Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “Too bad for me,” she said. “Theo’s over at his friend Ryan’s house—I swear I should send Mrs. McCarty a check for groceries—so I’ll be here all by my lonesome.”

  “Is there any way you can take Saturday off so we can go hiking before the foliage is gone?”

  “Really? A hiking date? Maybe Theo could stay with one of his buddies that night, so we could make our own fun later, too.”

  In my rear view mirror I noticed I was grinning like a maniac. The coming weekend included Columbus Day—meaning it was a three-day span that drew both the out-of-staters who needed to close up their summer camps and leaf peepers from all over the world—but maybe I’d get double lucky and find an inn somewhere with a vacancy.

  “I’m pretty sure a post-hike full-body massage can be arranged.”

  She paused. “Are you sure you’ll really be able to take the day off? I don’t want to make a plan that we have to cancel at the last minute because of this murder investigation or the damn bombing thing.”

  “I can’t guarantee that won’t happen, but I’ll do everything in my control to make sure it doesn’t.”

  “But not everything is in your control, Joe, as we well know.”

  “Not in mine, not in yours. If you’d rather not make a plan, we certainly don’t have to,”

  I heard her blow out a big breath.

  “I appreciate the gesture. But let me sleep on it. Theo has me on my last nerve, and I don’t want to set us up for another romantic fail. If I arrange for someone to cover the Rambler, then someone’s arrested for murdering Patrick, or another bomb goes off, our hiking plan will be torpedoed, and my disappointment will be all out of proportion.”

  “Theo’s act is really getting to you, isn’t it?”

  Christie sighed. “I’m tired of him ducking out of the house at all hours, acting like he can’t stand being at home. Being around him is hard, but feeling abandoned is even harder. I’m afraid I’m looking to you to be my balm, even though I know you’ve got your own stress.”

  “Did the two of you get into it today?”

  “Nope. He doesn’t talk enough for us to argue. He texted me this afternoon, announcing that he plans to not only eat supper at the McCartys’ but stay the night. Since when do you stay at a friend’s house on a school night, I want to ask, but I save my breath. I know what’s going on. He’s coming to grips with the fact that his father—who from a distance looked pretty cool—is a dishonest flake. But he can’t admit that to me, because it will make me right about something, and when you are sixteen, Mom is never right. So he’s mad at me because his father’s a jerk.”

  “You have every right to be crabby.”

  “But admit it, it’s not my most beautiful side.”

  “True. But I love you warts and all.”

  “Don’t get mushy on me when you’re not here to do something about it. Call me when you get back to Portland, okay? Even if I don’t see your face, it’ll be good to hear your voice.”

  * * *

  Alan Vesper and I had been freshmen together at Bowdoin. We’d lived on the same hall in the dormitory and gravitated to each other when we’d noticed the telltale signs of a fellow scholarship student. No car. Not much pocket money. No prep school pedigree. He transferred to the biology program at UMaine after our first year, but we’d reconnected a few years back. I sent him a congratulatory note when he announced on Facebook that he’d taken a job as a laboratory analyst at the ME’s office, and dutifully filed away the connection for future reference.

  Alan sounded happy to hear from me that Thursday afternoon, eager to go out for a beer after work. He and his wife had split the previous summer. She had their two young kids that night, which cleared the way for us to hang out. We met at a sports pub in Gardiner and talked about his life as a single dad for a while. I explained I was newly involved with a woman I’d desired for many years.

  “You’ve known her for ten years you’re just now getting down to it?”

  “Right.”

  “This does not sound like the Joe Gale I remember.”

  “She was in a serious relationship until last winter. After that ended, she needed some time to breathe. Then we had to have the talk about whether getting involved would put our friendship at risk, and then evaluate how her sixteen-year-old son would handle us becoming lovers. We made the leap in August, when he was away for a couple of weeks visiting his father. It was great. Then Theo came back, angry because the reality of dear old dad didn’t come close to the fantasy.”

  “Patience, my friend.”

  “I know. I tell myself every morning it’s a big friggin’ virtue.”

  After we ordered burgers and more beer I moved the discussion to Patrick’s autopsy, assuring him anything we discussed was off the record. Alan was cool with that and turned out to be a little bit boastful about being in the know about such a talked-about case.

  “I did his labs myself. You’ve seen the tox report, right?”

  “Heard about it from cop source. They don’t hand them out when it’s a homicide investigation.”

  “Trace levels of a sleeping medication in his system, an indication he’d had a beer or two the night before he died. While it’s not a good idea to mix drugs and alcohol, that’s not what caused his death.”

  “My cop friend tells me it was a head injury.”

  “Massive brain hemorrhage,” Alan said. “His skull was fractured, fissured on one end, but depressed on one edge of the fracture. Some bone fragments were embedded in his brain tissue, which means whether someone hit him or he fell, there was a lot of force. More testing is being done. My boss thinks he’ll ultimately be able to figure out whether he was hit on the head with a blunt object or fell and hit his head against something very dense, like a rock.”

  “So at this point, the ME can’t tell if someone else caused it?”

