“Unless,” I said, “you were unconscious.”
She frowned. “I haven’t been unconscious,” she said.
“Yes, you have,” I said. “You called it ‘passing out’ and you couldn’t remember if it was before or after you got pregnant, but you were really being drugged.”
“Drugged?”
I nodded. “Probably roofies, Special K, or GHB.”
“Date-rape drugs,” Anna said, the light of revelation sparkling in her eyes.
“Somebody drugged her and raped her?” Father Thomas said.
“Rape of a sort,” I said. “They didn’t have sex with her, but they did impregnate her. A violation like rape, just not as violent.”
“Who?” Mary asked.
“Who gives you tea all the time?”
She turned and looked at Tommy Boy. Everyone in the room followed her gaze.
“Who’s in love with you?” I said.
No one said anything, just continued to stare at Tommy Boy, who was now backing into the corner.
“Who’s dying?” I asked.
Everyone looked away from Tommy Boy, back to me, then to Father Jerome.
“What?” Jerome asked, trying to sound outraged, but unable to pull it off. “Are you mad?”
“Improbable, yes,” I said, “but it’s possible—and all that’s left after we’ve eliminated all the impossibles. You love her, worship her even. You’re dying. I think you wanted to leave something of yourself in the world—something of your best self, which Mary brings out. She does that for everyone. Good people always do. This wasn’t about sex. That’s why you didn’t rape her. This was about mortality, about not wanting to die.”
“Jerome,” Father Thomas said.
“It’s not true,” he said. “I would never do anything to Mary.” He turned to Mary. “You’ve got to believe me, Mary. I love you. I would never hurt you. This is all madness.” He began to look around the room. “This is insane. Don’t believe him. Don’t do this to me. Ask him if he has any evidence.”
“Do you?” Father Thomas asked.
“Is that why you searched the abbey?” Sister asked.
I nodded.
“What’d you find?
“Nothing,” I said. “Whatever he used is long gone.”
“See,” Jerome said. “See. I told you. This is—”
“A matter of faith,” I said. “I told you all that at the beginning of this discussion. It’s not like other cases. There’s no evidence. It’s the process of elimination. What we’re left with is the truth.”
“John,” Sister Abigail said. “We can’t very well accuse a man of such an awful crime without evidence.”
“So you’re saying our faith needs science to back it up?” I said. “The way the lie detector confirmed what we already knew—that Sister Mary doesn’t lie?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay.” Turning to Dr. Norton, I said, “Is it possible to determine paternity during pregnancy?”
Her face lit up. “That’s why I’m here,” she said. “Yes. If we do an amniocentesis I can harvest fetal cells that can be used to compare DNA.”
At that, Father Jerome dropped his bald head into his feeble hands and began to sob.
I returned to St. Ann’s a few days later.
Spring break was ending, and the abbey was beginning to fill up again.
I found Father Jerome and Sister Mary Elizabeth sitting on the front porch of his cabin drinking tea. At first, I was surprised, but only for a moment. She’s forgiven him, I thought.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mary asked as I reached the porch.
“No, thank you,” I said.
At first, Father Jerome wouldn’t look at me, but after a few quick glances, he must have seen that I wasn’t here to condemn him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said to me, his eyes filling, “but I’m so glad you figured it out. I felt so guilty. I knew I should confess, let everyone know what an evil thing I had done, but I just couldn’t. I was too weak, too self-centered.”
Mary said, “You don’t need to keep confessing to everyone you see. It’s time to put it behind you.”
“But John was involved,” he said, “and I didn’t really get to tell him how sorry I was and how much I appreciated what he did.”
“Okay,” she said, “but let that be the last one.”
“Can you believe her?” he asked. “She forgave me.”
His eyes filled again, and this time he broke down.
I nodded, looking over at Mary. “I’m not surprised at all.”
She smiled up at me, and in that moment, I had to agree with Jerome. Sister Mary Elizabeth was a saint.
“How are you?” I asked.
I was leaving St. Ann’s, and Sister Mary Elizabeth was walking me to my truck.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I really am.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stay close to Father Jerome,” she said. “I hope he can stay alive until our baby is born. Then I’m going to raise our child—where, I’m not sure—perhaps as a nun, but probably just as a teacher.”
“If I can ever do anything,” I said, “anything at all, just let me know.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Don’t be surprised when I call.”
“You’re an extraordinary person,” I said. “I find you to be enormously inspiring.”
Her big blue eyes glistened with moisture.
“I don’t say this often,” I said, “because I don’t think it’s true of very many people, but you are, in the very best and most profound sense of the word, a Christian.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” she said.
“Well, it’s true,” I said. “In fact, it may be the truest thing I’ve ever said. Father Thomas and some of the others thought this was a miracle, a sign from God to anyone willing to see it. Well, it is—you are. You are a grace. You make me believe in God, in goodness, in love, in compassion, and in a virgin birth.”
