So far, the young detective in blue jeans appeared normal enough, though rather well dressed for a civil servant. As a boy, he had worked in his father’s tailor shop, and he well knew the quality of the wonderful linen blazer draped on the back of her chair. So good was his sartorial eye, he could even attest to her T-shirt’s fine grade of silk.
Kathy Mallory’s eyes were focused on the glowing screen of a computer, and the light of a desk lamp gave her another halo, but the priest was long past that deception. As he approached, she did not turn to him in any natural fashion. The golden head swiveled—machinelike—and she did not look up to meet his eyes. No recognition at all. He might well be a piece of furniture with a clerical collar. This was an old, cold quirk of hers, one that used to unhinge him with the thought that she was not quite like the other children, not human, no heart, no pulse.
In a more worldly sense, she was not much changed in her mid-twenties. The high cheekbones were more pronounced, but she was otherwise a taller replica of the child with the cream-white skin and cupid’s bow lips. He often wondered if that lovely face had been the chief complaint of Sister Ursula, the ugly antithesis of Kathy. Yes, that would have set the old woman off. The nun would have regarded the infliction of pain as tempering temptations of the flesh, punishing a little girl for the crime of—
“Sit down, Father Brenner.” Kathy Mallory’s half-smile welcomed him to hell. It was a given that if she seemed at all happy to see him, it was only because she liked the diversion of toying with his soul—as if she had that power over him.
Well . . . did she not? Obediently, he settled into the wooden chair beside her desk.
“What brings you out tonight?” Her silken voice gave him no clue of inflection. Her red fingernails were more telling, drumming the desktop, prompting him to get on with his reason for bothering her.
He might begin with the news that her old nemesis, Sister Ursula, had died, but before he could open his mouth, she read his mind to say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Her condolences on the dead nun were delivered with an expression of pure pleasure, the way a cat might smile with a mouse in her teeth—at the moment before she bit down hard to break the creature’s back. No mercy, no forgiveness.
No surprise there.
“I’ve come about another nun,” he said. “A young one, close to your age. I’m afraid for her.” No sympathy was expected on this account. He could only hope to intrigue. “Sister Michael disappeared yesterday. She’s already been reported to Missing Persons. They said they’d look into it. . . . I know what that means.” Goodbye, Sister, and best of luck to you. “But I believe she was kidnapped.”
“So there’s a ransom demand.” Hardly intrigued, the detective turned back to the screen of her laptop, a sign of dismissal even before she said, “Go talk to Major Case. They handle that. We do homicides here.”
And it would take more than one homicide to interest her. Over the years spent following her career with the NYPD, he had learned that the Special Crimes Unit was best known for cases with a high body count, the bloodiest carnage in New York City.
“Ransom?” He scratched his head in a calculated show of vagueness. “Well, I don’t know about that.”
“No note? No phone call?” She faced him again, eyes narrowed. “Then why would you think it’s a kidnapping?” Clearly, she did not believe him.
Good. That should hold her attention. Oh, just the chance to catch him in a lie, to make him twist and squirm—how she would love that. “This is all I know,” he said. “Sister Michael was on the way to visit her mother on St. Marks Place. She started out in the morning, but never got there. That was yesterday. And we both know that Missing Persons is not out looking for her.”
“They’re swamped with runaways.” Her eyes closed in the slow blink of a contented cat, and he knew he had her now, for she was playing harmless when she tossed off the afterthought that “People are always walking away from their old lives.”
“If she wanted to leave her order, she would’ve worn street clothes, not this.” He set a snapshot on the desk. It was a bit damp from his hand. He had carried it all through this day into night. It pictured a young woman in the long robe and veil of a cloistered nun. “And I know she bought two red roses in her mother’s neighborhood. I talked to the man who sold—” Oh, no, he was boring her. Well, on to the bit he had saved for last. “I can promise you that Sister Michael’s mother does not have the mayor’s ear . . . but that man knew about the disappearance before the Missing Persons report was filed.”