  “Even if it was a fall, someone else may have caused it.”

  “Of course.”

  “The detectives who attended the post brought some landscaping stones, a bench and garden tools they’d collected, hoping we could match them up with the damage to his skull. They said his body was kind of sprawled, half on his side and half on his back. If he’d fallen there, the trajectory might have caused him to hit his head on the way down. But under the microscope, neither his head nor the bench showed evidence of a collision. Same with the stones, which apparently were stacked into a low wall a few feet from where he fell.”

  “How about the garden tools?”

  “I wasn’t involved in that testing myself, but from what I heard they were kept in an unlocked shed a good ten yards from the body. The killer could have pulled a hoe or a shovel from the shed, hit him over the head, then put it back and fled. Testing disproved that theory. No hair, no blood, no tissue on any of the tools.”

  “So the killer took the weapon with him?”

  Alan paused, a flash of worry passing over his features. “We’re really off the record here, right?”

  “Completely. No one—not even my editor—will know I got this information from you. I won’t identify its source as someone who works in the ME’s office, just ‘a source involved in the investigation.’”

  “And if they come to you and ask if it was me?”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The state police. My boss. A judge if you get subpoenaed.”

  I looked him in the eye. “I will go to jail before I give up your name.”

  Alan held my gaze for a full ten seconds. “The ME believes the priest wasn’t killed in the garden at all. Someone shattered his skull elsewhere, and dumped his body there.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I still have a landline and an old-fashioned answering machine at my house, because a surprising number of people who don’t want to be know
n to be communicating with me call me at home rather than at the Chronicle or on my cell. Some are older folks, but plenty aren’t. Perhaps it feels safer for them to leave their quiet messages on a machine in my otherwise silent house, to absolve themselves of whatever knowledge they felt the urge to share. Something like confession feels to Catholics, I guess.

  In the case of Peggy McGillicuddy there was nothing hushed about the two messages I collected when I got home shortly before nine. Her voice was like sharpened steel, cutting in immediately after the beep.

  “Joe. It’s Peggy McGillicuddy. I understand the police suspect Patrick was murdered. Please call me immediately.”

  “Joe, it’s Peggy again. The import of what I have to tell you can’t be overstated. Please call me as soon as you hear this message, no matter what time.”

  She picked up before the first ring finished, like she’d been sitting on top of the phone.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late. I just got home and heard your messages. What’s going on?”

  “I have some important information to share, about someone who’d been making threats against the Church in general and Patrick in particular.”

  “Who?”

  “Not on the phone.”

  “Shall I come to your apartment?”

  “Now,” she said. “Come right away.”

  She opened the door before I knocked, and almost yanked me into her tiny kitchen. She didn’t offer me a chair or a cup of coffee before spitting out what she had to say.

  “J.C. had it in for Patrick.”

  “J.C. Bozco? The bullhorn man? I thought he was one of your colleagues in the inner circle of the church-closing protests.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything other than he knows how to elbow his way to the front of the stage.”

  J.C. Bozco was a strident, stubborn, sanctimonious fellow who I’d assumed was the bad cop to Peggy’s good, the guy whose job it was to make her seem reasonable. Was her long finger pointing at him because they’d had a falling out, or had I been mistaken in my belief they were allied?

  “Why do you think Bozco wanted to harm Patrick?”

  “Because he said so, more than once. And because he has a history.”

  “What kind of history?”

  “A significant criminal history. Violence against others. Prison time.”

  “How do you know this?”

  She gestured toward the dining room, where her desktop computer sat in the middle of the table. “I’ve been digging up information about him.”

  Peggy sat in front of the computer and motioned me to a seat on the other side of the table. Before we dove in to what she’d learned from various databases and a private listserv, she offered a succinct summary of her experience with Bozco.

  “J.C. moved here a little less than a year ago and started coming to our meetings right away. He claimed to have been a lay minister in a large parish outside of Philadelphia, but that turns out to be untrue. But he talked a good game, and most people—especially the older folks who make up the bulk of our numbers—believed him and deferred to him. They were happy to give him power, not realizing the kind of action he advocates runs counter to our principles.”

  “When you say ‘our meetings,’ what do you mean?”

  “The Save Our Churches steering committee, a group of committed Catholics from all over Southern Maine who are determined to have a say in what happens to our parishes. You don’t need an engraved invitation to attend meetings, but they aren’t advertised to the general public, so you do need an in. His contact was someone from Boston who’d come to speak to us once about sit-in strategy. This man put J.C. in touch with a member of the steering committee, and the next thing you know he was dominating discussion at our meetings with his radical ideas.”

  I wondered if Peggy had been a nun—or perhaps considered joining the convent—at some point in her life. There was something about her wish for order, her need for hierarchy. This was a woman who lived by the rules even when breaking the rules. It sounded like Bozco was the opposite, an unapologetic rabble-rouser. Having studied history in college, I knew this was a common tension in political movements of all kinds.

  “You said he threatened Patrick. When did that happen?”

