The Rule of Sebastian

by Shelter Somerset

  In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit… I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth….

  He prayed the rosary the way he had when he’d worked cases back in Philadelphia. Many of his fellow officers, most of them Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Polish, uttered Catholic prayers for guidance.

  A quick glance at Brother Eusebius, and Sebastian realized he’d mumbled aloud. He opened his mouth wider to apologize, but Brother Eusebius had begun to join him in prayer. He too had clasped a near-complete rosary to his chest and recited the Apostles’ Creed, followed by the Our Father.

  Their prayers fizzled, and they continued their toil in silence. After work, Sebastian popped into his cell and dug among the contents of his small chest of meager possessions. He pushed aside the pocket Bible he’d carried with him during college, the Flyers baseball cap he sometimes wore when he worked outdoors in summer under the harsh mountain sun.

  He found it, still secured inside the small box where he’d stowed it when he’d left the police force four years ago. He took it out and lifted it to his eyes. The faint light filtering through the window glinted off the stainless steel.

  Many of his fellow officers had worn St. Michael pendants around their necks. And always made the sign of the cross instinctively when a call dispatched them to investigate another homicide, usually one per day in Philadelphia. Clenched in his fist, the medal magnified the resolution to conquer a brutal world.

  The reality of the situation tapped him on the shoulder. JC had been murdered. Inside their abbey. By one of his fellow brothers.

  Without any further delay, he draped the chain around his neck and slipped the medal out of sight inside his tunic. The cold chain sent a shiver along his spine. Too much time had lapsed since he’d relished the tickle against his chest.

  Sebastian was more than a Trappist monk, a fellow brother. He now donned the garb from his past. A homicide detective. Suspicious of each of them.

  By Retire, Sebastian had the quiet of the abbey to search for something useful. While everyone was tucked inside their cells, he walked the corridors, looking for a probable path the killer might have taken when he’d moved the body to the freezer. Obviously, the body had been moved. He suspected the crime had taken place inside JC’s cell. But who among them possessed the strength to have carried him from there to the freezer? Only himself, Casey, Brothers Micah, Lucien, Eusebius….

  What if he didn’t act alone? Had two brothers carried the body into the walk-in freezer?

  He tried to engage his old investigative and profiling skills. Did JC bring out desires in one of the brothers that would cause him to murder? Which one of the brothers had been ready to snap? If that was the motive, who might be next? Casey was the youngest—and by far the most attractive. Did they have a sociopathic serial killer on their hands? Someone who’d succumbed to the harsh, isolated winters high in the mountains and was looking to strike again?

  Little intelligence had been obtained from the slipshod medical examination Brother Jerome had conducted. Brother Jerome had admitted he had scant forensic experience. But Sebastian, focusing on the laid-out body of JC, had understood what he’d gazed at. The killer had struck JC’s left temple with some kind of blunt instrument, causing him to pass out, and then carried his body into the freezer, where he’d eventually asphyxiated or froze to death. The blow was dead on, no scraping or cutting. A solid hit with level force from a wide swing. Sebastian wanted to see more. Persuading the abbot to allow another medical examination might prove more difficult than the investigation itself.

  He walked down the long corridor outside the cells, acting as if he were heading to the bathroom in case any of the monks were to emerge and ask why he prowled about. Their doors were closed tight, including JC’s former cell. He opened the door, half expecting to find JC’s ghost sitting on the edge of the neatly made bed. Although he shared a wall with JC’s cell and hadn’t heard a commotion the night of his murder, the attack might have come swiftly and been nearly soundless. Plus, there had been a storm that night. Glancing around for what seemed the tenth time, he hoped a clue that he’d missed before might jump out from hiding.

  Faint moonlight cast a muted drabness on the already bland, tiny room that smelled of the familiar mildew, with a lingering hint of sandalwood. It looked untouched from when he’d last gazed inside. The wall shelf sat empty and pitiful. The chair pushed snug under the desk. His mind wandered, churning, deliberating. He shut the door tight and slinked away.

