ABSOLUTION (A Frank Renzi novel)

by Susan A Fleet

  “Okay. Mind if I follow you? I’m not familiar with the area.”

  A flicker of annoyance crossed the priest’s face, followed by a quick smile. “Of course. Let me run inside and get my car keys.”

  Frank waited in his car until a dark brown Toyota Camry came around the corner of the rectory, no dents or distinguishing marks, a fine choice if a killer wanted an inconspicuous car. He jotted down the tag number and tailed the Camry to the cafe, a rambling one-story building with a roof extending over a veranda with wrought-iron tables and chairs.

  “I love this place,” Krauthammer said, flashing an ingratiating smile as he opened the door. “The coffee’s great and the pastries are fantastic.”

  Piped-in classical music was playing softly and a rich coffee aroma filled the cheery sunlit room. Half of the dozen or so tables were occupied with people reading newspapers over breakfast. Below the service counter, a glass case held trays of delicious-looking pastries. The priest ordered coffee and a chocolate croissant from a stocky college-age kid in a white apron.

  “Same for me,” Frank said, adding to Krauthammer, “It’s on me.”

  “Thanks, that’s very kind of you.” Krauthammer waved at the kid in the apron to get his attention. “Could I get a to-go cup and a paper plate?”

  “No problem, Father.” The kid looked at Frank. “And you, sir?”

  “The same.” Why get it to go? Weren’t they going to talk here?

  When their order was ready, Krauthammer took the tray, flashed another smile and said, “I’ll find us a table outside.”

  Frank paid the bill and went out to the veranda. A young couple in running suits occupied a table to the left of the door. Off to his right at the far end of the veranda, the priest was sitting at a round table with his back to the wall. If he sat opposite the priest, he would be blinded by the sun, unable to observe his reactions. Was it deliberate, he wondered. To foil the ploy—if indeed it was a ploy—he dragged a chair around the table and sat beside the priest in the shade of the steep-slanted roof.

  “How do you like living in New Orleans, Father Tim?”

  Krauthammer tore off a piece of croissant, and chocolate filling oozed onto the paper plate. He scooped it up with his forefinger and licked off the chocolate. “A bit too humid for my taste. Interesting city though.”

  “Where are you from?”

  The priest popped the chunk of pastry into his mouth and chewed hungrily. His eyes were flat and dead-calm, as still as the water on a pond, not a ripple of emotion in them. “I grew up in Nebraska.”

  “Nice country, but I hear the winters are fierce.”

  “Yes, winters can be pretty bleak. All that snow and ice.”

  “Do your parents live there?”

  “No. Well, my f-f—“ The priest blinked rapidly, then blew on his coffee and took a careful sip. “Dad does. Mother died when I was two.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Thinking: What’s with the blinking? Was he hung up over his mother? Or was the nervous tick related to the father?

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s a bean-counter for a big insurance company in Omaha, plays with numbers all day in the actuarial department.”

  Frank filed away the offhand dig and sampled his croissant. The pastry was fresh and flaky, but the chocolate filling was cloyingly sweet.

  “So you grew up in Omaha?”

  “No, in Wahoo. Rhymes with Yahoo.” Another boyish grin. “It’s a little town near Omaha. We lived in a big old farmhouse in the woods. When I was a kid Dad used to take me hunting. We’d shoot at rabbits with his .22, but I never hit a single one. He said I was hopeless.”

  The priest gazed at him earnestly. “Actually, I missed them on purpose. I just couldn’t bear to hurt those little creatures.”

  Frank sipped his coffee, digesting the story. It sounded too pat, Krauthammer working overtime to establish his non-violent nature.

  “How about you, Detective Renzi? Do you hunt?” The priest’s face glowed with innocence, but his smile appeared forced and did not extend to his obsidian eyes.

  “Yeah, I hunt.” He waited for a reaction, but the priest just gave him a silent stare. “CDs, mostly. Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk.”

  “I see. You like jazz. Is that why you came to New Orleans?”

  “What do you mean, came to New Orleans?” Smiling to keep it light.

  “Well? Didn’t you?

