The Shadow Priest

by D. C. Alexander

  "Some minister of economics in France."

  "France, eh? If memory serves, I believe there's a place in France where the naked ladies dance."

  Arkin's face was blank.

  "You don't get the reference? A place in France where the naked ladies dance? See, Nate, you've been so insulated all your life, surrounded by chess-playing Andover dorks who hide behind academics because they can't get laid, that you're culturally illiterate."

  "Exeter dorks. Exeter. And, as usual, your prose is as awkward as the day is long."

  *****

  Soon they were walking to the pub after having to park Morrison's car down on Main Avenue. Though it wasn't yet Thanksgiving, many of the shop windows were already decorated for Christmas. By autumn, Arkin usually began hoping for an early, heavy snowfall. But this year, given Hannah's condition, all he cared about was being able to drive her to the hospital if he needed to.

  As they passed a candy shop, Pratt said, "Hold on, fellas. I want to look at something in that window."

  "The marzipan vegetables?" Morrison asked. "And you call yourself an American?"

  "No, not that crap. It looked like there was peanut butter fudge on the silver tray on the left."

  "Fudge?"

  "Yessiree."

  "You live up to your nicknames, Junior."

  As they doubled back, they passed a man wearing frayed blue jeans and a puffy black down jacket. As he slipped by them, keeping to the inside edge of the sidewalk, Arkin happened to catch a look at the man's shoes. The brown suede oxfords again. Arkin looked up to see the man's face, but he was turned away, as though examining something on the wall of the building he was walking past. The only thing on the wall was a standard no parking sign.

  The tiny hairs on the back of Arkin's neck stood up. What were the chances of his passing two different pairs of identical suede city shoes in this out-of-the-way western town on the same day? And if it was the same man, what were the odds it was a coincidence that Arkin would run into him again, and that the man would be wearing a completely different outfit even though barely an hour had passed since their first encounter? Durango was a small town, but still. Arkin stopped and turned around for another attempt to see the man's face, but the man was walking away from him. There was a motorcycle parked five feet away. Arkin hopped over to it and pressed a button to sound its loud horn. He held it down, the bike's horn filling the street with its obnoxious din. Yet while he wasn't more than 20 yards away, the suede-shoed man didn't turn around to see what the noise was about. He kept walking. Arkin let go of the horn and watched as the man rounded the corner and disappeared.

  "The fuck are you doing?" Morrison asked, looking half amused.

  "That guy who just passed us."

  "What about him?"

  "Ever see him before?"

  "I didn't get a good look. Why?"

  Arkin didn't answer, but watched the street corner, hoping the man would come back around. He looked up and down the street, eyeballing each pedestrian, looking for anything odd. Looking for the maroon Impala he'd seen by the Ore House. Nothing stood out. Against his better judgment, he took off after the man. But when Arkin finally rounded the corner, the man was nowhere to be seen.

  *****

  They grabbed a booth. Arkin and Morrison each ordered a stout and a glass of bourbon. Pratt asked for soda water with grenadine.

  "So what was that about, your little scene there back on Main?" Morrison asked Arkin.

  "Paranoia."

  "Over what?"

  "Being surveilled."

  Morrison's eyebrows rose. "It's funny you say that."

  "Is it?"

  "I've had the old tingle myself. Nothing solid. Just a feeling."

  "Where?"

  "Well, on the way here, for example. I swear I saw just the tiniest pause in a couple of pedestrians as we doubled back to the candy shop. That watcher's 10th-of-a-second, involuntary pause of contemplation. You know the one."

  "I do. But you didn't see it in the guy I was eyeballing?"

  "No. Not him. But I wasn't focused on him. It was a woman following behind him by about twenty yards, and a man on the far side of the street. What caught my eye was that they both did it simultaneously, the little pause."

  Arkin told them about the brown suede shoes. "Like I said, I'm probably just being paranoid."

  They sat silent, drank their drinks, and ordered another round along with two dozen hot wings. All the while, unwelcome theories, implications, and fears began to take shape in Arkin's mind.