  His feet carried him farther into the abbey. He searched for a blood trail, markings along the corridors. Any signs of unusual scuff marks. Probing for clues, reliving his old steps through the rougher sections of Philadelphia’s northeastern neighborhoods.

  He found himself looking into the kitchen. Brother Micah had scrubbed the counters and the chopping block, set upon the back wall, and the dinner pots and pans were stowed away and he’d shut off the lights for the night. Everything exactly as it should be.

  Sebastian opened the walk-in freezer. Cold air bit at his exposed toes. The floor was covered with tracks. All with the same sandal sole pattern, yet different sizes. More than Brother Micah—who, as the abbey’s cellarer, would have reason to walk in and out of the freezer—had tramped about. Even remnants of Delores’s paw prints crisscrossed the floor.

  The crime scene had been horribly corrupted. Captain Terry Reems back in Philadelphia would’ve chewed him out for disturbing the integrity of the scene. But his mind, fastened on the perspective of a monk’s when he’d discovered JC’s battered body, hadn’t registered normal investigative protocol.

  Spreading frost coated the trash bags that cocooned JC. He remembered carrying JC inside from the snowstorm and washing him and enveloping him in blankets while he was still unconscious. He had wanted to augment his body temperature. That no longer mattered.

  Before replacing him in the freezer, he had placed JC’s bloody cowl in a bag and taken it to his cell, where he’d examined it numerous times, but without modern forensic technology at his disposal, the blood markings meant little, other than JC had most likely been killed before he was wearing the cowl. He had to work primitive. Or, as Captain Reems used to call it, “slogging lean.”

  He scouted around JC’s body. Perhaps the creepiest crime scene Sebastian had examined—and he’d examined many. He laid a hand to his heaving chest, where underneath his tunic hung his St. Michael medal. His increasing breath came in thick bursts of hoary steam. He gazed around. Nothing in the freezer spit up any more clues than the last time he’d checked.

  Because the body had frozen, he and Brother Jerome could not definitively determine an exact time of death from hypostasis or rigor mortis, but there was little doubt the killer had struck when everyone was asleep in their cells during the night, sometime before the call for Rise.

  The killer probably wanted to conceal the body temporarily, and then once he had the opportunity, toss it someplace undetected. Maybe even the incinerator. Killers loved incinerators and dumpsters. But why hadn’t the killer taken the body there directly? In a fit of desperation, the killer had wrapped the body and shoved it in the freezer until he could clear his mind. Or maybe he knew well enough that a human body could not disintegrate in temperatures less than fourteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

  Sebastian closed the freezer door and peered around the kitchen. He switched on the light, waiting a good few seconds for the fluorescent bulbs to flicker to full brightness. Everything looked in its proper place. Brother Micah made sure his kitchen remained spotless and tidy. If any clues had remained, they’d been long scrubbed away.

  Sebastian held his breath. He stepped closer to the magnetic wall strip that held Brother Micah’s knives. He’d seen the knives so often, he hadn’t thought to look. He’d even used them himself when asked to help prep meals. They lined up in order, except for a single strange gap.

  But what did a missing knife have to do with JC’s murde
r? The killer had bludgeoned him with a yet unknown object. He placed a finger to his head and scratched to pull blood into his brain. Throat clearing behind him forced him around.

  “What are you doing?” Brother Micah said, peering at Sebastian.

  “I was just thinking of getting something to help me sleep, some warm milk or hot cocoa.” Sebastian forced a smile, tried to look nonchalant.

  Brother Micah smiled back. “Can I make something for you?”

  “I’ve actually changed my mind. But thank you for asking.” He nodded over his right shoulder. “Did you know you’re missing a knife?”

  Brother Micah screwed up his eyes and inspected the knife strip closer. “You’re right. My fillet knife is gone.”

  Sebastian had been right. “I know how you prize your kitchen utensils. I hope it didn’t break. When was the last time you used it?”

  “A few days ago. Saturday, I believe. I sometimes use it to peel apples when I make applesauce. I find it easier to control than the peeler, which was designed for righties. I didn’t break it. I don’t recall anyone else using it. And I emptied the dishwasher firsthand.”

