by Jane Haddam
“I’m not going anywhere,” the older child said. “And you can’t make me.”
“Well,” Scholastica said.
“You really don’t have to take the bus,” Genevra said. “We can afford to put you in a taxi. Even without my working full-time.”
“I keep telling you,” Tom said. “I don’t need you to work full-time.”
“I don’t want to go in a taxi,” Scholastica said. “Really. I’ve been riding in taxis all day.”
“With something like this, the trick is to make sure the police are efficient,” Tom said. “That’s the biggest danger. That they’re going to screw it up, you know, and drag it out. I mean, it ought to be obvious to anybody what happened. The wife was so sick she got too much for him. The kid killed her, then he felt guilty about it. It happens all the time.”
“You can’t make me either,” the younger child said, but she didn’t sit down on the sidewalk. She had that odd fastidiousness some girls did even from infancy. She didn’t want anything near her to have anything to do with dirt.
Scholastica looked up the street and thought she saw a bus far in the distance. A little flag went up at the back of her mind that said: see? prayer can be very effective. She put her arms under her cape and wrapped them around her body. The wind was cold and stiff and made the hem of her habit whip around her legs.
“Well,” she said again.
“I keep telling Tom it’s not a question of if he needs me to work full-time,” Genevra said. “It’s the future. We’re going to want to send them to private schools. We’re going to want to send them to college. What am I going to be making, if I take too much time off?”
“You’re not taking any time off,” Tom said. “You’ve just got a reduced schedule.”
This time, Scholastica was sure of it. There was a bus. Her cape had a collar. She flipped it up against what would have been her neck, if the folds of her veil weren’t hanging in front of it. Sometimes she regretted choosing a life that did not allow her to have children of her own. She never regretted choosing one that did not allow her to marry. The bus stopped three blocks up. Scholastica moved closer to the bus stop sign and leaned a little into the street, to make sure the driver would see her.
“T’hink of it,” Tom said. “You’ll get to meet Gregor Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
“I met him years ago,” Sister Scholastica wanted to say, but that would have taken explanations, so she didn’t. The bus pulled to a stop in front of her, and she leaned over to give Genevra a standard nonpeck on the cheek.
“I’ll call you next week,” she promised. Then she smiled at Tom and hurried up the steps into the bus, her token in her hand. The other nuns at St. Anselm’s had told her that there were drivers who would not take fares from nuns in habits, but the idea of accepting that kind of favor made Scholastica extremely uncomfortable. She had the token in the stile before the driver could say anything at all. Then she smiled at him, with more warmth than she had managed for Tom, and went to the back of the bus.
There were some favors that were so universal, and automatic, that Scholastica had given up worrying about them. It was the end of the day, and rush hour. The bus was packed. A young man in his twenties got up to give her his seat, and she thanked him and sat down. The old woman she sat down next to patted her arm, and said, “Bless you, Sister.” Scholastica wondered, idly, what it had been like to be a nun in the days when people knew what it was nuns did, and how important it was that they did it. These days, people had the money to write checks for what they wanted. It wasn’t the case that if the nuns didn’t work for almost nothing, their children wouldn’t be able to go to Catholic school.
The bus lumbered, and Scholastica closed her eyes. This was why she hadn’t wanted a taxi. She needed the time to unkink. For some reason, she had the prayer on the Miraculous Medal running through her head: O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. It hummed through her brain like bees on telephone wires at the start of the summer. The first time she had ever received a Miraculous Medal had been right before her First Holy Communion. She could still remember the old nun who had taught religion at her elementary school, leading the whole class over to the church where the medals were sitting in a big box near the Communion rail. There were brown scapulars, too, hanging from the hands of the statue of Mary in the little wall niche next to the candles. The nuns in her elementary school had been Sisters of Divine Grace. She wondered if that was usual. Did girls always enter the same orders their elementary school teachers came from? The method was working. She was relaxing. She was at peace for the first time all day.
She was so much at peace, she nearly fell asleep and missed her stop. She saw the lit windows of Cardman’s Books at the last minute. She would have jumped to her feet, but in her long habit it was nearly impossible. As it was, she knocked her veil off center, letting her hair, as grey now as it was red, spill out. She smiled sheepishly at everybody around her and tucked it back in. There was something that was good about the old habits with their collars and their wimples. You’d practically have to be decapitated to have your hair spill out. Scholastica went for the back door, pulling the bell cord on her way. When the bus screamed to a stop, she went out by herself, feeling like a black thing in the night. There was something about habits she could get behind. The Sisters of Divine Grace should change theirs from black to something colorful, like the sky-blue that used to be worn by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Scholastica was tired of looking like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
She actually had four blocks to walk to get to St. Anselm’s. She could have transferred to another bus, going in the right direction, but it hadn’t seemed to her worth the effort. The cold was waking her up. Her nerves were no longer on edge. She turned right and hurried along the crowded street toward the floodlights that illuminated the spires of both St. Anselm’s and St. Stephen’s. When she got to St. Stephen’s, she noticed that something seemed to be going on there, as usual. The notice board at the end of the walk said something about a “reading circle.” Scholastica liked to read, but she had never liked the idea of sitting in a circle and talking about a book. In her early days in the convent, she had resented most the habit of having a Sister read aloud at meals and recreation. To this day, she couldn’t stand the sound of audio books on the convent van’s radio.