He thought she might like that part, but it was hard to tell. She was tensing, as if wound by a spring and set to—
She leaned far forward. And, whiplash fast, he sat well back.
“What else did you hold out on Missing Persons? They’re not idiots over there. If you’d told them—”
“I wasn’t the one who made that report. . . . I don’t even know Sister Michael.”
Her eyes flickered. A eureka moment?
“So the church is cop-shopping,” she said. “Reaching out for a detective who’ll play nice with the ugly parts. . . . That’s why they picked you? Because they think we had a warm, cozy relationship when I was a kid?”
A good guess in some respects.
“I did go to Major Case,” he said. “Their detective sent me away after five minutes. I had no proof of kidnapping. That’s what he told—”
“You think there is proof. You think I can get it for you. So there was a ransom demand.” Her tone accused him of lying. Fair warning. It was confession time at the police station. “Where’d you get your information, Father? I know Mayor Polk won’t play golf with any priest lower than a bishop. Who told you he already knew about—”
“I can’t give you a name.”
“You can!” Her fist hit the desk as punctuation. “Nobody sent you here under the Seal of the Confessional.” Her sudden expression of anger fell away in the flip of a switch to one of resignation, which must be an equally false mask. “All right, just tell me what church politician talks to the city politicians. Does that make it less like ratting out another priest?”
Yes, that would do. “Father DuPont is on the cardinal’s staff. He’d be the one to—”
“And what’s the nun’s name?” She turned away from him to face her computer.
“I told you. Sister—”
“Her real name.”
Not the saint’s name taken with her final vows. The archangel had been a fierce choice for a nun—a name that was the battle cry of the good angels in the War of Heaven. “In her former life, she was known as Angela Quill.”
The detective tapped her keyboard. “So this woman disappears, and you jump to the conclusion of . . . what? A satanic nun collector?” She tilted her head to one side, her face a parody of innocence when she asked, “Why is that?”
“Hey, Mallory.” A man with hooded eyes slouched up to the desk. His dark hair was silvered with enough gray to make him at least twice her age. Raising one hand, he warded off her response. “I know. Half a day shot. I went home for lunch and walked in on a stickup. Took me forever to get through the booking.” He turned an affable smile on the priest. “I live over a bar. The owner’s my landlord. If I’d let the perp walk outta there with the cash, my rent would’ve gone up.” The man sloughed off his wrinkled suit jacket and sat down at the desk that faced and adjoined Kathy Mallory’s. The garment slid from his lap to the floor, and he left it there.
Not a tidy man.
Though the cheap suit did have an odor of spot remover, those shoes had not been polished in recent decades. This wardrobe-challenged detective introduced himself as Riker. “I’m her partner. What can we do for you, Padre?”
Not a Catholic.
Father Brenner pulled a folded sheet of paper from his cassock pocket. The bold type above the nun’s grainy portrait asked, HAVE YOU SEEN HER? This was his mission
statement at a glance, and he handed it to the man. “That’s my last one. I’ve been taping them up in store windows.” Sister Michael’s photograph was, more accurately, a picture of what she wore. Her face was the smallest element in the frame, and not what he had counted upon to stand out in the memory of the public. But her long robe and veil would be a rare sight on city streets.
“A dress-code nun,” said Riker. “Wearing that getup of hers must be hell in this heat. Is she from the Brooklyn convent?”
“No, she’s from the Monastery of Saint Bernardine. It’s about sixty miles upstate. The nuns have a website and a tractor, but otherwise, their traditions are centuries old. We have no pictures of Sister Michael in other clothes, and no family members to help with—”
“But her mother’s alive.” Kathy Mallory smiled to say that she had caught him in another lie, though he had yet to make even one false statement. “You told me the nun was on the way to visit her—”
“The mother only had the same photo I used for my poster. I called on the woman this morning.”
Detective Riker held the nun’s poster at arm’s length, the distance for a man who ought to wear bifocals. Brows knit together, eyes squinting, he asked, “Is that face—” The man looked to his partner, as if she might have an answer to that half a question.
