The Church of the Holy Child

by Patricia Hale

  The car had barely come to a stop when the front door opened and she came running out with her backpack slung over one shoulder.

  “Get me out of here, quick,” she said, coming up to Griff’s open window.

  “Why?” he asked. “What’s up?”

  “Neil’s on his way.”

  “Who’s Neil?” I asked.

  “Mom’s new boyfriend.” She air quoted the last word. “He’s a dork.”

  “He is?” Griff sounded smug. He liked the fact that after nearly ten years Allie still hated Eliza’s choice of men, him being the one exception of course.

  “He’s twelve years younger than she is,” Allie said jumping into the backseat as the front door opened again. “Why can’t he find someone his own age? He’s like thirty-three, Britt’s age for…” She stopped. “I mean. You know what I mean. It’s different when it’s the guy who’s older.”

  Griff and I exchanged a smile.

  “Allie,” Eliza called from the steps, “Get back here and give me a kiss.” She smiled and waved to us then held her arms wide, palms up, summarizing life with a teenager.

  “Mom, I’m thirteen years old.”

  “Exactly, you won’t be here forever so I want everything I can get before you move out.”

  Reluctantly, but with a grin tugging at the edges of her mouth, Allie walked back up the driveway into Eliza’s outstretched arms.

  “Does it bug you?” I asked Griff.

  “What, that a guy barely thirty is trying to keep her happy? God no,” he laughed. “I say, have at it.”

  “Thank you,” Eliza said to the back of Allie’s head as she turned toward the car. “I’ll pick you up after dinner.”

  Allie never stayed over on Wednesdays. According to Eliza, crime had a way of happening in the middle of the night. For some reason, weekends were a different story. I assumed that it wasn’t because crimes weren’t committed on weekends, but so that mother-of-the-year and her latest conquest could play house without a kid hanging around.

  “Mothers,” Allie said as she slid once again onto the backseat.

  I watched Eliza turn toward the door, moving with long elegant strides, her delicate arms floating at her sides, highlighted hair perfectly coifed rested on her shoulders. It certainly wasn’t our outward appearance that made us both his “type”. My raven pixie was something akin to a ten-year-old boy or a navy recruit, a cut that you have to have the face to pull off. Not to sound arrogant, but I do. There was no likeness between Eliza and me. Maybe that was the point.

  With a wave, Griff backed the car out of the driveway and almost directly into the grille of a light blue BMW.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” Griff asked, hitting the brake.

  “Gross,” Allie said. “That’s Neil.”

  I couldn’t see much beyond a Red Sox hat and mirrored sunglasses, but gave a cursory wave.

  “Well Neil ought to watch where he’s going,” Griff said.

  “He thinks he owns the place. They’ve only been dating for a month. I had to remind him last time he was here that it’s Mom’s name on the mortgage, not his.”

  Griff grinned. “I’m sure he loved that.”

  “Yeah,” Allie said. “So did Mom.”

  I twisted around in my seat so I could see Allie and asked her why she didn’t like him.

  “He thinks he’s totally cool.”

  “Is he?” I asked.

  Allie shook her head, scrunching her nose as though I’d suggested sautéed road kill for dinner. “He owns a big sailboat and goes on cruises to the islands for weeks at a time. I’m supposed to be impressed. Mom thinks he’s awesome. I think she could find someone better and her own age. He’s a creep.

  “What do you mean, a creep?”

  I heard the PI edge in Griff’s voice and put my hand on his leg.

  He glanced at me then asked the question again.

  “I don’t know.” Allie shrugged. “Can you turn up the radio?”

  “Answer me,” Griff said, turning the radio down.

  “Dad.”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  “I don’t know. He smiles at me all the time and asks what I’m doing. Like he’s trying to be my friend or something. I just want him and his Crest White Strips out of my face.

  Griff stifled a smile. “White teeth and wanting to be friends makes him a creep?”

  I patted Griff’s leg. “I think it’s a kid thing or maybe an adolescent, girl thing.”

  I looked back at Allie to see if she’d comment on my response, but she already had the buds from her iPod in her ears and her head was swaying right to left.

  “Women,” Griff said. “A guy can’t even smile right.”

  “You smile just fine,” I said. “Can we be friends?”

  He laughed and squeezed my hand. “Later.”

  When we got back to Griff’s, Allie bounced back and forth between iPhone and iPad.

  “What the heck did we do as kids?” Griff asked putting water on to boil, “without all the techy stuff?”

  “I watched TV,” I said popping the cork on a bottle of wine. “I’m guessing you ah…listened to the radio?”

  “Wise ass,” he said.

  Over spaghetti we learned more about Neil, at least from Allie’s point of view.

  “He’s a total dork,” she said. “He watches cartoons on Saturday mornings.”

  Griff didn’t say anything, but I know the fact that Neil was in Eliza’s house that early on a Saturday morning was more interesting to him than the fact that he watched cartoons.

  “Tara slept over last weekend and when we opened my bedroom door to get a midnight snack he was standing in the hallway.”

