Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  While Stella was dialing 911 she saw Rufe climb out of his truck in front of her house, run across the street and follow DiAngelo’s route into the rectory. She relayed this information to the 911 operator, so Barb Wyatt knew exactly who was inside when she briefed her SWAT team.

  When the pipe wrench crashed through the side window it was obvious we’d taken matters into our own hands. The SWAT guys were half pissed and half impressed that our instinctive action had its intended effect, stunning DiAngelo long enough to allow Peggy to beat him to the coffee table where the bomb sat, primed to explode.

  Tillie had some bruises on her small frame from when I pushed her aside, but they weren’t serious. She told me the next day—we’d obviously turned a big corner in the front parlor of the rectory because she actually called me—that she had black-and-blues on her hip and shin, but otherwise was unharmed.

  “Thank goodness for your plumber friend and his fine aim with that wrench,” she said. “If Peggy hadn’t gotten to the bomb first, Michael might have blown us to kingdom come before the police came through the door.”

  Peggy wasn’t hurt physically, but the emotional impact of the past week hit her as soon as DiAngelo was in custody. She apologized in advance that she would be incommunicado for a few days while she cloistered herself somewhere to grieve Patrick’s death.

  “My heart hasn’t accepted that he’s gone,” she said. “I need some time for contemplation and prayer.”

  Like me, she’d all but decided Bozco was the bomber and probably Patrick’s killer, too. While he was undeniably a hothead with a history of violence and a nasty proclivity for blackmail, it turned out he hadn’t murdered anybody or blown anything up.

  “I judged him as the worst kind of sinner,” Peggy said. “I need to atone for that somehow.”

  “But he hurt you twenty years ago, and blackmailed you in the cruelest possible way. He’s no innocent.”

  Peggy smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Who among us is innocent?”

  Barb told me later that the air had gone out of the Bozco-as-church-bomber theory when they stuck him in a lineup and Ryan McCarty swore none of the five men who stood scowling on the other side of the two-way glass was large enough to have been the man to whom he’d handed off two homemade explosives in the dark of night.

  “I shouldn’t have let DiAngelo’s collar shield him from scrutiny,” the chief said. “All the signs were there. His lack of control the morning the body was found, followed by aggressive boundary-setting about investigators being in the rectory. You may not have known this, but the bishop told us DiAngelo refused the opportunity to eulogize Patrick. He claimed they weren’t close, which contradicted the observation of everyone else we interviewed. The night of the wake he stayed behind to extinguish candles and left the chapel a few minutes before the explosion. Ryan confirmed the bomb had a built-in delay. Then he didn’t show up at the funeral.

  “All of this was bizarre behavior but we were tiptoeing around him because, you know—” she lowered her voice to a respectful whisper “—he was a priest. You’d think we would have learned that lesson.”

  Barb confirmed what Rufe already had figured out about why Patrick was selling off Church property.

  “The poor man was desperate to leave the priesthood. He and DiAngelo weren’t old enough to retire, and even if they were, the diocesan retirement plan is bare bones. Tillie McGuire said they argued about money a lot—not unlike other couples—with DiAngelo complaining they wouldn’t have enough money to get by. Based on what she told us and our interviews with the men who fenced the property, Patrick was building quite a freedom fund.”

  “If DiAngelo continued to make excuses, I wonder if Patrick would have left on his own.”

  “I expect DiAngelo thought about that, too. We’ll never know if Patrick fell against that marble table, or if DiAngelo pushed him. It could have happened either way. The fact DiAngelo moved Patrick’s body and tried to make it look like he had nothing to do with his death tells me he snapped that night, which is no surprise. They had an intense relationship that Patrick insisted either had to change or end. DiAngelo was desperate to keep either thing from happening. It’s the classic domestic violence dynamic.”

  I didn’t tell Barb what Rufe had told me—that he had access to Patrick’s secret bank accounts, and they held almost $150,000. Rufe had convinced me that it would not serve the cause of justice for the Church to get its money back.

  Rufe took Peggy into his confidence when he decided to donate the money to Save Our Churches. Even if the battle to keep St. Jerome’s had been lost, Rufe said, Peggy assured him the money would be used to sustain the food pantry and support the priest abuse survivor support group. Like Rufe, Peggy was good at keeping things private, so no one would know the identity of the anonymous benefactor.

  Young bomb maker Ryan McCarty was outraged when he learned his tormentor had been his confessor. He told police he’d slipped into the church Friday afternoon when confessions were being heard and entered the confessional booth, something he’d never done before. He didn’t know anything about the ritual of confession, so he just spit it out—he was the kid who’d built and set off the bombs that had terrorized the town. He promised not to do it again and asked to be forgiven. When the priest asked his name, Ryan told him, not realizing the experience was intended to be anonymous. It never dawned on him that the man who contacted him to buy bombs was the priest whose face had been obscured by a screen in the dimly lit confessional.

