by Jane Haddam
“What’s she trying to get at?” Michael demanded.
Hernandito sighed. “She says the nun she saw was no ordinary nun,” he said. “She says this nun was in a long dress with white around her face like in the old days, and you couldn’t see her hair. And this nun came up and touched her.”
“And?”
“And now,” Hernandito said, “she has no more arthritis at all.”
Six
[1]
FROM TIME TO TIME over the years, Gregor Demarkian had amused himself by reading novels that were supposed to be about the FBI. It always shocked him how inaccurate they were. It wasn’t mistakes in procedure he minded. Procedure was like a Paris couturier. It changed its silhouette from year to year. It changed its preferences in colors and fabrics from region to region, too, although it often wasn’t supposed to. What surprised Gregor was how often popular novelists insisted on turning the Bureau into a spy organization. In the fifties, it had perhaps been understandable. With the Cold War going full blast and the country seeing saboteurs under every mulberry bush, there had even been a television program that turned the Bureau into a spy organization. What was wrong with writers of more recent books, he didn’t know. He liked the ones by Thomas Harris. As for the others, they were all the same. Agents prowled through the back alleys of urban slums in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating gangs of drug runners. Agents glided through those temples of vulgar luxury called Las Vegas casinos in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating the Mafia. Agents sat in the ranks at meetings of the Patriot’s League in impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, infiltrating the lunatic right. Agents did everything, in fact, except what they actually did do, which was mundane police work applied to cases under federal jurisdiction or with interstate implications. As to where they got all those impeccable Brooks Brothers suits, Gregor couldn’t imagine. In his twenty years with the Bureau, Gregor had only known one agent who owned a Brooks Brothers suit, and that had been a gift from the man’s father-in-law. The suit had ended up getting ruined when the agent it belonged to had been pushed off a cabin cruiser into the San Francisco Bay in 1967, victim of a practical joke by three other agents whose sartorial preferences ran toward what could be purchased at Sears.
Reverend Mother General had left her office soon after the snake had, making a single phone call first and looking agitated all the time. Gregor waited politely until she was gone and then got down to what he had been trained to do. The fact that he was not actually authorized to do it in this case didn’t matter. Either the Cardinal had been telling the strict truth, unadorned by flights of wishful thinking, and Gregor was authorized to do what he was doing, but hadn’t heard it from Pete Donovan yet—or the Cardinal was talking straight through his hat. If that was the case, it wouldn’t be the first time. As long as Gregor was on Church property, though, it was the Cardinal’s version of reality that would apply. He got the handkerchief out of his pocket, draped it across the palm of his right hand to serve as a shield, and went to work.
The Cardinal’s driver had taken Gregor’s luggage into town, to a place called St. Mary’s Inn, where Gregor was supposed to be staying but which he hadn’t seen yet. Knowing the Cardinal, Gregor had had the good sense to keep his papers out of his suitcases and tucked into the inside jacket pocket of his suit instead. He didn’t have the crime report there—when the Cardinal delivered a report, it had all the verbal economy of a novel by Robert Ludlum—but he did have his notes. What was more important, he had very good photocopies of the anonymous letters the Cardinal had received. He wished he’d had a chance to ask Reverend Mother General if the piece of filth that had landed on her desk today had been the first. If it wasn’t, Gregor hoped she’d had the sense to hold on to the others.
He picked up today’s missive, computer graphics genitalia and all, by the upper-right-hand corner. He picked it up with the tips of his thumb and the first finger of his hand, and with both these tips covered by his handkerchief. Then he held the letter up to the light coming from Reverend Mother General’s office window. In a way, the precautions he was taking were both useless and silly. Anonymous letters almost never came complete with fingerprints. Either their writer was smart and used gloves—or stupid and used disorganization. It was remarkable how smudged prints could get when their provider was manic and mentally out of control. Then there was the question of watermarks and other identifying signs on the paper itself. That sort of thing was bad enough on a traditional anonymous letter, because a traditional anonymous letter was either printed on cheap mass-produced notepaper or assembled from letters cut out of newspapers on construction paper or newsprint. There was no way to trace any of that except back to the manufacturer, and all the manufacturer could tell you was how many millions of pounds of the stuff he had shipped to how many different states. Gregor didn’t know much about computers, but he had a feeling that they were going to make matters worse. For one thing, they always did. For another, Gregor remembered hearing a lecture on the computer explosion at the Bureau once. The man who’d given it had claimed that thousands of pounds of perforated computer paper were being sold across the country every day—and that had been in 1978.
With the light from the window streaming through it, the page looked flimsy and slightly oiled, as if whoever else had touched it had been sweating at the time. That could have been good news—body oils produced prints—except that the oiled smudges were much too big and had probably been smeared. Gregor put the page back on Reverend Mother General’s desk and took one of the Cardinal’s letters from his jacket pocket. There was no point in holding that one up to the light. It was only a copy, and a copy on photocopy paper, not computer paper, at that. He laid it down on Reverend Mother General’s desk next to her own letter and stood back to contemplate the two.