  “Maybe it’ll turn up.”

  Brother Micah stood motionless, his unfocused eyes on the wall of knives. “The ladies’ auxiliary in Monfrere gifted it to the abbey two summers ago,” he said. “They’re very expensive, from what I gather. Made in Massachusetts. A two-hundred-year-old manufacturer.”

  “Perhaps you can order another one. A single knife can’t be that expensive.”

  “Yes, I suppose I could.”

  “Should I shut the light off, or are you staying to get whatever it is that brought you into the kitchen?”

  Shaking his head, Brother Micah smiled like an impish boy. “I’ve changed my mind too.”

  “Then I’ll walk you to your cell, Brother Micah.”

  “Certainly, Brother Sebastian.”

  Sebastian bade Brother Micah good night by his cell and returned to his own, where he sat at his desk in the dark. The howling winds outside only seemed to jumble his head. He pulled his blinds shut and put his face in his hands.

  On Saturday, Sebastian ventured into the basement, where the brothers incinerated their trash during the winter. In summer, a service hauled out the garbage they couldn’t compost. The thin smokestack, the most visible edifice after the bell tower and which they used only during tourist season, puffed dark clouds into the wintery sky whenever they burned their garbage once a week—Saturdays.

  Sebastian had volunteered to cart the trash down in the service elevator and burn it for an excuse to rummage for clues. JC had been killed Tuesday night. Had anyone tried to discard vital evidence before the Saturday burn?

  “Brother Sebastian.”

  Sebastian glanced up right before opening the primary chamber, the flashlight he’d concealed inside his scapular squeezed in hand.

  Casey approached him. “I followed you here. I wanted to speak with you alone.”

  “Do you have news about JC?”

  “I went onto the computer in the administrative office, the one accessible only to a few others. I found the security password hidden away in a desk drawer.”

  “But I asked you to stay out of trouble.”

  “I had a perfect opportunity, so I took it.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  Casey shook his head, his eyes downturned and his cheeks darkening. “Not before Brother Lucien came. Unfortunately, I can’t access that computer anymore. Someone already changed the security password. Do you think it’s the killer?”

  Two mice scurried past them and into a dark recess. Need to get Delores down here, Sebastian thought, scratching his head. “Father Paolo probably detected someone using the computer and he changed the password, that’s all.”

  “I don’t think I cleared out the cache to cover my tracks, I’m afraid. Or maybe they always change the password on a recurring basis. That would explain why Brother Hubert would have to write so many. But I can’t find any new ones left in the desk like last time. I can recheck later, if you want.”

  Sebastian peered behind Casey’s shoulder toward the elevator shaft. “That won’t be necessary. I doubt they’d leave the passwords lying around again. Father Paolo’s too edgy about anyone on the outside finding out about JC.”

  “I can almost understand why,” Casey said, carrying on Sebastian’s reflective tone. “Imagine what the publicity would be like if the media learned a murder took place inside a monastery. Journalists can be vicious hounds. They’ll twist the truth and turn it into a worse scandal than it already is, making it into nothing but entertainment.”

  Sebastian examined Casey’s features, obscure in the basement’s murky lighting. There was something all-knowing in those chocolate brown eyes of his. “That’s very true,” Sebastian whispered. “Very true indeed.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful.”

  Sebastian set aside his flashlight. “You’ve done fine, thank you. In the meantime, you can help me rummage through the garbage bags before I torch everything.”

  Casey scooted closer. A strange, excited grin stretched the smooth skin around his mouth. “You think someone might have wanted to burn evidence?”

  “Exactly. Now you sort those two bags, and I’ll look through these. Careful, now.”

  For several minutes they dug among the trash until Sebastian sighed and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Nothing here. What about you?”

  “Just garbage. Lots of potato skins and apple peels and coffee grinds.” Casey shook his hands free of the grime.

  Sebastian scanned the flashlight at the trash by Casey’s feet. “You’re right. Looks like common garbage. Let’s check out the incinerator. There might be something left behind from the last burn.”