  Barb said because Ryan had come clean about the bombs he set off and had been so willing and eager to help find the man who blackmailed him, the DA’s office would go easy on him. “He’ll wind up in juvenile court—the kid set off three bombs on school property—one of which seriously damaged the football field—and that’s a big deal. But he hasn’t got any prior offenses, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he winds up with probation and a hefty dose of community service.”

  * * *

  Kathleen was still in Portland, hanging out with a nurse colleague who spent a couple of vacation days keeping her more or less out of trouble. Kathleen had not returned to AA, but she was sober when she met Rufe and me for lunch on Wednesday, struggling to wrap her mind around the fact that Michael had killed her brother.

  “I knew Patrick wanted out of the priesthood,” she said. “He told me almost a year ago. Michael tried to enlist my help talking him out of it. But I couldn’t. It was clear Michael was afraid to live in the outside world, but I’d come to believe my brother’s life depended on him doing just that.”

  The Saturday morning fight with Michael in the foyer of her home was, as she had said, about her boozing. “He came in the door upset, and went on a rant when he saw I’d been drinking when it wasn’t even noontime. I’d never seen him so wound up. He scared me.”

  DiAngelo’s raised voice caused Ritz to go bananas, so DiAngelo shut him in the coat closet. “I threw my drink at him and I did slip on an ice cube on the floor. But he was the one being aggressive. I was on defense. And it was only my second drink of the day.” She said it as though having bourbon for breakfast was no big deal. “I was far from drunk. I told you the fight was my fault because I didn’t want to lose Michael, too. I thought he was simply having a stress reaction. It never crossed my mind that he caused Patrick’s death.”

  “It sounds as though the notion of leaving the priesthood shook him to his core,” Rufe said. “One of the things I loved the most about Pat was that he didn’t care a whit about the status inherent in being a priest. He’d actually bristle when people deferred to him, or treated him differently because of his collar. Pat’s stories about Michael make me think he reveled in that.”

  “I’ve never thought about it, but you’re right. It was one way they were total opposites. Michael thought being a priest put him above other people. My brother never felt that way.”

/>   Rufe picked up on that aspect of our conversation as we drove from Portland back to Riverside. “Kathleen is clinging with all her might to whatever stage of grief comes before anger,” he said. “I agree Pat offered Michael a very difficult choice—you can spend the rest of your life living openly with me or you can remain a priest—but there was something cold behind DiAngelo’s eyes the day I spoke with him at the rectory. Behind the collar, I’m betting he was a self-important, controlling, manipulative man—a classic abuser.”

  “That jibes with the fact his first instinct was to cover up his role in Patrick’s death. He immediately went into damage control mode, trying to make it look like Patrick died out in the garden. When the autopsy revealed the head trauma, he doubled down on his deception. He stonewalled the cops for as long as he could, and when they insisted on looking for evidence at the rectory—getting inside his private life—he abused his position as a priest, terrified a troubled teenager and set off a bomb inside the church. He was desperate not to be caught, even if more people were hurt along the way.”

  “Doug, my Frig It buddy, predicts the case will never go to trial. The state will worry that a jury won’t convict a priest, and DiAngelo’s lawyers won’t want to expose him to the risk of a murder conviction. He thinks they’ll plead it down to manslaughter.”

  “Are the Frig It guys going to keep meeting?”

  “I think so. We have some internal fences to mend, but we’re used to hard emotional work.”

  * * *

  That phrase—hard emotional work—echoed through my head as I showered before heading to Christie’s for dinner the night after the rectory showdown. I was somewhat surprised to get an invitation.

  “Theo and I need time to mend,” she’d said the previous evening. “We’re halfway back to solid ground with each other. I need to focus on getting all the way there.”

  Added to the back-to-back stiff arms Monday night—first when I wanted to go with them to the police station, then when she made it clear I shouldn’t head over to her house when they got home—I was trying to prepare myself for whatever might happen.

  I knew what I wanted. Despite the rockiness of the initial stage of our romance, I hoped we could keep trying to clear the way for there to be an us. If Christie decided the universe was sending the message that we should be content with platonic friendship, I’d find a way to live with that. But if she was willing to live with my foibles and let me try to love her the way she deserved to be loved, I was all in.

  No one was in the kitchen when I arrived at Chez Pappas. Before I could call out, Theo stepped out of the bathroom and grabbed his jacket from a peg on the wall.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Going to Rufe’s to watch a movie,” he said. “Glad not to be under house arrest.”

  He gave me an awkward boy hug.

  “Mom’s upstairs,” he said. “Tell her I’ll be home by eleven.”

  I walked around the kitchen, anxiety running through me as I examined as though for the first time her woven tablecloth and collection of wooden spoons.

  Christie took her time walking down the stairs. She was wearing a soft purple sweater. Her dark hair was pinned up with jeweled hairpins. But it was the perfume that told me we were on the same page.

  * * * * *

  Available Now from Carina Press and Brenda Buchanan

  QUICK PIVOT,

  the first Joe Gale Mystery

  1968

  A cunning thief skimmed a half a million dollars from the textile mill that was the beating heart of Riverside, Maine. Sharp-eyed accountant George Desmond discovered the discrepancy, but was killed before he could report it. After stashing the body, the thief-turned-killer manipulated evidence to make it appear Desmond skipped town with the stolen money, ruining his good name forever.

