The Shepherd's Calculus

by C. S. Farrelly

  The top layer was a series of letters, all signed by Owen Feeney. They were in chronological order spanning fifteen years, starting with Feeney’s signature as a monsignor serving the archbishops of Chicago and Philadelphia and ending long after he had been made a bishop, just prior to his placement as head of the US Conference and talk of possibly being made a cardinal. In some of the letters, Feeney addressed his superiors. In others, he issued orders to those serving under his leadership. The subject matter of the letters, by this point, was unfortunately not unfamiliar to Peter.

  They generally began with a description of the alleged incidents of abuse, a summary of any investigation and interviews conducted to corroborate the report, and concluded with a recommended course of action. Not surprisingly, with the exception of one letter recommending that the accused priest be entered into a residential treatment program, every other letter suggested immediate transfer to a new parish. “At this time,” nearly all of them concluded, “we consider it to be in the best interests of our servant to protect his privacy in this matter and will be making transfer arrangements with this in mind.” Far more surprising were the objects of the transfer. In a collection of twenty letters, only six referred directly to William Hartnett. The rest referred to different priests serving under Feeney at various points in his career. In total, four pedophiles caught a break with Feeney, who pledged to handle each situation with the utmost discretion and decorum. By comparison, copies of letters sent to the parents of children who made complaints were a fraction of the length and provided far less detail, although in each instance they did commend the parent for raising their children in the Catholic faith.

  A second set of correspondence, between Monsignor Feeney and Cardinal Mulcahy, then still the archbishop of Chicago, outlined Feeney’s belief that there were reasonable grounds to deny a subpoena requesting church records related to Father William Hartnett’s time in Parkchester, Illinois. Feeney recommended a delayed response to the subpoena until other options could be considered.

  The last set of documents, however, really packed that Owen Feeney magic. Peter could see his strategic planning all over it and it convinced him, more than ever, that Feeney was the architect of the deal with Milton Casey. The document was beautiful. Professionally bound, it looked like it could have been put together by a top consulting firm. McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. It was a business proposal offering guidance on financial transactions related to abuse victims. For victims who seemed inclined to settle for quick money without involving the authorities, the report recommended the Church should act quickly. It should offer them $40,000–$50,000 in exchange for a signed agreement not to file additional claims, either in criminal or civil court, and a completed nondisclosure agreement. Victims who pressed for more money or had settlements negotiated by attorneys who pressed for more should be compensated up to, but not exceeding, $100,000.

  They, too, would sign both agreements about no future claims and nondisclosure. The funds would not be paid in one lump sum, but rather broken out over installments of $25,000 to avoid drawing unwanted attention. The Church should be prepared, he cautioned, for victims who would refuse either type of settlement and instead press for exorbitant amounts or their day in court. Every effort should be made to convince these claimants to settle out of court. In the event that this failed, he concluded, it would be appropriate for the Church to protect its financial interests by any tactic recommended by legal counsel, including the filing of multiple motions and nuisance appeals. Doing so, Feeney asserted, would stem the flow of other victims motivated to come forward by the allure of easy money and save the Church valuable funds.

  The piece of paper attached to the back cover of the proposal was dated one month later. It commended Feeney for his service and informed him of his promotion to bishop. Clipped to the back was an old newspaper article. The same one Ingram had borrowed from Peter that day when they discussed the scandal a few years ago. The same incident he had discussed with Monsignor Sexton. Only now, when Peter looked at it, he recognized parts of it immediately. He recognized the town of Parkchester and the quote from the single father near Rochester who’d borrowed William Hartnett’s car in his time of need. He recognized the description of Hartnett’s crusade for a battered women’s shelter. And finally, he understood how Ingram had pieced together what happened.