Bad Blood
The body lay facedown in the greening grass of late March, damp with dew, its limbs splayed out at odd angles. There were no signs of trauma—the brown correctional officer uniform, though wrinkled and ill-fitting, was neither torn nor blood-soaked.
I had a feeling things would change once the body was turned over.
I was standing near the back corner of the Potter Correctional Institution rec yard at a little after seven in the morning, having been met at the front gate by a new captain named Baker who escorted me past the chapel where I had been headed and through the closed compound to join the warden, the colonel, and the inspector.
Everyone looked more or less masculine in the brown CO uniforms—especially from the back—but the long, overly processed, white-blond hair let us know we were dealing with a woman. I could tell the fried hair had been straightened a few too many times, that its length, a little longer than her shoulders, was made possible by extensions.
Baker said, “She spends a lot of time and money on her appearance.”
I nodded.
Baker was tall and thin with dark skin, a quick smile, and kind eyes.
“You can tell that from looking at her back, Sherlock?” the colonel said.
Colonel Patterson was a middle-aged white man with a sour disposition and an enormous Southern-fried gut spilling out over his belt. He had bushy eyebrows dangerously close to meeting in the middle, and thick, perpetually sweaty hands.
“Look at her hair,” Baker said.
“Can we turn her over, Inspector?” the warden, Edward Stone asked.
Stone, an aging black man with graying hair, was one of the most formal people I had ever known. He was the only person at the prison to call Pete Inspector. He seemed stiff, but the movements of the thin body inside the three-piece suit, like everything he did, were more measured and careful than stilted.
“I’ll catch hell from FDLE if we do, but I’m used to it,” Pete said.
As if Stone’s opposite, Pete Fortner, the institutional inspector, was pale, short, pudgy, and unkempt, his eyes blinking often behind glasses that perpetually slid down his nose—underneath which was an unruly bushy mustache.
The morning was cool, a bit of bite in the wind, the sun yet to penetrate the clouds and fog.
We waited a moment, but Pete didn’t do anything.
“Well ...” Stone said.
Pete nodded, but looking down at the body again, hesitated.
Before becoming the institutional inspector, Pete had been the local high school football coach. His cousin, a Potter County commissioner, had gotten him the job, and though he had undergone countless hours of training and had been in the position for a few years, he wasn’t getting any better at it—and wouldn’t. He just wasn’t suited for his assignment.
“Hell, I’ll do it,” Baker said.
Without waiting, he leaned over, reached his long arms down, and rolled the body over.
It was a woman all right, the large augmented breasts busting out of her uniform appeared glued on—not moving when the rest of her did. Beneath her badly beaten and bloody face, her white skin was pale, her lifeless eyes green. It was hard to tell for sure in her condition, but she appeared to be in her forties, which was why the braces mounted on her small teeth looked so out of place.
“Anyone recognize her?” Stone asked.
No one did.
With more than three hundred officers and new ones transferring in all the time, it was nearly impossible to know them all.
The only blood on her uniform was a small amount that had come from her face, but how she had been murdered appeared obvious. It was around her neck. Beneath the blood-smeared brown collar of the CO shirt, her pale neck was ringed with bruises apparently made by large, powerful hands as they chocked the life out of her.
“Is it because of the ... ah, condition of her face?” he asked.
“She don’t look even close to any of my people,” Patterson said, then, turning to Baker added, “Does she?”
Baker shook his head. “We’ve got a lot of officers and I’m sure I haven’t learned them all yet, but I don’t recall anyone with blond hair like that and braces.”
“Maybe the braces are new,” Pete offered. “Or the hair.”
“Definitely not her natural color,” I said, not to be left out.
“What the hell she doin’ out here?” Baker asked.
Less than ten feet from the perimeter fence, the salon blonde was about as far back as she could get.
“Meeting someone?” Pete said.
“When?” Stone asked. “How?”
The rec yard had been closed since two o’clock yesterday afternoon when a thunder storm rolled in.
“Body’s not wet enough to have gone through the storm,” I said.
“So she came after ... When? What time did it stop raining?” Stone asked.
“It was clear by four when we left for the day,” Pete replied.
“So she was killed after four, but how’d she get out here and why wasn’t she missed and how did her killer get out of here?”
The rec yard of PCI is surrounded by its own fence with two gates and a tower at its entrance. To enter or exit, the officer in Tower III needs to buzz the gates open. The gates are separated by a twenty-five-square-foot holding area, and only one gate is opened at a time. The murdered woman had to have been buzzed into the rec yard at some point and her killer had to have been buzzed out.
“She could have been down here a while before she was killed,” I said. “She also could have been killed earlier somewhere else and dumped out here later.”
“We need to talk to the rec yard supervisor and the Tower III officers from yesterday,” Stone said.
Though unusual, it was obvious that he was planning to run the investigation.
“I’m on it,” Pete said. “They should be here in a few minutes.”
“And we need to know who she is,” Stone said. “See if the control room can tell us.”
