Let the Dead Bury the Dead

by David Carlson

  Worthy thought he did. A guy ten years younger than him, an ex-jock who looked like he still worked out. An African-American, at least six feet, five inches. Very quiet. He recalled something going around the precinct about Henderson, but he’d never heard the details.

  Captain Betts sat back in her chair. “Henderson remains on the case, but Sherrod has been requisitioned to assist on a federal case. The body found in the iron ore boat last summer.”

  Worthy shook his head. “Nope, don’t recall that. That must have been when I was overwhelmed with challenges at the academy.”

  Betts seemed unfazed by his crack. “The feds think that body is part of something bigger, a racketeering scandal. So they want Phil back as the local guy. Probably just for a few weeks.”

  Worthy groaned. “I don’t know how it works in Indianapolis, Captain, but around here, a takeover case is a no-win. If I solve it, it looks like I stole Sherrod’s glory. If I fail, I’ll be blamed for screwing things up.”

  “Remember finesse? I want you to solve it and do so in a way that brings credit to the entire department. Be a team player. Unless, of course, you’d prefer to stay at the academy.”

  Worthy leaned forward. “Here’s a better idea. Give me a fresh case, one with an intact site and helpful witnesses, one with nobody’s nose out of joint.”

  “That’s not what I’m offering, Lieutenant.”

  Worthy rubbed his forehead. “You and I both know the priest case should logically be given to the second in charge. Henderson, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t do that, and I think you know why.”

  Worthy tried to read his new captain’s face. “Well, I don’t.”

  “You really are out of the loop, aren’t you? The day after I moved into this office, Henderson decked Pescatelli in the locker room. Broke his jaw in two places. That was my welcome to Detroit.”

  Worthy shook his head. “Anything else you can say to make me want to take this case? Look, you said it already, I work best alone. My luck with partners has never been so great, even the non-violent type.”

  “I come with a different viewpoint, Lieutenant. You’re a senior investigator, a highly decorated one. In addition, you’ve trained recruits at the academy. Henderson needs some—what’s the word—mentoring? From where I’m sitting, you’re the perfect lead on this case.”

  Worthy heard the plea for cooperation but didn’t fall for it. “With all due respect, ma’am—I mean, Captain—it sounds like this Henderson needs a departmental leave.”

  He saw the color rise in his new superior’s cheeks.

  “I think you should work with him a bit before you tell me what he needs.” The two sat in awkward silence before she added, “I look at this as a chance for you as much as for Henderson.”

  “For me? Chance for what?”

  “Lieutenant Worthy, let me tell you the first thing that I noticed in your file. It was your ten requests to get out of the academy. I saw those the day before the priest was found strangled. And I thought about them when two reporters called and asked if I was going to assign you. Secondly, in Indy, we call that ‘name recognition.’ But my superiors figured the case would be straightforward, and we agreed that there was no sense adding to the resentment around here. So I gave it to Sherrod.”

  “I don’t see how that answers my question. How is this my chance?”

  She shook her head slowly, as if Worthy were being deliberately dense. “You have a chance to help a fellow officer save his career. You can see that, can’t you?”

  Worthy sat quietly. Now it was a charity case?

  “And you, Lieutenant Worthy, should see that saving someone’s career could be especially appropriate for you. You’ve known success, but you’ve also known struggle. The way I see it, both of you could learn something. Who knows, it may even change your Lone Ranger image around the department.”

  Worthy leaned back in his chair, trying to read between the lines. If Sherrod had been close to solving the case, he’d still be on it. That meant the case wasn’t as straightforward as everyone first expected. And what did he have to teach Henderson except maybe new ways to hate his job? Worthy’s last two partners in Detroit had complained loudly that he didn’t confide in them, didn’t include them in what the department called “direction-setting.”

  What I didn’t do was buy their drinks, Worthy thought. He had about as much chance of mentoring Henderson as he did of reconciling with his ex-wife, Susan. But what was the alternative—the academy?