  Peter stacked the papers back together and shoved them in the envelope. Halfway in, they encountered resistance. He pushed a little harder and felt the crunch of paper at the bottom of the envelope. He reached in and pulled it out, attempting to smooth the wrinkles and creases. It was a formal response to a subpoena filed by Ted Mercier demanding that Feeney turn over all e-mails related to sexual-abuse matters for a span of eight months in the previous year. It was printed on Conference stationery. Feeney explained that he was very sorry, but that Mercier was likely to be dissatisfied with the records. He was not a member of this so-called electronic generation, he explained congenially, and therefore used e-mail only sparingly. He reminded the attorney that he had already complied with a request for official hard-copy correspondence on this matter. Nonetheless, he assured him, he had the IT department retrieve all related e-mails from the office servers and they were attached. At the bottom of the page, three names appeared under the CC list.

  Something about the letter didn’t sound right to Peter, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what. The tone seemed unusually conciliatory, for one. Feeney struck Peter as someone who played hardball, particularly when he was challenged. He was surprised by how cooperative Feeney was being. But it was more than that. He tried to think back to the conversations he’d had with Feeney. There weren’t many and they usually took place at cocktail parties where conversation was surface-level only. That’s when it hit him—Feeney’s comments about being a technophobe. The last face-to-face conversation Peter had with him was at a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration hosted by the mayor of New York City in a hotel ballroom. The event was swamped, jam-packed with everyone from the Irish ambassador up from DC to the owner of an Irish bakery in Woodlawn. By the time the FDNY pipes and drums unit rolled in, Peter was on the verge of a claustrophobic breakdown. He darted away from the ballroom dance floor, seeking refuge in the wings. A few feet from him stood a man dressed officiously in a black robe with a velvet-rimmed shoulder cape and black skullcap. Peter couldn’t see his face, but he could see the man was holding a BlackBerry. It reminded him of when Ingram finally broke down and got a cell phone. No one had been more surprised than Peter when Ingram called him from it. And no one had been more amused when he got his first text message from Ingram, in all caps and full of mistakes:

  DEXTER THE TEXTER HERE!1

  PROVING I’”M NOT A DINOSAUR

  While he never quite got the hang of texting quickly, Ingram, ever the stickler for grammar, did eventually master the nuances of punctuation. He told Peter about the time he was showing a clip from a documentary on an excavation at Masada to his students. He noticed that one of them, a pleasant enough young woman named Kelly, had spent the better part of the class texting instead of watching the clip. He’d noticed because all but one light was out in the room, and her phone left a ghostly trail of illumination as she repeatedly pulled it out of her pocket. He quickly checked his attendance sheet and located her phone number. It took him a good few minutes to get it right, but he managed to send her a message that said:

  KELLY. STOP TEXTING DURING CLASS.

  NOW.

  FATHER INGRAM.

  He’d watched, Ingram told him, as she received the message. What must have been the initial buzz of the phone vibrating in her pocket. Her meager attempt to surreptitiously look around the room to see if anyone was watching. Best of all, the way her eyes popped wide open as she gaped at Ingram after reading the message.

  Even now, Peter laughed at the memory of how Ingram told the story. He’d been equally amused when he’d encountered this man, clearly an elevated member of the Church, using his Blac
kBerry at the mayor’s party. When the man turned in profile, Peter saw the mousy little mustache, the odd spectacles resting on his nose, and knew immediately it was Owen Feeney. To his surprise, Feeney also recognized him, even though it had been years since they’d seen each other. Peter suspected Feeney met more new people in one hour at a party than Peter met in a month. They even talked about the BlackBerry. Feeney complained that he’d only just gotten comfortable using the roller ball scroll and now they’d switched to something they called a “touch pad.” That was under two years ago. Feeney’s claim that he didn’t really use e-mail when he’d been conscientious enough to check it at a public cocktail party was ridiculous. The thin pile of e-mails Feeney returned to Mercier couldn’t be all there was.

