Precious Blood (The Gregor Demarkian Holiday Mysteries)

by Jane Haddam

  “Of course I am. Who in God’s name would want to murder—” Actually, he did know who might want to murder Cheryl Cass. He couldn’t be absolutely, positively sure—Cheryl had been so damned coy—but there were things she had said, things he hadn’t been able to put together at the time. He’d forgotten about it, because those were the things she’d talked about the first time. When she’d come back, all bubbly and warm and euphoric after her trip to Peg’s, she’d been on another track.

  He looked up to find Judy staring at him, and flushed uncomfortably. “Now, Judy,” he said.

  “‘Now Judy’ nothing,” Judy said. “Let’s face it, Andy. There are lots of people who might have wanted to murder that little tramp. I would have murdered her to keep her mouth shut about Black Rock Park.”

  “You’ve got more guts than other people.”

  “It doesn’t take guts, Andy. It just takes panic.”

  “Last I heard, it took means, motive, and opportunity.”

  “All of which you had.”

  “No, I didn’t. Motive, certainly. Means, I could have used Kath’s plant poison. But opportunity—I think you’re forgetting it was Ash Wednesday. I saw Cheryl at five. At five-thirty, I was standing in front of the altar at the church, griming up the faces of little old ladies from Ellery Street.”

  Judy was thoughtful. “It might not have been Ash Wednesday,” she said. “They didn’t find her until the Sunday after and she’d been practically frozen. They’re not sure when she died.”

  “They’ve got a pretty good idea. Nobody saw her after Ash Wednesday. I also read in one of those papers you think I don’t read that she hadn’t been registered at any of the hotels.”

  Judy cocked her head at him. “You really mean all this, don’t you? You’re not worried about any of it. You’re almost enjoying yourself.”

  “I’m not almost enjoying myself, Judy dear. I’m enjoying myself very much.” He grinned. “Here I am, absolutely in the clear, and there he is, the old fart, getting ready to make an ass of himself. I’m having a great time.”

  And that, Andy thought, as he watched Judy staring at him with her mouth wide open, was the most truth he’d told about anything in his life.

  [2]

  At eleven o’clock, just as he thought he had wrapped it all up and could get on his way to bed, the buzzer on Father Tom Dolan’s intercom rang. He stared at it in shock. He knew, of course, that the Cardinal was working. The Cardinal was always working. No matter how hard he tried, or how often, he was never able to get to the office before the Cardinal did. But the Cardinal was a sensible man. He knew what kind of shape Tom would be in at eleven o’clock at night on Wednesday of Holy Week. There had been the final plans for two dozen group baptisms to be coordinated today, the Cathedral Easter Mass schedule to be finalized, the trip to St. Agnes’s to be organized. All clergy and religious attached to the Chancery were, by the Cardinal’s order, expected to spend the days from Holy Thursday through Easter in contemplation and prayer. That meant they had to have their details cleaned up, and most of those details were Father Tom Dolan’s responsibility. Hell, Father Tom Dolan always thought, would be an eternal Wednesday of Holy Week, with the pamphlets for the Stations of the Cross service missing and the ride schedule for the nondriving elderly in a shambles and not a single one of the Easter dinner baskets ready to go out to the houses of the poor. He didn’t count ordinary business, like finding temporary housing for parishioners who’d been evicted from their apartments or extracting some CYO delinquent from the clutches of the juvenile justice system. Never mind the homeless shelters, the soup kitchens, the walk-in clinics, and the adult literacy programs. Never mind the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, the Fatima Novena, and the Vocations Club. Sometimes he wondered who had appointed him Lord High Czar of Catholic Welfare and then given him practically nothing to work with.

  His buzzer was buzzing and buzzing, short sharp jabs followed by long complaining wails. In any other year, he would have been convinced the Cathedral was burning down. At least. That was what it would have taken for the Cardinal to come looking for him at a time like this. This year, though, was an utter and unnerving mess. The Cardinal had been jumpy ever since Peg Morrissey Monaghan had come forward to identify Cheryl Cass from a picture in the Tribune—and why she had done that, Tom would never know. If she’d kept her mouth shut, the body would have been carted away to Potter’s Field and had nothing to do with them. Now Demarkian was here, his arrival announced by a call from Scholastica at St. Agnes’s, and the Cardinal was jumpier still. Tom was beginning to think the Cardinal was even less happy with this situation than Tom was himself.

