by P J Parrish
“What did he look like?”
Grascoeur looked up at him. “Look like? I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at him. I had only the one lantern I took with me into the church that night.”
“Anything would be helpful.”
Grascoeur was quiet for a long time, the lines on his face seeming to deepen.
“Was he young?” Louis asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t get that impression. His voice was deep but . . . very quiet and fearful. It was almost like a boy was inside the man trying to speak.”
Louis stifled a sigh.
“He wasn’t Catholic,” Grascoeur said after another long silence.
“How do you know?”
“Someone coming to the confessional always says right away, ‘Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. It has been whatever-days since my last confession.’ He didn’t say that.”
“Do you remember exactly the first thing he said?”
Grascoeur paused, then nodded. “He said, ‘I need to tell someone what I did to them.’” His dark eyes searched Louis’s face. “I didn’t remember that until just this moment. Do you think that matters?”
“Everything matters, sir. Can you recall any physical details about the man?”
Grascoeur shook his head. “He was wearing a heavy coat and a wool hat. I think he had a beard. It was very dark. As I said, all I had was one lantern that I had set down outside the confessional. I never really saw his face.”
Louis took a drink of water, thinking about Grascoeur’s distinctive lilt. “Did he have an accent?”
“Accent?” Grascoeur frowned. “Oh, you mean our Yooper accent.” He nodded slowly. “Yes, yes he did. A very strong one.”
That meant the man was a local. “Where exactly was your church?” Louis asked.
“Just south of Copper Harbor. It’s closed now. After I left, well, the diocese in Marquette felt there wasn’t enough of a congregation left to keep it financially viable. I guess they always thought we were something of an outpost up there.”
Louis had been thinking that he could ask the old priest for a list—even a mental one—of who had been in his congregation eleven years ago. How many murdering sinners could there be in one town? But that was out now.
“Is there anything else you can remember? Did you go outside after him? Maybe see a vehicle?”
“I didn’t go outside afterward. But I remember he smelled of wet wool and I remember there was a big puddle in the confessional after he left. He probably walked to me.”
If nothing else, Louis now had a geographical profile for his suspect’s residence. He was already calculating just how far a man would walk in a snowstorm to confess his sins when the reverend spoke again.
“Deponatur sacerdos qui peccata penitentis publicare presumit,” Grascoeur whispered.
“I’m sorry, sir, what did you say?”
“Let the priest who dares to make known the sins of his penitent be deposed.”
Louis remembered a talk he had with a fellow cop in the locker room back when he was a rookie on the Ann Arbor force. The cop told him that a priest he had interviewed would not give up the name of a man who had confessed to stabbing his wife. The cop was Catholic, and Louis remembered how angry and confused he had been.
“We all find ways to carry our guilt,” Grascoeur said. “Jesus Christ is there to take it away for us, but sometimes He leaves just enough so we don’t forget.”
His eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have done something more. I am so very sorry.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It wasn’t much of a motel, but they accepted his state police credit card and gave him a room as far away from the railroad tracks as possible. By ten p.m. Louis was settled into a lumpy bed, exhaustion fogging his brain.
Louis took a minute to call Joe and they shared a few words about their jobs. She was more interested in how he was adjusting to having rules and a boss than she was in Reverend Prince’s murder, but that was okay. He liked telling her how he felt. He told her he loved her and hung up. He had almost drifted into a light sleep before he remembered he needed to check in with Nina at his apartment house. She was watching Issy. And from the sound of her voice, she was getting quite attached to the old cat. That was okay, too. Cats—and Nina for that matter—pretended they didn’t need anybody, but they did.
He stripped down to his boxers, turned up the heat, and switched on the TV. The eleven o’clock news was on, the anchor recapping a segment called Around the Mitten. A small plane crash in Alpena killed two. A four-car accident blocked traffic along I-96 for three hours. A prostitute was found dead in a suitcase on a farm outside of Ionia. A cop had been shot and wounded in Detroit.
Finally, he killed the TV. The darkness settled in around him and, within minutes, he was asleep.
The dream started almost immediately.
At first it was just a feeling, the same deep-chest crush he had felt in the Eagle River Inn, the closed-in feeling that had compelled him to get out of his room and run down the cold beach.
But this time he could see where he was. He was running up some stairs. And he could hear something, footsteps thundering behind him on a wood floor. Then the dream shifted and he was floating high above, watching two boys run, and he was rooting them on, his own voice coming out small and feeble.
Run, run faster!
The dream raced on, like a speeded-up film. He tried to reach down for the boys, but they didn’t see his hand and they kept running until suddenly a door slammed and darkness came. He was no longer watching the boys, he was in the darkness with them.
A burst of light.
Come out of there!
No! No!
Something warm pushed against him and a boy’s face came into focus, close. So close Louis could see his tears, hear his gasps, feel the tremble of his fingers.
Then the boy was gone, dragged away by giant hands that sparked with prisms of light. Louis shrank back into the darkness, listening to the clapping of the giant hands and the other boy’s whimpering.
