“Imagine if all of the Crucifier's victims were willing participants in their own sacrifices. It might make sense of this bizarre case.”
“Yes, yes, of course, the literature of religion and cults is littered with examples of just that, yes. I suggested this early on in the case. Richard Sharpe knew of my fears along these lines. I suggested the victims could be participant members of a cult, or don't you recall?”
“Yes, well, the possibility's been staring us in the face for some time now, hasn't it?” She stared for a moment at the painting over his desk of the hamlet and small parish in the English countryside, a place of purity and innocence, the image of peace on earth, his former parish, he'd called it. Then she added, “Victims who voluntarily go to their deaths, imagine it. Imagine the impulse to be a major part of the Second Coming. Certainly, if convinced of this .. . Well, I can appreciate the longing, the need to be part of something greater, larger than oneself, can't you?”
“Yes, I can imagine it.”
She wondered what she might say to get him to admit to one incriminating word, to state that he had been working overtime in his attempt to mesh with his God, to mesh with Jesus Christ, and in so doing, bring about the Second Coming.
“Do you believe, Father Luc Sante, that a person can be bom into this world a victim, that his or her fate from the day of birth is stamped victim of murder?”
Luc Sante suddenly and forcefully disagreed, shouting “No!”, his fist coming down on his desk like a hammer. “A child is sent from God, and a child demands to be bom, and we are all placed here for a reason, not some reason we fabricate, but a reason He alone fashions. We have no say so in it, and we must listen to our inner voice. No one is created by God for the express purpose of being murdered.”
“What about created as a sacrificial lamb, then?”
He shook his head, considering this. “There is so much evil waiting here for the innocent. True enough, but innocence must face evil, do battle with it, struggle against it. Speaking of which, actually, I've recendy had my eye on Strand,” he said with a conspiratorial whisper, a finger raised to his lips as if telling her to keep it down. “Sometimes, I believe these old walls are filled with gossiping ghosts.”
“What is your concern about Father Strand?”
“Strange business going on hereabouts, that is between here and the street bazaar that I've only recently learned of. You know, I fear that Martin is no saint after all, but the very sort of being I've spent my entire life combating, the sort that disguises himself even in the robes of the church.”
She felt intrigued. 'Tell me more of your suspicions. Father.” She felt hopeful, that if Luc Sante could point her in another direction, it might prove him the innocent victim here, too.
“Well, I've my suspicions now that—God help us—that Strand could be involved in something sinister. Even that he could be this . .. this awful, godless Crucifier himself.”
This came as a revelation to Jessica and a welcomed one. “What makes you suspect him?”
“I learned of some questionable bills. That's how my suspicions were first fueled. These led to even more questionable donations, death gifts, actually. As it turns out, Coibby, O'Donahue, Burton, all of them have left funds with St. Albans through roundabout means, and it smacks as suspicious as bloody ... as can be, you see.”
“How long have you known of this?”
“I only just uncovered the evidence. I was here writing a letter to Sharpe on the matter. Look, look for yourself.”
She crouched forward and turned the paper he had been writing on, and yes, in black and white, he had been asking Sharpe to look into his findings, to determine what connection Strand might have with the murders. “I tell you I am now frightened to be alone around the man. But I did not link the problem at first with murder, of course, undl I telephoned the bank. He's been forging my name to accommodate himself in whatever manner he sees fit. He made a major purchase from an antique store.”
“What sort of purchase?”
“An altar of some sort, an altar I have not seen.”
“Are you certain of this?”
“I inquired. The storeman I spoke to over the phone thought me mad. Said I had paid for it with my own personal check. Forged, you see.”
“His own personal altar?”
“I've not seen or located it. I have no idea where it stands. But this and my curiosity about what he does with his evenings ... Well, I'd often wondered over that... and so last night I followed him down to the bazaar near old Crown's End pub on Oxford Street, and there I lost him. You know how crowded Oxford is always with tourists, all the quaint shops there. He disappeared into thin air before me, somehow into the bowels of the underworld there.”