  "So what do I do about this file?" Pratt finally asked as he licked buttery hot sauce from his fingers.

  "Oh, I meant to tell you, I made some calls. If there's anything to be found, it'll be found tomorrow and shipped to you."

  "You think you'll get better results than I did?"

  "I called Killick."

  Pratt's eyes popped wide. "You called the director of ops, for me? I'm going to remember you come Christmas, Nate, even if you are a heathen."

  "Don't count your chickens."

  "About you being a heathen?" Morrison asked. "Has Pratt finally convinced you to convert?"

  Arkin smiled.

  "You don't think they'll find anything." Pratt said.

  "I don't know. Maybe not. It's all very odd."

  "So what if they can't find anything?"

  "Then I can at least tell you the rest of what I know about the case."

  "Let's have it right now," Morrison said. "Your overuse of cliffhangers is getting just a little bit too irritatingly cute, even for you."

  "I don't have the energy."

  "Come on, you big pussy."

  Arkin sat slumped.

  "What the hell is wrong with you? You look like shit."

  "Thanks."

  "No, really. What's going on with you?"

  "I don't know. I haven't been sleeping very well. This case—" He shrugged.

  "The Priest case? What about it?"

  "It brings back a lot of dark memories for me." Arkin paused. "And Hannah—" He shook his head. "I think she looks worse. I think she might be going downhill."

  Morrison's expression softened. He slid his own tumbler of bourbon over to Arkin. Arkin caught it in his right hand, looked at it for a moment, then drank it and slammed the empty glass back down on the table. Hell. He sat up straight, a new intensity filling his eyes as he stared at himself in the large mirror that hung behind the old wooden bar. He lay his arms flat on the table. "Father Bryant was officially reported drowned in 1974."

  "Drowned," Morrison echoed. "Case closed. And then?"

  "And then, decades later, I did some poking around. To my astonishment, the archdiocese let me take a look at their archived records without a subpoena."

  "That has to be a first."

  "I copied the books covering the early years of the Royburg parish's existence and did a rudimentary audit. Pretty simple accounting. At any rate, what I found was eye-opening to say the least."

  "Do go on."

  "Over a period beginning three months after the industrial accident and ending the very month of Bryant's disappearance, the per capita tithing of the parish was almost exactly fifteen percent below what it was during the first years of the parish and in the years after Bryant was replaced by a new priest."

  Morrison nodded. Pratt looked perplexed.

  I crunched the numbers and figured that from 1968 to 1974, Bryant skimmed more than $12,000. A tidy sum in those days."

  "You think he walked away with the cash?" Pratt asked.

  "Not exactly."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean it would have been hard to travel inconspicuously with a burden of $12,000 in small bills pilfered from the collection basket. I took a guess that he'd opened a bank account somewhere. Somewhere he could go in his regular civilian clothes, and where folks wouldn't recognize him. So on this hunch, I visited all the banks I could find within about thirty miles of Royburg, figuring he wouldn't want to go f
arther than a single hitch-hiked ride of reasonable duration. Of course, many of the banks that were around in the seventies had long since gone belly up. Some had been taken over by larger banks. Most all had long since purged their records of old, dead accounts. And most had long since dumped all old paper records in introducing computerized systems. But to my absolute disbelief, I found a tiny, tiny, stand-alone bank in the little town of Acuff—about 27 miles east of Royburg—that not only had a plain old 'Mister' Collin Bryant as a customer, they actually had the paper records from his account. The bank was founded by Great Depression survivors who had a policy of keeping everything—literally every record or document they or their relatively small circle of customers ever generated—in boxes in their basement. They never threw anything away."

  "And?"

  "And Bryant had closed his account in 1974, exactly three weeks before his disappearance, wiring the balance of his $12,223 savings account to the account of a 'Collin Brant,' no 'y,' at a bank in Nanaimo, British Columbia."

  "Nanaimo?"

