’m waiting for the bus?”

  “No.”

  “I sit on the bench, if there is a bench, with my feet flat on the ground and my knees together. I keep my hands in my lap and I look down. I don’t read. I don’t look at the other people waiting with me. I don’t check out the traffic. It’s called custody of the eyes. Until a month or so ago, I’d spent seventeen years working very hard to practice it.”

  “But it was only a month ago,” Pat pointed out. “Except for Theresa Cavello, all these women had been out of their orders for—well, for years.”

  “I know. I don’t think it matters. I started looking around, you know, after I started going to Damien House, because every time I walked into that place someone I’d never seen before in my life would look me up and down and say, ‘nun.’ At first I thought it was just that people had heard about me—they knew I was Andy’s sister, they knew Andy’s sister was a nun. Later I realized it couldn’t have been that, because I ran into people who just knew on sight that I’d been a nun, who didn’t know who I was. So, like I said, I started watching.”

  “And?”

  “And,” Susan said, “as far as I can figure out, most of the traditional formation is impossible to get rid of. It gets to be too much of a habit—excuse the pun. It’s not just the way they—we—sit. Hands close to the sides, not swinging and not stuffed into pockets. Close to buildings or the edges of sidewalks. I can make myself look around at things while I’m walking, if I’ve got something interesting to look at and I decide I want to look at it. When I’m just walking, thinking about something else, I do the custody-of-the-eyes thing again. Then there’s the way I eat—”

  “Eat?”

  “When I first entered the convent, we had rules for eating every kind of food you could imagine. Actually, that’s a lot less stupid than it sounds. When you have to live in community with a bunch of women you don’t know, day after day, and you’ve got nothing in common with any of them except a vocation, little habits can get to be very irritating. So the traditional order used to—and I do mean used to, almost everybody has given this sort of thing up—anyway, we used to train everybody into the same habits. It reduced friction. I eat oranges with a fork—”

  “With a fork,” Pat repeated.

  Susan smiled again. “It’s worse than you think. I don’t just eat them with a fork, I very carefully dissect them into quarters with a knife first. Then I peel a quarter. Then I eat it with a fork. Then I peel another quarter. Then I—”

  “Good grief,” Pat said, “Do you eat potato chips with chop-sticks?”

  “No, but I’m totally incapable of not taking something that’s offered to me at dinner, and eating it, even if I hate it. I have an almost impossible time with small talk. I carry practically nothing in my purse. I have a very hard time shopping and when I do make myself shop I have to force myself to try things on. I feel so guilty when I look in a mirror, I put on makeup without the use of one. I—”

  “All right,” Pat said. “All right. What about these ex-nuns you’ve been looking at? How much of this stuff lasts?”

  “A lot. You can’t spend ten or fifteen or twenty years developing habits without having a hard time getting rid of them. The mirror thing especially. I don’t know what it is about the mirror thing, but we all have it. A phobia for glass.”

  “Fine,” Pat said. “Fine. But what does this mean? Is he picking his victims up off the street at random? Just running into a lot of ex-nuns?”

  “You’re the policeman,” Susan said. “Maybe I’m looking at it backward. Maybe he’s not picking on women he doesn’t know. Maybe he knows a lot of ex-nuns and he’s only killing the ones who do this kind of thing, the ones who were real nuns.”

  “What?” Pat said.

  “What’s that noise?” Susan said.

  The noise was Pat’s beeper. He grabbed his jacket and pulled it into his lap. He got the beeper out and
stared at it.

  He was going to have to answer his beeper, because it was blinking red.

