The Criminal Mind

by Thomas Benigno

  “Three older boys,” Fran added. “And I mean three older seminary students.”

  “But why this boy?” Jasmine asked.

  “Because they were rapists and thought they could get away with it. After all, the boy was already being abused by a priest there.”

  But they didn’t get away with it. Jasmine thought again. Or did they?

  Fran took a breath and leaned back in her chair when a knock was heard on the door. The waiter brought in their salads, sensed the heightened tension in the room, and quickly left.

  “I don’t remember reading about any students being arrested and prosecuted,” Jasmine said.

  “That’s because the boy never went to the police,” Fran answered.

  “But what about his parents?”

  “They didn’t either.”

  “Did anyone call the police? Did someone at the school? Did you?”

  “Hell, no. I was part of the cover-up––something I have had to live with for what seems like an eternity. Don’t forget—I was young, and at the time, the church was my whole world. But I did have one noble moment.”

  “What was that?

  “I called an ambulance for the boy. I denied it then, of course. I suppose something inside me was nagging at my conscience. The last thing the school wanted was the outside world to know anything about the attack. But then, after the boy was examined in emergency, someone at the hospital notified the police—and wouldn’t you know it—the only honest cop on the force at the time took that call. Simultaneously, someone at the Cartersville Gazette got wind of it and, minutes later, both the police and a member of the press showed up. But the boy wouldn’t talk—not a word. The reporter then got a hold of the boy’s medical chart, got his name off it, and called the boy’s father—who happened to be editor-in-chief of the paper.”

  “I suppose that explains the scandal.” Jasmine said.

  “Not really, and you’re jumping ahead. I was a teenage novitiate nun at the time—stalwart in my devotion to God, the church and its teachings, even when they were tailored to suit the circumstances—like aiding in a cover-up.”

  Jasmine downed the balance of her wine. Since she was as much hell-bent on learning the truth as Fran was in telling it, neither woman had yet touched their food.

  “The boy still refused to talk, even after his father showed up at the hospital,” Fran continued. “Then the father threw everyone out of the boy’s room, including the nurses and doctors. A few minutes later, the boy fessed up, but not completely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It wasn’t until the father searched his dorm room that he came to know the true nature of his son’s relationship with the priest—no thanks to the seminary staff. By the time the father got there, all signs of the attack were gone. The original bed sheets were changed, and any and all evidence of blood was cleaned up entirely. The father, however, was far more thorough than the clergy—and more thorough then even I was.”

  “What do you mean—‘more thorough than even you’?” Jasmine asked.

  “I was one of the nuns assigned to clean up the mess.” Fran said contritely.

  “And so…what did the father find?”

  Fran took another sip of wine. “The letters. He found the letters.”

  Stress always had the effect of raising my body temperature, as did sleep, which meant that the thick and fluffy bedspread at The Red Mill Inn was of little use to me. Halfway through my first night there, no matter how high I turned up the air-conditioning, I felt as though I were sleeping in a sauna. Fielding bits and pieces of disturbing information—rooted in both the past and the present, filtering in from a variety of different sources—left me exhausted. But most unsettling was the dark cloud of fear and acceptance that hovered over a town where children had apparently been going missing for decades.

  As my eyes grew heavy with the hour approaching midnight—lying under a thin sheet, my head on a soft pillow—I wanted out of this world, at least until morning. Fate though, would have none of it. Donald Riggins was ringing my cellphone.

  It was late. I was tired. Not recognizing the caller, I was about to turn the phone off, but for the fact that I had given out my number to countless residents of Cartersville that day.

  I expected that Riggins, the acclaimed former FBI agent that he was, would be only too proud to tell me how he had solved the mystery of the assault on Maureen.

  I was only half-right.

  “I suppose Paul told you that the landlord was missing his key to Maureen’s apartment,” Riggins began.

  “Yes, he did,” I answered.

  “Well, the landlord eventually remembered why.”

  “He remembered?” I asked sarcastically.

  “He’s eighty-five, Nick. He called me this afternoon and told me that the local detective on the case had just returned the key. Seems the landlord had given it to him while Maureen was in the hospital. The detective, a guy named McCormick, wanted to take another look inside.”

  “I met that guy. Makes sense. He’s nosy, but I suppose that makes him a good detective,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what still doesn’t make sense is how someone got in and out without breaking anything—and without being seen.”

  “Okay then, what’s the answer? Because I’m sure you didn’t call me this late to tell me you don’t have one.”

  “That’s correct, counselor. I didn’t.”

  “Okay I’m overtired, so just tell me. Who was it that assaulted Maureen, and how did they get into the apartment to do it?”

  “I went over every inch of that place—every inch of every floor, wall, and ceiling,” Riggins answered. “I checked every door, window, and every possible entry and exit. I even checked for trapdoors. Nothing.”

  “Maybe she was hit on the head in the hall as she was going in?”

  “If Paul’s notes are correct, and they always are, that’s not what she said. She specifically remembered being inside before she got struck.”