  An odd question. The priest knew he was an NOPD detective. After Rona put his name in her column, a Times-Picayune staff writer had done a profile on him that summarized his career. Serial killers often followed the news, even if it was only peripherally related to their crimes. Krauthammer had obviously read the piece.

  “Actually, I came here because I’m wild about Britney Spears. How about you, Father Tim? You like Britney?” Fuck with me, and I’ll fuck with you.

  The priest appeared taken aback but recovered quickly, flashing another of his too-frequent smiles. “Poor Britney. She’s had her problems. It’s so difficult for child stars. They have maturational problems.”

  You are so full of shit. He sipped his coffee and set the Styrofoam cup on the table. “I’m investigating the Melody Johnson murder.”

  The priest gave a solemn nod and licked crumbs off his fingers. “Hunting the serial killer. All these murders are related, aren’t they?”

  “Where did you go to college?” I ask the questions, you answer them.

  Krauthammer stuffed the last bite of croissant into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Saint Mary’s Seminary at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston.”

  “When did you graduate?”

  “When was I ordained, you mean?”

  Frank gazed at him, expressionless. “Whatever.”

  “I was ordained four years ago.”

  “And St. Margaret’s is your first assignment.”

  “What makes you say that?” Not smiling all of a sudden.

  “When did you start working at St. Margaret’s?”

  Krauthammer frowned. “Let’s see … almost three years ago.”

  Right before Kitty Neves was attacked.

  “What made you decide to become a priest?”

  That got him a virtuous look and a pious smile. “I’ve always wanted to serve the Lord.”

  “Lots of sinners out there,” he said, and waited for a reaction.

  A stillness came over the priest, as if he’d gone deep within himself, eyes distant, body motionless. Then, a beatific smile suffused his face with a fervent glow. “In the end the Lord forgives all sinners.”

  “How’d you hook up with Patti Cole? Did you meet at Bennigan's?”

  Krauthammer went rigid as a granite statue. Frank could almost feel the tension radiate from his body. The priest opened his mouth to speak, but his face froze in a grimace. The episode lasted only a few seconds, but Frank noted it, aware of its significance.

  The silence was broken by the screech of metal against metal, a grating sound that intensified as a freight train rumbled across a railroad trestle behind the building. The rumble became a roar as boxcar after boxcar trundled over the bridge. Two minutes of train noise. Two minutes for Krauthammer to pull himself together.

  “I don’t know Patti Cole. I never met her.”

  “But you knew Melody Johnson. Did you ever talk to her?”

  “No, but I saw her in church now and then.” Krauthammer smiled, his eyes wide with innocence. “A pretty girl. Too bad about the birthmark.”

  A big fat lie. “Suellen Mathews was pretty, too. She could’ve been a Victoria’s Secret model, don’t you think?”

  Krauthammer gazed at him, unsmiling. “I didn’t know her, either.”

  “You must have seen her picture on TV and in the newspaper.”

  “It’s possible. I don’t pay much attention to these awful murders.”

  Big fat lie number two. “Yeah? Someone told me you said Suellen dressed like a slut and she got w
hat she deserved.”

  The priest stiffened. “I never said any such thing! She wasn’t even in my parish. Why are you asking me about these girls?”

  “I’m a homicide detective. We tend to be thorough.”

  Krauthammer wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and pulled up his sleeve to look at his watch. A Mickey Mouse watch, Frank noticed. Strange. He hadn’t seen one in years, and he had never seen one on an adult.

  “Have you talked to Father Daily?” Krauthammer said. “Why don’t you ask him about Suellen and those other girls?”

  Conscious of Daily’s sketch in his pocket, he maintained a deadpan expression. Did Krauthammer know that he’d talked to Daily?

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell, but I talk to a lot of people. What makes you think Father Daily knew Suellen?”

  “He’s rather permissive, which makes him popular with young people.” Krauthammer folded his paper plate and napkin, jammed them in his coffee container and stood. “Sorry, but I’ve got to run. I’ve got tons of work to do.”