  His buzzer was still buzzing. He leaned forward, unearthed the box from an untidy stack of papers, and said, “Your Eminence?”

  “Oh,” O’Bannion said. “Good. For a minute there, I was afraid you’d gone to bed.”

  “I was just about to, Your Eminence.”

  “Yes. Well. Put it off for a minute, will you? There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Of course, Your Eminence.”

  “You sound like you’re getting ready to kill me. Unstarch yourself a little and come down to my office. I won’t keep you long.”

  “Yes, Your Eminence. Right away.”

  “Right away is good. I think I’m getting an ulcer.”

  The intercom went dead. Tom shook his head at it and stood up. The untidy stack of papers was the fallout from a hundred scattered projects. He picked it up and dumped it in the trash. Then he did a couple of waist rotations and some arm stretches, to unkink his muscles. It was good to be out of habit. His branch of the Third Order Regular was so conservative, he usually felt obliged to wear it, but Wednesday of Holy Week was always an exception. The only people who saw him on Wednesday of Holy Week were the Cardinal and the Cardinal’s secretary, and Tom had the feeling the little nun liked him in jeans.

  He left his office, walked down the empty hall and across the dark reception lounge, and let himself into the Cardinal’s office without knocking. The Cardinal was stretched out on his couch, looking like an overweight Roman getting ready to banquet.

  “There you are,” he said when Tom came in. “Get everything done?”

  “Everything I could think of, Your Eminence, yes. Everything Sister could think of, too.”

  “If Sister hasn’t thought of it, it doesn’t exist. She’s the soul of efficiency. Sit down.”

  Tom sat down. He was glad to. He was so tired, his legs felt like sandbags. “I arranged for a car to take us to St. Agnes’s tomorrow,” he said. “I know you don’t like to be driven around, but I couldn’t think of any other way to fit that visit into your schedule. If we have to run for public transportation, we’re never going to get back here in time for the Mass at eleven-thirty.”

  “Did you hire a limousine?”

  “Of course I didn’t, Your Eminence. I hired a 1986 Buick. The only real expense will be the driver.”

  “I could have driven myself.”

  “No, you couldn’t have, Your Eminence. You haven’t driven yourself since you were raised to the See. That’s what? Three years?”

  “Four. What about you?”

  “I haven’t driven a car in Colchester since I was sixteen. I haven’t driven one at all since I’ve been here. A driver is really the safest solution.”

  “I suppose so.” The Cardinal sighed. “But you know what’s going to happen, Tom. That little bastard Barry Field is going to get hold of it, and it’s going to be all over television the day after tomorrow.”

  “Barry Field’s Prime-Time Encounter with Jesus?”

  The Cardinal sat up. “I wish you wouldn’t find that man so amusing. I know he used to be a friend of yours, but he’s turned into a virulent anti-Catholic in his middle age. Near middle age. Whatever. If I hear myself called a pimp for the Whore of Babylon one more time, I’m going to wring his puffy little neck.”

  “It’s just a local television sta
tion, Your Eminence. I don’t think he’s got much more than a one-hundred-mile range.”

  “He will have soon. There’s some gossip you probably haven’t heard. I got it straight from the Papal Legate. Don’t ask me how he knows, but he always does. Your Barry Field is getting picked up by the Reverend Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network.”

  “Whoosh.” Tom was impressed. “That’s the big time, isn’t it?”

  “Is that all you can think of?”

  “I think Barry’s probably very pleased. He always did want to be a success.”

  “A success.” The Cardinal snorted. “When I think of all the time I spent trying to convince him he had a vocation—”

  “Barry, too?”

  The Cardinal looked embarrassed. “It was his junior year in high school. And he did have a vocation, I’m sure of it. Then he went away for the summer and when he came back, I don’t know, he was changed. Then he ran away from home for a while. It was three months before he came back. I should have expected something like this.”