  “What are you saying, Don? It’s late and I’m beat to shit.”

  “What I’m saying is…she did it to herself.”

  “They were love letters,” Fran exclaimed.

  “To whom and from whom?” Jasmine asked, her impatience heightening with every revelation.

  “From the boy to the priest,” Fran answered, in a tone that indicated surprise that Jasmine hadn’t figured that out already.

  But Jasmine’s mind didn’t work that way. She assumed nothing because assumptions can be misleading. Conclusions come from cold hard facts and nothing less. The purveyors of dark secrets love nothing more than to send their adversaries down the wrong path and further away from the truth.

  “Were there any letters from the priest to the boy?” Jasmine asked.

  “No,” Fran replied. “The boy’s letters did refer, however, to statements of affection made by the priest, but nothing that was found in writing. But here’s where it gets interesting: In one of the letters, the boy wrote about being physically bullied by some of the older boys while they taunted him with homophobic slurs.”

  “If I understand you correctly, these letters were written while the priest was having a sexual relationship with the boy, and still nothing was done to stop the bullying?”

  “No one really knows if the priest did anything to protect the boy. Maybe he tried. Maybe he spoke to the older boys—or maybe there was some other reason for the assault.”

  “Something is not making sense here,” Jasmine interrupted. “You said the boy’s father found these letters hidden in the boy’s room. If they were letters meant for the priest, what were they still doing in his room?”

  “The boy wrote them, but never sent them,” Fran answered. “They were found in envelopes with no addresses on them, dated only a few days apart. It was a cry for help, if you ask me, whic
h leads me to believe that if the priest never got the letters, he might never have known about the bullying. Maybe the boy was afraid to send them, or maybe—in some therapeutic way—writing it down helped him to cope. No doubt he was suffering. The last letter was dated the day of the attack. In it, he wrote that he was considering suicide.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jasmine said sadly. “And the boy just left the letters in his room for anyone to find?”

  “No. They were hidden in the ceiling tiles.”

  “And his father was the one who found the letters?” Jasmine asked skeptically.

  “The father was a reporter for the New York Daily News for ten years before relocating to Cartersville. I guess he looked where no one else thought of looking.”

  “Why would someone who worked for the Daily News in New York City take a job in Cartersville?”

  “I don’t expect you to remember this note in history, but in 1950, New York City was in a financial crisis. I suppose the serene, rural landscape of Cartersville had its appeal.”

  Jasmine shook her head in disbelief, though she believed Fran probably had it right.

  Fran continued. “He also had a son who expressed a desire to become a priest. With the Mount Seneca Seminary in town, it probably seemed like the perfect fit.”

  Jasmine still hadn’t touched her food. “None of my research uncovered what happened to the boy afterward. The priest was reassigned to a parish in Buffalo, but that’s all I could find.”

  Fran took another sip of wine. “After the boy got out of the hospital, he did not return to Mount Seneca. He finished at a local public high school. After graduating, he started college at Fordham University in the Bronx, but then transferred to Columbia—which doesn’t make much sense, considering his grades at Fordham were poor to mediocre. But I’m leaving something out: his family’s wealth—especially on his father’s side. I’m talking about the Holcomb family. That was their name. It escaped me for years, but just popped back into my head like a chicken coming home to roost.”

  Fran picked up her glass of wine, and in one swig it was gone. She then took a breath and continued. “Though in her own right, his mother was considered well-off, the father was heir to a huge family fortune. George Holcomb was his name. The boy’s name was Richard. It’s all coming back to me now. No doubt Richard’s transfer was on the heels of his family’s influence. Fat Ivy League endowments can do that. Unfortunately, fruit from that money tree would have been better used for psychological counseling—considering the incident at Columbia that eventually resulted in the boy’s dismissal. It seems young Richard had gotten himself ‘a girlfriend’.” Fran made quote marks with her fingers. “I suppose they were getting serious, or so she thought, which explains why she stayed over in his dorm room ‘on the sneak’ one night. The relationship though, was short-lived—excuse the pun. In the wee hours of that same evening, students in the adjoining rooms heard them arguing. Curiously, it was something about his manhood. Seems the young coed wasn’t getting enough of the ‘slap and tickle’ to keep her satisfied. The next morning, she was found lying on the courtyard pavement five stories down. Afterward, Richard claimed that she had been suffering from depression and must have jumped. But when the police arrived, the sole dorm room window was not only closed, but also locked. According to Richard, when he got up that morning, he found it open, and figured it was the girlfriend’s doing before she went to classes. The room would often get stuffy at night. In turn, he shut it and locked it. Since he had no reason to believe she jumped, he had no reason to call the police. The problem with his story was the time of year. It was January. Why would she leave a window open in New York in the dead of winter with her boyfriend still asleep? The other problem: It was Friday, and like most of the student population, she had no classes. Bottom line: Considering the argument they had, and that no one was able to corroborate her so-called ‘depression,’ Richard was charged with second-degree murder. After his father posted an exorbitant two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollars bail—quite a fortune back then—Richard was released from jail. When he never returned for trial, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Richard, however, was never found.”