  Frank watched him carry the coffee container to his car. Interesting. Krauthammer had ordered his coffee in a to-go cup because he didn’t want to leave his prints on a ceramic mug. Or his saliva, for a DNA sample.

  _____

  Seething with fury, the sinner drove to the rectory and went directly to his room. Renzi had ambushed him, pure and simple, asking about Melody, then sucker-punching him with questions about Patti and Suellen, all the while gazing at him with the eyes of a hunter. Probing and assessing.

  Renzi considered him a suspect, no doubt about it.

  Lots of sinners out there.

  That was the clincher, that and the Britney Spears taunt. Renzi knew about the sinner messages, had surmised that he hated bleached-blond girls with painted faces, girls like Britney who flaunted their half-naked bodies to tempt men, licking their lips, gyrating their hips in mock-sexual frenzy.

  He unlocked his armoire, opened the doors and gazed at the tongues floating in alcohol inside the jars on the top shelf.

  Renzi’s questions about his childhood didn’t scare him. He hadn’t seen Father in years, a mutually agreeable separation, though he telephoned the man on holidays to keep up a pretense of filial devotion. If Renzi went to Wahoo and talked to his father he would learn nothing. In fact, he really needn’t worry about Renzi at all. Renzi was a low-echelon NOPD detective, not some FBI profiler with an off-the-chart IQ like his own.

  And his rabbit-hunt yarn had been a brilliant stroke. Not precisely true, although Father had taken him hunting one Saturday. Weekends were a blessed respite from his second grade classmates, who loved to ridicule his stutter. When he asked to go out and play in the new-fallen snow, Father made him play the baseball game first. To Father, it was a game. To him, it was torture. Father knew baseball statistics backward, forward and upside down, and expected his son to know them, too.

  “Who’s the last batter to hit four-hundred?” Father asked, gazing at him, his bushy eyebrows a solid line above his darkly threatening eyes.

  He knew the answer: Ted Williams batted .406 for the Red Sox in 1941. But under his father’s implacable gaze, he froze. “T-T-T—”

  Father’s lip curled in disgust. “Come on, spit it out!”

  He tried, eyes blinking, mouth working, but the words were a logjam inside his mouth.

  “You’re hopeless! Put on your snowsuit. If I can’t get you to talk, maybe I can teach you how to hunt.”

  Knowing Father hated to wait, he hurriedly donned his snowsuit. Father was already outside, holding a Winchester .22-caliber rifle in the crook of his arm, his breath visible in the cold, curling from his mouth like cigarette smoke. They tramped through the snowy woods that surrounded the house. When they reached a clearing his father positioned him beside a huge fir tree with drooping, snow-laden branches. They waited. He could still remember how cold he felt, shivering, his fingers like icicles inside his gloves.

  Then a rabbit hopped across the clearing, its brown fur stark against the new-fallen snow. Father raised the gun to his shoulder, tracking the rabbit’s movements. What happened next was a revelation.

  A loud crack and the rabbit dropped like a stone and lay still.

  “See that?” Father said. “I got him with one shot.”

  Indeed he had seen it. One minute the rabbit was hopping across the meadow and the next moment it was dead. Father held the power of life or death in his hands. He could hardly wait to do it himself. His heart thrummed with excitement as Father showed him how to use the rifle. One by one, four rabbits hopped across the clearing. He did his best, cradling the stock against his cheek, squinting down the gun barrel, holding the power of life and death in his hands. But it was no use. He missed every one.

  With a look of utter contempt, Father had said, “What the hell am I going to do with you? You can’t talk, and you can’t shoot, either.”

  Recalling the cruel taunt, he gritted his teeth. But Renzi had lapped up his story like a cat drinking milk.

  Don’t be so sure, said the voice. Renzi is a hunter.

  Nonsense. Renzi’s attempt to shake him had been an utter failure.

  He took one of the tongue jars off the top shelf and caressed the glass.