“Underworld? What underworld?”
“There's said to be a series of catacombs and vaults, old cellars left over from Roman times down there below the bazaar. No one goes there of course, rat-infested, perhaps a few homeless living down there, but Martin somehow disappeared there.”
“Shall we go have a look?” she asked.
“By all means, but shouldn't we call for what is it? Backup? As they say in police parlance?”
“If we find something, we'll call for backup. Come on. Lead me to where he disappeared.”
“First, I want to settie your mind about St. Albans.”
She looked queerly back at him.
“Don't deny it. I know you've come to suspect me in all this hideous affair. Rampant suspicion. Isn't it all part and parcel of what you do for a living, my dear?” She sighed heavily, nodding. “Yes, I'm guilty.”
He took her gently by the arm. “Now come along to our dungeons here in the cathedral, so you will put your mind at ease about Father Luc Sante.”
At midday, Richard Sharpe pulled up to the York Hotel in search of Jessica, time seeping away from him like water through a sieve. He'd been unable all morning to locate her to even inquire if she would consider wearing a wire. He inquired with the crime lab, Schuller and Raehael. No one had seen her this morning.
She had left word with no one.
He then tried telephoning her at her room, but he'd been unable to reach her at the York, either.
He had a mad notion she might actually be in her room, sound asleep with earplugs in her ears, or in the shower when the phone had continued to blare. He kept telling himself that she could not be so foolish as to go into Luc Sante's lair again, alone.
He banged uselessly on the door even as he listened for the shower within, but no report of any noise whatsoever on the interior returned to him. Finally, he went back downstairs and demanded a key, flashing his badge, fearful she might be incapacitated inside her hotel room.
When he and the chief of hotel security, a friend of longstanding, entered the room, they found it immaculate, the bed even neatly arranged, he supposed so that the maids needn't work so hard where she might be concerned.
Richard searched the premises for any clue, any sign of where she might have gotten off to when his eyes fell on Luc Sante's book on the nightstand. “Can we trace her last call from here, time and destination?” he asked the security head. “Absolutely. I'll just have to make a call,” Harlan Nelson replied.
The wait felt longer than it was, Sharpe nervously pacing the empty room. Finally, Nelson read the phone number, saying, “The call was put in at 10:40 p.m.”
“That's the Yard, CID, no help.”
“Anything else I can do for you, Richard?”
“No, Harlan, but thank you. Will you lock up here? I must hurry.”
“Certainly, Richard, and my best to your girls.”
But Sharpe had disappeared through the doorway. In the lobby, he ran into Erin Culbertson who slowed him, saying, “Aren't you spending a lot of dme here these days!”
“Out of my way, Erin.”
“Cheeky of you, Richard, not returning my calls!” she called out after him. She then located her assistant who drove the van wi
th all the equipment, and they tried to follow Richard Sharpe through the noonday traffic.
Driving as fast as he dared, Richard imagined all sorts of horrors for Jessica. He suspected that she had indeed gone back to St. Albans, knowing what she now knew, in an attempt to confront Luc Sante with the facts.
Sharpe feared such an act both brash and deadly. He rushed toward St. Albans, but he found himself hopelessly snarled in traffic, some accident ahead. He radioed for Copperwaite to join him at St. Albans, to stake the place out as Stuart had suggested, explaining that Jessica Coran had already returned there before he could get to her to discuss the wire device. “Can you meet me there?”
“Where are you now?” asked Copperwaite. “In traffic at a streetlight. Some accident has gridlocked me in. I'm abandoning the car for a few blocks' walk, and from there I'll catch a cab.”
“See you a block south of St. Albans, then? On Exeter, maybe?”
“Fine, yes, do that.” Richard was off and running.
Using a flashlight, Luc Sante led Jessica to and through. “All the known secret chambers of the cathedral,” as he put it, explaining that the crypt they stood in, at the very bottom-bottom of the church had, in the Middle Ages, become the burial crypt of the early priests who had lived their lives behind the walls of St. Albans.