And she did. As her laptop was angled toward Riker, Father Brenner saw the full-screen display of Sister Michael clad in a torn red camisole that hung from one bruised shoulder by a flimsy string. The makeup was garish. The dark hair was spiked and streaked with purple dye.
It was an old police mug shot.
Kathy Mallory raised her eyebrows, as if only mildly curious. “One of your more interesting nuns?”
Detective Riker stared at the screen image that gave up the name in bold capital letters. “Quill!” He looked down at the poster and tapped the date of the nun’s disappearance. “Two Quills go missing on the same day?”
—
ALMOST THERE.
Detective Riker had cadged a ride out of SoHo in the backseat of a patrol car, and now he rolled north past the skyscrapers of Midtown, heading for the Upper East Side, the heart of the search for a kidnapped schoolboy.
How long had his partner intended to toy with Father Brenner before mentioning Jonah, the other missing Quill? Riker wasted no pity on the priest. That old man had known what he was dealing with before he walked in the door of Special Crimes.
Kathy Mallory was also—special.
As the car rounded a corner, he saw a familiar face on the street and leaned toward the patrolmen in the front seat. “Guys? I’m gettin’ out here.”
The driver pulled to the curb half a block from this precinct’s station house, and Riker stepped out on the sidewalk to shake hands with an old friend, a sergeant like himself, but not in the Detective Bureau. Murray was still in uniform and now in charge of the officers canvassing Jonah Quill’s neighborhood.
After their exchange of Good to see your ugly face and What’s up, Riker was told why the kidnap story had not been fed to reporters. “The kid’s uncle is loaded with money,” said Murray. So, on good odds of a ransom demand, the crime had not gone public. And there were no worries about leaks to the press corps. The police commissioner had menaced news outlets all over town with naked threats to people’s private parts, a time-honored practice officially known as media cooperation.
Riker slung his suit jacket over one arm as he walked down East Sixty-seventh Street alongside Sergeant Murray. They passed by a woman with a Great Dane on a leash, and the detective had to wonder how large the lady’s apartment might be to accommodate a dog the size of a pony. How many acres of floor space? Downtown, south of Houston Street, Riker was considered a social climber because his bathtub was not in the kitchen.
He gave the nun’s poster to Murray as they entered the local police station, a landmark building from the late 1800s. Though Riker’s own station house was also more than a century old, it was less grand. This one, disguised as an oversized town house, had been built to blend in to a patch of the 19th Precinct that was filthy with millionaires. But the neighborhood had no flavor, no music. There might be some history to it; the detective did not know or care. No rockers had ever sung songs about this part of town, and that said it all for Riker.
Sergeant Murray, not so vain as the SoHo detective, put on his bifocals, the better to study the small face on the poster. “I’ll be damned. Nobody told us about any nun. . . . She looks just like Jonah.” He led Riker up the stairs to the second floor, saying over one shoulder, “Tell you what we got. Cops downtown reported sightings of a blind kid tapping his way up a street with a white cane. They can place him in the East Village that morning. But we got other sightings in the Bronx and Queens.”
“The East Village fits with Sister Michael,” said Riker. “We know she bought flowers on St. Marks Place around nine that morning.”
“Well, this’ll get us some leads.” Sergeant Murray held up the poster for a second look. “What’s up with those dicks at Missing Persons? We should’ve had a copy of this. The nun’s even got the kid’s smile.”
“Shit happens.”
The sergeant nodded to say, Amen, brother, and then he stopped by a closed door at the top of the stairs. “We keep him in here.”
The door opened by a few inches to give Riker a covert look at a civilian half his age, who sat at the far end of a conference table that was littered with paper cups and take-out cartons, pens and yellow pads. The young man’s head was bowed, and his hands were clenched together in a white-knuckle prayer.
Murray kept his voice low, saying, “That’s the kid’s uncle, Harold Quill. He won’t go home. Don’t expect much, okay? The guy’s punchy. No sleep since his nephew disappeared.”
