Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  I nodded. “I think you are right,” I said. But, oh, how I wished he would be wrong.

  It was three days before I could make myself ask his Eminence the question that had been poisoning me. I could no longer hold it in.

  “You have questioned those with whom he did his evil, Poitou and Henriet.”

  He was a chancellor at the moment and brusquely busy with neglected affairs of state. “I have,” he said. He seemed annoyed at the interruption, though he did look up at me, which he did not always do.

  “Thoroughly?”

  “Thoroughly enough to know that they are his accomplices in evil and should suffer whatever fate may befall their master.”

  “So they knew the manner of death for these innocents, then.”

  Jean de Malestroit evinced a bit of discomfort. “Not all were innocent, Guillemette. There were some who appeared to have sought out Lord de Rais’s company to take advantage of his position. One cannot say those young men were entirely blameless.”

  I did not wish to waste time arguing that point, for my resolve was waning. “But those who were younger—you know the manner in which they died.”

  “I do.” He set his reading down and leaned back in his chair, perplexed. “Is there something specific you would ask, Sister?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “There is.”

  “Then speak it, if you will be so kind; there is work before me and I would like to resume it.”

  “The younger ones,” I asked, “say, ten, eleven years old—how were they killed?”

  “Cruelly,” he answered. “How else?”

  “No, I mean what were the exact methods he used to end their lives—”

  “Guillemette—”

  “Tell me.”

  He paused before speaking. “Some were killed by having their blood drained. Others were slit at the throat and then decapitated.”

  For a stunned moment, I was quiet.

  In the name of God . . .

  I was almost relieved, because it was not what I’d expected to hear. But true relief would not come until the final answer had been given.

  “Were any slit up the belly?”

  He looked directly into my eyes. “Yes. Most. Now, why do you wish to know these gruesome details?”

  I ignored the question completely. “Eminence, I would go on another journey. But this one will be longer than the last. I would like your permission to take Frère Demien with me.”

  He set aside his work. “That is impossible. You cannot be spared just now.”

  “Ask Sister Élène to take my place.”

  “And Frère Demien is needed as well—”

  “The harvest is well in hand. We can both be spared.”

  “But where now? We have already—”

  I raised my hand, and he allowed himself to be silenced.

  “There are things I would know,” I said.

  chapter 20

  The plane went up like a rocket out of John Wayne Airport and lurched quickly to altitude, but the rest of the flight was decent, and it seemed shorter in duration than the interminable security checks we went through prior to getting on board. We set down in Newark; it was my first in-person look at the diminished cityscape. Everyone on the plane was silent as we taxied to the gate. It seemed only proper.

  The five of us went in a shuttle to our mediocre hotel. Being the only girl, I had a room to myself, whereas the guys were doubled up. It would work out perfectly. I actually learned some stuff in the class that Friday. It was too bad that I would have to miss the next day—the instructor had talked about covering some topics that sounded really interesting. Search engines that were specifically designed for investigative work, pay-as-you-go services, some similar to Lexus Nexus, that focused on bad guys. But I had things to do. Saturday morning I snuck out of the hotel at 0600 while everyone else was asleep. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door handle and tucked a note under one of the guy’s doors to the effect that I’d been up all night with female troubles and wanted to sleep. Big strong cops could face guns without flinching, but a tampon is a whole other matter.

  Detective Peter Moskal would be waiting for me at South Station, which he assured me was very convenient to Southie itself. I told him I would be happy to take a cab, but he insisted on picking me up.

  I recognized him right away by the gold shield hanging off the pocket of his leather jacket, but he was not the shabbily dressed, worn-down donut depository I expected to see. Moskal was Clint Eastwood-handsome, right down to the cragginess. He had great hair, neatly cut and styled. He was trim and tall and had a friendly ease about the way he moved. Not a bit of gray, though he had to be in his late forties at least.

  No wedding band.

  “I guess they start cops real young here,” I said.

  Big smile. “Yep. I was four when I went into the academy. But I’m ready to retire, at least according to my wife.”

  Damn. The good ones are always taken.

  “I want to thank you for giving up part of your Saturday for me.”

  “It’s okay. None of my kids had anything going on but homework, so it wasn’t a problem. I can’t help them with their math anymore anyway.”

  He gave me a melting smile.

  “So,” I said, all business, “you have the files?”

  “Sitting on my desk. I thought we’d go there and take a look at them—there’s a lot of material. Then if you want I can take you around to the scenes. But they’re not the same as they were back then. I hope you’re not expecting to find anything new after two decades.”

  “I’m glad that the buildings are still there. Cripes, in L.A. it seems like buildings go up and down every year. I just really want to see where these things happened. I’m starting to develop a sense of who this Durand is; I want to see if I can place him there. And if there’s time, I’d like to talk to anyone who might have been involved in the original investigation.”

  “You’re going to be disappointed about that. The lead detective is—well, let’s just say he’s a pretty serious alkie. He can barely talk anymore. The sergeant who first came on the scene retired about three years ago with a nice pension. Found out he had cancer not long after that and died last year.”