Her penlight in hand, Jessica felt the breathing, staring walls closing in on her. They'd left the warmth and sweet-smelling incense of rosewood in the cathedral, left its familiar corridors. This place formed a dungeon mired in dme, sodden with dampness. It recalled the mine shaft she and Richard and Tatham had traversed.
“You have a cemetery below the church. How ... interesting,” she managed. “I'm something of a cemetery enthusiast, and I've seen crypts and cemeteries in every place that I've ever visited, but nothing like this.” The room opened on a secret chamber where headstones lay in rows on the dirt floor; beneath each a former priest lay at eternal rest.
“In ancient times, it was thought the only way the graves of the holy fathers would remain undisturbed,” explained Luc Sante.
“They were robbed in those days by grave robbers, body snatchers, I know,” she said.
“Actually, the holy men had their bodies hacked up and pieces sold to the superstitious who—”
“My God, why?”
“Oh, but a holy man's finger or even more so his penis could bring joyful bounty to a family who blessed it each night!” Luc Sante laughed. “Human idiocy, but there you have it. Imagine how much people paid out in funds for the purported bones of Christ over the years. His body has been sold over and over for countless generations like some of your swampland in Florida.” Again, his laugh bounced about the silent sepulcher. He then pointed to the slabs with inscriptions. “My predecessors. Their remains still considered as holy as ever.”
Luc Sante next opened another room, using a huge jailhouse key on a large ring, and there he displayed a small crypt. Jessica saw the crypt here as an ancient, sealed stone coffin, like something out of a Robert Bloch gothic novel, where a timeless vampire might reside within.
Here, too, stood walls lined with torches that burned centuries before, now sitting silent under Luc Sante's modem, battery powered, handheld torch, the flashlight sluicing through cobwebs, creating a patina of flying dust particles everywhere. The walls were festooned with dust-laden cobwebs, appeared crumbling as did the stairwell leading to this place.
“I think I've seen enough,” she confessed.
“Not at all. There are corridors on either side of this room. A regular mausoleum. What we hide here is fairly banal, of no interest, and certainly out of use.”
“You've made your point well, sir.”
“We may just as well take this path,” he countered. “It leads full circle to where we entered, and it is no further, and along the way, you can decide for yourself if St. Albans has any other skeletons in her closet.”
They continued along ancient corridors, the odor of earth and mineral-rich water, seeping through the rock face here, filled her nostrils. They passed several dungeonlike rooms, each of which Luc Sante insisted on opening, each sending forth a vile, stale breath like that of cadavers. Cobwebs and filth which appeared to have gone undisturbed for centuries met them at every turn. “Nothing whatever here,” he assured her again. “Still, I can well understand both your suspicion and curiosity.”
“How did you know I was suspicious and curious?”
“It's part of you, isn't it? In your genes, your nature? And me ... I read people. Part of my genetic makeup to read and understand people.”
Jessica felt a sense of calm acceptance and welcomed relief waft over her as a result of Father Luc Sante's simple gesture and his revelations here. She felt badly that she ever doubted the man, felt badly about herself as well, that she could be so stupid as to embarrass herself this way, and she readily discounted all the coincidences when Father Luc Sante said, “I fear my suspicions about young Father Strand, however, to be true. Do you know he brought many people here for solace, such as the twins, you know, the hapless pair you met the other day. He thought they could benefit from both his ministering and my therapy, and perhaps they have. They respond to me because I was once their minister, when they were younger, you see.”
She noted his absolute innocence in admitting this fact. “Father Strand knew this fact, and so he arranged to bring them here?”
“He did.”
“And what about Father Strand. How long have you known him?”
“It seems forever. He was just a boy first time I met him. He readily joined our choir at Bury St. Edmonds at the time.”
“Bury St. Edmunds?” she asked.