  Tom got up and went to the Cardinal’s desk, where Sister had left three large thermos bottles of coffee and a stack of paper coffee cups. Sometime in the last few minutes, he had crossed the line between tiredness and exhaustion. The room was spinning and his stomach was rolling around under his rib cage like a rogue marble.

  “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked. “Barry Field? I’m afraid I’m not holding up very well—”

  “No, no,” the Cardinal said. “It’s wasn’t about Barry Field. I was just—digressing. That’s all.”

  “That’s all right. What was on your mind?”

  “Gregor Demarkian.”

  Tom Dolan smiled. “What’s the matter, Your Eminence? Having second thoughts now that you finally got him here? I told you at the time—”

  “I know, I know. And no, I’m not having second thoughts. Even if Andy Walsh wasn’t responsible for that poor woman’s dying, I’m sure somebody was. It may not have seemed like it, but I was paying attention when that Lieutenant John Smith talked. And when Demarkian talked, too, come to think of it. They’re right about one thing. If she really had committed suicide, she wouldn’t have been in that alley.”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “Your Eminence, you didn’t know Cheryl Cass. I did. At one time, I knew her very well. She wasn’t—like other people.”

  “There isn’t a human being on Earth who wants to die in an alley instead of a nice soft bed, except maybe some saint looking to get martyred for the Faith. I don’t suppose you think your Cheryl Cass was a saint.”

  “No, Your Eminence. Anything but.”

  “The more I think of it, the more I’m sure we were a little hasty at the time.”

  “Why? Your Eminence, the entire police department of Colchester is convinced it was suicide, except Lieutenant Smith. I listened to all the arguments, too, you know. I understand Smith’s position. But—”

  “Sister Scholastica says there wasn’t any of that plant stuff missing from the convent.”

  “Sister Scholastica says Sister Peter Rose says there wasn’t any of it missing. And you know Sister Peter Rose, Your Eminence. She’s a holy woman, but she’s got a brain like an drained honeycomb.”

  “Maybe.” The Cardinal looked mulish. “I still don’t think it could hurt to get Demarkian and Smith together for a talk. Demarkian is supposed to be good. Maybe he could clear this up.”

  “It is cleared up.”

  “Cleared up for me,” the Cardinal said. “Then I could stop worrying about it. You don’t know how I’d like to be able to stop worrying about it.”

  “I have a fair idea, Your Eminence. But you know, Mr. Demarkian might clear this matter up in a way you wouldn’t like at all. You could be stuck with a scandal and Andy Walsh at the same time.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Tom. You’re full of faith, hope, and charity—but always in moderation.”

  “Right now I’m full of coffee and close to dying of it.” Tom drained his paper cup and tossed it in the trash. “If that’s all, Your Eminence, I think I’d better get out of here. I’m close to collapse.”

  “What about Demarkian and Smith?”

  “Well, Your Eminence, I suppose you’ll do what you want. You usually do.”

  The Cardinal laughed. “All right,” he said. “All right. Get out of here. Only make a couple of notes to yourself for tomorrow. I want you to call Father Walsh first thing in the morning and remind him we’re coming.”

  “Do you think he’ll need a reminder?”

  “He tends to get amnesia in sticky situations. I don’t know what he intends to pull at Mass tomorrow, but I have no interest in putting up with selective memory loss as well.”

  “What else?”

  “After you call Father Walsh, call Gregor Demarkian and make an appointment with him at the Chancery for morning. Maybe the three of us can have a long talk.”

  “I’m going to go to bed, Your Eminence.”

  “Go,” the Cardinal said.

  “I’m gone.”

  Tom stumbled across the Cardinal’s office, through the reception lounge, into the hall. He got as far as the door that connected the Chancery offices to the residence wing without knowing anything at all about what he was doing. Then he got a little puff of second wind, and found himself standing stock-still at the bottom of the dark stairway. He was holding on to the bulb at the bottom of the banister, only seconds away from a dead faint.

  Dear God, he thought. I’m tired. I don’t think I’ve been this tired in my entire life.