  It might turn out to be a wild goose chase, but he decided to try to track down information on the recipients at the bottom of the letter. He had no idea if he’d be able to get in touch with them or even how he’d explain his call. They certainly weren’t going to answer polite questions about their boss’s e-mail habits from a complete stranger who also happened to be a reporter. But it was possible he had a friend in common with them. DC was the biggest small town Peter had ever encountered, and if you know more than fifteen people who lived there, six degrees of separation could put you in touch with almost anyone.

  He started the same way he had started with Kevin Garrity. He entered the first name into a search engine. The first one, Charles Miller, appeared to be an attorney in the Conference’s Office of Legal Counsel. He dug around but didn’t find anything outstanding about Miller. Next up was Sheila Kenner, communications director at the Conference. Last was Martin Austin. The first few hits that came up clearly identified him as an IT guru. He’d been quoted in a few articles about some software platform Peter knew nothing about. Peter scanned the first page of search results and was midway through the second when he saw Austin’s name attached to a web page for someone named Luke Rutkowski. He clicked on the link and was brought to a PDF of Rutkowski’s resume. From an IT perspective, Peter thought it was probably fairly impressive. His resume read a little bit like Martin Austin’s comments—technically knowledgeable but eminently incomprehensible. His credentials talked a lot about implementing secure servers and designing systems to safeguard sensitive information for clients.

  Martin was listed as his supervisor for an internship with the US Bishops Conference. Peter cross-checked the date of the letter with the dates listed on Luke’s resume. They overlapped. Of course, that didn’t necessarily help Peter. When he was in college, he’d been honored to be selected for a summer internship with GQ. He felt slightly less honored after a summer spent largely photocopying and watching other people do the kind of work he wanted to do. But when he got to the end of Luke’s resume, he felt a tiny rush of adrenaline. Listed under his professional references was Bishop Owen Feeney. That changed everything. Peter was fairly certain the editor in chief of GQ wouldn’t have known he spent three months roaming the halls of his building, let alone offered to act as a professional reference. And Feeney didn’t offer to do anything unless there was something in it for him.

  With a little digging, some articles from Luke’s hometown paper, and the help of a few privacy-violating people-search services, Peter was able to determine that Luke Rutkowski was in his second year of an MBA program at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. He graduated from high school in Wooster, Ohio, where he grew up with his mother, who worked as a bank teller, and four siblings. His father, a factory foreman, appeared to live in Nescopeck, Pennsylvania. A credit check on Rutkowski showed no loans taken out currently or in the past. No Stafford or PLUS loans for his undergraduate education at Ohio Dominican University and, more tellingly, no such loans taken out for business school. According to the Mendoza website, the estimated cost of the program was over $50,000 per year, with scholarship aid that generally didn’t cover these costs in their entirety. He didn’t know what, if anything, Luke had to do with any of this. But if he’d been working in IT for Feeney when Mercier sent the subpoena, then Peter wanted to talk to him.

  When he announced to Emma that he was going to South Bend for a few days, her response was not at all surprising. She thought he was insane, but if it was connected to Ingram and it would help him move past all this, then he should get going and she’d see him when he got back. Even as he tried to call it “research” in his mind, he knew that “stalking” was a more appropriate term. He hung around the halls of Mendoza trying to recognize Luke based on some fuzzy photos in a few online issues of the Dominican University newspaper. He gave false credentials as a business journalist when a secretary stopped him to ask what he was doing there. He finally spotted Luke leaving the graduate athletic center. He introduced himself as a reporter and said he was doing an article on how effective internships were. He was wondering if he could ask him a few questions over a cup of coffee. Luke eagerly agreed. At times Peter did actually feel bad about lying so readily and often to get people to talk. It was one of the things Ingram said he didn’t like about the profession his protégé had chosen. “Ah, but I wouldn’t have to lie if people didn’t lie to me,” Peter had retorted. Ingram had patted him on the shoulder with a smile. “You don’t want to get into a debate on moral imperatives with a theology professor, Peter,” he told him. And wisely, Peter hadn’t.

