by Dias, Jason
She turned to almost face me. “A baby girl. It was not common to name children when they were born. Back then, so many children died that we did not think about them as people until they were old enough to work. But I named her. Rosalie. The Bishop was there to take her away. That scabrous old man.”
Scabrous. Ten point word. Non-native speaker. My adrenaline, already high since the sun went down, still spiked a little. This looked like a break in the façade.
My side of the glass started to fog up. I put some air on it. We’d be at the station before the engine warmed.
“They said she would be raised in the country by a good family. It was good. When I killed that old man, I knew it was true. But then, that day, I did not know. I gave birth, they took my Rosalie, I fell asleep. A lot of blood loss. It was nearly the last day of my life.”
I’d picked up a guy two years ago who’d claimed with complete certainty he’d been shot and killed in Manhattan in ninety-six. That his alleged murderer was George Bush Sr. in disguise as a motorcycle cop was the least bizarre part of the delusion. He thought he was dead. Ysabeau was shaping up to spend Christmas at the local psych ward.
After all my questions.
“Are you dead right now?” I said. Bush’s victim had said yes.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to run a couple other things by you. One. Who is president right now?”
She laughed, a tinkling sound. “Your Donald Trump. Such a vulgar man. Today is Friday. The end of December. Christmas in three days. Seven and seven and seven are twenty-one. World backwards is spelled dee-el-ar-oh-double you.”
So not delirious. That didn’t rule out psychosis. “You said you killed a priest.”
“More than one. But I killed that old man in Paris, so long ago. When I died, that was the first thing I did. It is how I come to be here now, continuing the work. I confess, again: I killed those two people. They were as bad as that old man in Paris. Here is your station.”
I made the left. Punched in a code at the stand and rolled the window back up on the way into the secure lot. I put the Caprice in an open spot near the back, behind a big white van.
Ysabeau touched my hand when I cut off the engine. When I turned to look at her, she said, “Time to sleep again, Dominique.”
I went out like she’d flipped a switch. The dream started immediately.
That same old man, in his black frock coat and white collar, stood in Rousseau’s library. That office room in the Grand Seminaire de Metz. No desk, no easel. A cauldron sat over a stove in the center of the room, water boiling steadily. Rousseau knelt before the pot, bare to the waist, a priest to either side – strong-looking men in their twenties.
He didn’t resist. The strong men took his arms and dragged him closer to the pot. The old man took his left arm at the elbow. “You know this must be done.”
“I have sinned,” Rousseau said. “I beg forgiveness.”
“It is God’s place to forgive. In the bottom of the cauldron is a ring. My signet. Bring it out.”
Rousseau’s face, already pale, blanched further. His hand trembled. The men kept him still.
“It must be done.”
“Bishop Clearey. If it must… Only, I may not be strong enough. Will you help me?”
“I will. Brothers?”
The two young men all but pushed him into the pot. Berger thrust Rousseau’s hand into the water. Rousseau screamed, rage, pain and fear all mingled up in the sound like notes into a chord. He snatched the ring out of the water and dropped it to the floor. It took a little bit of his skin with it. He did not stop screaming. He held the arm out in front of him. Livid red, swollen, awful.
Berger took a towel from a nearby chaise and threw it over Rousseau’s shoulders. “Clean up this mess,” he told the younger priests. Then he led the sinner away. Out of the room. Down stairs in blonde oak into the basement.
“Have I atoned?” Rousseau asked, his voice cracked.
“Atoned? This is not atonement, Brother, nor even punishment.” Down another flight of steps, these ones stone. Into a cell. One wooden cot, a book stand with a Holy Bible, and nothing else – not even a blanket. “You will remain here. Each night, a boy will bring you a cup of water and a crust of bread. In thirty days, we will have your judgment. If you survive your wound and your arm is intact, God has forgiven you.”
He spun on one heel. Stepped out of the room and slammed the door shut. A heavy bar thudded into place. Inside, Rousseau sobbed. Pain and outrage.