  “What do you say, Lieutenant?” Betts asked.

  “I think this is a total disaster waiting to happen.”

  Captain Betts opened a folder on her desk and turned over a few sheets of paper. “I was led to believe you’d like the other person involved in this case.”

  Worthy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Another person? He pictured the red-headed Cunningham, top recruit at the academy, dogging his heels.

  “No, no, Captain. Maybe that’s how things work in Indianapolis, but—”

  “A third? Give me a little credit, Lieutenant. I’m talking about this note I received yesterday, about the priest they’ve brought to fill in at the Greek church.”

  The tightness in Worthy’s chest eased. Was what he was thinking possible?

  The paper-shuffling stopped as Betts drew out a sheet. “Ah, here it is,” she said, stabbing the name at the top with the bow of her glasses. “One thing you’ll learn about me, Lieutenant, is that I never forget a name. So, when I saw that Father Nicholas Fortis, a monk from Ohio, was assigned to St. Cosmas, I went back into your file. Isn’t that the priest who worked with you in New Mexico?”

  Chapter Two

  Worthy sat at his desk and reread the note. Yes, it was true. Father Nicholas Fortis—Nick, to him—had been assigned to St. Cosmas Greek Orthodox Church. That fact alone didn’t cancel out the crap he was sure to get from Sherrod, if not from this Henderson, but it certainly trumped it.

  He had worked with Father Fortis for the first time four years before, when a novice monk originally from Detroit and in his second year at Father Fortis’ monastery, St. Simeon’s, was found with his throat cut in an Ohio farmer’s field. Father Fortis had been the monastery’s novice master at the time. To the surprise of both Father Fortis and Worthy, they had worked together as well as Worthy had worked poorly with his colleagues in the precinct.

  The two men could hardly seem more different. Worthy didn’t see himself as shy, although everyone around Father Fortis would seem so by comparison. Father Fortis was an overly talkative, sumo wrestler of a man with a trailing ponytail. Because of his habit of breathing heavily through his mouth, Father Fortis advertised his preference for spearmint candies, the smell of which wafted from his heavy black beard.

  On the other hand, Worthy was lanky, fair-haired, slightly slouched, and just beginning to gray. The stories in the papers over the past five years—at least the flattering ones—tended to refer to him as quietly ambitious, and he really couldn’t argue with that assessment. Worthy’s assigned partners in Detroit could vouch for his ambition but had tired of his lack of communication as well as his stunning successes. What surprised Worthy was that, in their work together, Father Fortis had reacted so differently to his taciturn nature. It wasn’t that Father Fortis—or Nick, as he preferred Worthy to call him—understood Worthy’s intuitions any more readily than others, or that Nick was any less critical. No, the difference was that, for some reason, the very silences that irritated his usual partners did not bother Father Fortis. Father Nick had an uncanny ability to be talking and at the same time listening deeply. Worthy knew that his own silences were not spent listening to others as much as pondering the clues of a case. He had come to understand that Father Nick somehow understood that his silences tended to precede intuitive leaps.

  Of course, Nick would have expressed his attitude in another way. He would have said that his trust in those difficult and ambiguous moments wasn’t so much trust in Worthy
’s methods as in God’s truth winning out. Faith was something Worthy had repeatedly told Nick he no longer had, but even that chasm between them had only brought a knowing laugh from the priest.

  And now Nick was serving at St. Cosmas, the site of a grisly murder that still rocked Detroit. Father Spiro George, a priest old enough to retire, had been brutally strangled at nine in the morning and in broad daylight. The method used by the killer had apparently been to grab the vestment piece that hung around the priest’s neck and tighten it until the old man’s heart stopped for lack of oxygen. Not a pretty way to go and not a pretty way to kill—face to face until the last second.

  Worthy would like nothing better than to drive out to the church and hear Nick’s initial theories—of course, he would have several, and all of them would be interesting—but department protocol prevented him from going anywhere until the case was formally turned over by the last team. And that was set to happen in fifteen minutes, back in Captain Betts’ office.