She crossed the street and went down along the side of St. Anselm’s, to get to the convent entrance. She let herself in the wrought-iron gate and looked around at the courtyard. The school was dark. It would be, at this time of night. The convent was mostly dark, too. It couldn’t be much later than twenty minutes to seven. She went down to the annex where the offices were and tried the door. It was locked. She let herself in with her key.
Whoever had been last to leave this place had not been very careful. There were lights on in the hall, and in at least two of the offices. Scholastica left the lights on in the hall and turned the office lights off automatically. “Let me inform you,” her novice mistress had once said, “of the concept of the kilowatt-hour.” She got to her office and tried her door, but that was locked as well. She got out her keys and opened up, wondering who had bothered with the lock, and why. She had told Thomasetta long ago that there was nothing in her office that needed to be protected like money in a vault.
She knew as soon as she opened her door that there was something out of place, but because of the way the light was coming in from the door she couldn’t tell what it was. Her first thought was that there might have been some vandalism. That would explain why her door was locked. Somebody had gotten in and made a mess. She reached for the light switch and flipped it up, wondering if she was about to find graffiti spray painted across her cabinets.
Instead, she found Sister Harriet Garrity, slumped across the top of her desk, her body weighing down manila file folders stuffed thick with papers and stuck all over with colored Post-it notes. Her face was blue. Her nec
k was raw and caked with brown blood, as if something had torn at it, trying to rip out her throat. There was vomit everywhere, and as soon as she saw it, Scholastica knew what it was she had first noticed as wrong. It was the smell, that was what it was. The room had been shut up, maybe for hours, with the heat on, and now there was a smell so sweet and intolerable and thick she almost threw up herself.
She reeled backward, out of the room, and dropped to her knees. She was so dizzy, she didn’t think she could breathe. She put her head down between her knees and then all the way to the floor. The floor felt cold and good against her skin. She would have to get Father, she thought. She would have to get Gregor Demarkian.
But right now, all she wanted to do was scream.
EIGHT
If Gregor Demarkian had had a cell phone, John Jackman would have been able to get in touch with him anywhere in the city; and the newspapers would never have had any reason for WPLD to show a picture of Cavanaugh Street looking as if a bomb had gone off there. Instead, Gregor had meandered home from his last interview with the Philadelphia police, stopping at one store to pick up a box of dark chocolate Godiva raspberry crowns for Bennis and at another to buy a copy of the latest Nora Roberts for Tibor, and then walking up one street and down another looking in windows. He saw a sequined and beaded evening scarf, so obviously not made of real silk that it was painful to look at. He saw a giant ostrich costume made out of fake red feathers, left over from New Year’s Eve. Eventually he got a cab, but the driver had the radio turned to a foreign language station. It wasn’t a foreign language he understood. He had a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer and read that instead. There was something very wrong with the water mains near city hall. The mayor was concerned. A study showed that drug use was down among the teenagers of Philadelphia, but since the study had been done by asking those teenagers whether they took drugs or not, he didn’t put much credence in it. He did think over a little of what he had heard about the deaths of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly, but until he had a chance to see the scenes and go through the papers for himself, he didn’t expect to have much of a handle on it. He did worry, a little, about this business of being consulted both by the Church and the police, but he didn’t worry about it long. John Jackman was right. The Church was not paying him, and had not offered to pay him. The Cardinal Archbishop had only asked him to help. He would never have helped in any way that would have concealed the truth, if the truth was not what the Cardinal Archbishop wanted it to be. This was why he never took consulting fees from individuals or private organizations. Real conflicts of interest came at the end, when there was no way to escape the fact that your client was hip deep in culpability.
The cab turned the corner onto Cavanaugh Street, and for a moment Gregor thought he was looking at another of Donna Moradanyan Donahue’s extravaganzas. This time, instead of just wrapping Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in red and white crepe paper, she had put up lights. There were lights everywhere. They illuminated the front of his own small brown brick apartment building. Donna Moradanyan had made something of an extravaganza of that. There was a gigantic heart, studded with red-and-white twinkling Christmas lights, that reached from the windows of the empty top-floor apartment to just above the windows on the first floor. It was good that it was hollow in the middle, or nobody would have been able to see out. How far away was Valentine’s Day?
The cab slowed to a crawl, and Gregor suddenly saw why. The street was full of police cars—three black-and-whites and an unmarked that only a little old lady who never watched anything but Barney reruns could mistake for an ordinary person’s car. There were television people, too, although not as many of them as there might have been. Gregor saw one sound truck and a reporter with a mike being set up in front of hot lights. His stomach lurched. Cavanaugh Street was the safest place in the city of Philadelphia. That didn’t mean it was invulnerable. And there were accidents, too, although this didn’t seem to be one. Gregor scanned the vehicles anxiously, but not one of them was an ambulance.