Cold woke me. Still night. Ysabeau, of course, was gone. The dream lingered, the exceptional vividness of it. I could smell the scalded flesh. The cold air of Paris, distinctive. The dirt from the stone floor of the cell.
I could hear my blood in my ears. Taste blood in my mouth. Fear. Breathing came hard. I’d been in danger before. Just last week, I’d had to shoot a suspect before he could stab me. But now, for the first time, I feared an abstraction.
The dream. It’s vividness. Ysabeau’s apparent ability to cast me out of consciousness, into dreams. Specific dreams.
I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Whoever she was and however she was getting to me, she was currently the only suspect in my murder investigation. I needed to have her picked up.
Inside. Past the keypad entry. Security station in the back. “Hi, Carla.”
“Working late?” Carla, sixtyish and balding, sipped coffee from a World’s Greatest Grandmother mug.
“You know how it is. Need you to bring up a tape for me.”
“Stuff hasn’t been on tapes since the nineties, Detective. What you need?”
“There’s a camera on the gate, right? Should be able to find a nice clean shot of me pulling in.”
She set down the mug and started jabbing at a keyboard with her fingers. The screen in front of her changed to an interior view of the wire mesh gate. “Selfies? Doesn’t seem like you. Got that tablet in your hands all the time, but do you even have a social media account?”
“Hey, is that me?”
Looked like it. Old Caprice. Good picture; I could see the paint starting to peel away from the front of the hood. Only one problem.
“Is that the right time?”
“How many times you pull into the lot tonight? This is twenty hundred hours and change. You go out and back in?”
“No.” I still felt shaken. Physically, like my bearings were off and my teeth loose in my mouth. Now dread found a place in my belly. A little cold trickle of adrenaline. I thought about it. Ysabeau had not appeared in my rearview mirror. On two occasions. But I hadn’t imagined her, either. Ay had seen her. Hauled her in. “How long do we keep visual records?”
“Depends what you want. Gate, indefinitely. Huge server in the basement.”
“Not the gate. Front desk. Interview room. Two nights ago, Watanabe put a guest in Interview Two. Uh, ten p.m., approximately.”
More jabbing and poking. Two minutes later:
“But she’s alone.”
Carla peered at the screen. “Yep. We’ll go forward and backward. Badge log says she came in and out.”
She did. Alone every time. On one occasion, at the right time stamp, she behaved strangely, as if walking next to someone. Nobody there.
That adrenaline trickle again.
“Sorry, Detective. You sure you have the right day?”
“Yes.” No. I wasn’t sure of much in that moment. “Do me a favor. Don’t tell anyone I was here tonight.”
“Won’t lie for you.”
“Of course. If someone asks, be honest. Just… I know how nights are on the desk. Easy for rumors to start. I’m headed back out.”
Carla grunted and blanked the screen.
I went out the back door, back to my car. As the engine idled, I sat back and thought.
Peace
I had Ay on the phone. I said, “Any more leads at the church end?”
“Nothing new.” She sounded tired.
�
�We’ll have to go down there later today. I’m having Burt work on a warrant. Want all their video recordings. See if Sidney was on film.”
“No film anymore, Detective. What’s your twenty?”
“Car. Sprague Avenue. Driving up and down all night, looking for our suspect. No dice. Hey. You remember who was on the desk when you brought her in?”
“Wilcox.”
“Right. I remember feeling… Never mind. Talk to him and see if he remembers you bringing her back to Interview.”
“Detective?”
“Just do it.” I hung up. Went through the 7-11 for coffee. Half a cup of dark roast mixed with cocoa from the dispenser. People gave me a lot of space. I had on jeans, a blue shirt and a tweed jacket. Even minus the man’s size nines, I couldn’t have looked more like a cop if I’d worn my blacks. I stood there in line, impatient, unable to ignore the conversations going on around me.
