by Jane Haddam
“Aristotle,” Father was saying, “could never have been accepted as a source of Christian philosophy if St. Thomas hadn’t found a way to disguise his religious skepticism, but once that skepticism had been disguised—”
Mary blinked, and the Crucifix on the wall seemed to waver. She felt a wave of dizziness roll over her, as if she were about to faint, except that she didn’t feel faint. She felt as if she were floating. The floor had dropped out from under her feet. The air had become tactile and electric. The light no longer seemed to be the light from the fluorescent lamps above her head, but another kind of light entirely, coming from nowhere, going to nowhere, purely white.
A second later it was over, except for the slight feeling of nausea that presented itself as a rush of acid to her throat. Mary swallowed as hard as she was able. Then she closed her notebook and put her pen in her pocket, deliberately and carefully. She was afraid that if she moved too quickly, she would find that she had forgotten how to walk.
“Miss McAllister?”
“Sorry, Father,” Mary said. “Don’t feel well.”
This was not exactly true. She didn’t feel unwell as much as she felt claustrophobic. She had to be out of this room, and after that she had to be out of this building, in the air, in the cold, anywhere where she couldn’t be confined. She put her notebook into her backpack and stood up. Father had come down the row to her, a half-panicked frown on his face. She could hear him breathing.
“You don’t look well,” he said. “Are you sure you’ll be all right? Would you like to have somebody come with you?”
“I just want air,” Mary said, and then blushed a little, because that was rude, and she was never rude to priests. She got one of the straps on her backpack over one of her shoulders and headed out of the room, into the long corridor that went the entire length of this wing of the building. It was a beautiful building, picture-perfect college Gothic, made of marble and almost brand-new. It must have cost the earth, and it occurred to her that it was strange she’d never thought of it. At the end of the corridor there was a fire door. She went through it and out into the quad.
Out there, there was a statue of St. Francis, in habit, holding out his hands to the birds. St. Francis was one of the saints Sister Harriet Garrity had actually been able to like, although, of course, she had disapproved of his relationship with St. Clare. She liked St. Teresa of Avila, but disapproved of her relationship with John of the Cross. She positively hated The Little Flower, who had seemed to her to be the worst sort of male-identified woman. Mary rubbed her eyes and walked past the statue, farther into the quad. There were statues everywhere. She had, she thought, liked Edith Lawton more than she had liked Sister Harriet Garrity. Edith might be annoying, but at least she didn’t pretend to be a Catholic.
When she got to the statue of St. Clare with the stone bench wrapped around it, she sat down. She had, she thought, known this was coming. Somewhere at the back of her mind, it had always been with her, waiting for her to stop long enough to notice it was there. The problem was, now that she had noticed it, she wasn’t too sure what to do with it, or even how to go about deciding what to do about it. Her head ached a little. Her hands were cold. St. Clare’s veil was as long as a waterfall.
All right, Mary thought. This is it. I’m going to be a nun.
EIGHT
1
Execution in Pennsylvania was by lethal injection. Gregor Demarkian had known that all the time, but for some reason he had been blanking it out, especially when Bennis had been the one asking him. He didn’t know why that should be so. Of all the possible forms of capital punishment, lethal injection was certainly the best—although the idea of calling one method of killing someone “the best possible” made his head ache. He could imagine other situations, and other people, with other answers: Homolka and Dreen, up in Canada, who only thought a killing was good if the victim screamed. Still, there really were worse methods. The gas chamber, which was a matter of being fully conscious while being asphyxiated in a booth with windows all around it, so that you could be seen by the largest possible audience. The electric chair, which was not only obviously painful—you would scream if your mouth wasn’t muzzled shut—but which kept malfunctioning, doing only half the job, causing buckets of blood to gush out of the mouths and eyes of its victims, causing burns. With lethal injection, they put you to sleep first. The element of righteous retribution was removed. The apocalyptic undertones were banished, once and for all, to the minds of the lunatic fringe who came to stand at the gates on execution evenings, cheerleading for death.
And that, Gregor thought, as Henry Lord pulled the car through three sets of electrified gates into the “official visitors” parking lot, is what I don’t like about lethal injection. It may be the most humane method we have, but it normalizes the whole process. It makes capital punishment appear as no more serious a policy decision than farm price supports.
The electrified gates were guarded by uniformed officers with rifles—with machine guns, Gregor noticed. Being used to federal prisons rather than state ones, he was a little surprised. Federal prisons were often minimum security. Stockbrokers who had traded on a little inside information and bankers who had scammed a few federal loans weren’t going to do much that was physical except notch their daily running time from thirty minutes to an hour. State prisons got the kind of prisoner whose idea of an interesting afternoon was to kill all five of the people in the convenience store they were robbing, and then to try to kill the cops who came to arrest him. Of course, federal prisons also got interstate kidnappers and Timothy McVeigh, but Gregor had no idea what they did about those people. McVeigh, if he remembered rightly, was on a federal death row. That one was probably not minimum security.