  He looked out his office window at the cars whizzing by on I-94. His entire fourteen years on the force had been spent in this very office, but he’d noticed as little about the cars and trucks that flowed by as the colleagues who’d come and gone from the precinct.

  Self-absorbed? That’s what his ex-wife, Susan, would say, and in his low moments he tended to agree. After all, there had to be something terribly his fault to cause his marriage to end. Now, nearly five years later, he still wasn’t precisely sure what that was.

  At other moments, he felt her criticism to be far from fair. He thought of himself less than anyone else, if that were possible. If fault lay anywhere, it had to be in the way he approached his work. From his first months in homicide, he’d spent his waking moments trying to understand the mentality of those he was looking for. Over the years, he’d entered deeper and deeper into their darkness. He imagined them dreaming their deeds, planning the way they’d kill their victims, and finally gathering the courage to carry out their plans. That had been the extramarital affair that had ended his marriage.

  So, what kind of person would strangle a priest with his own vestment? And did the odd weapon point to a crime of passion or an accident gone awry? The time of day and the sheer violence of the method suggested a lack of planning, a spontaneous eruption. But the newspaper story reported that not a single fingerprint, other than the victim’s, had been found on the vestment. That meant gloves, and gloves suggested a level of premeditation.

  He glanced at his watch. Still five minutes before he met Henderson and had to face Sherrod again. He reached into his desk drawer for a legal pad, wanting to jot down his initial questions before Sherrod detailed his own theories.

  He began with “Murder site: sanctuary” as one heading and wrote below: “How did killer go unnoticed? Any significance to where body found? Why kill this way?”

  Under a second heading, “Relationship,” Worthy wrote two questions for later consideration: “Did killer know victim?” and “What was on the victim’s appointment schedule for that Tuesday morning?”

  Worthy suspected that Sherrod had barely considered such questions, if he’d thought of them at all. Lieutenant Philip Sherrod took the standard approach. A murder happens. The goal is to solve it as quickly as possible.

  And how is a murder solved quickly? The approach followed by Sherrod and others was to chase after all known leads before they got cold. Worthy called it the “Hurry and Look Busy” approach. Sometimes it worked. The killer was sometimes caught hours after the crime, the evidence still in his possession. But even when that approach failed, as Worthy suspected it must have done on this case, it was sure to safeguard the department from criticism by the mayor and the media.

  Worthy knew the method because that had been his own for his first years as a detective. But then something odd had dawned on him, changing his outlook completely. Kneeling over the bludgeoned body of a city councilman in a sleazy flophouse, it came to him that murder had a lot in common with falling in love. The face of the victim, frozen in death, often held the same look of surprise as on the face of someone experiencing that first kiss.

  What Worthy had come to believe over the following years was that, in death as in love, the intersection of the two lives in question was rarely haphazard. Something in the past—some prior hope or decision, something perhaps quite small and made in secret—had made that kiss, or that knife in the heart, inevitable.

  The trick was to uncover those past decisions, and that took time. Worthy painstakingly, and often maddeningly for his partner and for Captain Spicer, retraced the decisions made by the victim over the final days, weeks, and sometimes months. He collected long lists of names of those the victim had met, had wanted to meet, or was afraid to meet. But he also unearthed the odd hopes and frustrations of the victim, those tiny clues initially dismissed by witnesses as unimportant.

  His approach almost invariably led to early criticism. He was dawdling, giving the killer time to leave town, or ignoring the “hot” clues. But Worthy had learned to stick with the material he was gathering, convinced that within the victim’s hopes and frustrations, the killer would be found. The three commendations on Worthy’s wall proved that his approach often worked. Other parts of his file attested to the fact that his approach was hardly foolproof.