One person left, the line moved up by one. “Jerry, how’s it going?” The cashier seemed to recognize one of the customers. They chatted for thirty seconds. Then he paid for his coffee and donut and pack of smokes and left. The line moved up one. Seemed like the folks working the registers knew about one person in four.
My turn. I stepped up. Dropped three dollar bills on the counter. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
The checker, a young woman with bright eyes and a smile despite the hour, didn’t say anything. She just raised one eyebrow and tucked my bills in the register.
“There’s a woman who lives in this neighborhood, or at least works around here. At night. Small. Really small. Always has on a weird old-fashioned dress, no matter the weather. You know her?”
She shook her head and looked for the next customer.
Well, worth a shot. I made it to the door. A gentleman stopped me just short. “I know her,” he said, almost whispering. “She in trouble?”
I moved out of the way of the door. “No, no trouble. Just want to ask her some questions. She’s a witness.”
“You a cop?”
“Yes, but not vice. Homicide.” We weren’t big enough to have our own dedicated homicide department but regular folks watched television. They knew the language. “Just want to ask her some questions.”
“Vice? She’s not a hooker. Or a drug dealer.”
“Oh.”
The man frowned at me. He looked sixty or so. Dickies jacket, two-day beard stubbly, grizzled. Boots that matched the jacket.
I said, “Still. You know where I could find her?”
“She don’t come out during the day.”
“Where does she stay?”
His frown deepened. He seemed to be engaged in some internal debate. “I don’t know if I should say.”
“Nobody is in trouble. She might be in a little danger, though. Need to check in on her.”
He looked around. Nobody was looking. “You know the cemetery? Union Road?”
“Yeah.”
“Across the road is that funeral home. Seems a little ghoulish with all the old-folks homes around.”
“She’s near there?”
“In there,” he said, looking at his shoes.
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“In the basement. Lots of coffins down there. She knows the manager.”
I leaned a little closer to discretely smell the guy’s breath. No alcohol. “Thanks for your help, sir.” I headed out, not bothering to give him my card and the call-me-if spiel.
Short drive to the office. I punched in my code at the pedestal, feeling groggy from another night in the car rather than in bed. Parked, went in the back door.
Ay sat at my desk on the customer side. Burt occupied my seat. She held a file folder.
“Warrants?” I said.
“Any and all visual recordings. They’ll most likely cooperate in any event.”
“I’m a belt and suspenders kind of girl. Thanks, Boss.”
She stood up. “Captain got a call this morning. Some church higher-up. They wanted to know if we had a suspect.”
“Sounds natural.”
“Captain wants you to wrap it up quickly.”
“Understood.”
She edged out by me. From the hallway: “I’m sure you do.”
“What’s that about?” Ay said.
I sat in my chair. Burt had warmed it for me. “Coded messages. Captain’s a Catholic. That phone call was as much about politics as natural concern. We’re to wrap it up and not ask questions about the victims.”
“I didn’t hear any of that.”
“Good.” She meant she hadn’t heard any of the implications; I hoped she heard my implication that it would be good never to repeat what she’d heard. “Tell me.”
“Tell you. Oh, Wilcox. Yeah, no memory problems. He saw what we saw. Weird girl, under five feet tall, fancy dress that could use a laundromat. What’s this about?”
“Shut the door.” She did. Looked at me with special interest. “First time I saw her was on the street. Drove by her, stopped to welfare check her. Moved on. I glanced in the rearview and didn’t see her. Didn’t think anything of it.”
“So?”
“Next time. We picked her up. Didn’t see her in the rearview while she was in the back seat. It was dark, I still didn’t think about it. Only it was cold out. I could see my breath. I could see your breath. I couldn’t see hers.”
“What are you saying?”
I leaned back in my seat. “She doesn’t seem to feel the cold. Next: she doesn’t show up on videotape. Cameras all over this building, she isn’t on the recordings. You saw her, I saw her, Wilcox. She’s not on the tape of the interior door that night or the back gate when I brought her in last night.”
