True Believers

by Jane Haddam

  He took her out into the hall, and then across the hall into the side of the church proper. There was a little corner there that was cut off from the people in the pews. The only way they could have been seen was by somebody praying in the Mary Chapel, but the only person in the Mary Chapel was stretched out on a pew and fast asleep. Marty looked at the pews in the center of the church and felt a moment of hesitation. What had happened to Mary McAllister? Usually she had the homeless people up and moving by this time. He hadn’t intended to do what he was going to do in full view of thirty people—and especially not these people, who were not right in their minds and might be set off by it. On the other hand, he didn’t see what else he could do. If he waited any longer, Father Healy would come down to change. The Sisters of Divine Grace would come over from their convent. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe he would be able to get past all of them with Bernadette.

  Marty looked out at the pews again. The homeless people were still there, but now he made sure that nobody else was. People knew that Catholic churches were open twenty-four hours a day. They came in at all hours of the day and night, to pray for help or to offer repentance. At least, that was the theory. Marty had never actually known anybody who did something like that. He checked the front of the church, and the back. He squinted long and hard at the great double doors. He looked at the empty stretch of floor in front of the Communion rail. He had never noticed before that the church had so many statues, or that they looked so dead. He made the sign of the cross. Bernadette would have killed him for that last bit. She did not think that statues of the Blessed Virgin were dead.

  Somewhere in the back, a light flickered. It happened so fast, he thought he might have imagined it, except that the homeless people seemed to have noticed it, too. The ones that were awake began to move around on the pews. One or two of the ones who weren’t moaned in their sleep.

  It was now or not at all. Marty knew that.

  He hefted Bernadette higher into his arms and started out across the church proper. Several of the homeless people noticed him, but they said nothing. They didn’t even come to look at what was going on. Where they came from, they probably saw things like this all the time—people too drunk or stoned to walk on their own; people being carried and lifted from one place to another. Marty didn’t think it would occur to them that Bernadette was dead.

  He got to the very center of the Communion rail in front of the altar and put Bernadette down carefully on the floor. There was a good thick carpet there, so he didn’t have to worry too much about her being uncomfortable. He made the sign of the cross in the general direction of the monstrance, where a consecrated Host was kept for the adoration of the faithful. He wondered if the Church counted the homeless people as keeping the Host company through the hours of the night. It was terrible. He knew so little about religion, even after all the time he had spent with Bernadette. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that God hated him, and that he must have hated Bernadette even more. There was no other explanation he could find for why the things that had happened to them had happened to them. God’s love seemed to be reserved for people like nuns and priests and people like Mary McAllister, who came from big houses in the city or the suburbs and went to colleges like St. Joe’s that cost more in one year than most people made in two. He knew that people were not supposed to be born cursed, but he was sure that was exactly what had happened to him.

  Bernadette was lying in front of the Communion rail, her body uncurling slowly, almost as he watched. Marty reached into his pocket and took out the gun. He had bought it on the street for two hundred dollars, along with two rounds of ammunition, and he had no idea if it was what the man who sold it to him had said it was. A .357 Magnum. That was what he had wanted. He was only sure it was a real gun, because he had insisted on test-firing it first.

  The homeless people hadn’t noticed the gun any more than they had noticed Bernadette. They might not have been able to see it. Marty looked at the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Mary Chapel, and then at the cloth-draped marble altar that was made to look like a banquet table in the palace of a prince of the blood. The church ceilings were even higher than the ceilings in the rooms around it. The cavernous space seemed to be full of wind that blew in and out of his ears in hiccoughing gusts.

  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he said to himself.

  Then he put the gun in his mouth and blew off the back of his head.

  PART ONE

  God is expensive, but he has very good taste.

  —SHIRLEY CURRY

  ONE

  1

  For Gregor Demarkian, for most of his life, the inevitable end of a successful criminal investigation did not exist. He had been called into court from time to time to testify to something he had seen or heard or analyzed. When he had been a special agent for the FBI, he had been called to court particularly in kidnapping cases. Later, when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, he had watched other men go to court in his stead. Behavioral Sciences dealt with serial killers, and they went to court far more often than kidnappers did. Gregor had a theory about that, eventually. It was that murderers were almost always entirely self-absorbed. A kidnapper was after money. When he failed to get it, when his plans went haywire and he found himself in custody, his primary objective was to save his skin. If a decent plea bargain would do that, he would take it. Murderers were different. Somebody who killed in the heat of the moment might be willing to listen to reason when he was arrested and in jail, but the kind of murderer who planned it almost never was. That kind of murderer wanted to star in his own movie, to be the focus and center of attention, to have all the world’s cameras trained on him. He wanted people to know how shimmeringly brilliant he had been, even though that knowledge would send him to the electric chair or the gas chamber or, as was more and more often the case now, a hospital gurney with rubber restraints and a lethal injection. Gregor sometimes wondered if they liked it, all the way to the end, the ceremony and solemnness of it. He wasn’t sure, because this was the part he didn’t know about. His objections to capital punishment were moral and practical. He had seen exactly one execution, and he had never been interested in seeing another. He only thought that the old line from Dr. Johnson was not entirely accurate. The prospect of hanging might work wonderfully to concentrate the mind for some people, but for others it only heightened the sense of specialness, of being a chosen instrument, of being the next best thing to God.