  "Vancouver Island. Hometown of Diana Krall, the jazz pianist. But here I hit a dead end. On the Canadian side, we could find no surviving records of the account or the wire transfer, and the only Collin Brant who ever lived in the province was a different guy. A lumber mill worker from Prince Rupert, younger than Bryant by seventeen years. So best I could figure, Bryant worked up some form of fake ID to facilitate the wire transfer, then dropped it and went underground with his big pile of money. Unfortunately, that was as far as I could track him.

  "So that was it?" Pratt asked.

  "Did you really just say that?" Morrison said to Pratt. "Did you really just ask Arkin, our resident clairvoyant and winner of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, if 'that was it'?"

  "Well, I mean, I—"

  "—am an ignorant Utah hillbilly? We know."

  "Not seeing a way forward, I backtracked. Dug back through the case file. In fact, I did exactly what you're doing now," he said, turning to Pratt. "Got credit card data, found a pattern of gas station stops within a couple hundred miles of three Zastava shootings and involving the same credit card account number, and then traced the account to a Wyoming LLC: Beartooth Expeditors. I subpoenaed the articles of organization and found that it was owned by another company. A Canadian company—PPK Packers of Port Hardy, British Columbia. Also on Vancouver Island. With the help of our Canadian liaison, I was granted permission to go up there for a covert look. All I found at the address of record was an empty, rotting, long-abandoned salmon cannery. It had obviously been boarded up for years. I walked all around it, not knowing what to look for." Arkin's eyes were fixed on a something far away as he told the story. "Then, on the back corner of the building, in an area of gravel driveway overgrown with weeds and blackberry vines, I saw them."

  "Saw what?" Pratt said.

  "New fasteners."

  "Fasteners?"

  "Screws. Quite unlike the regular nails that had been used to board up all the other windows and doors. The nails were all thoroughly corroded. But the screws holding the two-by-fours into place over this tiny, nearly hidden fire door were practically new, spray painted flat black to hide their shine. But I spotted them. I ran to the nearest hardware store to buy a screwdriver, came back, unscrewed the boards, picked the simple doorknob lock, and stepped inside. The place stunk of the stale air of disuse, of rodent excrement, dampness, and mildew. There were dead flies everywhere—on the windowsills, more scattered about the dusty floor."

  "And there were footprints in the dust. Many sets of footprints, some older, some new, all from the same sized foot, and all leading from the fire door to a tiny side office partitioned off from the greater interior of the warehouse. In that office, under a tarnished brass mail slot cut through the outer wall, lay a pile of unopened mail, free of dust, with cancellation dates no more than two weeks old. Most of it was junk. But there was also a postcard with nothing in the text section but a series of three ten-digit numbers, as well as one sealed phone bill addressed to 'PPK Packers.'"

  "Was there a phone in the building?" Pratt asked.

  "No."

  "Maybe they'd forgotten to cancel their phone service when they went out of business."

  "But if nobody was paying for the line, the phone company would have cut it off in short order and sent the amount due to collections," Morrison said. "And this place had been out of business for years. So who was picking up their mail and paying the bill?"

  "Exactly. I figure someone was using the number to communicate via remote electronic voicemail. Somebody calls the voicemail system and leaves a message. Someone from somewhere else retrieves it. I held the phone bill up to the window to try to see what I could see through the outer envelope. Most of the text was of such a small point size that I couldn't make it out. But the total amount due looked to be either $54 or $64 and change. I put everything back just as I'd found it, resealed the door, then staked the place out from the woods across the road. After five days of eating hideous freeze-dried food and sitting bored out of my mind in a clammy plastic camouflaged poncho out in the never-ending British Columbia rain, watching the place through binoculars, a man finally appeared. An Asian man, maybe 5-foot tall. He was jogging, dressed out in a runner's typical rainy day garb. He made one pass, running on down the road, around the bend and out of sight. But then he doubled back, slowed, turned into the narrow gap between the building and the encroaching brush, and disappeared."

  "He could have been taking a leak," Pratt said.

