All the Dead Fathers

by David J. Walker

  “I’m thinking that was bogus,” she said. “I’ve put it completely out of my mind. You should, too.”

  “Yeah? Good. Okay.”

  He hung up, then realized he’d forgotten to ask what time she’d be home that night. But he didn’t call back. Wouldn’t want her to think he was worried, right? Or that he wanted to clip her wings, or anything.

  10.

  Kirsten slipped the phone into her purse. Michael was too polite to ask what Dugan had said, and she didn’t tell him. Any hope that the murders of two men on the list might be merely coincidental was gone now, and she wasn’t ready to deal with his reaction. He’d hear soon enough, and maybe he’d get a night’s sleep first. Plus she’d had a long day herself, and it looked now like it wasn’t over.

  Heading north from the city on the tollway, they got off at the exit near Lambs Farm and drove to a Wendy’s, where they both ate salads. Then Michael directed her to Villa St. George, tucked away on the campus of the University of St. Mary of the Lake. Driving through the gate and down a long, empty road, she thought how odd it was that he’d been living here for going on two years now, and she’d never once been here, not to pick him up, not to visit him. “It’s a big place,” she said, “this university.”

  “A thousand acres, mostly untouched woods and lake,” Michael said. “None of us priests, though, calls it a ‘university.’ We all just call it ‘the seminary.’ That’s the only major school on campus. They put it here back in the nineteen twenties, because they wanted it smack in the middle of nowhere.”

  Now, though, the seminary was an island of calm in a sea of suburban sprawl, about an hour’s commute from the city. It was very dark out, but she asked Michael to give her a driving tour of the grounds, and he seemed delighted. Other than what he called “the main chapel,” a flood-lit redbrick church that looked like it had been lifted from the green of a Vermont village, she didn’t get much of a view of the various buildings he pointed out. But they all seemed large, brick, and colonial-style, with white pillars lined up everywhere. They drove across several bridges and even through one small tunnel. The whole place looked pretty deserted, though they did see a few other cars coming and going.

  One encouraging thing was the obvious presence of a private security force. She saw two different patrol cars in the half hour it took to follow Michael’s guided tour, navigate the dark winding road around the lake, and finally arrive at the narrow lane that led into the retreat house, Villa St. George. By then she’d also seen two motionless deer, a fat, waddling raccoon, a half-dozen joggers in reflective vests—all male—and a blur that streaked past her headlights and might have been a fox.

  She thought the private police force might explain why, of the three men from the list who’d been murdered, none had resided here. Unlike Michael and the others living here, those three had chosen—if indeed each of them had the choice—to walk away and make no appeal to Rome about being stripped of their priesthood.

  They broke out of the trees and approached the retreat house, which was also colonial-style, surrounded by lawn and shrubbery. “Well,” she said, “if you’re gonna be put in dry dock somewhere, you could do worse.”

  “Oh, it’s a beautiful setting all right,” he said. “Great for prayer and study. But none of us wants to be here, you know? Not day after endless day. So it’s hard not to turn a paradise into a prison. And now, these killings. It’s terrifying.”

  * * *

  Earlier that day, during lunch at the Art Institute, Michael had told her how he and the other priests were afraid the authorities wouldn’t put serious effort put into apprehending a killer whose only targets were men a lot of people thought deserved whatever they got.

  “We’re not even sure there is such a killer,” she had said then. “But I told you all along, I won’t abandon you. One of the things I do is provide security services for people. And I could do that for you. I could—”

  “Oh no,” he objected. “I wasn’t implying you should do that.”

  “I could put you up in a safe place.”

  “But I’m supposed to live at Villa St. George, and—”

  “I know, but they’ll make an exception under the circumstances.”

  “Even if they did, Kirsten, what about the others? I mean, it’s gotten so they look to me … for encouragement.” He seemed embarrassed. “Anyway, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Fine, then I can provide extra security right there.”

  “No, there’s the expense. I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “You don’t have to ask. You were there for me when I needed it, and I owe you.” And this might be her chance to finally get that debt off her back.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “What I did for you was … well … it was a long time ago. And I didn’t do that much. Anyway, listen to me.” He leaned across the table and sounded almost angry—or like someone trying to sound angry, anyway. “I want you to stay out of this.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “But what you want has nothing to do with it.”

  She meant that, and she could tell that he knew it. They finished lunch in silence and hadn’t spoken again of her involving herself.

  They’d gotten very good at not speaking about things.

  * * *

  Now she pulled to a stop near the building entrance. Michael opened the car door, then closed it again and turned to her. “I really don’t want you to get caught up in—”

  “Like I told you at lunch,” she said, “it’s not about what you want.”

  “But—”

  “Wait.” She took a deep breath. “Dugan told me there’s been a third killing … from the list.”

  “My God, what—”

  “I don’t know anything more and I don’t want to discuss it now. I’m going to do what I can.”

  “Well then, at least…” He was having difficulty talking. “At least you should be paid. I’ll talk to the others about … I guess … putting our money together.”