  They sat down and Peter asked a few introductory questions. Where Luke was from, where he’d done internships, how helpful they were. Then he just went for it.

  “So—let’s talk about Owen Feeney,” he said.

  Luke looked away. “Oh. I, uh, I didn’t really work for him.” He tried not to sound nervous, but it didn’t work.

  “Really? I must be mistaken,” Peter said. “I saw him listed as a personal reference on your resume.”

  Luke tried to backpedal. Explained that he’d met Feeney but didn’t really work with him a lot that summer. After watching him founder, Peter laid it out. He knew he worked in Feeney’s office. He knew Luke was an accomplished computer programmer. He was also aware that Feeney had responded to a subpoena with a total of sixteen e-mails for an eight-month period. Why was that? Luke shrugged. Peter tried again. Didn’t Luke think it was odd that Feeney never used e-mail? Luke didn’t know what Peter was talking about. Peter stayed firm. “You don’t know or you don’t want to say?” he asked. Luke responded first with silence. Then he started to stand up. “I think I should probably go, Mr. Merrick.” He turned and walked away.

  “Okay,” Peter called after him. “Then let’s talk about paying for business school.”

  Luke stopped. When he turned, his eyes were wide again. He walked slowly back to Peter’s table and stood there staring at him.

  “Business school isn’t cheap,” Peter went on. “And from what I’ve seen, you’re not taking out any loans.” Luke sat back down.

  “I can fill out a formal request to review your financial transactions at the school,” Peter bluffed. “It’s going to be messy. A real pain in the ass for everyone and I might get turned down in the end. But not before it turns you into damaged goods. Or you can tell me how you’re paying for business school and why I think that trail is going to lead to your buddy the bishop.”

  Luke didn’t last much longer after that. He told Peter all he knew was that he was an intern and Feeney was his boss and had instructed him to expunge information from the servers. “Which servers?” Peter pressed.

  “The e-mail exchange servers.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Luke shook his head.

  “And did you? Expunge the information?”

  Yes, he admitted. He had. Most of the e-mails went, except for a few. “Feeney sat next to me and we went through them. He handpicked the ones not to erase.”

  Peter sat quietly, letting the boy talk. The more he talked, the more information Peter got. Luke couldn’t remember what the e-mails were about, but Feeney seemed to know what he was looking for.

 
“And what did he offer you in return for helping out?” The question kicked Luke’s nervousness into a full-blown panic.

  “Nothing,” he started. “It wasn’t like that. I was just doing my job.”

  Peter repeated himself. “What did he offer you in return, Luke?”

  Luke’s cheeks flushed. He was tapping his foot now. “He said he’d write me a letter of recommendation for business school, and if I needed help paying for it, he didn’t see why his office couldn’t offer some assistance.”

  “Define ‘some.’”

  “So far?” the boy asked. Peter nodded. “Most of it,” Luke finished.

  “And you didn’t think that was weird? That your boss asked you to delete a bunch of e-mails then offered to cover an enormous expense for you?”

  Luke groaned. “I know, I know.” He buried his face in his hands. “Am I in trouble?”

  Peter ignored the question. He needed Luke to focus. “When did Feeney ask you to do this?”

  “I don’t know,” he whined. “I don’t remember. The end of the summer maybe.”

  “Luke.” Peter said the name forcefully. “Think hard about this. I need you to give me a date.”

  “Mid-August. I always went to visit my dad then. For the Poconos Raceway.”

  Peter pulled out the papers he found at Ingram’s desk. It looked like Feeney got the first letter from Ted Mercier at the beginning of August. Luke blanched when he saw the Conference letterhead.

  “Calm down,” Peter told him. “The subpoena didn’t come in until August 29th, so you should be fine.” Luke gasped. “Will be fine.” Peter tried to clarify, but it was too late. Luke had begun breathing heavily and muttering “Oh God” over and over.