“Same printer,” Gregor said to himself, half out loud. Then he wondered how much difference that made. Computer printers were not like typewriters. Typewriters were eccentric. They took on individual characteristics in no time at all. Computer printers came with daisy wheels that could be changed at will, and that were discarded as soon as they showed any signs of wear or idiosyncrasy. What was worse, fresh daisy wheels produced printing identical to that produced by other fresh daisy wheels of the same type, so that two letters could look as if they’d been produced on the same machine when they had been written on two different machines twenty miles apart. Then there was the terminal factor: Just because two letters had been printed on the same printer didn’t mean they had been written by the same person. That was true of typewriters, too, of course, but computers made the problem harder to solve. With typewriters, you were at least sure that, for two people to have used the machine, two people had to have been at the machine. Large organizations with sophisticated computer setups, though, had terminals that could be plugged into their central printers from dozens of different locations and several miles away. Two letters printed by the same printer might have been composed by two different people, neither of whom worked anywhere near each other or the location of the printer itself. Gregor was getting the surreal feeling that investigating these anonymous letters was hopeless and that investigating anonymous letters was going to go on being hopeless forever more. Once the masses were thoroughly plugged into the system, anyone who wanted to could send nasty messages to anyone anywhere and be impossible to stop, in spite of the fact that those messages might be ruining lives, causing divorces, putting an end to international peace—
“I’m overdramatizing,” Gregor said. This time he must have said it more than half out loud, because it elicited a response. Although Gregor was facing the desk, he was still turned slightly away from the door. His line of sight was toward the window and the sun that seemed so strong and bright outside it. The cough he heard came from behind him. It didn’t sound like anything that could have been produced by Reverend Mother General.
He had picked up one of the anonymous letters while he’d been ruminating on the death by com
puter of Civilization As We Know It. He put it down again.
“It won’t do you any good to worry about it,” the voice of the cough said, deep and now unmistakably masculine. “Only way we ever catch these people, we pick them up for something else and find copies of the letters on their kitchen table. And we do pick them up for something else. Almost always.”
Gregor would have liked to dispute this observation—there was a great deal about it to dispute—but he was caught by the sight of the man who filled Reverend Mother General’s office door. Gregor Demarkian was a physically large male. He was over six feet tall. He wasn’t exactly fat, but he had a layer of middle-aged padding on him. He also had a pair of naturally broad shoulders that made him look a little too wild in the formality of suits. The man in the doorway was a giant. His body filled the door frame from side to side. His head came so close to the top of the door’s frame, Gregor almost thought he was going to have to duck when he came inside. He was at least six feet ten, and he had bulk to match, fat and muscle both. He was such an apparition, Gregor found himself stepping back instead of going forward to meet him.
Either the giant didn’t notice, or he was used to that kind of reaction. He marched into the office—not having to duck when he came through the door after all—and held out his massive hand.
“You must be Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “The Cardinal’s told me all about you. I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Pete Donovan.”
Pete Donovan’s voice was a good deep bass. It bounced from window to wall to ceiling like a Roman candle released indoors and made the windowpanes shake.
[2]
Later, Gregor Demarkian would look back on the first fifteen minutes he spent with Pete Donovan as one of the most highly efficient, well-organized introduction sessions he had ever had with a local police officer. Maybe because Gregor still thought in Bureau terms—the efficient is the dry, the well-organized is the linearly logical—it didn’t seem that way at the time. Pete Donovan shook his hand in great, ligament-wrenching arcs. Then he walked over to the desk, looked down at the two anonymous letters Gregor had laid out against it, and grunted. Then he retreated to a corner, to prop himself up against a wall. Gregor thought that was very sensible. There were chairs in Reverend Mother General’s office, but Pete Donovan didn’t look like he would fit in any of them. There was the desktop to sit on, but the desk’s legs didn’t look like they could hold Pete Donovan’s weight. Gregor was awed. Donovan was a young man, a good twenty years or more younger than Gregor himself. Middle-aged spread was still in the future.
Instead of getting into all that—which he didn’t want to do and which wouldn’t have been polite in any case—Gregor sat down on the chair he had been occupying when Reverend Mother General opened her package and stretched out his legs.
“I wasn’t exactly worrying about it,” he said. “I was just annoyed by it. What happened to Reverend Mother General?”
“She went off with a lot of other nuns to look for a snake. Do I have that right? With this nasty letter she got, there was a snake?”
“A black snake,” Gregor said. “Not very big. Not dangerous at all.”
“I know black snakes.” Donovan rubbed the back of his neck. “Which one was it? The letter she got?”
For a moment, Gregor didn’t know what Donovan was talking about. Then he realized that the policeman couldn’t have any idea which of the letters on the desk belonged to Reverend Mother General. It could have been either or both. Gregor cocked his head and asked,
“Why do you assume it was one or the other? Why not both?”
“Because Reverend Mother General always says exactly what she means and what she said was that she got a nasty piece of mail. If she’d got two, she would have said two.”
Of course, there were other possibilities. Neither of the letters on the desk might be the one received by Reverend Mother General. Gregor could have substituted two others, for purposes of his own. Reverend Mother General could have taken the real letter with her and palmed off a fake on Gregor. A million and one things could have happened, most of them improbable, but all of them possible given the limitations of what Donovan knew. If Donovan had been an agent, Gregor would have given him a lecture about it.