  Renzi didn’t appreciate his superior intelligence, his quick thinking, his talent for deception, a tactic he had used his entire life. Today’s performance had not been flawless—the Patti Cole question had shaken him—but the noise of the train had given him time to regain his composure. And he had readily admitted knowing Melody Johnson. Yes, Renzi was a problem, but not half as worrisome as the killer-priest theory. The Archbishop had denounced the idea, but Rona Jefferson kept fanning the flames. If the dead blackbird didn’t shut her up, he would have to take stronger measures.

  Don’t forget Father Daily, said the voice.

  Right. Charlie Malone had told him that Renzi talked to Daily, but Renzi had denied it. The conclusion was obvious. Daily suspected him. Could be anyone, even you. Daily had told Renzi to interrogate him. The old buzzard had to be stopped, and exposing his affair with the housekeeper wouldn’t do it.

  The sinner caressed the jar that held Patti’s tongue and hot burning desire coursed through him. Patti, the supposedly innocent girl from Iowa, the temptress who’d fought him to the bitter end. He tilted the jar and Patti’s tongue slithered about in the alcohol, stoking the fire in his groin.

  If Daily was screwing his housekeeper, surely he must have committed other sins, something in his past that could be used to silence him. Daily had said he’d been ordained at Saint Paul’s Seminary in Minnesota. At Georgetown University he had taken classes with a man who now worked in the Saint Paul’s records office. They still exchanged Christmas cards.

  Surely his former classmate would check the contents of Daily’s file. All he had to do was call and ask him.

  _____

  Fearing he’d be late, Frank broke all speed limits driving to the Eighth District station. At first glance Krauthammer appeared harmless, a clean-cut friendly young priest. But the nun had seen him talking to Melody forty-eight hours before she was murdered, and he had denied talking to her. Why had Krauthammer asked if he’d talked to Sean Daily? Did he know Lynette was Daily’s parishioner? Good thing he hadn’t questioned him about Lynette, or Krauthammer might think Daily had fingered him as a suspect.

  All the evidence in the case pointed to an intelligent killer, intelligent and manipulative. Krauthammer was expecting questions about Melody, but the Patti Cole question had thrown him. There was a reasonable explanation for this. When questioned by the police after a well-publicized murder, many people got nervous and lied about stupid things. But the rapid eye blinks and the facial tick indicated that Krauthammer had once been a stutterer. The first episode had occurred when he’d asked if his parents still lived in Wahoo. Unable to articulate the word father Krauthammer had begun blinking.

  Years ago while grilling a suspect, he’d seen a similar facial tick. D
uring the interview he missed it, but caught it later on the videotape. He asked a speech pathologist to review the tape, and she said the suspect had probably stuttered as a child. Facial ticks often accompany stuttering, she explained, and even if therapy cures the speech disfluency, the ticks almost never go away, especially when the subject is stressed. As Krauthammer had been, reacting to a surprise question about Patti Cole.

  The speech pathologist had also said that fricatives caused more difficulty than other consonants. As an example, she cited words beginning with the letter F, like Father, which caused more difficulty than, say, the letter D, as in Dad, which was how Krauthammer had referred to his father after the blinking episode.

  Frank swung into the parking lot beside the station. The fact that Krauthammer had once been a stutterer didn’t make him a killer, but Frank found it significant, given his new victimology theory. Maybe the killer targeted women with physical flaws or emotional scars because he’d once had a flaw of his own. Stuttering had to have caused Krauthammer difficulty as a child, and, if it continued into his teens, problems with women. His father still lived in Wahoo. The priest hadn’t stated his first name, but how many men named Krauthammer would be working in the actuarial department of an Omaha insurance company?

  He left his car and hurried into the station. His gut was urging him to go to Nebraska. Too bad it wasn’t telling him how to convince Captain Dupree to give him the time off to do it.

  CHAPTER 15

  Wednesday, 11:45 A.M.

  “I gotta hit the john,” Frank said to his desk-mate. “You can handle things for ten minutes, right?”

  Officer Alicia Reyes gave him a long stare. She’d been on the desk for six months after breaking her leg in a street fracas that spiraled out of control. A light-skinned black woman with serious freckles, she had just turned forty and currently had no boyfriend. When they weren’t dealing with the lowlifes the patrol officers dragged in, she constantly moaned and groaned about this.