  “What was he doing?” Griff asked.

  “Holding a glass of milk. He told us not to make a mess in the kitchen.”

  “So what’s the big deal?”

  “It’s my kitchen. I can do whatever I want.”

  “Where’d she meet him?” I asked.

  “Starbucks, he was behind her in line. Told her he’d pay for her coffee if she’d drink it with him.”

  Griff looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “Sounds a little overconfident for my taste,” I said. “What does he do?”

  Allie shrugged. “Mom said he does something with the stock market. He just moved here from Wisconsin or Washington or maybe it was Wyoming. I forget. It’s something with a W.”

  “That narrows it right down.” Griff took a sip of his Chianti and gave me a wink. “Maybe it’s more that you don’t like your mom having a boyfriend.”

  “No Dad, that’s not it. I’m not a baby. I don’t care if Mom goes out on dates. I just don’t like it when she brings them home.”

  “Does that go for me too?” I asked.

  Allie looked at me and smiled. “No, you’re already family.”

  Griff looked at me and raised his hands, palms up. “See?”

  I smiled at him, but avoided the topic. “Apple pie?”

  Allie stood, joining me as I cleared the table.

  “Chicken,” Griff said, when I reached for his plate.

  I kissed the top of his head and followed Allie into the kitchen.

  While we were slicing the pie, the doorbell rang. I heard the scrape of Griff’s chair on the wood floor as he rose to answer it and then Eliza’s voice.

  “Hey, why didn’t you tell me about your birthday party,” Griff said when Allie and I came back into the room.

  “I just hadn’t gotten to it. We were talking about other things,” she said and giggled. “It’s next Saturday at Mom’s. I’m having a slumber party, but you and Britt can come for dinner and cake, okay?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Griff said.

  Allie looked at me. “Can you come?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Britt’s not used to a bunch of screaming teenagers.” Eliza said to Allie. “It might be more than she can take coming from a quiet apartment.” She flash
ed me a gotcha smile.

  “I think I’ll be able to handle it,” I said. “At least I’ll give it a try.” I smiled back at her, hoping my eyes were saying the two words I couldn’t.

  The man standing beside Eliza took a step forward and extended his arm toward me. “I’m Neil, I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Britt.” I slipped my palm into his outstretched hand and pulled back quickly from what Griff would refer to later as a fish grip.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.

  “I’m sure,” I glanced at Eliza.

  “Mostly from Allie.”

  “Oh,” I said, relieved.

  Neil was a head taller than Eliza, his hair short and spiked with gel. (I thought mine looked better.) He wore a black tee shirt beneath a cashmere V-neck sweater and crisp jeans. I felt like I should have vacuumed before they arrived.

  Allie grabbed her backpack and kissed Griff without a prompt. “Love you, Dad. See you at the party.”

  The door closed behind them and Griff and I went back to the pie for seconds.

  “What did you think of Neil?” I asked.

  “He dresses better than I do.”

  “I thought you told me once that Eliza was afraid of the water. I wouldn’t think she’d be that impressed by his sailboat.”

  “She is, or at least she was. Maybe Neil’s changed her mind.”

  “Youth and sex have a way of overcoming a woman’s fears.” I said shoveling a piece of piecrust into my mouth.

  EIGHT

  In the morning I went home to get ready for work. I keep a toothbrush, deodorant and body wash at Griff’s, but my clothes travel back and forth.

  On the way to my apartment I called Sandra. I hadn’t checked in with her since our last conversation. I wanted to know if she’d spoken with Shirley’s caseworker. It was a long shot thinking that she’d give me anything. Information pertaining to women at the shelter was as guarded as our national security. Nobody got near it.

  “That son of a bitch,” she said, forgoing hello.

  “Sandra, I’m so sorry.”

  “Have they got him?”

  “Keith’s in custody and being charged.”

  “Small consolation.”

  “Hopefully the DA can make the charges stick.”

  “Of course they’ll stick,” she said. “How could they not?”

  “It has to be proven.”

  “He has a history of beating her, how could they not prove it?”

  “Shirley always dropped the charges before they got into the courtroom. Griff and I are going up to see the ME this morning. I’ll keep you informed as the case moves forward. Have you spoken with her caseworker?”

  “Yes, but they were still a day or two away from setting the plan in motion.”

  “So Shirley left on her own? Without help?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “I told her to leave him when she came to me.”

  “That was the right advice.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Violence is the nature of our work. I have to remind myself of that every time something like this happens.”

  “You’ve been through this before?”

  Sandra hesitated. “Not for a few years.”

  “The last case I tried drifted through my head. I shook it away. “I’ll be in touch,” I said and ended the call.

  After a shower, I washed down eggs over-easy with coffee and met Griff at the office. We drove the hour from Portland to Augusta trying to reason why Shirley would have left on her own without assistance from the shelter.

  “Do you think Sandra was being honest?” Griff asked. “I mean, would she withhold information to keep the shelter staff out of the investigation?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. She’s pretty protective, but I think she’d be up front under the circumstances. She wants this settled as much as we do.”