“No, no ... Gloucester. Edmunds was my second parish. Had to pay my dues to find my way to a London parish. “I didn't want the twins here, but Strand stood his ground, saying they had no other place of refuge, that the world was too big for them. He convinced me to take them in. They live nearby, but in practice, they live here at St. Albans.”
“O'Donahue lived in Bury St. Edmunds,” she told him. “And you never told police of your connection with her.”
“I had none. If she were in congregation there, she did not make herself known to me.”
“But you saw the police report saying where she had once lived.”
“I did, but I didn't think it relevant. I did not know her.”
She nodded, accepting this. “I'm sorry,” she told him, “for ever having suspected you of... of being involved in such evils as ... as I did.”
“Nonsense, my dear. It is your job to cultivate a healthy, suspicious, and cynical mind. Without it, where would you be? Shall we go down to Crown's End, to the street bazaar, see if we can learn where Martin has been hiding himself away of late?”
“Do you think it might tell us something?”
“Me, perhaps. I know the young man has been doctoring books. I just don't know why, and this purchase of an altar? I know he's not set up a storefront church anywhere.”
“I suppose it wouldn't hurt to have a look.”
“That's exacdy what I had thought.”
“Where is Strand now?” she asked.
“I'm not sure. He comes and goes pretty much as the spirit moves him, especially of late.”
“Well, then, let's have at it.” It was a phrase she'd picked up from Sharpe.
On exiting the church, just before pushing through the doors, Luc Sante spotted Martin Strand getting into a cab. He pointed at the man in black and said, “It's him—Strand. He's likely off to the bazaar. We must flag down a cab and follow him.”
Jessica rushed out ahead of Luc Sante and waved down a passing cab. They clambered into the cab and with Strand's cab long out of sight, the old man shouted, “Crown's End bazaar.”
“Which end, east or west?” asked the driver.
“Either! Just get us there the quickest possible speed.”
“That'd be east end, then,” replied the cabby.
; “Then do it, man! Do it!”
They soon found themselves deposited amid the street bazaar, a series of street hustlers in makeshift cubicles, many surrounding ancient buildings here which by day served as office buildings. Booths and open air stands invited tourists in, the booths three layers deep, some fixed up around ancient pillars. This, the east end of the serpentine bazaar, teemed with shoppers, mostly tourists, but somehow, amid the crowds, Jessica made out the back of Father Strand's head. She feared losing sight of him. Strand moved along briskly just across and down the street from where Jessica stood alongside Father Luc Sante. They froze for a moment, seeing the shadowy, distant figure of Strand looking about before disappearing again into the crowd.
“Where the deuce is he?” Luc Sante wanted to know, waving his cane.
“He's there!” she told Luc Sante, pointing. But Strand's visage, or rather his long golden hair, went in and out of a sea of others. “We need to get closer, or we'll lose him.”
“I'm slowing you down. Go ahead, shadow him as you police people like to say. I shall come along behind you. I don't wish to lose him any more than you do. Go, go!”
She did so, putting all her effort now into keeping Strand in her sight. If anyone at St. Albans was guilty of serial killing, it must be the mysterious Father Martin Strand, she told herself as she became Strand's shadow.
She gazed back once to see if Father Luc Sante followed, and she could see him coming along, slowly but surely. People on the street engaged Luc Sante, called out to him, asked for his blessings. When Jessica returned her gaze to Strand, the man had again vanished. “G'damnit,” she cursed.
Luc Sante, catching up, gasping for breath, asked, “Why have you stopped? Where is he?”
“He's gone.”
“Gone?”
“Vanished.”
“Without a trace?”
“Like smoke ... like a chameleon.”
“Oh, and this is exactly where I lost him when last I was here.” Luc Sante jabbed the sidewalk with his black cane.
Circling, staring in all directions, being jostled by the crowd, Jessica said, “Then there must be someplace he is disappearing to, right about here. He can't have stepped into another dimension.”
Blind Instinct Page 36
