Night Sins

by Tami Hoag

  The wages of sin is death. Wicked daughter of Eve.

  Had he hated her all this time for interfering with his wife's treatment, for trying to cure the illness that had eventually killed Doris Fletcher? Had he killed Doris himself?

  “Mr. Fletcher? Police! We have a search warrant!”

  There was an arrest warrant as well, though Mitch doubted Father Tom would press charges. It gave them access to him for the time being. The fact that Fletcher had run off with the weapon had been enough for Judge Witt to issue the search warrant.

  A floorboard creaked a protest as Mitch stepped up into the narrow hall. A window straight ahead let in butter-yellow morning light through a double layer of sheer white curtains that obscured the view to and from the street. On either side of the hall, matching white six-panel doors led into what would be architecturally matching bedrooms.

  He tried the door on the left first, letting himself into the room cautiously, but the room was vacant in more ways than one. It had been stripped of whatever life it might have held when Doris Fletcher was alive. Mitch felt instinctively the stark monastic quality of the furnishing and decoration was post-wife. The bed was a narrow bunk covered with an army surplus wool blanket made up so tight, he could have bounced dimes off it. The nightstand held a lamp and a worn black Bible. The only other piece of furniture was a chest of drawers, the top bare of the usual personal debris. The only decorations on the stark white walls were a crucifix and a sepia-toned print of Jesus festooned with old palm fronds.

  The room across the hall was locked, a situation that was dealt with with the bottom of Mitch's boot. The door swung back on its hinges, banging against the wall. Downstairs, Noogie responded to the sound with a shout, but Mitch was too stunned to answer him.

  Blackout shades blocked all light and all vision from the outside world, but the room was aglow with the flames of candles, their waxy scent thick in the air. A single row of sconces lined the walls, the shadows of their flames dancing. Candles in glass holders—some clear, some red, some blue—sat in clusters on side tables. Their light was sufficient to show the room for what it was—Albert Fletcher's personal chapel.

  The walls of the room were painted the same shade of slate as the walls of St. E's, and someone had gone to great pains to imitate the intricate stencil patterns that adorned the church. Even the ceiling was painted to simulate the arches and frescoes. Crude renderings of angels and saints looked down from gray clouds, their faces weirdly distorted, grotesque.

  At one end of the room stood an altar draped with a white brocade antependium and rich lace runners. On it were arranged all the accoutrements of a Catholic Mass—the thick cloth-bound missal, the golden chalice, a pair of candelabra mounted with more fat white candles. On the wall above the altar hung a huge old crucifix with a painted effigy of Christ as gaunt as a greyhound, dying in agony, blood running from the gory wounds in his hands and the gash in his side.

  Artifacts. The word struck Mitch as he took it all in. These were not homemade imitations, they were the genuine articles. He could envision Albert Fletcher sneaking them up here from the basement of the St. Elysius rectory in the dark of night; cleaning them, his long, bony fingers stroking over them lovingly as he stared at them with the light of fanaticism in his eyes. The candlesticks, the crucifixes, the plaques of the stations of the cross, the statuary.

  Perched on mismatched pedestals around the perimeter of the room were old statues of the Holy Mother and various saints whose names he could only guess at. Their sightless eyes stared out from faces that were chipped and cracked. Their human hair was ratty and thin, looking chewed off in places and plucked out in others. They stared over a congregation that was equally unanimated—four small pews of mannequins.

  Mitch's skin crawled as he looked at them. Heads and torsos, some with arms, some without. None with legs. The males were dressed in shirts and ties and old castoff suit coats. The females were swaddled in black cloth, sheer black draped over their heads. They all sat at perpetual attention, staring blankly at the altar, the light from the candles flickering over their plastic faces.

  And to the side of the altar stood yet another of their silent rank. The mannequin of a boy dressed in a black cassock and dingy white surplice. An altar boy.

  A rumble of thunder announced Noogie's ascent up the stairs. He pounded down the hall and came to a dead stop in the doorway of the room, his service revolver pointed at the ceiling.

  “Holy sh—shoot.” He stared, wide-eyed, his jaw hanging halfway to his chest. “Man,” he whispered. “I've never seen anything like this. This is creepy.”

