Both men thanked the priest, and declined.
“Is there anything you can tell us about Bobby Farrar, Father?”
Father Dominic stood and went over to the fireplace, prodding at the logs absentmindedly with a brass poker.
He shrugged. “I’m afraid not, really. He was very close to Father Martin. I know he had some . . . emotional difficulties . . . when he was younger. And I know he’d been injured—Father Martin told me he used to have to give the boy testosterone pills, because of his injury.
“Martin was quite proud of him; I get the impression they had quite a mentor/protégé relationship. I know that he did well in high school, particularly with extracurricular activities—he was a gifted artist. He used to stage the annual crèche for St. Stephen’s, and he designed sets for the high school drama club. Very accomplished!
“Then he went on to college, and took up computers, and did very well for himself. Martin had a theory that Bobby’s 356
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interest in ancient languages gave him the edge over his colleagues, his fascination with symbols and syntax; I could see where that sort of skill set might come in handy for a computer programmer.
“After college, he founded a software company, and developed a database system for medical and insurance records. Hugely successful, made him a fortune. He created databases for some of the biggest schools in the Northeast, I believe.
“But I’m afraid that’s all I know. He ended up in New York City, as I said, but Father has had no news of him in some time.”
He paused.
“May I ask . . . Is Mr. Farrar in trouble?”
Slater spoke up. “Just routine inquiries, Father. Routine inquiries.”
The priest nodded. “Ah. Routine inquiries. Very good.”
He glanced down at his watch.
“It should be safe now. The drug eases the pain for a few hours, but he wakes at the drop of a pin.”
He stood, and they followed him to the bedroom door, where he turned and put a finger to his lips. He gently turned the knob and pushed the door to Father Martin’s bedroom open.
The ceiling lamp, apparently on a dimmer circuit, seemed to cast more shadow than light. The room was a sickly green in the weak light.
Jenner could hear the rattling tide of Father Martin’s breathing. The old priest was half hidden behind the door, the foot of his hospital bed sticking out beyond it.
Father Dominic pointed at the far wall. There was an or-nately framed, large-scale watercolor, painted almost exclusively in shades of red. In front of a long-haired, bearded king on a throne was a kneeling man with a silver halo, arms lifted, palms upward in supplication, eyes raised to heaven.
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a third squatted in front of the kneeling man, a short, curved blade in his hands. The man with the knife was carving symbols across his victim’s forehead; thick crimson rivulets covered his face like a net.
The priest closed the door.
Don Slater touched the priest’s arm and said, “Father, what was that painting of?”
The priest smiled a little. “Striking, isn’t it? It’s a portrait of Theophanes. In Constantinople, sometime in the eight hundreds, he spoke out against the Emperor Theophilus, who had insisted that religious images be destroyed. When Theophanes refused to shut up, the emperor had his men cut a long verse onto his face; supposedly it took them two days to complete it.”
“Father Martin tells me it was Bobby’s absolute favorite subject to paint.” He grinned at them. “What is it about young people that draws them to the macabre?”
They sat down, back in the living room.
“Father, can you think of any other place where some of Bobby’s letters might be? Perhaps in Father Martin’s room?”
“Well, I suppose it’s possible. But I’m afraid we really can’t go looking through there tonight—the man needs his sleep. I’m very sorry.”
Jenner glanced at Slater, then looked at the priest.
“I have to tell you that this is a matter of life and death. Mr.
Farrar may be involved in the killing of a series of university students in New York City, and we believe that he may have abducted a young girl. Our backs are against the wall here.”
The priest nodded gravely.
“With all due respect, Doctor, Father Martin hasn’t received a letter from Bobby Farrar for some time now. It seems very unlikely indeed that there’d be anything of relevance to the current situation in old letters. I’m happy to give you access to the shed, but, as I’ve said, you’re going to need several men to dig it out if you’re actually going to get 358
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in. I’m sorry, but I can’t let you into Father Martin’s bedroom tonight.”
Don Slater began to speak, but Father Dominic silenced him with a wave. “I’m sorry, but he’s a dying man, and suffering terribly. You’re welcome to wait until he wakes, but that may not be until morning.”
Jenner nodded.
“I understand.”
He leaned back, then turned to Slater.
“I should probably be getting back to New York. Do we have enough time before we head out for a cup of coffee?”
Slater said, “Up to you, Doctor. Shouldn’t dawdle too long, or we’ll never get back up out of the damned valley. Pardon my French, Father.”
The priest stood with a smile.
“I’m delighted to have the company. Sometimes the rectory seems a little too quiet, with just Martin and I. And I rarely have visitors—too new in Snowden, I guess. It’ll take me just a couple of minutes.”
He made for the kitchen. Slater stopped him, saying, “Sir, my son’s outside in the car—mind if he joins us?”
“Good heavens, no! Bring him on in—we don’t want him freezing out there.”
The priest went into the kitchen, Slater through the front door. Jenner stepped quietly into the hall. He probably had about four minutes, five if he was lucky.
