The Judas Child

by Carol O'Connell

  He went on in this voice of a stranger, “There was a man who made a point of saying, ‘Father, forgive me,’ each time I was raped. One day, I beat the crap out of him with a lead pipe. And then I forgave him. The pipe scrambled his brains, so he no longer remembers what I forgave him for. But I did keep the sacraments. Though I had to improvise on the penance. One Hail Mary equals a broken nose. Three Our Fathers is a smashed testicle.”

  Nothing remained of her old choirmaster.

  “I wish they’d left me in the general population. On this cell block, I only hear the confessions of insects. The perverts share everything with me, all the things they won’t even tell their lawyers.”

  “Do they ever talk about the local case? The two girls?”

  “Sometimes. But they prefer to reminisce about their own crimes against women and children. They lie in their beds when the lights go out, and they jerk off their cocks while they confess to me in the dark. And then the corridor fills up with the stink of semen.” He pushed back from the table. “But I don’t think you need to hear any of that. Confession isn’t a perk of the priesthood. It’s a kind of hell.”

  “Father, I know you won’t remember me. I was—”

  “I remember you missed choir practice the week before I was arrested.” He sat back and regarded her with greater attention, making more assessments of her hair, her clothes, the scar. “Father Domina said your family moved out of town.”

  So at least a few people had noticed her passing by, taking up space in the world, and she marveled over that for a moment. “My parents never told me about Susan Kendall’s death.” She had been eighteen years old before she learned of the murder.

  An uneasy silence prevailed between them. Other noises intruded on the room, sounds from the prison yard outside the window, voices of men and the rhythm of a ball bouncing off the exterior wall. She noted the thrum of heavy machinery. The prison laundry must be close by; she could see the steam escaping past the side of the barred window.

  At last, he said, “I used to worry about you, Sally. You were the only child I ever knew who aspired to blend into the walls.”

  She understood this perception. As a little girl, she had been neither pretty nor homely, tall nor short, only finding her voice when she sang in the choir.

  “My name is Ali now,” she reminded him. Her open wallet of credentials still lay on the table between them, and her altered name was punctuated with a Ph.D. She wondered if he didn’t find that advanced degree quite odd, given the bland child she had been.

  He nodded in approval. “Ali suits you better. As I recall, you were in danger of an ordinary life. I’m glad mediocrity passed you by. I imagine the scar had a lot to do with that.”

  The choirmaster from her childhood came back to visit with her for a few moments. Father Paul’s eyes were penetrating, gently probing the soft places, silently asking where the hurt was—just like old times. Oh, but now he saw something new in her expression. Had she unwittingly given herself away? Whatever it was, it jarred him. He physically pulled back and cast his eyes down, perhaps in time to rescue himself from discovery.

  This morning, a state trooper manned the front desk, displacing the village police sergeant who usually sat behind the glass window with his newspaper and a cup of coffee.

  Rouge thought Chief Croft had been a good sport about handing his station house over to the BCI investigators. But then, Charlie Croft had always maintained that he could run the village’s six-man police force from a telephone booth. The chief’s small private office was on the floor above, but the remaining space had been used only for town council meetings once a month, and as a voting place in an election year. Now there were footsteps from many pairs of shoes walking across the ceiling. The ground floor of the station house was almost eerie in the absence of yesterday’s circus of noise and raucous energy. One man sat on a plastic chair in the reception area. A press pass was clipped to the lapel of his suit.

  Where had all the other newspeople gone?

  Rouge pinned his new identification tag to his jacket and signed the state trooper’s logbook. Then he climbed one flight of the narrow staircase and opened the door to a wide front room and a steady din of conversations punctuated by the ring of telephones. FBI agents and state investigators sat at tables and desks raided from the public library next door. They were taking statements from civilians, while the uniformed officers were hauling reams of paper from one end of the room to the other. A portable radio unit spat out a burst of static and garbled words from the state troopers’ cars out on the road.