  She sat in the car and watched him disappear into the building. His earlier statement, that he hadn’t done much for her, just wasn’t true. She was the only one who knew. She’d never told a single person about what happened to her in Florida. It was so … stupid … and embarrassing. She always knew she should at least tell Dugan but could never get herself to do it. She’d kept it a secret so long, and it just never seemed to be the right time.

  * * *

  It had been only a few weeks after she’d graduated from high school. She’d been struggling with her parents for years and, finally, after a huge fight with her mother, she took the Greyhound to Fort Lauderdale—literally ran away from home—with a girlfriend. She was eighteen, after all, and they refused to treat her like an adult. She took her graduation money and the two girls planned to party awhile, then get an apartment and get jobs. What could be simpler?

  What actually happened was that the friend got homesick and went back, while Kirsten—suddenly free of a lifetime of rules—threw herself into a whirling blur of beaches and volleyball and all-night parties. She got drunk way too often and got way too little sleep. Then one night, in a bar, she met the most wonderful guy. He was older, like thirty or something, but he was single and had his own business—a real estate office. His father’s business, really, but his father was retiring soon and he would be taking it over. He seemed so wise and sophisticated—not immature and irresponsible like the guys her age. This man actually listened to her, tried to understand what she was about.

  Sexually he was way ahead of her—who wasn’t?—but he was patient and considerate, and with him life wasn’t just about drinking and having sex. It was about tenderness, and humor, and interesting, fun things to do … plus drinking and having sex. He cared about her as a person, too. She ran out of money and he got her a job in the real estate office, and advanced the security deposit and a month’s rent on a tiny condo one of his clients owned as a rental unit. Only later did she realize that she should
have talked to the receptionist who was let go to make room for her.

  When she got pregnant she was surprised, and terrified. Worst of all, he was enraged. It frightened her to listen to him. He said she’d lied to him about her precautions. But she hadn’t. It was just … well … they hadn’t always been thinking clearly. He was beside himself, like a person she didn’t even know. Didn’t she realize that he couldn’t afford to be saddled with a baby? He said there was only one choice for her. He’d pay for an abortion and he’d talk to his dad about letting her keep the job … until she got on her feet.

  She cried for two days straight and then called home, but they had their own crises to deal with. Her mother was severely depressed and angry at Kirsten and at the world. Her dad, a Chicago cop, had just shot and killed a woman and was entering into a terrible struggle that would eventually make him leave the department. So she told them things were going great with her, and she’d be coming home for a visit any time now.

  She stopped drinking, but still she was sick all the time. She missed a lot of work and they had to get someone “more reliable.” She went through two horrible months of pregnancy while she made up her mind, and then she had the abortion. This was followed by some complications that she didn’t quite understand, but which kept her too tired and sick to look for another job. After the abortion she never saw the guy again and didn’t want to.

  She couldn’t pay her rent and, finally, after one more long, sleepless night on a sofa in the apartment of some people she barely knew, shaking and cramping up and terrified, she called the only person she could think of—her priest uncle, a man who had once had a drinking problem, and had beaten it.

  Michael flew down the very same day, got her to a doctor, paid for a decent hotel room for her. She cried nonstop and eventually told him everything. He listened, and kept telling her that her life was going to work out just fine, and that we all do things we wish we hadn’t. At the time, she had no idea just how well he knew that. She did know how much he disapproved of what she’d done, especially the abortion, but he never said she was stupid, or selfish, or sinful. He never asked her to go to church, or even to pray. He said God loved her, and she should just try to hold onto that idea, and that would be enough for now. Eventually he took her back to Chicago and never told her parents or anyone else what she had done—or even that he’d gone down there and brought her home.

  All her family knew was that she came back. She had a really nice tan, her friends said, and seemed a little more … well … grown up or something.

  11.

  As she drove away from Villa St. George Kirsten dug out her cell phone and called the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office in Rockford. “Sergeant Daniel Wardell, please.”

  While she waited she realized Dugan was right. If she was only providing security, there was no real necessity to talk to the cops investigating the murders. But she was in it now, and she couldn’t help wanting to know more about the killings … and the killer. It might help her protect Michael. Besides, Wardell probably wasn’t in, and if he was, he probably wouldn’t—

  “Wardell here.”

  She introduced herself and he seemed willing to talk to her. She said she thought maybe the state police would have taken over the case by now.

  “No way,” he said. “Those guys would drag a body across the road to get it out of their jurisdiction. This one’s mine.”

  She was fifty miles away, but the body count was growing and she didn’t want to waste time. So she pressed him and he said he’d meet her at ten o’clock, at a Dunkin Donuts near the sheriff’s office.

  * * *

  At five after ten, Kirsten walked into Dunkin Donuts just as two cops in uniform were leaving. A slope-shouldered, heavyset man in a rumpled gray suit sat in one of the place’s two booths, nursing a cup of coffee. She was sure the lone patron was Wardell, but neither of them acknowledged the other. She ordered coffee and corn muffins at the counter, feeling his eyes on her the whole time, and then took the cup and the bag with her to the booth. He didn’t stand as she slid onto the seat across from him, just nodded and lifted his hand in a sort of vague salute. He was fiftyish, with intelligent eyes and a confident, world-weary demeanor. She’d worked with lots of cops, and she could pick out the good ones. Wardell was one of them. She showed him her ID and thanked him for seeing her.