  We parked in the lot reserved for the Crime Lab and ascended the granite steps. My palms were damp. I’d seen dead bodies in a variety of venues, but pale and rigid on a slab in the ME’s office after an autopsy was never my favorite perspective. I prefer a warm dead body to a cold one.

  Gina rose from her desk as we opened the door. She was tall and slender with black hair and killer, hazel eyes that even had me swooning. She could only be described with adjectives like hypnotic and sensual and was the antithesis of her work. My gaze drifted from the mutilated cadaver that was once Shirley Trudeau to Gina’s face.

  “Detective Stark sent you?” she asked.

  “We’re sort of…collaborating on this one. What have you got?”

  Gina looked at me and raised her eyebrows. It was no secret that John was barely hanging on. “Not much,” she said turning back toward Shirley.

  “Time of death?”

  “Roughly, four a.m.

  “Fingerprints?”

  Gina slipped on a pair of black-rimmed glasses, transforming herself from super model to hot librarian. “Nothing useable. The prints on her neck are smudged and not what killed her anyway. She wasn’t strangled. She was beaten to death, blows exclusively to the head. The final one came from something with a rough, but sharp edge.”

  “A brick?” I asked.

  “Possibly. See the imprint here?” She pointed to the right side of Shirley’s skull, which had been shaved in order to illuminate the cause of death more clearly. “The weapon made a deep, horizontal incision and left a ragged edge.”

  “Jesus.” Griff ran his hand through his already disheveled hair.

  “What happened over here?” I pointed to the opposite side of Shirley’s head where a large patch of hair was missing.

  Gina shrugged. “She looked like that when she got here. It was torn out.

  And that’s not all,” she said. “You ready for this? Her nails were trimmed and her hands cleaned, postmortem, with traces of Isopropyl alcohol, Alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, Alkyl polyglycoside and Propylene glycol propyl ether.

  “You lost me after Isopropyl alcohol,” Griff said.

  “Clorox wipes.”

  “What?”

  Gina nodded. “Whoever did this, wiped their DNA off her hands with Clorox wipes.”

  “That’s bizarre,” I said.

  “If it is her husband,” Gina looked at Griff. “He watches a lot of CSI.”

  “If Keith Trudeau found her at Amtrak and went crazy because she was leaving, he wouldn’t have been that thorough,” I said. “I doubt he just happens to carry Clorox wipes with him. He’s not that smart.”

  “Just because whoever it was knew enough to clean her hands, doesn’t mean we’re dealing with Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter.”

  “Lecter would have eaten her hands,” I pointed out.

  Gina stifled a laugh. “With all the cop shows on TV, most people are aware that removing any possible trace of DNA is a good idea. I don’t think you have to be a professional to know that. But a beating is an up close and personal way to kill someone, which leans toward somebody with emotional ties.”

  “Do I detect a but?” Griff asked.

  “You know as well as I do in a crime of passion the killer wouldn’t have the presence of mind to wash off DNA. They just don’t think like that in the moment.”

  Griff sighed. “It’s something to consider.”

  “Sorry I can’t be more helpful,” Gina said.

  On the way back to Portland, Griff and I tried to come up with different scenarios of Shirley’s death, but each idea led us back to Keith. She wasn’t stupid enough to let a stranger lure her behind the Amtrak station at night. It had to have been someone she knew. Someone she felt safe with.

  “No woman walks into a dark field with a guy she doesn’t trust,” Griff said.

  “Wouldn’t that theory rule out her husband? I asked. “With his history of violence, she wouldn’t have felt safe with him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Griff said. “Even though he had a history of violenc
e, she might have agreed to talk with him not wanting to have a scene in front of the people in the station.”

  “She wasn’t stupid. She’d never have gone into a dark field with him alone. She knew what he’d do to her when he realized she was leaving. Unless she had come to the station alone and was walking across the field…”

  “And he was waiting for her,” Griff said.

  “But even that doesn’t make sense. My gut tells me she wouldn’t have gone alone.”

  Griff shrugged. “The logical place to start is with Keith until we can rule him out. I still haven’t made it to the lounge where he had dinner and watched the baseball game. I’m going now. Do you want to come?”

  I ran my fingernails along the hairline at his temple. “As much as I’d like to spend my day with you, I’ve got a couple other case files sitting on my desk.”

  Griff slowed his SUV at the curb in front of our office building. “You cooking tonight?” he asked.

  “Chicken Marsala.”

  “See you around six, I hope.”

  I sat at my desk anxious to catch up on work, but instead all I could think of was the fact that Brooke Trudeau would never see her mother again. If history really did repeat itself and the past predicted the future, then the years of phone calls to the Portland Police Department reporting domestic violence at the Trudeau residence would be enough to put Keith away. At the age of three, Brooke had already lost her mother and was about to lose her father. The cost would be years of therapy to deal with her sense of abandonment, an inability to trust and the incapacity to form lasting relationships. Children pay the tab for the crimes of their parents. I was still making payments on mine.