He reached for the bedroom door handle and was about to turn it when he heard the priest call out, “Doctor, you’re in luck! I have some Starbucks Rift Valley blend! You’ll feel just like you’re in the city—”
Jenner stepped back into the living room. “Sounds great!”
He returned to the bedroom, turned the handle, and slipped inside, closing the door behind him.
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through translucent skin, his shriveled hands clawing the sheet to his neck. There was water and a medicine bottle next to the lamp on the bedside table.
Jenner scanned the room. The bookshelves were packed, but scrupulously neat. The desk, though, was covered with papers, apparently a way station for the priest as he sorted his mail. Jenner started to sift through the memos and calendars on top of it, then turned his attention to the drawers, quickly tugging them out one by one. In the lowest drawer, he found what he was looking for: a small wad of postcard-size linen stationery, bound with a purple silk ribbon. The topmost was a view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge in maroon ink.
He closed the drawer, and straightened. There was a click, and the bedside lamp flooded the room with light.
Father Martin was sitting propped up in the bed, his fingers trembling against the switch on the lamp cord. His face was thin and pale, the cheekbones prominent, his hair a brush-cut ruff of white. His eyes were unblinking, bright green blue, his left eye deeply crusted and bloody.
Jenner walked to the bed, flashed his shield, and said,
“You’ll have these back within the week. You should get some rest now.”
He reached over, tugged the switch from his hand, rotated the lamp so the priest couldn’t reach the switch, then turned it off.
Then he turned his back on the upright shadow in the bed and left.
; The two Slaters were standing in the hallway, Andy confused, his father unruffled. Don gestured to the living room, and they sat without talking. Seconds later, the priest walked in with a tray holding a large French press coffeepot, cream, sugar, mugs, and a plate of Pepperidge Farm Milanos. He nodded a welcome to Andy Slater, and then started to pour.
*
*
*
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Where do you go when your body’s there, but you aren’t? In the days lying in the dark, shivering under the blankets, Ana slipped away, her body now just a beaded curtain wrapped around her, her spirit slipping past the silvery chains, leaving them swaying as she left.
She didn’t look down from space and see her body; it wasn’t like that, not at all like that, not mystical and groovy and life-affirming. But there was tranquility in the absence.
She would go back to Florida, back to Silver Lake. Lying by the swimming pool with Carmen, her hair smelling of chlorine, her skin warm and tan.
And she would be okay for a while, remembering the heat and light on her skin. But then it would abruptly break, and she’d feel herself tumble out of space back into her body, jerking into consciousness with a gasp, sobbing as she found herself on the mattress in the freezing dark, the coarse blanket chafing as she tried to get warm.
When she was awake again, awake and fully conscious again, it was hard, because she’d start thinking about what the man was going to do with her, and she’d lie there feeling her tears cool as they coursed down her filthy cheeks.
She’d once read that people who set themselves on fire don’t feel anything because they’re in some kind of trance state. When he killed her, she wanted to be in a trance state.
When he started cutting on her, or drilling her, or whatever he was going to do to her, she wouldn’t be in her body. She was going to leave it; not so much leave it as disappear inside it, find some spiral staircase inside herself and walk down it, go down deeper and deeper inside until she was gone, like one of those monks burning in kerosene.
The thought of being deep inside herself, locked away inside, far from him, made her warm again; and then she could think about Silver Lake, and Carmen, and the sun. At least for a while.
monday,
december 23
Jenner had left one of the windows open in his loft, and the room was freezing; in the lamplight, he could see his breath fall and disappear.
He threw down his bag and went to the kitchen. Three messages. His cat paced on the counter, purring, while he played them back.
The first was Rad, voice creaking and painfully slow. Rad had passed Jenner’s information on to the Inquisitor team; they’d located a software business address for Robert Farrar and a handful of residences for the name. They were checking the residential addresses, and an ESU team was responding to the software company address.
The second was from Pyke, a terse request for news, for anything Jenner had heard. The third had come in just before he’d walked through the door.
“Doc, it’s Pat Mullins. Rad asked me to follow up with you.”
There was a loud grinding crackle and then a silent pause; Jenner imagined the glove covering the mouthpiece as Mullins spoke with someone on the ESU team. He came back on the line, sounding tired and pissy, and Jenner knew his leads hadn’t panned out.
“Evening was a bust. Six Robert Farrars in the five boroughs, contiguous New Jersey, Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, and whatever the hell that southernmost county in Connecticut is, Fairfield, I think. We identified a software company he was a partner in, went belly up not too long after 9/11. In association with that, we found a residential address for Robert Farrar; he’d moved from the place, like, three years ago. No forwarding address. We’re following up on that now.”
In the background, Jenner could hear chatter, and imagined the strike team back at the station. Hanging up the body 364
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armor, locking the guns into the cages, bitching about the evening, about his bum leads.
“Took an ESU team to Williamsburg, to the office address. It’s a retrofitted factory; the whole building’s used by technology firms and the like. Got the building manager out of bed, he says the guy moved out of there a year or two ago, when his business went bust. So that’s a whole night, nothing to show for it.”