  He said he promised Larry Candle he’d talk to her if she asked, because he appreciated what Larry had done for him. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I was a Cicero cop and my career was in the toilet. He saved me.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that many favorable stories about Larry. What happened?” She asked because Wardell seemed to want to tell her about it, and it was a way to get the conversation started.

  “I’ll make it the short version,” he said. “It’s three A.M. one night and I’m solo and I pull over this drunk who’s driving half on the sidewalk. The guy’s belligerent and tries to pop me one. He missed, but I was young and stupid and I totally lost it. Beat the shit outta the mope. Turned out later he was mob-connected, but I didn’t know that. So I rough up my uniform and rub dirt on my face and call for backup, and we take him to the E.R. to get him patched up first, and then to the station and charge him with resisting arrest and battery of a police officer. The usual. The next day, though, he’s got witnesses. Two guys, also low-level Outfit, saying they were in a car behind me. Total bullshit, but they claimed they saw it all. I was going down for sure, but one of my buddies was a cousin or something of Larry Candle. The guy was mostly an ambulance chaser but he had got my buddy out of a jam. So I went to see him. I’d have swore he stepped out of a cartoon, but he got the job done for me, too.”

  “Really,” Kirsten said. “Larry doesn’t strike me as having … I don’t know … a keen legal mind.”

  “Yeah, well, he fucking saved my ass, pardon the expression. The mayor of Cicero at the time—not the woman who went to jail—but one of the ones before her, he was supposedly mobbed up, too. And Larry claimed he knew somebody who knew the mayor. All I know is, pretty soon the police brutality charge got dropped, the charges against the mope got dropped, and everyone was happy. Except that Larry … ah … suggested I better leave the Cicero department. So here I am. Best move I ever made.”

  “Damn,” Kirsten said, “just when I think I have Larry Candle figured out—like he’s an obnoxious, little loudmouth shyster—I discover some new something he’s done that I hadn’t—”

  “Uh-huh.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t have a lotta time, y’know?”

  He told her that after Larry Candle’s call he’d checked her out through some contacts he had … Chicago cops. He didn’t say what responses he got, but they must have been at least halfway favorable, because he agreed to share “a few of the facts” with her “off the record,” things not given to the media about the killing of Thomas Kanowski on I-90.

  She had the clear impression that as they spoke he was trying to make up his mind how far he could trust her.

  He said his supervisors were stressing the lack of similarity between his case and the murder of the ex-priest Stanley Immel in Minnesota. “Still,” he said, “some people—including you, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me—think the two killings are connected, and that they’re just the beginning.” He paused. “Some people also think the priests on that list are animals and deserve whatever they fucking get.” He leaned toward her, staring. “Guess you don’t feel that way, huh?”

  “My feelings, and yours,” she said, “aren’t on the table.” She leaned forward then, too, and kept her eyes fixed on his. “Some cops—including you, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me—do their jobs the best they can, Sergeant Wardell, regardless of their feelings.”

  She waited, and finally he nodded, just slightly. “The name’s Danny,” he said, and leaned back in his seat.

  She did, too.

  12.

  “The Minnesota killing,” Kirsten said, “Sta
nley Immel. That was a stabbing, right?”

  “Don’t have all the written reports yet,” Danny Wardell answered, “but ‘carving’ sounds more like it. Victim stripped naked and tied to a kitchen chair, then sliced repeatedly with a large knife. Skin hanging off in strips. Bled to death.” He paused. “Oh, the guy had a small dog, some kind of mutt. Dog got it, too, but not the same treatment. Just laid out on the kitchen table and smothered under a sofa cushion. The thing is, although it beats the shit outta me how they can tell, they say the dog was done before the man.”

  “God,” Kirsten said, “he made the victim watch his dog die first.” She put down the corn muffin she’d been buttering and took a deep breath. “But anyway, Kanowski’s murder was brutal, too. So that’s a similarity.”

  “Murder’s always brutal, but these two were very different. Kanowski died of a bullet through the brain. Entering at the back of the neck, angling up and exiting out the top of his forehead.” He demonstrated with his hands. “Except by that time he had no forehead, because it was blown away. No slug found. Weapon probably an automatic, maybe nine millimeter, possibly silenced. I say that because he was probably shot not far from where he parked his car at the rest stop, and even if there were no other cars there at that time of night, it would have been risky to fire a gun. The trail isn’t entirely clear, but it seems the body was dragged about thirty yards to an area not visible from the parking area, then laid out on its back and cut up with some kind of knife.”

  “The mutilation was post mortem?” she asked.

  “Doc says no question.”

  “Was there any … you know … pattern to the cutting?”

  “Pattern?” Wardell shook his head. “Whoever it was opened the victim’s jacket and shirt to expose his skin, pulled his pants and underwear down to his knees, and went to work. Throat, chest, stomach, lower abdomen, down to and including his genitals. No pattern. Not the sort of careful strips it sounds like there were in Minnesota. Just a mess of blood and organ tissue all over.”