  “Excuse me,” he said to her. “I’ve got to go find a phone,”

  Chapter Two

  1

  WHAT HE SHOULD HAVE done, Father John Kelly thought, was to have stayed safely home at the Jesuit rectory and read a book. After his evening with the bishop, what he was doing—standing on Dan Murphy’s doorstep in the dark, ringing the bell and getting more agitated by the minute—made no sense at all. Still, he was on Dan Murphy’s doorstep, and he was ringing the doorbell, and he had no urge to go home. At home there would always be the chance that the bishop would call and give him another sermon about briefing the visitors before they were shown into the Presence. Pat Mallory, it seemed, had not been well enough briefed—and neither had the bishop. He’d ended up having to listen to a lot of information he hadn’t known the first thing about. There was something in Father John Kelly that was very pleased with that, a kind of fierce exasperation very much like anger. The bishop sat there in the chancery, spiritual leader of a see that included one of the most violent and degraded cities in the United States—meaning Bridgeport, which was what Riley was supposed to be bishop of—and there was no damn reason on earth why he should have found child prostitution, police corruption, and the structural malevolence of the juvenile protection services a shock. It was Father John Kelly’s private but so far unexpressed opinion that the vast majority of the Catholic bishops in the United States lived in a time warp where FDR was still president, Al Smith was still a hero, and good Catholic laymen wanted nothing more exciting in their lives than a chance to meet the Pope.

  He pressed the buzzer again, waited, got nothing, and tried the door knocker again. He couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside the house, not even the sound of the bell. He had no idea if the damn thing was working. He picked up the door knocker and pounded that, just in case.

  The bishop was on his way back to Bridgeport, riding in a big black car his predecessor wouldn’t have been caught dead in, with a car phone next to his hand and a bug up his ass. John Kelly rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. A bug up his ass. That was probably some kind of blasphemy. He didn’t really care. He tried the buzzer again, tried the door knocker again, stamped his feet. Somebody had to be home. Dan had to be home. John Kelly had called Dan Murphy’s office and confirmed that.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, to the air.

  That was when he got an idea. He reached for the doorknob and turned it. He had expected to find the door locked. Instead, he found it open.

  This was most definitely a sin of some kind, but he was too worked up to put a name to it.

  2

  In the foyer, standing on the black-and-white checkerboard marble, his agitation began to ebb away—and that was bad. Without it he lost what little self-assurance he had. He looked up the great curving staircase, to the dark on the landing. He looked through the pair of fifteen-foot-high double doors propped open in front of him, to the dark of what he thought must be the living room. He wasn’t sure. He had never been in this house before—odd to think of, considering how constant his relationship with Dan Murphy had been—and he didn’t have the first idea of where anything was. Or where anyone could be.

  “You want to know who Victor Coletti is,” he said aloud in the silence. “You want to know who really owns WNHY-TV. You want to know what all that business is about.”

  He was whispering.

  He clamped his teeth shut, tight, hurting his jaw. He advanced to the double doors and looked into the room beyond them—a living room for sure. On the other side of it, curtains had been pulled away to expose a great wall of glass. Arc lights were lit across the long, narrow expanse of back lawn, illuminating a fountain and a garden house and a gazebo. There was a statue in the middle of the fountain, mock-Greek, a woman in flowing robes with one arm raised. He felt along the wall inside the left-hand door and found a switch.

  It was when the light went on—an elaborate chandelier, spreading out over his head like George Orwell’s infamous chestnut tree—that he became sure he was being watched.

  “Dan?” he said.

  Dan didn’t answer, and neither did anyone else.

  Out on the lawn, wind was rippling sluggish snow over the lawn. A line of pine trees was shivering and shaking at the back. The surface of the water in the fountain had hardened into ice. John Kelly reached for the pocket where he usually carried his cigarettes and found that he had forgotten to bring them.

  “I want to know who Victor Coletti is,” he said again, and knew that was a mistake.

  3

  When the blow came it hit him squarely on the back of the head, like a flat thing falling, even as he knew it wasn’t a flat thing but a bullet. Sound and feeling wouldn’t mesh. Life and death wouldn’t mesh either. He felt himself suspended in time, half here and half there, like on that Christmas day when he had walked and walked until he had gone into a church. The priest was still waiting for him there, in the same black robes, with the same tired expression on his face—but what the priest was offering him was much clearer. Not an education. Not a life of safety. Not a vow of poverty with its secret promise of never, ever allowing him to get himself in debt. Not Victor Coletti, either, because Victor Coletti was a ghost.