  “Did you find anything downstairs?” Mitch asked as he bent and ran a hand over the well-worn velvet padded kneeler before the altar.

  “Nothing.” Noga remained in the doorway, his gaze skating nervously over the faces of the mannequins.

  Mitch rose. “It's not a real church, Noogie. You don't have to whisper.”

  The big officer's gaze fixed on the statue of the Virgin Mary with half its face missing. He swallowed hard and a shudder rippled down him. “It's weird,” he said, his tone still hushed. “Downstairs it's like no one lives here. I mean, there's no stuff—no newspapers lying around, no mail, no knickknacks, no pictures on the wall, no mirrors.” His eyes went wide again. “You know, vampires don't keep mirrors.”

  “I don't think he's a vampire, Noogie,” Mitch said, opening the closet door at the back of the chapel. “Crosses ward them off.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  In the closet hung a row of priest's vestments, old and frayed but clean and pressed. Some were still in the plastic bags from Mueller's Dry Cleaning in Tatonka. Black cassocks and red ones, white surplices and mantles in royal purple and cardinal red and rich ivory with elaborate embroidery.

  “Mitch!” Lonnie Dietz hollered below. “Mitch!”

  “Up here!” Mitch bellowed.

  The run up the stairs winded Dietz. His face was ashen, setting off the bright red of his nose. His hat had tumbled off and his wig was askew, looking like a small, frightened animal clinging to his head. He stopped on the landing as Mitch wedged himself past Noogie into the hall.

  “I think you better come out here,” Dietz said. “We think we just found Mrs. Fletcher.”

  Pat Stevens lifted the dust cover on the mummified remains of Doris Fletcher sitting behind the wheel of her 1982 Chevy Caprice. She was dressed in an old cotton house shift that had rotted away in places where fluids had leaked from the body during one phase of decomposition. Mitch had no idea what she had looked like in life, whether she had been thin or heavy, pretty or homely. In death she looked like something that had been freeze-dried until all fluid evaporated and the tissue and skin shrunk down tight against bone like leather—which was precisely what had happened. Hideous didn't begin to describe her sitting there shriveled inside her dress.

  That she had died in the winter had saved her from being ravaged by insects and rot. By the time warm weather had arrived, she had already been partially petrified. Timing had also prevented the neighbors from detecting her fate with their noses. Had Albert Fletcher locked his wife's dead body in a Chevy Caprice in July in Minnesota, he would not have been able to keep the secret three days, let alone three years. But Doris Fletcher had been obliging in death, if not in life.

  “How do you suppose he got her here?” Lonnie pondered nervously as he paced back and forth alongside the car. Noogie stood back against the wall of the garage, mouth hanging open in a trance, his winter-white breath the only indication he had survived the shock.

  “Religious nut like him, why wouldn't he give her a decent Christian burial?” Pat Stevens asked.

  “Apparently, he didn't believe she deserved one,” Mitch said.

  He read the note pinned to the front of Doris Fletcher's dress.

  Wicked daughter of Eve: Be sure

  your sin will find you out.

  9:41 A.M. -19° WINDCHILL FACTOR: -38°

  The press buzzar
ds, circling town with their ears tuned to their police scanners, picked up the radio calls and made it to Albert Fletcher's house ahead of the coroner. They clustered in the driveway, moving like a school of fish—drifting in unison, then scattering as their ranks were broken by cops, quickly drawing back into their group.

  Mitch swore at them under his breath as he tried to direct his men and the BCA evidence techs between the garage and the house. The photographers and video people were the worst, trying to blend in with the official personnel in order to sneak shots of the body and the chapel.

  The scene was trouble enough without gawkers. A three-year-old mummified corpse presented a whole array of logistical problems. The BCA people argued among themselves as to how to handle the situation. Noticeably absent from the discussion was Megan.

  Mitch couldn't believe she hadn't beaten a path to the scene the second the call had gone out. She should have been right there in the thick of it as the crime scene unit took Fletcher's house apart board by board; taking notes, making a mental picture, processing the information through her cop's brain to formulate fresh theories.