  “But JC was murdered on Tuesday. We don’t burn trash until today.”

  “I wondered if I had smelled smoke Tuesday night. I’m thinking someone might have come down here in the middle of the night. Do you recall smelling anything?”

  “I wish I did.”

  Sebastian recalled his strange dream the night of JC’s murder. He’d seen Casey playing the flute by a cliff above a tree-filled gully, a bright angel surrounded by the dark clouds racing above. Then he realized the dark clouds were billows of smoke, and a raging forest fire had snuck up behind him. He remembered the stench of smoke, so real he could taste it. The abbey’s three wood-burning fireplaces never created such an odor, even when lit simultaneously. The incinerator, when torched on Saturdays with the low air pressure of a cold winter day, often did. Had the smell of someone lighting the incinerator filled Sebastian’s dreams?

  With a quick flex of his wrist, Sebastian aimed the flashlight inside the chamber. The brothers had burned much garbage throughout the winter. Mounds of ashes and charcoal chunks stood as relics to discarded moments in time. The frugal brothers burned mostly foodstuffs, cardboard boxes, and a meager amount of paper products. He roved the flashlight along the bottom and into the back and around the edges, where the less burnable trash piled up. The incinerator was still warm from the last burn, which Sebastian believed had been Tuesday night.

  “When I found JC in the walk-in freezer,” Sebastian said, his voice echoing inside the chamber, “he was wearing a cowl over his street clothes. Why would he be in a cowl in the middle of the night? His jacket and knapsack are both missing from his room.”

  “You think the murderer tried to burn them to make it look like JC had left like he planned?”

  “I hope to find out.”

  Sebastian also hoped to find whatever blunt instrument the killer had used to strike JC on his left temple, along with the missing fillet knife. He glanced over his shoulder at Casey standing watch. He paced, peered around the corner toward the elevator and stairwell, wrung his hands. More nervous than Sebastian. Perhaps he shouldn’t have enlisted his help. Too much for him to handle.

  But Casey he trusted. That’s why he’d asked him to be
his secondary. Too bad he could no longer access the computer. Maybe Sebastian should talk to the abbot about that. He did request he look into JC’s murder. Computers proved instrumental in any good, modern investigation.

  Sebastian shoved his head deeper inside the chamber, almost as if he wanted to suffocate those troublesome notions. Stink of soot and cinders and rancid garbage made him turn up his nose.

  A strange thrill exalted him. The hairs on his nape stood erect. He wanted to pull Casey closer in a sudden rush of good feeling. Someone had murdered a guest of theirs, yes, but only Sebastian had the gifts to solve the riddle. He searched and prodded and penetrated, like he had for eight years before being forced out of the PPD. But he understood his expanding confidence, not the horrendous crime, tickled him.

  “Grab me that poker.”

  Casey handed the poker to Sebastian, and Sebastian raked among the ashes and debris to see what lay underneath. He pulled closer to his view a strange looking half-dollar-sized object. He laid the poker aside and stood to get a better look at the object in the light.

  “What is it?”

  “A buckle of some sort,” Sebastian said. “Partially melted, but clearly a buckle. Made from tough polyurethane. Hard to burn. Not to mention poisonous.”

  “You think it’s the buckle from JC’s knapsack?”

  Sebastian grinned at Casey. “That’s my guess. I can’t think of anything else. But who knows how long it’s been buried in there. Could be from anything.”

  He scavenged through more of the debris. “Here’s something extra.” He pulled out a thin, slinky object about two feet in length.

  “It’s a zipper, looks like,” Casey said.

  “Long enough to fit a coat about the size JC wore. Not sure what all this means, other than it confirms my suspicions.” Glancing back inside the chamber, he said, “Doesn’t seem to be much else here. We better head back upstairs before everyone thinks we’ve fallen in.”

  Casey and Sebastian loaded the primary chamber, after which Sebastian secured the loading door, struck a match to the firebox, and stepped back to watch the flames fill the chamber.