The lean, dark-haired Quill sported a stubble of beard, and the wrinkles in his expensive suit were also a few days in the making. When the detective and the sergeant entered the room, the man looked up with the eyes of the boy and the nun, large and gray and ringed with black lashes, but his had a vacant look of no one home. His skin was bloodless. And a puff of air might push him over, not that he would notice.
Riker had seen this before—what was left of a man when a child went missing.
After Sergeant Murray made the introductions, the detective sat down beside the distraught uncle. “So . . . you got a family connection to Angela Quill. Is that right?”
No response? Was this guy debating whether or not he should answer that simple question without legal advice? Rich people—could they even answer a damn phone without a lawyer?
“Angie’s my sister,” said Harold Quill. “She’s a—”
“A nun, yeah. Was she meeting up with your nephew yesterday morning?”
“No! Why would you—” Quill covered his face with both hands, as if that could make a cop disappear, and he shook his head. “I drove Jonah to school. . . . He should’ve been in class.”
“The nun’s gone missing, too. My partner’s downtown talkin’ to your mother. Do you—”
“No!” Harold Quill grabbed Riker’s arm, and the detective pretended not to notice that this man’s fingernails were digging into him. “Promise me,” said Quill, “promise you won’t tell my mother where I live!”
—
DETECTIVE MALLORY was Mrs. Quill’s only visitor from the NYPD. Evidently, her son had failed to tell police that his kidnapped nephew had a grandmother on the Lower East Side. Less surprising, no one had even telephoned for a statement on the disappearance of her daughter, the nun. Most surprising? This woman had taken the dwindling of her family members quite well—as if one or two of them might vanish on a typical day.
“I called the prioress to tell her what I thought of my daughter for standing me up.” In a lower voice, the mother muttered, “That bitch. That whore.”
And would the nice detective like some tea?
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Statuettes of saints cluttered every surface in this stuffy parlor that stank of scented, votive candles, the odor of cinnamon warring with rosemary and lavender. All the walls were lined with portraits of Jesus: a laughing Christ and a weeping one, but predominantly bloody, suffering Christs nailed up by hand and foot, and these images had set the tone of the interview with Mrs. Quill, whose mouth was forever frozen in the downturned arc of the righteous, whose eyes were way too wide and laser bright with the light of the Lord.
Mallory sat on the sofa, flipping through the family photograph album. Useless. Most of the faces pictured here had been scratched out, though not all of these erasures were done with the same tool. Some cuts were sharper than others. Beside her sat the scrawny matriarch of the family, dressed in a prim white nightgown. The loudmouthed crone guided the detective, page by page. And so Mallory discovered that images of the husband had been the first mutilations.
“May he rot in hell! He left me with three damn kids.”
Next in the order of abandonment came the scratched-out face of a blond daughter.
“Gabriel. Gabby, we called her. She was fifteen when that picture was taken. That’s when she ran away from me. A year later, she died giving birth to a bastard.” Mrs. Quill said this with great satisfaction, as if that death might have been payback for a child born out of wedlock. The woman lowered her voice and leaned closer to share another happy confidence. “Gabby’s son was born blind.”
Even a more seasoned detective would have flinched. Mallory only looked down at one more photo of a faceless girl, and this one had dark hair.
“Oh, that’s my Angie, the other goddamn whore.” Mrs. Quill reached out one bony hand to turn to the next page, and there was the only unscarred picture of this daughter, a recent addition that had yet to be pasted in with album corners. Sister Michael was posed in the robes of a nun. “She redeemed herself . . . with the church.” Sarcasm suggested that the nun had yet to be redeemed here at home.
Every picture of Mrs. Quill’s son, Harold, had the face scratched out in the year he had sued her for custody of his nephew, Gabby’s blind child. “Poor little Jonah. They stole him from me—Harry and that bitch social worker. By now, the boy’s drowning in sin.” A photograph of this child as a toddler, who had yet to commit any known sin against his grandmother, had survived the knife cuts of omission from the family.
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