  The old landmark building had retained its fifteen-foot ceilings, but long tubes of fluorescent lights marred this one remaining detail. The exposed brick of the walls had been painted over to disguise the building material as something more plastic, less sturdy. According to Chief Croft, the new color of the walls was “puke-green” and not “essence of willow,” as the painter had asserted. Movable partitions of padded fabric had been brought in by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to divide the fringe space into cubicles, and computers sat on every surface as more solid reminders that the world had changed overnight.

  Rouge was surprised to see Marge Jonas at her desk this morning. The civilian secretary was the only other survivor of the State Police takeover. She was wearing her platinum-blond hair this morning. Marge had wigs in every color except her own natural iron-gray.

  He would have said hello, but the secretary was immersed in a technical manual. By her muttered obscenities, he knew she was deep into the latest computer glitch to plague the new system installed by the BCI task force. Beneath her chin, three rolls of flesh jiggled to the rhythm of her bobbing head as she looked down to the manual and then up to the lighted screen of scrambled text.

  He walked on by, and she called after him, “Not so fast, Rouge Kendall!” Marge only used his full name if she was irritated.

  He stopped dead and turned to face her. “Hey, Marge.”

  One pudgy finger marked her place in the closed manual as she leaned over her desk to stare at his legs. “When I told you to come in wearing street clothes, I meant a suit. Are those your Sunday-go-to-meeting jeans? I notice they’re still sort of blue.”

  “It’s all I had.” His late father’s tweed jacket had fit perfectly, but his mother could do nothing with the old man’s trousers, tailored for legs two inches shorter than his own.

  “You need work.” Marge stood up to display two hundred and twenty-five imposing pounds of authority as she rolled one hand to motion him closer. “Honey, come here. Let me fix that.” Her dexterous fingers quickly undid the sloppy knot below the collar of his shirt. “We don’t want Captain Costello to know you’ve never worn a tie in your life.”

  This was close to the truth. He had always worn a uniform to work and lived a blue jeans existence after hours. And so he stood by her chair, in docile surrender, while she properly knotted his father’s silk tie. A brown suede jacket lined with sheepskin was slung over one arm. This was his own, but purchased in his college days and showed some wear and shine.

  Marge stepped back to admire her handiwork. “Now you look like a BCI investigator.”

  “Hey, I’m just reporting for a plainclothes detail.”

  “Don’t contradict me, hon. I typed up your press release this morning.”

  “My what?”

  She shot him a warning glance and nodded toward the private office appropriated by the BCI commander. The man standing in the open doorway had been a familiar sight in Makers Village for more than a decade. Captain Costello kept a summer house on the lake, but he frequented the shops and restaurants in every season. Many villagers had come to regard him as a local man, one of their own, though they found him somewhat aloof. Over the past ten years, the captain had never set foot in this local police station—and now he ruled it.

  Costello was walking toward them. The man did not look happy, and neither did he look like anyone’s idea of a top cop in the BCI. The captain
might have stood five feet ten on his tallest day, but the permanent slouch had made him inches shorter in middle age. Small in the bones and introspective in demeanor, he seemed better suited to academic work.

  Yet when Costello addressed his troops en masse, his voice took on a workingman’s character, a rough and colorful vocabulary so at odds with his physique and the bow tie. In more personal conferences, rumor had it, he could cut off a larger man’s balls in ten words or less.

  Rouge wondered if this came naturally, or was it art?

  Captain Costello slapped a newspaper down on the secretary’s desk with the crack of a rifle shot. Marge jumped, Rouge didn’t; he was staring down at a five-year-old photograph of himself in the baseball uniform of the Yankees rookie league. The headline said, “Local Hero.” A companion photograph showed him carrying Sadie Green’s bicycle.

  Now Costello held up the arrest report with Phil Chapel’s signature at the bottom. “Why didn’t you make out this report, Kendall?” The captain’s words were vaguely threatening.