  “Damn. I hope he took the spousal benefit.”

  “He wasn’t married.”

  “Well, at least he didn’t leave an impoverished widow.”

  “No. Sean O’Reilly came from a pretty comfortable family. In fact, he was Wil Durand’s uncle.”

  “Cut it out. No way.”

  Buildings whizzed by as he nodded. “It’s true. I grew up right here in Southie and I actually knew his family. We all know each other here, at least by reputation.”

  The shock of this revelation took a moment to settle in. “Forgive me if I’m making false assumptions,” I said. “But isn’t Moskal a . . . European name? I thought Southie was a pretty tight community of Irish-Americans.”

  “Well-put, Detective,” Moskal said with a laugh. “It’s Polish. I guess they give you diversity training out there too.”

  “Once a year, whether we need it or not.”

  “My mother’s maiden name was O’Shaughnessy. They let her back in even though she married a Pole.”

  “Oh, well. There you go.”

  There we went, into his car, which he’d left in a loading zone—no one was going to give him a ticket. We worked our way southeast through the Boston waterfront, an area marred by stalled transitional construction. Gradually, over the course of a quarter mile, industrial gray cinder block gave way to pastel yellow and green row houses. The city’s glacierlike push into the residential neighborhood was unmistakable. I wondered how hard the neighborhood was pushing back, or if the ice had already settled in.

  “Durand’s got two sisters alive, and his mother—Sean was her brother. They live in a real nice house on the beach. I would definitely suggest that you talk to someone in the family; they’re an interesting bunch.”

  “Ho
w so?”

  “Well, for starters, Wilbur Durand’s sister is Sheila Carmichael. Half sister, I mean.”

  She was one of those lawyers with a high Dershowitz factor and a national reputation for making prosecutors jump off bridges. I’d seen her on television many times, as a talking head for some client whose right to commit mayhem was in danger of being abridged by the unsympathetic lackeys of the taxpayers, myself among them. Her defining feature was a barely tamed mass of deep red hair with a Bonnie Raitt–style white streak. A formidable woman, all steel, all the time.

  “I guess he won’t have any trouble getting an attorney, then, if he turns out to be the guy I’m looking for.”

  “Probably not. The family is lace-curtain Irish, though they’re not Kennedy-rich, just comfortable. Jim Durand was his mother’s second husband. The first one, Brian Carmichael, died young. Left her with a bunch of kids. You’ll want to talk to someone in the family.”

  He kept saying that. I was aching to ask why, but it felt too soon.

  The South Boston precinct had no lot of its own; blue-and-whites were parked in layers along the front of the building. Moskal pulled the car into the first available space.

  “And I thought we had parking problems.”

  “Your streets this narrow?”

  “No.”

  “Then you haven’t lived.”

  “I’ll bet our traffic jams are worse than yours.”

  He gave me a big broad smile and melted my heart. “Take the southeast distressway at four o’clock on a snowy Friday afternoon. Then you’ll know what a traffic jam is.”

  It was an odd little game of one-upsmanship, but fun, and it took the edge off. As soon as we entered the dilapidated building, I knew he would win the bad-office contest hands-down. Moskal’s desk was crammed into the corner of a room with a stained ceiling and rusting heat pipes.

  “Welcome to my domain,” he said. “Such as it is.”

  The files were right there, neatly stacked and squared up to the edge of the initial-scarred desktop. He picked up the pile and handed it to me. “This should keep you busy for a while. I’m about to make a coffee run. You want anything? I go to the Dunkie right down the street. They have bagels and muffins and all that.”

  I asked for coffee and a blueberry muffin and tried to give him money. He refused it and left me there with the files. They were heavy in my lap, so I set them back on the desk again and took the first one separately. I dove into the written report.

  The first boy who disappeared in South Boston—Michael Patrick Gallagher—was thirteen years old but young-looking for his age, the classic “good boy” who did well in school and never got into trouble. He was last seen in mid-afternoon at a South Boston corner store, where he emptied his pockets of pennies and nickels to buy two candy bars and some gum. He parted ways with a small group of his regular companions at that corner. His arrival time at home should have been around 3:30 P.M., but it was a Friday afternoon, when it was not unusual for Michael to stay out later if he had little or no homework. When 7:00 P.M. rolled around and he had not yet made an appearance, his mother made several nervous phone calls to his immediate group of friends, which proved futile. His father called the police at 7:20 P.M. A patrol unit was sent via radio call to the Gallagher home. The police officer who took the call on this disappearance began the investigation with the standard questions to the parents: Did they have any reason to think he might have run away based on how things were for him at home and at school? Did they in fact know how things were going in school for him? Had there been any recent noticeable change in the boy’s behavior? No to all.

  The officer searched the home to eliminate any possibility that Michael might have come in unnoticed and fallen asleep somewhere or, worse, might be unconscious and unable to hear his parents calling. He was satisfied within a short time that the boy was not in the house and that the parents were being truthful with him, that this was probably not a case of a runaway teenager whose family didn’t realize there was trouble in his life. Michael had a favorite television show that appeared in reruns on Friday afternoon at 5:00 P.M., but he had not come home to see it. His mother stated that she was very surprised he had missed it.