Noise welled up in the background, and Mullins paused for a second. “So, yeah. A bust. But, anyway, thanks, Doc.
Take care.” He paused a second, then added, “Sorry.”
Then a click, and the loft was silent again.
Jenner looked again at the postcards he’d stolen from the dying priest. A waste of time—various watercolors in Farrar’s weird maroon color scheme, just views of the Manhattan skyline, the correspondence a couple of years old.
He threw them down on the table and started to undress.
So, that was that. Driving through the snow, he’d imagined Ana being rescued, Farrar shot dead. By the time he reached New Jersey, the fantasy played in an endless loop, slow motion like the climax of a Peckinpah movie. The shadowy figures of the ESU team slipping around back of a suburban house, or a burned-out warehouse, flash-bangs in, cops through every door and window. Farrar going for his gun and being blown away, every person in the room emptying his assault rifle or handgun clip into him, shredding the monster until what was left would have to be scooped into garbage bags and carried to the morgue. Ana would be tied to a chair in the corner like a silent-movie heroine, weak from hunger and fear, and when the cops pulled down her gag, she’d ask for Jenner.
So much for that.
He felt like his chest was slowly caving in. He’d found the guy, but there was nothing he could do. He’d blown his last chance with the cops. Sure, they’d work his leads, and if the Precious Blood
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leads paid off, they’d bust Farrar, but Jenner was history. If they ever thought of him afterward, the thing they’d remember was how he got Joey Roggetti killed. How he dragged them from their homes a couple of nights before Christmas to chase down shitty leads in Brooklyn in the freezing cold.
Jenner lay down on his bed, staring at the ceiling. After a minute, he rolled carefully to his right and picked up his book of saints, a mass-market paperback published by a Cis-tercian press in England. The entry began blandly enough: Anastasia d. AD 304, tortured and received the Holy Crown of Martyrdom at Palmarola during the Diocletian Persecution, after refusing to renounce her faith.
But Jenner knew that they always hid the really horrific deaths behind banal descriptions. He made himself read the whole text one more time.
Saint Anastasia, on discovering that all the confessors had been butchered by the emperor, wept openly in the Roman court. When asked why she was crying, she said she wept at the loss of so many of her brethren.
She was then interrogated, and revealed herself as a Christian. When Diocletian couldn’t persuade her of the existence of the gods, she was sent to the holy man Upian. When Upian failed to get her to renounce her faith, he sent three pagan women to seduce her. When she rejected them, Upian attempted to force himself upon her; he was immediately struck blind, then collapsed and died, convulsing in agony. The prefect of Rome then tried to starve her to death, but she miraculously survived. Finally, she was led to the island of Palmarola for torture and execution. Her breasts were cut off, she was burned on a bonfire, and then decapitated.
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Religious myth is fluid, the stories changing with the century and the chronicler. Farrar would piece together the cru-elest version, distill the most horrific interpretation. It wasn’t a story from almost two thousand years ago anymore: it was real, and it was actually going to happen.
The Ambien Jenner took worked too well: he slept until the early afternoon, waking with a start to the ringing phone.
He hadn’t closed the curtains; the sky was tarnished tin, the room shadowy and s
omber.
He was too stiff to reach the phone, but when he heard Rad struggling to speak, he pulled himself out from under the blankets and picked up.
“Rad. I’m here.”
“Hey. Jenner. Good to speak to you.”
“How you doing?”
Rad coughed, and muttered “Ow” under his breath.
“Hangin’ in there. Okay.”
“I got your message last night. Thanks. And Mullins called to say the warehouse was a bust, and the residential addresses, too. Anything else turn up?”
“Naah. They think he’s the guy. Farrar.” He was breathing a little heavily. “They confirmed he designed and installed the databases at Hutchins, and at New Hope Clinic. Figure he has backdoor access. Computers—”
Jenner said, “Yeah. That’s pretty much what we figured.
Anything else?”
“No . . . Keep you informed . . .”
“Okay, Rad. You take it easy, okay?”
“You too, Jenner.”
He was about to hang up when he heard Rad say,
“Jenner.”
He answered.
“Jenner . . . you did good. You got everything right, all along . . . I appreciate it.”
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“Thanks.”
“No, Jenner, wait.”
It was painful to listen to him.
“Look. They’ll get her, okay? They’ll find her.”
“Thanks, Rad. I hope so. Thanks.”
There was a clatter as the detective hung up.
He put on a robe and drank some water. He put fresh food in the cat’s bowl and took care of the litter. He went into the bathroom, brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, then went back into the kitchen. The Weetabix was finished, so he fixed a bowl of Raisin Bran, then took it to the table and sat, looking out over the East River. He spat out the first mouthful of cereal; the milk was clotted and bitter. How could he not have noticed? He picked up the bottle—expired five days ago.
He sat, the taste of spoiled milk in his mouth, staring out the window. The Lower East Side, and Brooklyn beyond, the low mosaic of dense buildings, a few boats on the river, and on the other bank the warehouses of Williamsburg, like an old Dutch engraving.
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