  But that, he knew, wasn’t true. He had been just this tired once before, and it had been at the start of the worst year of his existence.

  FOUR

  [1]

  GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NEVER paid much attention to the day-to-day workings of a Roman Catholic church, or to any other kind of church. In spite of the popularity of clerical mysteries in fiction and the frenzied fuss the media made whenever any religious person was involved in any kind of crime, there was actually very little of that in real life. Bigtime evangelists had their problems with the IRS. The more radical orders of nuns sank themselves in the bewildering politics of Latin America. Every once in a while, a priest or minister or rabbi got himself involved in a sexual scandal. On the whole, the clergy and religious were a group remarkable for its ability to stay within the law. The real market in religious crime was in the fringe cults, and in that small set of psychopaths who found religion a convenient excuse for the mayhem they would have committed anyway. That same set of psychopaths also found religion a handy handle on which to hang an insanity defense. In his ten years as head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Department, Gregor had had exactly one set of serial killings with a “religious” motive: a man named Gunnar Manz had tried to convince the law enforcement arms of fourteen states that his dedication to the murder and decapitation of forty-year-old housewives was a charge laid on him directly by God, speaking through the Archangel Raphael. Manz had not been a particularly interesting psychopath—unlike Gary Gilmore, who fascinated Gregor to this day—but Gregor had put in his time watching the tapes and reading the transcripts of interviews. In Gregor’s opinion, Manz had had as much contact with the Archangel Raphael, in fact or fancy, as Gregor himself had had with Siberian fishing villages. Meaning none. Manz was neither schizophrenic nor hallucinatory. He was a con artist. He conned every state but Florida, and Florida had executed him.

  If Gregor thought about Roman Catholic churches at all, it was simply to conclude, vaguely, that they were much like Orthodox and Armenian ones. For hundreds of years after the Great Schism, right up to the Council of Trent, the three had offered pretty much the same Mass in pretty much the same words, although in different languages. The Schism was more a political than a theological event. When the Armenian Church had gone off on its own, there had been a theological break—but the Armenian Church was profoundly conservative liturgically, and the
services hadn’t changed enough for anyone but a Patriarch to notice. The organization of parishes hadn’t changed at all. St. Agnes’s, Gregor had decided, without really thinking it through, would be a lot like Holy Trinity back in Philadelphia.

  As it turned out, that wasn’t true, although Gregor had a hard time figuring out why. He got up at five-thirty in the morning, distinctly uncomfortable from hunger—lentil beans didn’t stay with you, no matter how much olive oil and onions you mixed in with them—and having nothing else to do, stationed himself at the window to pass the time until he could go over to the convent for breakfast. He had no idea what nuns ate, but the bread-and-water rumors of his childhood hardly seemed creditable. Even if they didn’t have what he wanted—which was about four pounds of well-fried bacon—they ought to have something that looked like real food. After all, Catholics only gave up one thing for Lent. Not life.

  His room was a small square box with a brass-and-walnut crucifix hanging over a prie-dieu on one wall and a narrow cot covered with a gray army blanket against the other. The closet was big enough for four or five brooms and contained only three hangers. The chair was the sturdy wooden flat-backed kind that had once been a staple of parochial-school classrooms. The only redeeming feature of the place, Gregor thought, was the view: straight into the middle of the courtyard.

  He rummaged around in his suitcase for his robe, noticed that George’s pink tie seemed to be fraying at the edges, and abandoned the tie to wrap himself up in plaid wool flannel. Rosary House was not enamored of overheating. He picked up the chair, dragged it over to the window, and sat down. It was still dark out, but the courtyard was very brightly lit. It was a solid square patch of city lot, anchored on the intersection corner by the church itself and on the Ellery Street corner by what Gregor was sure must be the school. The fire doors were a distinct giveaway. Rosary House occupied the center of the back stretch of lot. Like the building to its left, it fronted on no street. The building to its right fronted Carver. Gregor had no way of knowing which of these was the convent and which the rectory, but he did know each had to be one or the other. The Carver Street building was the smallest on the lot and the most advantageously placed of the three smaller buildings. Gregor mentally assigned it to the priests and hoped he was right.