In spite of the fact that Donovan was so young, however, he was neither an agent-in-training nor Gregor’s immediate subordinate in a Bureau operation. Gregor was simply unused to dealing with young law-enforcement officers in any other way. He was going to have to squelch his impulse to instruct. Donovan was being cooperative, probably because the Cardinal had asked him to be. Gregor didn’t want to jeopardize that.
He got out of his chair—he was so restless—and picked up the box the letter and the snake had come in. It had fallen to the floor in the confusion and been kicked—by Reverend Mother General or himself, Gregor didn’t know—slightly under the desk. Gregor turned it over in his hands and said, “The postmark is Maryville. The postmarks on the Cardinal’s letters have been Maryville, too. Did you know the Cardinal was getting these things?”
“No,” Pete Donovan said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised. Things have been—a little weird around here lately.”
Gregor chucked the box onto the desk. “What about Reverend Mother General?” he said. “Has she gotten any more of these things?”
Pete Donovan shrugged. “As far as I know, no. At least, she hasn’t come to me about them. That doesn’t mean she hasn’t gotten them.”
“You sound as if you think she must have.”
“Maybe I do. Like I said, things have been a little weird around here lately. St. Mary Magdalen’s out in Borum Ridge was vandalized about a month ago. Borum Ridge is on the western end of town. Whoever got in there took the crucifix off the wall behind the altar and hacked it into wood chips with an ax. Then they smashed a lot of windows and defecated on the altar. They must have made a racket fit to wake the dead, but Father Testaverdi was away for the week and there wasn’t anyone to hear them.”
Gregor considered this. “That kind of thing is usually kids, isn’t it? Kids pretending to be Satanists or kids getting drunk or stoned and out of control.”
“Sometimes.” Donovan conceded the point grudgingly. “The problem is,” he went on, “this isn’t your big city or your bedroom suburb. We’ve grown a bit. We even have our own version of a low-rent district, complete with Spanish bodegas and knife fights once or twice a month on Friday nights. But even the low-rent district is small.”
“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”
“What I’m getting at is, we all know each other.” Pete Donovan sighed. “Hell, I know every one of the Spanish kids by face and name except for maybe one or two who moved in in the last week or so. I’m not saying I’d recognize everybody who lives in town. It’s a bigger town than that. But it’s not a much bigger town than that. If someone’s desecrating altars and sending nuns—which one did you say it was?”
“This one.” Gregor picked up the letter with the picture on it and handed it over.
“Wonderful,” Donovan said. He studied the letter for a protracted moment and then leaned over to throw it back down on the desk. He was actually tall enough to do that while keeping one foot bent against the wall. “Now I’ve got someone sending dirty pictures to a nun. This is all I’m going to need. The Cardinal is going to be livid when he hears about this.”
“The Cardinal is fifty miles away in Colchester.”
“The Cardinal might as well be hiding under my bed.”
Donovan pushed himself away from the wall and began to pace, back and forth, between the office door and the window.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ve lived in this place, in Maryville, all my life, except for four years I spent in the army. I even went to college at St. Francis of the Snows just outside town and I commuted there. I know this place. I know these people. And I know something else. I know that no outside agitator has moved into the area recently. I know there aren’t any strangers lurking in th
e bushes. The only strangers we get are the ones who immigrate from Central America and none of them is desecrating churches or—did I tell you what happened at Iggy Loy the week before the flood?”
“No,” Gregor said. As usual when he was on an errand for the Cardinal, there seemed to be a lot of things no one had told him. “All I’ve really discussed with anyone is the murder of Brigit Ann Reilly,” he told Donovan now. “The Cardinal has been receiving anonymous letters, yes, and he’s concerned about them, but not so concerned about them as he is about the death.”
“Does he think the two things are connected?”
“You know the Cardinal. He thinks everything is connected.”
“I think everything is connected,” Pete Donovan said. “I didn’t know anything about any anonymous letters so I haven’t had a chance to work them into the theory, but give me time. What happened up at Iggy Loy, that’s—”
“St. Ignatius Loyola Church,” Gregor said. “Sister Scholastica told me.”
“Yeah. Well, Iggy Loy is the closest church. The nuns would be in that parish if they were in any parish, which they aren’t because they’re a Motherhouse. There’s a lot of traffic between here and there. The nuns run the parish school and the CCD program—that’s Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, catechism for children who don’t go to parochial school. So there’s always one nun or the other over there for something.”
“Always nuns?” Gregor asked. “Not nuns and postulants and novices?”
“They send everybody everywhere these days,” Pete Donovan said, shooting Gregor the desperate glance Gregor had come to think of, over the years, as the mark of a sensible man defeated by Vatican II. Gregor thought it was interesting to see it in a man so young. If Pete Donovan was nostalgic for the old Church, it was a Church he had known only as legend. He cleared his throat a little and said, “It doesn’t really matter who they send, for this, because none of the nuns ever saw it because Father Fitzsimmons made sure they didn’t. Do you get the feeling that everybody is protecting everybody else around here and nobody is doing anybody any damn good at all?”