It’ll be okay. Stay there. Just stay there.
Then it was quiet, and the light changed to a pale pink and he could see a boy turning in slow circles to follow the movement of the pink light. The smell of simmering greens filled his nose, making him both nauseous and hungry. Then a pale old man appeared at a rainy window, a minister draped in a purple silk robe and wearing a red and green knit wool hat with tassels. The old man held a book of poetry by Langston Hughes that he pushed through a liquid glass window.
Do you want to know?
The minister spoke but his lips didn’t move.
Do you want to know?
The boy in the pink light started to cry. The minister melted away, morphing into a dragon-like monster with yellowed claws and black wires coming out of his head.
Louis bolted awake. He tumbled to the floor as his legs got tangled in the sheet. Gasping for breath, he stayed on his knees in the darkness.
What the hell was happening?
He never dreamed like this, not this vividly and not about his work or monsters or missing children.
He sat back against the bed, fighting the urge to get out of the motel room and run off the adrenaline. He could hear the steady pelt of rain against the window and looked at his watch. It was two a.m.
He shut his eyes and tried to replay the dream in his head before it faded away. It seemed important to remember it, as disturbing as it had been. He concentrated and a few more details came into focus. The hallway had ugly, yellow wallpaper. The other boy was wearing a striped T-shirt. The smell of the simmering greens was surely a memory of his childhood in Mississippi. The minister was faceless, but he had to be a manifestation of Jonas Prince and Grascoeur.
The dream was fading. There was nothing left now but that awful tightness in his chest.
Get a grip, Kincaid.
He opened his eyes, pushed to his feet, and went to the bathroom.
He turned on the tap and splashed his face with cold water. When he looked up, he caught his reflection in the cracked mirror. His eyes were wide, the pupils black pinpricks.
Do you want to know? Do you want to know?
Suddenly it made sense. He knew.
The sharp images in the dream passed before his eyes, flashes of light from a prism, blurry and fast and sharp. And even though nothing was in focus, now he understood.
The creature with the giant hands and flashy rings, it was not a symbol of the killer who had left two boys in a candle box. It was a real man.
Moe . . .
That was his name. He was real. And that hallway with the yellow wallpaper was real. It was a real place in a real house, a big decrepit house in Detroit. A house where the man named Moe took in foster kids in exchange for state money.
And the boy . . .
Louis shut his eyes. It came slowly, so very slowly, like something pulled from some place deep inside him. Not from his memory, but from his heart.
Sammy.
Louis leaned on the bathroom counter, breathing hard against the tightness in his chest.
God. My God.
And that other boy, the second boy who had escaped the monster by staying hidden in the closet, he knew that boy, too.
It was him.
Louis moved back to the bedroom but had no desire to get back into bed. He threw open the drapes, grabbed the chair and sat down at the window. For a long time, he just stared out at the rain-blurred car lights.
After a while, he leaned forward and reached around his ribs, feeling for the only small, round burn scar of the six on his back that he could reach. When he found it, he traced the tiny rope of raised skin once with the tip of his finger, then drew his hand away.
He closed his eyes, remembering what Steele had said to him the first day the team had gathered around the conference table.
Bon retour chez toi.
Welcome home, Louis. Welcome home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was nine-twenty-two when Louis got to the church the next morning, and Cam, Tooki, Emily, and Junia were seated around the conference table, case folders spread open in front of them. Steele stood at the head of the table and made an exaggerated gesture of glancing at his watch as Louis slid into the only empty chair.
Louis pulled out his binder and flipped past his notes from his interview with Grascoeur to focus on his interviews with Anthony Prince and Walter Bushman. When he looked up, he noticed the changes to the murder board behind Steele. A large schematic of the Beacon Light Cathedral had been added, with colored pushpins designating primary and secondary crime scenes. There were new photographs, including several angles of Jonas Prince’s corpse, the dressing room, and headshots of the suspects thus far—Bushman, Anthony, and a man Louis assumed was the expelled gay guy whose name he could not recall at the moment.
Steele’s voice drew his attention back. “Junia, continue.”
Junia began a summary of the preliminary forensics, which confirmed that Jonas was killed in the dressing room by manual strangulation, with no evidence of defense wounds. A church employee said that Jonas had worn a purple robe for that evening’s service and not the blue robe and gold stole that Jonas had been found wearing in death.
Steele interrupted her. “Cam, I want you to find out if there is anything special about this blue robe and gold stole.”
“Will do, boss.”
“Junia, go on please,” Steele said.
Church employees also confirmed that the door to Jonas Prince’s dressing room was always locked and only Jonas had a key, but so far no key had been found. The dressing room was also not a regular stop on the cleaning crew’s route, as Jonas never wanted anyone in there unattended. They cleaned and vacuumed once a week, on Wednesday mornings, with the Reverend there to monitor.
Louis looked down at his notes, and closed his eyes, fighting exhaustion. Even after a morning shower and the ninety-minute drive down from Saginaw, adrenaline still coursed through him, like a low-grade fire just under his skin.