  There was a light up at the top of the world now and John Kelly could see it. It had started as a point and was spreading across all the darkness of space. In that light there was not only his history, but the answers to all his questions. He could turn back and see the man who killed him as surely as he had been able to see the chandelier the moment before he died.

  The man who killed him was standing in the middle of the living room, tucking a gun into the waistband of his pants with one hand. With the other he was holding on to the shoulder of a small boy who looked frightened and frozen. There was no movement in the boy’s body at all, not even the rise and fall of breath. The man pulled the boy closer to him and spun him around.

  “Stuart,” the man said. “Stuart, wake the fuck up.”

  Stuart didn’t move.

  “Crap,” the man said.

  He spun Stuart back around again, pressed the nozzle of the gun to the base of the boy’s skull, and fired.

  Up in the light, spinning away from it all, Father John Kelly thought how strange it was—that he had known this man and not known that he liked to dress in women’s clothes.

  Chapter Three

  1

  IF THERE WAS ONE thing Pat Mallory knew he couldn’t do, it was to bring Susan Murphy where he had to go. It was one thing to take the woman out to dinner and pretend she wasn’t who and what she was—a civilian and the district attorney’s sister. It was another thing to haul her along on what was going to be a royal mess. Pat Mallory knew about the messiness because he knew every possible intonation in Ben Deaver’s voice, and Deaver had sounded close to hysterical.

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” Deaver had said, “you’re not going to believe what he did this time.”

  “What did he do this time?” Pat had asked him.

  Deaver had been in no mood to talk. There was a lot of noise going on in the background, police noise. Pat heard someone laughing and was sure it was Dbro. Dbro was enough to make Deaver nuts all on his own. Pat wished he could think of some way to get Dbro off the force, or transferred to Miami, or wounded in the line of duty. Even watching Dbro getting cited for heroism wouldn’t hurt if the bottom line was that he’d no longer be carrying a shield. Unfortunately, Dbro was the kind of cop who never got wounded in the line of duty. He didn’t give enough of a damn to take any risks.

  “Ben?” Pat said.

  Ben didn’t answer.

  “Ben,” Pat said again.

  Somewhere in the distance, a man was shouting, frenzied and angry and close to violence. “Cordon it off,” he was screaming. “Cordon it all off. Do it now. Get those goddamned civilians off the goddamned crime scene an
d do it goddamned quick you fucking assholes what does the city pay you for?”

  “Pat?” Ben said. “We’re out on Sullivan Street. Do you know where that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You better get out here fast. There’s a patrolman named Dunbar who’s lost it completely, I think he’s going to shoot someone, for God’s sake.”

  “What’s the—”

  “Pat, just get down here, will you please? You can see it when you get here. Just get here.”

  “I’m with a woman and I’ll have to—”

  “Put her in a cab.”

  Ben Deaver hung up.

  2

  IN THE END, PAT Mallory didn’t put Susan Murphy in a cab. Edge Hill Road wasn’t exactly on the way to Sullivan Street, but it was in the same general direction, and this was another ex-nun he’d just gotten a call about. It didn’t matter which theory he used, his original one or the one he’d been developing since Susan gave him all that information about ex-nuns. Neither theory exempted her from attack. Neither could, because they both ended up at the same place, except that the second one gave him a name and a face, a name and a face he had heard and seen for the last time on the day he met Susan at Damien House.

  Coming back across the restaurant, he grabbed their waitress and threw a wad of money at her—too much money, but it didn’t matter. Coming back to the table he grabbed Susan and pulled her to her feet.

  “We’ve got to get out of here now,” he said. “I’m taking you home. I’ve got to be someplace.”

  “Is it another one of the boys?”

  Pat shook his head and pushed her toward the door. “Another one of the women. Run, Susan, we’ve got to move it. Something’s gone haywire.”

  She was a good girl, a good woman, a brick, whatever. She practically ran out onto the street and down the sidewalk to where he had parked the car—parked it illegally, too, for once not caring who got upset. He found something funny in the fact that he had always refused to do that when he was on official police business, and had finally fallen when he was on his own time.