He took a wad of bills out of his pocket and threw them into the front seat. “Let me out here,” he said. “Keep the change.”
He was at least two blocks away from his own building. On the street, it was cold, but that made it easier. He looked at the little knots of people near him and saw nobody he knew. He looked at his own building and saw nothing in the way of a police line. At last he spotted Bennis, standing on the steps in front of their own building’s front door, talking to a tall black man who had to be John Jackman. He pushed past a couple of other people, including a cameraman for WPCT who was swearing at a minicam, and made it to the clutch of cops standing around the bright yellow fire hydrant as if they were dogs waiting to take their turns. Who had decided to paint fire hydrants yellow?
“Bennis,” he said, reaching the steps.
Bennis turned. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Here he is.”
“Where have you been?” John Jackman demanded. “Aren’t you on a mobile? What’s the matter with you?”
“Of course he isn’t on a mobile,” Bennis said. “He barely has e-mail.”
“Will you tell me what’s going on?” Gregor said.
John Jackman tugged his arm. “Let’s go. My car. We’ve been looking for you for an hour.”
“That’s what all this is about?” Gregor looked from one end of the street to the other. “You sent three police cars with their lights flashing just to find out where I was.”
“We’ve got a major problem,” Jackman said.
“And what are you doing here?” Gregor let himself be pulled toward the unmarked, unprotesting. “Does the deputy commissioner make a habit of paying personal visits to consultants on homicide cases? What are you doing?”
“Wait,” Bennis said.
She ran down the steps and across the sidewalk and caught Gregor just as John Jackman was about to push him into the car. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and said, “Take care of yourself. And say hello to Scholastica for me.”
Gregor pecked air and half fell backwards, because Jackman was pushing him.
“We’ve got a problem,” Jackman said again. “I don’t know where you’ve been, but we’ve had a bulletin out for you on every radio station in the greater metropolitan area. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you even listen to music?”
“The cab driver was listening to salsa,” Gregor said.
Jackman’s driver turned around. “You want to go straight to the church?” he asked.
“Straight,” Jackman said. Then he turned to Gregor. “We’ve had another murder.”
“And that’s it?” Gregor demanded. “That’s why you staged a major siege on Cavanaugh Street? What were you thinking?”
“It’s not about the dead body,” Jackman said.
“Then what is it about?”
Jackman threw himself back on the seat and stared at the car’s upholstered ceiling. “Look,” he said. “Shut up and wait until we get there. You’ll see what it is soon enough. What do you know about the Reverend Roy Phipps?”
“Not a lot.”
“Well,” Jackman said, “you will.”
PART TWO
The first born from the dead
—COL. 1:18
ONE
1
Gregor Demarkian would have spent the ride across the city making John Jackman explain what was going on, but he didn’t have a chance. Almost as soon as they were off Cavanaugh Street and out in real traffic, Jackman was leaning over the front seat, talking frantically into the shortwave radio. Gregor found himself thinking that it would be a good thing if the deputy commissioner’s car was fitted out with a shortwave in the back—and then how idiotic it was that Jackman wanted to go into administration. What was this man going to do behind a desk, with no real contact with ongoing investigations? Jackman was one of the most totally committed officers Gregor had ever met. Even as a rookie, still in uniform and studiously ignored by the men who considered themse
lves “real” detectives, John Jackman had been unable to approach a crime scene without bonding with it. Some people loved their families. Some people had hobbies they couldn’t live without. John Jackman loved the half-panicked miasma that surrounded a newly found body, the barely controlled chaos that seeped into the bones of everybody responsible for bringing order to the scene. It always looked so well organized on television shows, so much a matter of training and skill and remembered organization. In real life it was a nagging, edgy fear that you would do something wrong, that you would step sideways when you should step back or drop a piece of paper you didn’t even know you had in your pocket and contaminate the crime scene forever.
Most of Philadelphia was quiet, and well lit. Whatever crisis John Jackman had on his hands, its urgency had not seeped into the rest of the population. They passed through the kind of neighborhood where the bars would open as soon as the law allowed and stay open until the law required them to close. Gregor remembered how shocked he had been, in college, to discover that there were men who would sit down on a barstool at eight o’clock in the morning and have a couple of beers before going in to work. He tried to figure out if they would be passing anywhere near the University of Pennsylvania campus, but he had never been particularly good at directions. He didn’t know where he was. The houses in this neighborhood were shabby, and mostly cut up into apartments. The one small park they passed looked like it needed to be raked. There were dead leaves and broken bottles on the ground, even though this was February.
Then they turned a corner, and Gregor was suddenly able to see light, far too much light, right ahead of them. He leaned toward the front just as John Jackman slumped backward, but the scene was too far away to make sense, and too bright. He sat back himself and asked,