“What’s the reverie about?” Henry Lord asked, pulling into the parking space one of the guards was indicating with a waving machine gun.
“Timothy McVeigh,” Gregor said. “I hope that idiot has his safety on.”
“I hope he’s not an idiot. I never have liked this place. I used to have clients here, when I was younger, but I never have liked it.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to like it,” Gregor pointed out.
“I know that. That’s not what I mean. I’ve been to other prisons, though, and it doesn’t give me the feeling this one does. I really hate being in this place. Maybe it’s because of death row.”
Henry got the car settled in the space and turned off the engine. The guards suddenly surrounded the car, staying just far enough back to give the impression that they didn’t really think they’d have to shoot anybody, but close enough in so that they could if they decided they wanted to.
“Maybe it’s because they treat visitors here as if they were potential escapees,” Gregor said drily. He opened his car door and stepped out, unfolding a little from the car, because it was a compact and he was so tall.
Henry got out, too, unfolding less, because he was shorter. A thin, small man in a neat brown suit came through the guards, holding out his hand.
“Judge Lord,” the small man said, shaking vigorously. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m very pleased to meet you. I’ve read mountains of print on you. You lead a very interesting life.”
“This is the warden, Ed Nagelman,” Henry Lord said. “You’ve got to introduce yourself, Ed. Gregor was with the Bureau. He doesn’t know the first thing about wardens.”
“Actually,” Gregor said, “I was thinking about wardens. About the one at the federal facility that has Timothy McVeigh.”
“We’re very happy not to have him here,” Ed Nagelman said. “We’ve got enough trouble with the SGN.”
“What’s the SGN?”
“The Seamless Garment Network,” Gregor said. “That’s very odd. Sister Harriet Garrity was a member of the Seamless Garment Network.”
Ed Nagelman looked momentarily blank. “Oh,” he said finally, “you mean that woman who died, the murder you’re looking into. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most o
f the members of SGN seem to be nuns. You may have seen some of them out in front of the gate. They’re already gearing up to protest this one.”
Ed Nagelman nodded at the guards, and then led the way through them and across the parking lot to the path that led around the front of the large building.
“Everybody has to come through the front,” he told Gregor, “even me. And anybody who comes in or goes out of the secure area has to have an armed escort.”
“Even on visitor’s day?” Gregor had this vision of dozens of wives and small children, waiting for men with machine guns to follow them everywhere.
“Visitors of that kind aren’t admitted into the secure area. We have a visitor’s room where people can sit at booths and talk to each other through bulletproof glass. But for somebody like you, who will be meeting with a prisoner face-to-face, within the prison’s secure compound itself, we’ve got armed escorts.”
Gregor cleared his throat. He did not repeat his line about hoping that the idiots had their safeties on. He just thought it.
They got to the front door, which oddly enough—at least oddly to Gregor’s mind—did not seem to have anything in the way of security on it. It just opened, like a door. Inside, in the lobby, there was plenty of security, including four more uniformed men armed with machine guns.
“It makes you wonder how anybody ever escapes from places like this,” Gregor said.
“If it makes a difference to you, nobody has ever escaped from this one,” Ed Nagelman said. “It’s our job to make sure they don’t. And it’s in their best interests, although they think it isn’t. I don’t know of a single escape attempt from a maximum-security facility anywhere in the last ten years that has resulted in somebody successfully getting out and staying out alive. They die of cold. They die of exposure. They get shot dead on the main street of some godforsaken small town somewhere when a concerned citizen who watches too much television recognizes them and panics. Do you know how many people in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania carry handguns?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Gregor said.
Ed Nagelman led them to an inner door. One of the armed men came forward to open it up for them. They stepped into a small space with another door on the far side of it. Then the door they had come through closed and snapped locked behind them. Only then did a uniformed man from the other side of the far door open that one, so that they could go on through into yet another room full of men.
“The whole place is set up like this,” Ed Nagelman said. “They’ve got scientists who work out the possibilities and devise ways to protect us from them. I would expect that this system would be much the same in federal prisons.”
“Not so many guns,” Gregor said politely.
They went through another door, into another secure lock, and out the other side through yet another door. Gregor had the odd feeling that they were caught in a journey to the center of the earth, or—what was that movie, with Gregory Peck, or maybe with Cary Grant, where the man had amnesia and kept remembering himself going down to subbasements that didn’t exist? Beyond this set of doors there was another room with another set of doors. Beyond that, there was yet another room and yet another set of doors. Gregor had not seen a single prisoner yet, as far as he knew. It was as if this place had been so thoroughly occupied by an invading army, all its inhabitants had left.
After this next set of doors, they found themselves in a long corridor with rooms on either side. They were still not actually in a cellblock, but they at least seemed to be in a functional part of the building.
“These are conference rooms,” Ed Nagelman said. “They’re here so that prisoners can talk to their lawyers—death-row prisoners, by the way, and only death-row prisoners. Contrary to the people who picket us at the gate, we do not indulge in summary executions here. Most prisoners stay on death row for over ten years, and, if anything, they have the best accommodations in the place. Their own individual cells, without roommates. Their own exercise yard, very uncrowded and very carefully policed. Their own communications facilities, including telephones and Internet access. I’d be a fool to think that prison rapes never happened here, but I can guarantee they don’t happen to condemned prisoners. Here we go. A smallish room, but adequate for the purpose.”