  Now he padded into the living room and confirmed his suspicion that Bennis was, indeed, asleep on the couch. She had curled up into a ball against the leather, with one of his own robes bunched up under her head for a pillow. The television was on and turned slightly on its stand so that she could face it directly while lying down. The morning news was playing, with another story about the suicide of that young man at St. Anselm’s Church. Gregor frowned slightly—it had been over a week; the fuss and fumbling had gone on far too long—and wandered back down the hall to his own bedroom to get dressed. His hair was still wet from his shower. His neck was cold. Outside the big living-room window, the world was mostly dark. Sometimes it seemed to him impossible to figure out what to do in these situations. He almost never knew what to do about Bennis at all. Everything he did do was somehow off—not wrong, exactly, but not really right. He wondered if he ought to be satisfied that, in the mess this had become, she had not started smoking again—but he had a feeling that that had more to do with Bennis’s fundamental stubbornness than with him.

  Suddenly, on a whim—no, more on a premonition—he went back to the living room to check on her again. He was wearing his boxer shorts and his socks and his shirt and his tie, but the tie was still hanging around his neck like a scarf. He was all too aware of the fact that his big window had no curtain. If Lida Arkmanian happened to come to her window across the street at just this moment, she would catch him in his shorts. The trick was that Lida would not come to her window. She always had her breakfast
coffee in her kitchen, which was on the ground floor in the back. Gregor looked at Bennis and hesitated. He had no idea what he had intended to do when he got there. Bennis had not moved. The coffee table she had pulled up next to the couch was littered with debris, but it was the debris of somebody who had stayed up all night to watch the creature features: a coffee cup still half-full; an open bag of Chee-tos, barely touched; a half dozen crumpled paper napkins that looked as if they had been used to wipe up spills. Bennis looked haggard and half-dead, the way she did most of the time these days, but at least she had gotten out of her clothes and put on an oversize T-shirt. A half dozen times over the past three weeks, Gregor had found her still in her knee socks and clogs. He had been able to tell by the dirt on her soles that she had been out walking again.

  The invitation from the state was not on the coffee table. That, Gregor realized, was what he had been looking for. In the beginning, when they had first sat down with Anne Marie’s lawyer and he had outlined just how final the situation had become, Bennis had carried that damned invitation with her everywhere, as if she needed it to identify who she was. It hadn’t helped that the governor of Pennsylvania had gone on the air three times in ten days to assure the people of Pennsylvania that this time justice would be done. Anne Marie Hannaford might have escaped execution over and over again for the past ten years, but she wouldn’t escape it one more time. There were no more appeals left to try, no more avenues left to explore. The only chance she had was an order of clemency from the governor’s office, and the governor had no intention of issuing one.

  “Do you think she’s evil?” Bennis had asked him, one afternoon, out of the blue, when they had been wandering through a department store looking for a bright red scarf to buy Donna Moradanyan Donahue for her birthday.

  It had been the oddest scene: the department-store aisles flanked by counters and shelves full of things that all seemed to be made of something metallic in silver or gold; Bennis in her shop-for-something-expensive uniform of Calvin Klein coat and two-and-a-half inch stacked-heel boots; himself trying desperately not to meet the eyes of saleswomen who had nothing to do in a store that was practically empty. Before Bennis spoke, Gregor had been feeling guilty. Now that they were officially a “couple,” they were expected to buy their presents together—but didn’t that shortchange the people they were buying presents for? Surely Donna deserved a present from each of them, the way she had every year before. At Christmas, Gregor had had to restrain himself from running out at the last minute and buying another whole set of Christmas presents. If he hadn’t been sure that Bennis—already pumped up beyond belief from nicotine deprivation—would have killed him, he would have done it. But things had been better, then. That was before the new date of execution had been set. Anne Marie’s lawyers were still in court. It still looked as if there might be a chance.

  Bennis was holding a red scarf in her hands. Gregor would have thought it was just what they were looking for, but he could tell from the way she was fingering it that she didn’t like it.

  “I don’t think ‘evil’ is a very useful word,” he said finally. “I think she’s dangerous. I don’t think she ought to be walking around loose. I think, under the right circumstances, she would probably do it again.”

  “I want to know if you think she should be dead.”

  “I never think anybody should be dead,” Gregor said. “No, I take that back. There was one person, just one, whom I thought ought to be executed. I’m putting that badly. In that one case, I thought execution was justified. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, whether or not I think she ought to be dead doesn’t mean very much.”