  “It was Phil Chapel’s arrest. I just carried the bike for him.”

  Costello shook his head. “Miss Fowler set the reporters straight on who did what and why.” The threatening tone was not vague anymore. “I really hate this, Kendall. From now on, you report directly to me, and you report every damn thing you do. You can start with an accurate arrest report. Then I wanna talk to you.”

  When the door to the private office had slammed shut, Marge put one hand on Rouge’s shoulder. “It’s not as bad as you think.” She opened her appointment calendar. “See this? I got you down for an applicant interview. That’s what he wants to see you about. It’s a transfer to the State Police and a promotion.” Now she waved his mouth shut. “It doesn’t matter if you never filed the application. It wouldn’t be on his desk unless he asked for it. So you’re going to be a baby BCI investigator. Okay?”

  She handed him a sheaf of papers. “That’s your report. I got all the facts from Miss Fowler’s interview. Just sign it and wait ten minutes before you hand it in. If you don’t pretend you typed it yourself, you’ll jerk him out of shape again.”

  “Thanks, Marge.”

  “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “I need to find a woman.”

  “I’m not easy, Rouge. I have to be seduced. I want flowers.”

  “She’s tall, brunette—”

  “I can do brunette. But I look better as a blonde.”

  “The trooper at the desk said she was in here yesterday, but he didn’t get her name on the logbook. She’s got a scar on the right cheek. It runs down to her mouth. Looks like she’s always smiling on one side.”

  “I’ve seen her.” Marge shook her head in mock wonder. “God, did she turn heads in this place. I don’t know what got the most attention, the face or that skirt. It’s slit up to—”

  “Where can I find her?”

  “You’ll see her tomorrow at the briefing.” Marge looked down at her appointment calendar. “She’s giving a lecture to the task force at ten o’clock. But you should think this through, Rouge. In my experience, nice girls wear panty hose.”

  “So what do you think of our Ali now?” The prisoner addressed the shadow lying underneath his bed. He found great peace in merely sitting on the floor, leaning back against the cool wall and staring into that patch of darkness.

  It was insane to regard a shadow as a sentient being. Or perhaps the young were onto something when they suspected their own beds of harboring entities; the children all knew they were not alone in the dark. And now Paul Marie knew it, too.

  The shadow understood things about children, and little girls in particular. The thing under the bed had absorbed all the guilt of the prisoners in neighboring cells as well as their extensive knowledge. It was always awake to their confessions, so the priest might sleep through the long nights of whispered atrocities.

  In the early days of confinement, when he had suffered the rapists, the shadow had emanated sorrow for him—and forgiveness for them. When Paul Marie had increased his size and beaten an assailant nearly to death, the shadow had absorbed the blows of the beaten man, felt all the pain, and thus allowed the priest to wield pipe and fist, to break the bones of faces and limbs without remorse, untroubled by empathy.

  In exchange for services rendered, the prisoner gave sanctuary to the thing under the bed. He sometimes suspected it of being a flawed and somewhat shopworn deity in search of redemption, and doing hard time as the surrogate soul of a priest. He knew he had either lost his mind or found his faith. One of these things must be true.

  But which?

  No matter. He would not take the thing back inside himself. It could die under the bed for all he cared. Yet he did nothing to harm it, made no attempt to kill it, though it would have been as simple as lifting up the mattress and exposing the shadow to the overhead light.

  Now Father Marie inclined his head in a prelude to conversation with the dark thing. “Are you hungry? What would you like best? Shall I throw you a bone—or a little girl?”

  He stood up and made a square tour of his small austere cell, ten feet by ten, trailing one hand along the bare wall and then the bars.

  So two more children are missing.

  Had something new been added to his delusion? He could hear the buzzing of flies, but there were none about. No flights of angels’ wings—only the buzz of fat black insects? A brain tumor perhaps. He would welcome that. Yes, perhaps the flies were inside him.