  A description and photograph of the missing boy had been sent out on Teletype and distributed to all patrol officers within the city of Boston. The case was then assigned to a detective in the South Boston district. The initial incident report was signed by the patrol cop, one Peter Moskal.

  I was just starting to read the other detective’s last overview of the case, a bitter chronicle of frustration, as Moskal set my coffee and muffin down on the desk.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were the first one on the scene?”

  He got very philosophical on me. “It seemed like way too much of a coincidence. I don’t know, I guess I felt a little spooked. But when I heard what you were asking about, I was really glad. I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to work on this one. I asked to reopen this case a number of times over the years, but they would never let me do it without new evidence.”

  I sat back and regarded him. There was excitement in his expression, to replace the previous troubled look, and fire in his eyes. “Well, Detective, looks like you’re going to get another trip to the plate on this one.”

  “Let’s just hope I don’t get thrown a curve. This whole thing always felt so unfinished to me. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, until now. I should thank you.”

  “Well, it’s my pleasure,” I said. “I think. But speaking of unfinished, I have to get back to New York tonight. So prioritize my day for me, if you wouldn’t mind, based on what you know.”

  He reached over and took the remaining files off the desk and dropped them on top of a nearby cabinet. “Forget these,” he said. “Or at least put them aside for now. The Gallagher kid’s case is the most complete of all of them, and if you’re going to pick up anything, it’ll be there. We’ll go to the scene first—it’s not far. And then I would talk to the Gallagher family. His father and a couple of brothers still live in the neighborhood. If there’s any time left, there’s someone I think you should definitely talk to. A real nice woman—knew Durand’s family pretty well, but sort of from the side, so she doesn’t have any kind of protective loyalty. Lady by the name of Kelly McGrath. Her sister Maggie was a caretaker in the Durand house for a while—she’s gone now, though, from cancer too.”

  “It’s an epidemic, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll say. Hope it doesn’t get me.”

  “Ditto.”

  Moskal made three calls for me before we set out for the scene where the Gallagher boy was found. Sheila Carmichael’s answering service said that she was out of town and would not be returning calls until Monday; he left no message, but wrote the number down for me so I could at least call her when I got back to L.A. Patrick Gallagher, Michael’s father, said he would love to talk to me; according to Moskal, he even sounded eager. And Kelly McGrath would be happy to have me over around teatime. We would go straight from her home back to the train station. It would be a grueling little tour.

  “I could try to find the detective who did all the follow-up on this case if you want, but I have to tell you, the guy won’t be much help.”

  “Right now I have too much to do and not enough time. But I could call him from L.A.”

  “I don’t know if he has a phone anymore.”

  “He’s that bad?”

  “Worse.”

  He drove; I read. The interviews conducted by the now-alcoholic were complete and beautifully done; I hated to think about that kind of skill going down the tubes. There was a discernible chronological escalation of the man’s anxiety in each report he wrote, much like I’d seen in Terry Donnolly’s work. When the shutdown finally came, it was one of those whimper-not-bang situations. The investigation just sort of burned itself out, taking with it a previously fine police officer.

  He had rounded up all the known pedophiles in the ar
ea, as I had, at the request of his supervisor, also as I had. Three suspects, all white men in their thirties, were questioned beyond the initial interviews but later released because no evidence could be found to link any one of them to the boy’s disappearance.

  He had extensively interviewed all of Michael Gallagher’s buddies, none of whom recalled anything unusual or disturbing about the afternoon’s events or the boy’s demeanor. Michael had bade them all a smiling good-bye, according to the transcripts, and then headed in the expected direction toward home with a half-eaten chocolate bar in his hand. One of the friends recalled watching Michael unwrap the rest of the bar as he turned a familiar corner, after which he could no longer see him.

  That was the last reported sighting of Michael Gallagher until his body was found the following Monday morning.

  The car came to a stop in an alley behind what appeared to be an abandoned building. It was a narrow triple-decker house with railed porches off the back. Clotheslines extended from each porch to a utility pole across the alley. It was altogether depressing, even a little scary.

  “Here we are,” Moskal said. We got out of the car and he led me straight to the bottom porch. He pointed to the lattice that enclosed the porch base to cover the support posts.

  I pushed on one of the panels; it gave slightly but wouldn’t open more than a couple of inches.

  To my great surprise, Moskal kicked it in with one vicious thrust of his foot, disturbing whatever lay within.

  “Nice place for a kid to die, huh?”

  It was dank and smelly and filled with cobwebs. God alone knew how much rat shit had been deposited onto the dirt floor, how many skeletons of mice had been left behind by stray cats, how many skunks had shot off their glands in there, how many winos had escaped the rain. All of their leavings would have been worked further into the dirt during the assault on Michael Gallagher, probably by downward pressure from his belly as he was raped from behind.

  The boards below the porch were suffering from terminal dry rot along the bottom edges. “Looks empty,” I said quietly.