  As a postscript, Fran went on to explain that two years after the scandal at Mount Seneca, she left the order of novitiate nuns. At the young age of twenty, she had heard and witnessed enough religious hypocrisy to last a lifetime. She went on to finish college and started a career as a social worker, which eventually led to a managerial and board position at USadoptions.com.

  Before their lunch meeting was over, Fran leveled one more tidbit of puzzling information at Jasmine. “By the way, I don’t know if this has any importance to you, but I heard talk of a passageway—a tunnel. I’m not sure where it is—under the seminary, or the Seneca River, or somewhere under the town. Don’t know if it still exists, but every time that tunnel was talked about, seriously or in jest, it seemed like something to be afraid of. If you ask me—it has its own secrets.”

  Back in small-town USA again.

  What a crock.

  I’ll take the big city any day.

  Nothing here is what it appears to be.

  Everyone is always smiling like they’re hiding something.

  It’s too much for even Madeline to deal with.

  That’s why we have to join forces, like in Star Wars.

  Got to keep Mia away from all this.

  I just know it’s going to get ugly up here.

  Judy

  As I continued my conversation with Donald Riggins—while still lying in bed with my head and neck stiffening on a soft pillow—I started to wonder if I would ever be able to fall asleep again.

  “What do you mean, ‘did it to herself’?” I asked, as my nerves reached high alert, and the last thing I felt was tired.

  “What I mean is,” Riggins countered, “just like I said, she either did it to herself or someone she’s in cahoots with did it to her.”

  “Like her ex? She can’t stand him.”

  “It’s not the ex, Nick. I can tell you that.”

  “He’s probably still in Tennessee. She told me that he was a real chauvinist––demeaning and downright abusive––made her quit teaching to be a stay-at-home wife and mother. She had no choice, she said.”

  “I’m not going to mince words. Paul told me that you have feelings for this woman.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I had a friend at the FBI run a check on her after I pulled her prints off the inside corner of her medicine cabinet. You would think it would be easy to find her prints all over her apartment, but no. Someone had wiped it clean, along with getting rid of all food boxes, cans, bottles, and jars in her kitchen cabinets, pantry and refrigerator. Someone was not taking any chances of leaving a fingerprint on anything.”

  “Someone?” I asked. “Do you mean, her?”

  “Maybe,” Riggins answered. He took a breath, and I could tell he was choosing his words carefully. “Probably her.”

  “Just spit it out. What did your FBI connection find?”

  “I assume you’re sitting down.”

  “I’m actually lying down. I don’t know where you are, but it’s midnight here. So please…I’m sure I’ve heard worse.”

  “Well, here goes. First, there is no ex, and there is no son in the Marines or anywhere else. She did have a husband—a car dealer who died in an accident five years ago when his car ran off the side of the road and into a mountain wall on LA’s Mulholland Drive. I’m sure Maureen…I’ll call her that for now…was very upset upon hearing the news, only not for the reasons you may think. Turns out, according to the hubby’s accountant, he was heavily in debt and left her the paltry sum of only fifty thousand dollars after he died. It was not what she bargained for, I’m sure.”

  “Okay, Don, what exactly are you telling me, and what the hell is her real name anyway?”


  “Olga Sokolov.”

  “She’s Russian?”

  “That’s right, and a Grade-A con woman with Russian mob ties to boot.”

  By this time, I was sitting up in bed with my head in my hands. “You had started to say that her injury was somehow self-inflicted.”

  “Nick, did it seem to you that the detective on the case in Franklin was kind of cool about the matter?”

  “McCormick? Yes, it did, actually. At the time, I thought he just didn’t give a shit. Or maybe he just didn’t like me when I met him—my New York accent maybe.”

  “As it turns out, he didn’t like her accent either—or at least the trace of it that he heard. Then there were her medical records. The lump on her head was closer to her neck. The part of her head that was the surface of her brain was untouched. But there’s more. When I searched a kitchen drawer where the knives, forks, and spoons were supposed to be, I found a hammer—no utensils, just a hammer. Evidently, she was quick to put it away before the police arrived. But her big slip up was…she forgot it there. She didn’t forget to wipe it clean of prints though. If you ask me, she hit herself on the back of the neck with it, heard someone coming—maybe the widow upstairs, who found her—and then hurried into the kitchen where she stashed the hammer away before lying back down on the living room floor.”

  My mind started to drift. “So, her name is not Maureen?”

  “Correct. She’s Russian and a citizen of the United States via her marriage to that LA car dealer—may he rest in peace––who I suspect was probably murdered.”

  “Holy shit.” I spoke reflexively, as it all sunk in, and I felt as if that same hammer had struck me, too.

  Riggins cut in, and I welcomed the sound of his voice—anything that could interrupt the nausea I was feeling. “Let me ask you, Nick. No way she’s with you now up in Cartersville, right?”