  He turned away from the bickering agents and headed for the side door of the garage. He jerked the door open and nearly ran head-on into a puppy-faced reporter with bright eyes and a stupid-looking grin on his face.

  “You'll have to wait outside,” Mitch snarled. “Law enforcement personnel only in here.”

  “Chief Holt!” The grin stretched wider and he offered Mitch his gloved hand. “I've had a call in to you since nine o'clock. That secretary of yours is a real guard dog.”

  “Natalie is my administrative assistant,” Mitch said coldly, ignoring the proffered hand. “She runs my office, and if she hears you call her a guard dog, she'll rip your head off and shout down the hole. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.”

  Puppy Boy didn't seem to know whether he should be amused or contrite. Mitch scowled at him and backed him into the driveway. Whatever else this guy might have been, he was tenacious. He hustled alongside Mitch as he headed to the house.

  “You'll have to wait for the press conference like everyone else,” Mitch snapped.

  “But, Chief, you don't seem to understand. I'm not with the press. I'm with the BCA.” He dug an ID out of his coat pocket and held it up. “Agent Marty Wilhelm, BCA.”

  Mitch stopped in his tracks, unease creeping along his nerve endings. “I haven't seen you on this case before.”

  Puppy Boy gave him a lopsided grin that seemed wholly inappropriate considering the circumstances. “I was just assigned.”

  Mitch kept his expression carefully blank. Agent? Megan had told him DePalma was considering sending another field agent to assist her. She said she would take it as a sign of her imminent demise.

  “Well, Agent Wilhelm,” he said softly, tightly. “Where is Agent O'Malley? She's the one you should be dogging, not me.”

  Marty Wilhelm stuffed his ID back in his coat pocket. “I wouldn't know. She's been relieved of this assignment.”

  2:20 P.M. -16° WINDCHILL FACTOR: -32°

  You get yanked off the job. You get sued for slander. You get kicked in the head with a migraine. You've just about topped your day of days here, O'Malley. And the night is young.

  Megan supposed it was still afternoon, but time had ceased to mean anything to her and the living room shades were down, making the room dark. But not dark enough. Death wouldn't be dark enough to ease the pain in her eyes, or quiet enough to keep sound from piercing her brain. The refrigerator kicked on with a thump and a whine, and she whimpered and tried to curl into a tighter ball.

  She still had her coat on, though her boots had come off—one by the door and one somewhere along the path between the still-unpacked boxes. The confounded gray scarf tried to choke her as she changed positions. She jerked at it with a trembling hand and wrestled it off to fling it on the floor. Her hair was still tied back. She could feel each individual strand as if some unseen hand were pulling relentlessly on her ponytail, but she couldn't concentrate hard enough to get the rubber band undone.

  The pain was unrelenting, a constant high-pitched drill boring into her head, an ax splitting her skull. God, she wished someone would split her skull with an ax and put her out of her misery.

  She should have been injecting herself with Imitrex, but she couldn't move from the couch. If she had been able to get herself upright, she didn't think she would even know where the bathroom was. She had pulled one of the few empty boxes in the apartment within puking range. Any port in a storm.

  Gannon and Friday had taken up their posts on a stereo speaker box across the room, and watched her intently. They were old hands at the vigil. They never came too close or made a sound. As if they were perfectly attuned to her suffering, they lay across the room and watched her, ever diligent. Friday's white-tipped tail hung down the side of the box, the last inch twitching slowly back and forth, back and forth, like a pendulum.

  Megan stared at it for a while, then closed her eyes and saw it still. Back and forth, back and forth. The rhythm made her dizzy, nauseated, but she couldn't erase it from her mind. Right, left, right left. Then it picked up words: Paige Price, Paige Price, right left, right left, Paige Price, Paige Price.

  DePalma's voice came in, crackling with anger. “How could you be so stupid? How could you say that in front of twenty goddamn news cameras?”

  Paige Price, Paige Price, Paige Price . . .

  “. . . five-million-dollar slander suit . . .”

  Paige Price, Paige Price . . .

  “. . . against you and the bureau . . .”