It was, Gregor saw, thoroughly adequate for the purpose, sort of a cross between a police station’s interrogation room and a law firm’s conference room. There was a carpet, but no paneling. The table was made of wood but the chairs were made of metal. At least they weren’t bolted to the floor.
“I’ve sent somebody out to tell Miss Hannaford you’re here,” Ed Nagelman said. “As soon as she’s ready, she’ll be brought down.”
“Miss Hannaford?” Henry Lord said.
Ed Nagelman shrugged. “She objects to the use of her first name. I don’t feel like arguing with her. Some of the guards are not so polite. She has quite a manner, though, our Anne Marie.”
“She always did,” Gregor said.
“Yes, I gathered that,” Ed Nagelman said “It’s odd how they are, you know. Of course, most of the prisoners I know are men. The only women I deal with are the ones on death row. But it’s surprising how many of them have an exaggerated sense of their own importance—of their own virtue, I’d guess you’d call it. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve only met one man who hasn’t been convinced that he’s innocent as the day is long, and that was Father Murphy.”
“Father Murphy?” Gregor stopped in the middle of taking off his coat.
Ed Nagelman nodded. “Father Murphy. Brian Murphy. From Our Lady of the Fields. I was thinking about him when Henry told me you were going to come up here. Because the papers have been saying you’re helping the police with a murder at St. Anselm’s, and that was Father Corrigan’s old stomping grounds. Not that Corrigan was ever here, of course. He was dead as a doornail before the lawsuits started.”
Gregor dropped his coat on the nearest chair. “But Father Murphy was here?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Ed Nagelman said. “For three years. There are people who say he would never have ended up here if it hadn’t been for Corrigan, but I don’t believe that. It isn’t 1964 anymore. Kids who get molested tell their parents, and their parents believe them, and there are laws that prevent anybody from keeping it all quiet. At the time the scandal broke, Murphy had a boy at Our Lady of the Fields, so they could prosecute him, and they did. Gave him ten years. He lasted three.”
“Do you mean he was paroled?” Gregor asked.
“Paroled and shuttled off to a monastery somewhere in Wisconsin, from what I remember. The archdiocese promised he wouldn’t be permitted anywhere near children, and they kept their promise. If you want my opinion, from what I’ve heard about cloistered monasteries, I’d prefer jail. But I’ve got to give this to him. He knew he was guilty. He accepted that he was guilty. He was ashamed that he was guilty. I’ve often wondered if it had anything to do with his being a priest, and if Corrigan would have been the same way. But I doubt it. Corrigan had that look in his eye, you know what I mean? The look that says, as far as he was concerned, the world, the universe and everything came right down to him.”
“Well, Jesus,” Henry Lord said. “What was it in the end. Thirty kids?”
“Exactly sixty-two corroborated,” Ed Nagelman said. “We got that information as part of the package on Brian Murphy. And when I saw it, I hate to say it, but all I could think of was that we’d all gotten lucky. I mean, at least he didn’t kill them. Most of the ones I see, the kids are dead. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
There was the sound of a door opening and shutting in the hall. Ed Nagelman went to the door of the conference room and looked out
“Here she comes,” he said. “Good luck with your conversation. Where you think you’re going to get with it is beyond me.”
2
Here, as in all prisons, inmates were expected to wear the clothes the prison issued them, but
Anne Marie Hannaford had found a way to make that uniform appear to suit her self perception. Gregor Demarkian watched her curiously as she came in. She was, he thought, his first extracurricular murderer. If she had not decided to murder several members of her own family, he would not have met her sister Bennis, and he might never have developed this retirement consulting business, which he still insisted to himself was not a business at all. Looking back, he remembered thinking that an “ordinary” murderer ought to be different than the serial killers he was used to tracking. Now he knew that she was not different at all. Like the most intelligent of the serial killers—the ones, like Ted Bundy, who were not schizophrenic or bipolar or otherwise mentally impaired—she lived in a world of her own making, where nothing really existed but herself. It was the first requirement of murder, that ability to blank the rest of the human race out of existence at will, and that was why Gregor had always thought it was hogwash, the idea that anybody could be a murderer. Anybody could kill in the heat of passion, or if they were afraid for their lives and panic—that was true. Most people could not do what Anne Marie Hannaford had done, or what was being done now at St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s.
Anne Marie was a daughter of the Main Line. She had gone to Agnes Irwin and Bryn Mawr. She had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies. If she had been prettier, she would have been the kind of person he would have expected to find on the cover of Town and Country. But she hadn’t been prettier. It was Bennis whose picture had appeared on the cover of Town and Country the year she was a debutante, and in Vogue, too, that same year, dressed in riding clothes and carrying a whip. Bennis still had both of those pictures, framed, in her own bedroom.