  Worthy closed his notes and exhaled deeply. Two approaches, each at odds with the other. He stood and straightened his tie, realizing as he left his office that he’d just described the real cause of the tension between Sherrod and him. It wasn’t simply that Worthy was a college grad and Sherrod had worked his way up from the neighborhood beat. Nor was it that Worthy frequently had his picture in the paper, though that didn’t help. The bottom line was that Sherrod was the poster child for the hurry-up approach. When he solved a case, he bragged as much about how quickly he’d made the bust as about the arrest itself. For Sherrod, police work was a race. The first to cross the line should win. And that is why he hates me, Worthy thought, as he headed down the hallway. And that’s why this won’t be a fun meeting.

  Sherrod was already waiting in Captain Betts’ office, as was an African-American who was staring out the window. This must be Henderson, Worthy thought. The room was quiet when Worthy entered, but Sherrod looked up from cleaning his nails as if he’d already given Henderson an earful.

  “Well, look who’s back?” Sherrod said. “I thought you’d died or at least been transferred.”

  Worthy made no move to shake hands. Sherrod was one of those guys who, while not fat, had a fat man’s face. Round, with a comb-over and a wispy mustache to complete the look. Pushing forty, Sherrod was a year ahead of Worthy on the force and a detective’s generation ahead of Henderson.

  “No,” Worthy replied, choosing a chair closer to Henderson’s side of the room. “They have me out at the academy.”

  “Oh, right. Teaching them how you fucked up that missing person’s case in New Mexico.” Sherrod shot a glance at Henderson. “Hear about that, Hoops? Worthy caught a killer out there. Didn’t find the missing girl, but hey, what the hell.”

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Captain Betts said, coming through the door. Sherrod stopped the chatter as their new captain took her seat behind the desk and adjusted her half glasses.

  Looking up, she said, “Everyone know each other here?”

  Worthy stood and took a step toward Henderson. “I’m Chris Worthy.”

  Henderson barely glanced his way as he shook his hand. “Uh-huh.”

  Captain Betts cleared her throat. “For the record, Lieutenant Sherrod has quite emphatically expressed his wish that he have two more weeks on this case.”

  “Maybe only one,” Sherrod interjected. “Hell, Captain, give me the three days left in this week, and it could be wrapped up.” He raised a hand, thumb and finger forming a closing vise. “We’re that close.”

  Captain Betts leaned back and gazed at Sherrod for a moment. “Given all the work you’ve put into the case, your desire is natural. Bu
t as I made clear this morning, this meeting is for you to turn the case over to Lieutenant Worthy. Apprise him of the most significant developments and demonstrate the collegiality I know you’re capable of by giving good counsel. As everyone in this department will find out, collegiality is key for me.”

  “All I’m saying is that I’m this close.” Sherrod’s thumb and finger remained aloft.

  “I’m sure you meant to say that Sergeant Henderson and you are that close.”

  Sherrod looked puzzled. “Isn’t that what I said?”

  Worthy noticed Henderson’s attention remained on the view outside. Was he even listening?

  “Proceed with your summary, Lieutenant,” Captain Betts suggested.

  “No problem.” Sherrod moved to the edge of his chair. “What we have here is a robbery gone sour. The file describes the article stolen as an altar thingamajig, a piece of silver of some considerable value, but what’s the market around here for something like that? Anyways, I figure—we figure—the perp or perps came over from the projects, from Suffolk. There’ve been three break-ins in the neighborhood over the past ten months, and after a little pushing on some contacts I have over in Suffolk, three names keep popping up. We were in the process of bringing them in for questioning when the feds requested my assistance. One of them, a guy named Bales, is a real nutcase. Picked up twice on battery, once on assault. So, Hoops, start with him and lean hard.” Sherrod looked in Henderson’s direction. Getting no response, he turned back to Captain Betts. “Like I said, if you could give me a few more days ….”

  Captain Betts jotted down a note. “So you’re going on the assumption that the priest interrupted a burglary.”

  “Assumption? No, it’s a fact, ma’am,” Sherrod replied, looking pleased with himself.

  “Why would anyone break in at nine on a Tuesday morning?” Worthy asked. “Why not the night before when the place is empty?”