  Paige Price, Paige Price . . .

  “. . . I don't care if she's the whore of Babylon . . .”

  Paige Price.

  “. . . you're off the case . . .”

  Off the case.

  Oh, God, she couldn't believe it. Couldn't stand it. Off the case. The words brought a wash of shame. Worse than that—far worse—was the fist of panic that tightened in her chest. She couldn't be off the case. She wanted it so badly. To find Josh. To catch the monster who had taken him and tormented them all. She wanted to be there to slap the cuffs on him and look him in the eye and say, “I got you, you son of a bitch.” She wanted it for herself and for Josh and for Hannah. But she was off the case and the truth of that shook her to the core.

  The pain burst inside her head like a brilliant white light bulb, and she pressed her face into the couch cushion and cried.

  Another wave of pain obliterated all thought. Helpless to do anything else, Megan gave herself over to it. Somewhere in the distance she could hear the beat of helicopter rotors, the sound like bird's wings thumping against her eardrums. The search went on without her. The case went on without her.

  The phone rang and the machine picked up. Henry Forster wanted to talk to her about Paige. When hell freezes over. Which may be imminent, she thought, shivering, pulling her coat tighter around her.

  The phone chirped again, making her whimper, and again the machine picked up. “Megan? It's Mitch. I just heard you got yanked. Um—I thought you might be home, but I guess not. I'll try to get you on the radio. If you get this message first, call me. We've got a situation with Fletcher.” There was a beat of silence. “I'm sorry. I know how much the job means to you.”

  The apology sounded awkward and sincere, as if he didn't make many, but the ones he made counted. He was sorry. He was giving his condolences, one cop to another. Tough luck, you're off the case. It's been nice knowing you, O'Malley. She would become a memory, someone who had barged into his life for a week, shared a bed with him for a couple of nights, and moved on.

  She couldn't expect him to feel anything deeper than physical attraction to her. She knew nothing of love or relationships, or being a woman—as Mitch had pointed out so bluntly. He had been in love enough to marry, enough to have a family, enough to still mourn the loss of that woman. She'd never had anything that came close. She only had the job and it was going down
in flames.

  How could she have been so stupid?

  The phone seemed to ring incessantly. The press had gotten wind of the debacle. Paige, the bitch, had probably broken the news herself in a live exclusive from the steps of City Center.

  Megan wondered about the “situation” with Albert Fletcher. What situation? She couldn't remember. It hurt to try. A dozen different half-remembered conversations tumbled together in her mind, all the voices talking at once in a dissonant chorus that made her ears ring and her head swim.

  Please stop. Please stop.

  The telephone shrilled again.

  Please stop.

  Tears ran down her face. Dizzy, wishing she would pass out, she slid down off the couch and crawled on her hands and knees to unplug the phone. She made it back to her barf box in time to be sick, but she couldn't muster the strength or coordination to get herself back on the couch. Beyond caring, she curled into a ball on the floor and lay there, waiting for the pain to end.

  4:27 P.M. -20° WINDCHILL FACTOR: -38°

  No one had seen a sign of Fletcher. He had vanished. As Josh had vanished. As Megan had vanished.

  She didn't answer her telephone. She didn't answer her car radio. It seemed she had walked out of the station and disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Mitch prowled the streets of town looking for any glimpse of Albert Fletcher, directing the search for their fugitive from the radio of the Explorer. The radio crackled. Positions of units. Complaints about the cold. Frustration at another dead end. A chopper passed by overhead, sweeping slowly over the rooftops of Deer Lake for a glimpse of the demented deacon.

  Wicked daughter of Eve: Be sure your sin will find you out.

  Megan had run into Fletcher at St. E's. He had been less than charmed by her. If Fletcher knew where Megan lived . . . She wouldn't have thought twice about taking him on.

  He caught sight of her white Lumina parked at a cockeyed angle to the curb in front of her apartment house. The driver's door was ajar. Visions of her being pulled from the car pushed him into a trot up the sidewalk to the big Victorian house. He took the stairs two at a time to the third floor. No sound came from her apartment. No light leaked out under the door.