  "It would have been a long leak. All in, he spent about as much time in there as I figured it would have taken him to unscrew the door, grab the mail, and reseal the place. He wasn't holding anything in his hands when he emerged, but his pockets bulged as though filled with papers. Needless to say, I tracked him home and forwarded his address and license plate number to my Canadian liaison. Came back as a Zhang Zhou, Canadian citizen granted asylum from mainland China 22 years earlier. A refugee of some sort. Clean record up north. Anyway, in an unbelievably bad stroke of luck with respect to timing, within hours of dictating the report of my discovery to headquarters via telephone, I was bluntly summoned back to headquarters by the director of personnel. I was to appear before a board of inquiry formed to review my conduct in Indonesia. I returned home, and immediately asked our Canadian liaison to subpoena Zhou's bank and phone records, as well as the phone records for PPK."

  "And?"

  "And the only calls made to PPK's number were from burners. Unregistered, disposable cellphones, purchased from convenience stores or shopping mall cart vendors, pre-charged with however many minutes."

  "Shit," Morrison said.

  "But," Arkin said as he held up a finger, "I also found a deposit to Mr. Zhou's main checking account, in the amount of $64.33, made exactly one day after he'd paid his mysterious visit to the abandoned PPK cannery."

  "Get out!" Morrison said, his face breaking into a smile. "Did I not tell you he was the fucking best there ever was?" he said to Pratt. "So who made the deposit?"

  "Another Canadian company, this one in Vancouver."

  "What was it called?"

  "Something with an 'S.' Or maybe an 'F.'" Arkin's expression changed. He looked Pratt and Morrison each in the eye, in turn, then turned his own eyes downward. "I can't remember."

  "What?" Morrison asked. "You, mister steel trap for a memory? You can't remember?"

  "Nobody's perfect."

  "Nobody's perfect? Are you shitting me? You? With something that critical?

  "I got the call from my Canadian liaison," he said, sounding deeply frustrated. "I wrote the name of the company down on the very top line of the very first sheet of paper in a brand new yellow notepad. I used a red pen. After the liaison rung off, I put the pen in my right-hand desk drawer and took a long sip of hot coffee from my Exeter mug." Morrison and Pratt sat rapt. Arkin shook his head, looking suddenly quite worn down. "Then I got a rather distracting phone call from
the deputy attorney general's office bluntly ordering me to a meeting, right then and there, to discuss the results of the personnel inquiry."

  "And then what?" Pratt asked.

  "Then nothing. Then, in my agitation over the ominous and urgent summons to the personnel inquiry meeting, and not anticipating the immediate need to do so, I failed to record the name of the Canadian company in my memory. Then, I was suspended for two weeks without pay. Then, I was escorted from the deputy's office straight to the back door, without a chance to stop by my office, after having my badge and gun taken and my coat and umbrella all but thrown at me. Before the suspension was up, I was issued orders to redeploy to Durango, and all the cases I was working for the D.C. office were taken away from me. The deputy attorney general himself ordered me to keep my nose out of them. And I never again saw the yellow notepad with the name of the Vancouver company on it. The most I ever learned after that was that the new agent the Priest case was assigned to did a couple of months of follow-up before the case was closed out for 'lack of actionable evidence.'"

  "They didn't even let you go back to your office?" Pratt said. "So you couldn't get or even see your yellow pad with the name of the Vancouver company? The timing!"

  "One of the more rotund building security goons met me and the security goon who was escorting me down from the deputy's office at the back exit with a box containing my personal cellphone, my sack lunch, and my travel coffee mug. And, as I mentioned, they gave me my coat and umbrella. That was it. No yellow pad. Nothing to do with any of my cases. Just an acid glare for the road from each of the guards as I stood on the sidewalk, half in shock, looking back at them as they pulled the door shut behind me. You'd have thought they told those guys I'd been downloading child pornography on my work computer. Don't call us, asshole—we'll call you."

  "That must have pissed you off to high heaven."

  "It was a thousand years ago."

  Morrison grinned hearing this. "Oh sure. You can tell yourself that all day."

  "I still have a copy of that photograph though."

  "Exactly," Morrison said.