  “Perhaps a month ago. A few of us made a plan to go out for coffee after a steering committee meeting. J.C. must have overheard someone mention the name of the coffee shop, because he showed up on his own. True to form, he took over the conversation. The man has no interest in hearing anyone else’s thoughts, he reiterates his own ideas until the horse is dead. That night he outlined a scheme to kidnap Patrick and hold him for ransom until a list of demands had been met.”

  “I’m guessing you shut down that notion.”

  “Yes. Quietly. By talking one on one with the other members of the group. Neither I nor anyone else challenged him that night at the coffee shop, we just let him talk. He was almost frothing at the mouth with intensity. It made a lot of people uneasy, both what he said and how he was acting. Lawbreaking may appeal to hotheads, but it doesn’t win the day in the long run. It causes you to lose people who otherwise would be with you.”

  “So who told him the kidnap scheme was a no-go?”

  “To my knowledge, nobody.” Her voice was thick with regret. “I make it a point not to interact with J.C. directly. He frightens me. And I suspect the others are frightened as well. I told myself he was just venting, but it well could have been an actual plan on his part.”

  I pictured Bozco, a wiry man with a scruffy beard, maybe forty, intense as all hell. “You think he might have tried to kidnap Patrick on his own, and killed him in the process?”

  “I have no idea. But I believe J.C. is unbalanced. He hides it most of the time, but when he winds past a certain point, he loses control.”

  “How do you know he’s been in trouble with the law?”

  She plucked a sheet of paper from a neat stack of documents to the left of her keyboard. It was what the detective novels call a rap sheet, a summary of a person’s criminal history. These days it’s available online if you know a person’s date of birth and social security number. The sheet for James Christopher Bozco, date of birth June 1, 1976, showed a 1995 conviction for third-degree assault in Delaware, for which he did sixty days in jail. A felony aggravated assault followed in 1997. That one earned him four years in a Pennsylvania prison.

  “How did you manage to get this information?”

  She dropped her hazel eyes to the keyboard. “I have a friend who works in the criminal justice system. Not here in Maine, so no one you’d know. He did me the favor of finding out the identifying information I needed to access this, and digging up some background once I had the sheet.”

  “So Mr. Bozco is no altar boy.”

  “Not hardly, though he claimed to have been one once, and as I said, a lay minister as well.” Her hand was clamped on top of the stack of papers.

  “You’re not going to share that with me?”

  “I promised my friend the information he helped me find would be for my eyes only.” She paused for two beats. “But I can tell you what I found.”

  “I like people who keep their literal promises but are willing to share information creatively when circumstances require.”

  “If that isn’t smooth, I don’t know what is,” she said. “Paulie Finnegan schooled you, right?”

  “That he did.”

  “Pull out your notebook then.” She shuffled the pages. “The Delaware assault happened when J.C. was nineteen. The victim was his sister. He hit her in the lobby of a hospital when she told him he couldn’t visit an unnamed family member. He did sixty days in jail, and was ordered to get anger counseling.”

  “And in Pennsylvania?”

  “The Pennsylvania assault charge involved a prostitute in Phi
lly. J.C. beat her badly. Broke her jaw and two ribs. That time J.C. went to serious prison. He was twenty-one years old.”

  “He did four years?”

  “Yes. His sentence involved some probation after his release.”

  “It’d be interesting to know how he did on probation.”

  “It appears he stayed in the Philadelphia area until he moved here, so you’d need some contacts to check that out.”

  Peggy paged through the other sheets in her stack. “Those were the adult offenses. I picked up some hints that he had a juvenile record, but couldn’t find any details.”

  “You said something about a listserv?”

  “I made some discreet inquiries on one that links activists across the country, Catholic laity working on the same issues we are. I obviously can’t post a general message, because he’d almost certainly see it. So I’ve sent private messages to people I know who live and work in and near Philly, hoping to find someone who worked with him on church matters. I want to know if he made similar threats against Church officials in the past.”

  “Will you let me know what you learn?”

  “You bet. You’re my insurance, Joe. If J.C. figures out I’m looking into his background, I wouldn’t put it past him to come after me. The more you know about what I know, the safer I am.”

  “You really think he’d try to harm you?”

  “Maybe not physically,” she said. “But there are many ways to hurt someone.”

  * * *

  Roz Fortuna was still in the newsroom when I swung by a little after ten. Though she didn’t say so, I had the sense she was waiting for me.

  “You’ve been a busy man, calling in updates to Leah all day. I’m sure you’ve got plenty that hasn’t worked its way into print yet.”

  I pulled off my jacket and held up a finger. “Hold that thought,” I said. “I’ve got to hit the head.”

  As I jogged down the hallway to the men’s room I considered what Kathleen had told me about growing up with Patrick, what Alan had divulged about the ME’s conclusions, and the dirt Peggy had dug up about J.C. Bozco. Though Roz was on my team I had to be careful. This week she was filling in for Gene, but her real gig was the celebrated metro columnist. She liked the big headline, to be the one in the know. She’d hadn’t stepped on my toes yet, but there was a first time for everything. If I was going to tell her about my progress, she was going to tell me about hers.