  But now one flew past him, and then another brushed his skin, and he recoiled.

  One more turn around the cell. He came to rest in front of the bed and knelt down to speak more intimately with the shadow. “About those little girls—you know how this will all turn out, don’t you?”

  The flies had stopped their buzzing. They had gone away and left him in deep silence, where the real madness was. Now the priest could hear his own heart beating, and then another heartbeat layered over this one, light and tripping, skipping beats, struck with fear—the wild heart of a child.

  Only Captain Costello was aware of David Shore. The small boy was not simply timid or nervous; he was clearly frightened, all but hugging the wall as he shrank back from the heavy foot traffic in the wide, noisy room of adults. Costello watched the youngster through a crack in the blinds covering the glass on his door. The child seemed fixated on the red-haired cop seated just outside the office.

  Shy David was springing off the toes of his running shoes, set to fly, anchored only by fascination for Officer Rouge Kendall. Now David ventured away from the wall with short, halting steps, and Costello was reminded of that first endless trek across a ballroom, heading for the sure rejection of an invitation to a dance.

  The child came to rest in front of the young cop, who was engrossed in a handful of papers. David bit down on his lower lip. His running shoes were undecided, stepping one foot forward and one foot back. A baseball card was clutched in his small hand. Captain Costello had to squint to make out the New York Yankees logo and a portrait of Rouge Kendall with his pitcher’s glove.

  Well, the trading card was hardly valuable, since the pitcher had washed out in his first season on the rookie league.

  The young cop looked up, surprised to see David hovering over him. Kendall stared at the boy’s card bearing the picture of himself as a twenty-year-old baseball player with his whole life in front of him.

  Captain Costello sucked in his breath.

  Please, Kendall, don’t blow this chance.

  So far, the little boy from St. Ursula’s Academy had spoken to no one but Mrs. Hofstra, his school housemother. Costello was convinced that David would have more to say if he could only speak for himself.

  Kendall took the proffered card from the boy’s hand, and while the cop searched his pockets for a pen to sign it, David melded into the crisscrossing patterns of uniformed officers, BCI investigators and feds. The child disappeared so quietly the cop had not yet noticed. His head wa
s bent over the card as he signed his autograph for the ten-year-old fan.

  Costello winced. The new trainee had blown it.

  Rouge Kendall looked up to see the empty space where David had been standing.

  Too late now. The captain opened his office door. “In here, Kendall.”

  The policeman entered the office with no sense of fear that Costello could immediately detect. But then, this was the first time he had been alone with the younger man. In the past four years, Kendall’s undistinguished career in a one-car town had made him invisible to the New York State Police. If not for the open file on his desk, Costello would have known nothing about him.

  Though the captain had only moved to this state ten years ago, every county resident knew the name of child killer Paul Marie. The victim, Susan Kendall, had become less famous over time, and her sibling was totally anonymous. Until last night, when Costello had called for the background material, he never made the connection between this ordinary village cop and a formerly powerful publishing family.

  As Rouge Kendall sat down in the chair by his desk, Captain Costello had an uneasy feeling. He was looking at a perfect specimen of youth, only twenty-five years old, yet bearing the calm demeanor of a more mature man and the weary eyes of a very old soul. Perhaps damage could account for that, and a murdered sister was a lot of damage. Certainly nothing else about this officer was outstanding. The captain had already decided that Rouge Kendall did not belong with the State Police—not as an investigator, and not even as a trooper.

  Costello turned his attention to the hastily assembled file on his desk, too thick for such a mediocre cop. “This is all about you, kid.” He tapped the folder. “The Internal Affairs idiots see you paying property taxes on a fifteen-room mansion, and sirens go off in their pointy heads. They don’t know that even the white trash in this town have nice houses. So one of them ran a check on your source of income, and now he thinks a Manhattan auction house is fencing your stolen goods.”