“What is she, a vampire?” Ay had on a smile but her eyes didn’t seem to know about it.
“I don’t know. Not a vampire, obviously, because those don’t exist. I just wanted to be sure I didn’t imagine her.” I engaged in Ricky’s habit. “There’s more, but I don’t want to talk about it yet. You up for a ride?”
“The parish is up north. Thirty minutes on the highway. I can drive if you like.”
“Sure. Take the Vic.” That would allow me time to dig through more databases. And the file Ricky had passed on. We loaded up. Ay drove sedately, an irritating four miles per hour under the posted highway limit of seventy-five. Nobody likes passing cops, especially in cars that look like unmarked units, which the Crown Victoria exactly did. Not a lot of chatter. I mostly kept my head in emails and databases.
“Got something here,” I said. “Missing kids that fit the profile in the right time period.”
“There’s a profile now? More locals?”
“Not exactly. Yes, there’s a profile. Not locals. I might be exceeding my mandate. New York, six to ten years ago. Big city. Lots of kids go missing. Not a lot of kids have parents who attend our vic’s church.”
“How does that affect us? It’s out of state and so on.”
“I think this is bigger. I think the Feds are going to show up before long. If they don’t, I’m going to call them.”
She took the exit for State Line Road. “Interstate crimes? Boss wants us to avoid the cover-up angle.”
“Interstate crimes, yes. Church stuff, again, not exactly. I think we have a serial killer here. I’m walking backwards through the data, looking for victims that fit the MO tied to that… what do Catholics have? A parish?”
“Not formally, but sure.”
The church squatted on the left, just off the highway. Built of bricks imported from parts east, a few stones from Germany. Ay parked eight rows back from the doors. I’d have parked a lot closer.
“Broken necks shouldn’t be too hard to find. Disarticulated necks should stand out. And the weird bleeding out, too. Our perp isn’t subtle.”
We stepped out of the car and started walking. Nice temperature today: fifty-six and sunny. The community college next door boasted half-dressed young people walking across their acres of parking
lot. We came up against a security door, a big steel thing with electronic controls. A woman spoke to us through a speaker in a bulletproof window to the left.
“Help you?”
Ay’s uniform set the tone. She flashed a badge and smile. “Is there a head of security we could talk to, please?”
The desk clerk buzzed us in. The door clicked open. It moved smoothly and soundlessly. Inside looked more like I’d expected a Catholic church to look: dark wood, icons, rugs, books and bookshelves. Big, black wooden doors sat ajar, guarding rows of pews. We were ushered into the security office where a big man sat on a tiny stool, surrounded by pine- and mistletoe-themed decorations.
“Help you?”
I produced the warrant. “Need all your tapes from November.”
He frowned. Glanced over the paperwork. “What’s this about?”
“Keeping your congregation safe. My boss talked to your boss. I thought you were prepped and ready to be cooperative.”
“Sure, no problem. Only data doesn’t sit on tapes anymore. We’d need a basement full of ‘em. And they’re a fire hazard. If they catch, they produce toxic fumes.” He handed me a little rectangular object. “Thumb drives. Already burned you a copy.”
“So what was the song and dance about?”
“Curiosity. So you’re not going to tell me what it’s about?”
Ay jumped in. She produced a photo of Sidney gleaned from his New York parish website, alive, smiling, looking not terribly evil. “Do you know this man?”
The chief shook his head. “Never seen him. I mostly work in here, though. Scheduling and such. Maybe Barbara knows him. What’d he do?”
“Can you bring Barbara in here for us?” It would be crowded. The room barely fit the chief.
Barbara turned out to be the woman working the door. She glanced at the photo and said, “Sure, I’ve seen him around. He’s clergy. Not one of ours, though. Maybe from a neighboring church. Some Sundays, once a month give or take, I’ll see him in the pews. He filled out an application to assist with Sunday School. Rick, what happened with that?”
“I’ll check.” He opened a little green file cabinet and started digging through paperwork.