When following protocol, which wasn’t always as consistent as it should be, the officers in the control room were supposed to visually identify everyone entering and exiting the institution by matching their employee photo ID with the person holding it. They were also in charge of logging and distributing institutional keys to staff.
“At some point we need to call FDLE and get a crime scene unit down here,” Pete said.
“At some point we will,” Stone said. “At the same point we give them two identities—this woman’s and her killer’s.”
“You wait that long, you’re gonna catch hell from them.”
“No, Inspector, you are,” Stone said. “I plan on blaming you. Now, all of you, find out who this woman is and who killed her, and find out fast.”
The three towers of PCI provided one of the best views of the flat North Florida landscape. In addition to the entire prison complex, we could see the seemingly unending pine forest that surrounded it.
Stone and I had climbed up Tower III with the officer who had been on duty last night and were now standing with him and the duty officer inside the tower.
“Who saw the body first?” Stone asked.
I glanced down at the body. It was nearly two hundred yards away, but clearly visible. Colonel Patterson was standing next to it smoking a cigar.
“I did,” Eric Taunton said.
In his early thirties, he was a thick-bodied white man with a thin mustache and freckles. His shift began at seven this morning.
Josh Weeks nodded.
“Josh was gathering his things when I first got in here,” he continued. “I just took a quick look around and—bam, there she was.”
“She?” I asked.
I looked down at the body again. It was difficult to tell from this distance that it was a woman.
“Yeah,” he said, following my gaze. “I’ve got real good eyes. It’s one of the reasons I got this post. It was easier to tell when she was on her stomach. I could see a lot of blond hair.”
I nodded.
“She just jumped out at me,” he said. “At first I didn’t believe what I was seeing, thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but when I looked back and saw she was still there I called Josh over and showed him.”
“Why didn’t you see the body?” Stone asked. “There was at least an hour of daylight before Officer Taunton arrived.”
“I just missed it,” Weeks said. “I guess my eyes ain’t as good as his.”
His eyesight wasn’t the only thing that made me question his assignment to this post.
Much larger than Taunton, Weeks was nearly six and a half feet tall and over three hundred pounds. He had dirty blond hair that was too long and needed washing, and breasts that could have benefited from the support of a bra.
“How do you miss a dead body on the rec yard right under you?” Stone asked.
“Warden, I’m sorry, but I just missed it,” he said.
“Did you even look in that direction once the sun came up?”
He started to nod, but stopped. “Honestly, I can’t remember,” he said. “Thing is, no one’s on the rec yard ’til after the shift change, so I usually concentrate on the compound.”
Stone nodded slightly, but his deep frown and posture communicated how displeased he was.
“What time’d you buzz her through?” Stone asked.
“I didn’t,” Weeks said.
“You sure?”
“Positive,” he said. “Hair like that, I’d remember.”
“She was in there before eleven last night when you started your shift?” Stone said. “That’s a long—”
Weeks shook his head. “I worked a double yesterday,” he said. “I was here from three yesterday afternoon ’til seven this morning. She didn’t come through during that time.”
Stone and I both looked over at Taunton.
He shook his head. “She didn’t come through during my shift yesterday,” he said. “I worked f
rom seven until three and I’m positive I didn’t buzz her in during that time.”
“You realize what you men are saying?” Stone asked. “That she didn’t enter the rec yard yesterday.”
They both nodded.
“That seems far less likely to me than that one of you buzzed her in without realizing it.”
“I’d remember,” Taunton said. “No one gets in without me knowing it.”
“Me, too,” Weeks said, though a little less confidently.
Stone turned to me. “Anything else?”
“Either of you know who she is?” I asked.
They both shook their heads.
“Either she’s new,” Taunton said, “or we’ve never worked the same shift.”
“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Same here.”
“So, you don’t know her and didn’t buzz her in,” Stone said. “Yet there she is on the ground, murdered in a part of the institution you’re responsible for.”
When we stepped out of the tower, Pete and Baker were waiting for us near the gate.
“What’ve you got for me?” Stone asked.
He stepped up to the gate and the rest of us followed. We were buzzed into the holding area by Taunton, then once we closed the first gate and walked to the second one we were buzzed back into the rec yard.
“Nothing helpful,” Baker said. “Everyone’s accounted for.”
Stone cupped the crooked fingers of his bony hand around his ear. “Retransmit.”
“Everyone who entered this institution yesterday is accounted for,” he said. “Logs look good. All the keys’ve been returned. I couldn’t find any discrepancies.”
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Stone said.
“But,” I said, “it does fit with what Taunton and Weeks said.”
Stone looked at me, his face a question. “You believe them?”
I shrugged. “Not necessarily,” I said, “but the fact that it lines up with what the control room says gives it more credibility.”
When we reached the body again, the colonel was puffing on his cigar. It was narrow and cheap and had a beige plastic filter tip on the end.
“Put that thing out,” Stone ordered. “You’re standing near a crime scene.”
Six John Jordan Mysteries Page 44