  “Well, it won’t change anything, but that wasn’t what I was getting at.” Bennis bunched the scarf into a ball and threw it back on the display table. Gregor could see the saleswomen watching her. She was such a prime target: obviously rich, and obviously used to it. He wondered if she was even seeing the scarves anymore, of if they had wandered into a more urgent area of her mind, the part where she had to solve the problems of the universe, now, immediately, without excuses. It was a part of the mind that usually atrophied after adolescence, but the withered organ never disappeared. Gregor knew that from experience, too.

  They got to another set of shelves and another set of scarves. Bennis seemed to like this set more. She passed up the solid red one to look at one with red-and-grey stripes. She wound it around and around her hands and nodded slightly.

  “Pashmina,” she said finally. “You don’t usually see it in patterns.”

  “What’s pashmina?”

  “A kind of cashmere.” She handed the scarf to Gregor.

  Gregor noticed that the scarf was both softer and longer than the ones he was used to. Then he looked at the price tag: $278.

  “Good God,” he said.

  Bennis took the scarf from him and headed for the nearest counter. Saleswomen probably got commissions on the things they sold. Whoever ended up with Bennis was going to have a very good sales day.

  “What I want to know,” Bennis said finally, “is what I should think about it. It’s not as if we were ever close. I don’t think Anne Marie has ever been close to anyone.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “That’s the point.”

  “I know. And there’s what she did. Which was horrible. Beyond horrible. But I still don’t know what I should think about it. Maybe it’s because she’s my sister, still my sister, you know what I mean. In spite of everything. Even in spite of the fact that we never really liked each other. Maybe I’d feel the same way about the execution of anybody I’d ever known.”

  “People do, you know. It’s almost impossible for a psychologically normal person to kill someone he can see as fully human. That’s why, when there’s a movement to stop an execution, there’s so much time taken to make the convicted murderer seem human. Think about the Karla Faye Tucker case in Texas. It hurt to see her die in the end because she had become real to so many of us. She wasn’t a name and a story. She was a person.”

  Bennis had found a counter. She folded up the scarf and put it down. The saleswoman was there in a blink, gurgling incoherently. Gregor didn’t think Bennis heard a word she said.

  “There’s something else,” Bennis told him. “I thought I might as well warn you. The state of Pennsylvania sent invitations to my brothers and to Dickie Van Damm.”

  “And?”

  “Chris is going to come out and stay with Lida. I don’t know about the other two. I don’t even know where Bobby is. And as for Teddy—” She shrugged.

  “I like your brother Chris. I’ll be glad to see him.”

  “Yes, well, the thing is, he may not be the only person you see. I’ve got it on good authority that Dickie is going to witness the execution. That he’s going to—be there. In the peanut gallery. Or whatever you call it.”

  “Ah.”

  “If he’s there, he won’t leave us alone. You must know that. We’ll see him. He’ll come out to Cavanaugh Street. He’ll make a nuisance of himself somehow. In person, I suppose I mean. Anyway, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  The saleswoman was no idiot. She could see that Bennis wanted to talk to Gregor and not listen to her enthuse about the scarf or about the wonders of pashmina. She interrupted only once—to ask if Bennis would like a gift box—and as soon as she had a positive answer went about her work with silent efficiency. The gift box was red and came with a white satin ribbon. Valentine’s Day was only a few days away.

  “You know,” Gregor said, “I don’t think you really have to worry about Dickie Van Damm. He’s a nuisance and a damned fool, but he’s not dangerous to you, or to anybody except when he’s driving drunk. And I’ve heard he doesn’t do that anymore.”

  “He hired a driver.”

  “There, then.”

  The saleswoman handed back Bennis’s credit card and then handed over the box. Bennis tucked the box under her arm and walked away. Halfway down the ais
le to the back door, she stopped.

  “It’s just that it’s going to be such a mess,” she said desperately. “It would have been a mess under any circumstances, but you know what he’s like. He’ll be all over the news. He’ll make a celebration of it. The dim-witted little prick.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said—and now, all this time later, he said “yes” again, out loud to the air in his bedroom. Then he tightened the belt around his pants and slipped his feet into the penny loafers Bennis had bought to replace his standard FBI wing tips. It still felt strange to him that he didn’t have to bend over to tie his shoes. He still didn’t understand why the shoes didn’t just fall off his feet, without laces to hold them on.

  He went back out to the living room. Bennis was still sleeping. The news was still on. Now it seemed to be about puppy mills, somewhere in Bucks County. Gregor leaned over the coffee table and turned it off.

  Bennis coughed in her sleep, and moved. Gregor got the throw blanket from the back of the couch and tossed it over her. He didn’t think she had actually slept in a bed since that interview with the lawyer, and she didn’t look as if she were about to start sleeping in a bed anytime soon.