  Present Day

  Veteran journalist Joe Gale is covering a story for the Portland Daily Chronicle when a skeleton falls at his feet: Desmond’s bones have been found in a basement crawl space at the long-shuttered mill. For Joe, digging into the past means retracing the steps his mentor Paulie Finnegan had taken years ago, when the case was still open. But the same people who bird-dogged Paulie four decades ago are watching Joe now. As he closes in on the truth, his every move is tracked...and the murderer proves more than willing to kill again.

  Read on for the opening scene of QUICK PIVOT:

  Chapter One

  Friday, July 11, 2014

  Riverside, Maine

  From my first day at the Portland Daily Chronicle until he dropped dead of a heart attack six years later, Paulie Finnegan held me close under his crusty wing and taught me what was what. Hunched next to the police radio, black-framed glasses pushed up on his forehead, Paulie distilled small-town journalism to its essence.

  A lot of time, the story you go looking for isn’t the story you’ll find. It’ll be bigger or smaller than you thought it’d be. A quiet meeting with a short agenda will get raucous. The sure bet for page one will fizzle. You’ve got to master the quick pivot.

  My late mentor’s words flashed through my mind the instant I saw a skull tumble out of a collapsing brick wall in the basement of the Saccarappa Mill, freed from its tomb by a sledgehammer-wielding demolition crew. Until that moment, I was a guy writing a feature about a defunct textile factory being turned into condos. Before the skull stopped spinning on the concrete floor, I’d made the quick pivot.

  “What the hell?” The goliath who’d knocked the hole in the wall pulled off his sweat-fogged safety glasses and gaped at the disembodied head. Holding up a massive hand, he dropped to one knee and made the sign of the cross. After a silent moment he rose to his feet and scowled at Nate Kimball, the rookie developer planning to rehab the crumbling mill.

  “You’re not payin’ me enough to deal with this shit.” He picked up his sledgehammer and lumbered toward the stairs. Neither of his helpers moved an inch, but the younger one, looking shaky, yanked his grimy T-shirt over his nose and mouth.

  Nate was gulping air as though he’d been punched in the stomach, his pudgy face as gray as morning fog. The son of a local real estate mogul, he was looking to follow in Daddy’s footsteps. A gruesome discovery in the basement of his first big renovation project was going to strangle the optimistic narrative he’d been spinning for the past hour. But Nate’s PR problems weren’t my concern. Before he could object, I slid my reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket and crouched to inspect the find.

  Hollow eye sockets gazed at the ceiling. A leering rictus of intact teeth shone yellow in the dim light. Using my pen, I coaxed the skull onto its left side. The back of the head was caved in, but not by the sledgehammer’s blow. A dark substance stained the cracked bone, insinuating a long-ago assault. My mind raced as I scribbled my observations. How the hell did a skull wind up behind the wall? How many others were back there?

  Forcing a couple of deep breaths, I maneuvered the battered skull back to its original spot. Five feet away, Nate was a statue in the swirling masonry dust, eyes riveted on the smashed wall. It was easy to read his mind: a skull on the floor meant the rest of a skeleton must lie nearby. I edged toward the uneven hole.

  “Bad idea, Joe.” His voice cracked.

  I scrabbled through the smashed bricks, squatted down and poked my hard-hatted head through the two-foot-wide gap in the wall anyway, shaking away a mental image of bony fingers reaching for me. “Long dead,” I told myself. “Longtime dead.”

  The stench of mold was overpowering. No light penetrated the darkness. Water dripped in the distance, but I couldn’t get a fix on where it was coming from.
The sensation was like swimming underwater at night, blind and claustrophobic. I was working up the nerve to thrust an arm into the void when Nate shuffled his feet against the gritty floor.

  “C’mon Joe. We’ve got to go outside and call the cops,” he said. “There’s no goddamn cell reception down here.”

  I pulled my head out of the hole and eased to my feet. Buying time to calm my thudding heart, I did a slow three-sixty in the narrow hallway, then pulled out my phone and shot a half dozen photos while circling the skull.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea to be taking pictures.”

  “It’s my job, Nate.”

  “Well you’re here because of me, and I want to get the hell out of here.”

  Nate’s eagerness to summon the police was understandable. He had a boatload of money tied up in his plan to turn the crumbling Saccarappa Mill into a hipster magnet. He wanted to get the cops in and the bones out, fast. But it likely was my only chance for a good look, because the first lesson they teach in cop school is to keep reporters the hell away from crime scenes.

  For ten bucks cash each, the demo guys agreed to stand guard. Nate and I took measured steps until we reached the stairs. Then he sprinted ahead, like a boy convinced the boogieman was on his heels.

  Outside, Nate paced the cracked parking lot while stuttering out the story to a 911 dispatcher. I leaned against a graffiti-tattooed wall and wondered how a corpse came to be bricked into a crawlspace in the rundown mill that once was the heartbeat of Riverside, Maine.