Emily was talking now, offering a profile of the killer as organized, methodical, and comfortable in the church environment.
“You have a working profile of Jonas?” Steele asked.
“He was very private but well liked and considered kind,” Emily said. “He was known to give parishioners money from his own pocket, but he was conservative in his social views, to the point of banishing those who did not adhere to his high moral standards.” She glanced at her notes. “His favorite sermon topic was forgiveness and he often said that the church was not a country club, it was a hospital where souls were healed.”
“And his son, Anthony?” Steele asked.
“His distress seems genuine and he was mildly disoriented, which is normal for family members of murder victims,” she said. “He has, I believe, an inflated sense of ego that he reinforces by surrounding himself with symbols of his achievements.”
“Not unusual for a man living in the shadow of an icon,” Steele said.
“But I also believe he is deeply insecure,” she said. “This manifests itself in several forms of OCD, primarily the need to arrange things and control what is happening around him. And the more a person tries to control the external psychological and physical stimuli surrounding him, the more things are raging out of control internally.”
“OCD,” Steele said, tapping his pencil. “Isn’t there a type of compulsion where you fear having sinful thoughts?”
Emily nodded. “I’d need a much longer interview to go there. I have to say that if he killed his father, it wasn’t to take over the church. The man clearly understands he does not have his father’s charisma.”
Steele turned to Tooki. “How about the family finances?”
Tooki spoke without looking up from his computer screen. “The church is incorporated and grosses about one million a year in donations, and another two million from its television broadcasts. All of Jonas Prince’s assets were owned and managed by the church and all but about ten percent remains with the church in Jonas’s death.”
“What about Anthony’s finances?” Steele asked.
“His assets—his home in Grand Rapids and two cars—are titled in his name only. He earns an executive manager’s salary of two-hundred-and-fifty thousand a year. I am still working on his investments and expenditures. His bank has not yet computerized.”
Tooki looked up, squinting. “His wife, Violet, has a trust, left to her by her father. Anthony administers it, but I haven’t been able to find out much about it yet.”
“Cam, how did your interviews go?” Steele asked.
While Cam rattled on about the janitorial staff and the homosexual Jonas had banished from the congregation, Louis’s mind drifted back to the wilderness of the Keweenaw Peninsula and the guilt-ridden, faceless man who sought out absolution in the middle of a blizzard. He was re-reading his notes from Grascoeur when Steele said his name.
“Louis?”
He looked up.
“I asked, what was your impression of Walter Bushman?”
Louis closed his binder. “He liked Jonas Prince, but he had no kind words for Anthony. Anthony tried to blackmail him a few months back and Bushman got Jonas to back him off. Plus, he has an alibi. He was with two hookers.”
Cam slammed his folder shut. The gesture drew Steele’s attention and, for a moment, no one moved. Then Steele turned back to the table.
“You’ll each get a set of crime scene photos this afternoon,” Steele said. “I need your witness statements and summaries by three p.m. There’s a copy machine in the back room. Make copies for each of us. I want you to share everything. I’ll see you all at four.”
Steele started away toward the loft. Cam had disappeared, his chair still swinging back and forth. Tooki retreated to his desk computer. Emily was at her desk, feeding paper into her typewriter. Louis watched her peck with two fingers for a minute, then he stood up and went over to her.
“All your time in the FBI and you never learned to type any better than that?”
She didn’t smile.
He sat down. Her desk was littered with pink and green Post-It notes and folders of varying colors. He could see a bright-yellow file folder, labeled “CMU suicides” in the bottom rung of a stacked in-box.
“How you doing?” he asked.
Emily shrugged and leaned back in her chair. He noticed her gaze drifted to the CMU file.
“Did you make any progress on your test case?” he asked.
“Didn’t have much time,” she said. “But so far, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. The families say no way would their kids take their own lives.”
“Maybe they’re right,” Louis said. “They should know their kids better than anyone.”
Emily’s eyes slid to Louis. “No parent really knows their kids. And most don’t want to. It’s too much work, too much of an emotional investment. It’s easier to look the other way and hope that when you look back, your kid will have somehow emerged from the darkness of adolescence as a normal human being.”
Emily drew a deep breath, but the bitterness he had heard in her voice shadowed her eyes, making them a deep sea green.
“What about you?” Emily asked. “You look like hell.”
“Not sleeping.”
“How come?”
He hesitated. He liked Emily, but she was a psychologist and they liked to pick the lockboxes of the brain.
“Talk to me,” Emily said.
“I’m dreaming about my childhood,” Louis said quietly. “And a boy I haven’t thought about in over twenty years.”
Emily said nothing, but her eyes were intense on his.
“Aren’t you going to tell me that my subconscious is struggling with some sort of unresolved issue and I should tackle it head on?” Louis asked.
“Actually, no,” she said. “I don’t believe in dream interpretation. It’s just your brain on overdrive.”
“I don’t think so,” Louis said. “This is different.”
