Truth Beat

by Brenda Buchanan

  “I understand Michael was absent.”

  “Smart man.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  She paused. “Not exactly. He emailed me about noon, apologizing for not telling me ahead of time that he wasn’t going to be at the funeral. He implied he still was shook up about the bomb in the church, but I think he had his mind made up last night at the wake. I was there for almost three hours and other than greeting me formally when all the priests lined up, he never once looked in my direction.”

  “Do you think that might have been because of what happened the other day at your house?”

  “God only knows, as the priests say.”

  “A source told me he left the rectory in the middle of the funeral, carrying a suitcase, like he was heading off on vacation.” I didn’t know why I didn’t tell her I’d witnessed his getaway personally.

  “Not vacation, a silent retreat. He told me that in his email, too. That he’d asked the bishop to excuse him from his duties for a week because he needed time away from St. Jerome’s for contemplation and prayer.”

  “So where do priests go to retreat?”

  “There are several monasteries in New England with plenty of extra rooms these days, given the low priesthood sign-up rate.” She let loose an actual chuckle. I heard her sip whatever she was drinking. “All he’d need to do is call ahead and book a space. It’s kind of like a private hotel chain for the men in black.”

  “With fewer amenities,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised. The Church is pleading poverty and closing parishes, but those places were built in the golden days. He won’t be sleeping on a cot.”

  “Any idea which one he’d choose?”

  “Nope. Someplace in greater Boston maybe. Or Providence.”

  “Do you think he’ll check in once he arrives at whatever monastery he’s chosen?”

  “Hard to say,” she said. “Like I said, he didn’t let me know he was going until after he was gone.”

  * * *

  Rufe stopped by at suppertime. An hour of on-and-off sleep hadn’t come close to taking the edge off my exhaustion, and I was in the middle of another epic coughing jag when he walked in.

  “You sound like hell,” he said.

  “I feel better than I sound.” My voice was a croak.

  “Lying flat probably isn’t the best idea,” he said.

  I adjusted the pillows so I nearly was sitting up straight. “This isn’t a conducive sleeping position.”

  “You forfeited easy sleep when you went inside that church last night.”

  “Et tu, Rufus?”

  “Sorry, pal. You want me to fix you something to eat?”

  “I’m not hungry. Christie brought soup earlier.”

  “Too bad you missed the show at the funeral. The Mass itself was what you’d expect, but the pre-game was choice. You should have seen that Peggy McGillicuddy in action. The crowd almost lifted her on its shoulders when she ran him off.”

  I had no intention of relating Peggy’s painful history with Bozco, so I changed the subject. “I understand Kathleen held up okay.”

  “She’s another impressive woman. Marched down the center aisle behind the priest who was swinging the incense burner, head high, eyes clear.”

  “She called a while ago. Not sober but not smashed.”

  “She have any idea why DiAngelo was a no-show?”

  “He emailed her after the fact to say he was on his way to a retreat center, somewhere out of state, she thinks.” I filled him in on my spur-of-the-moment decision to undertake surveillance while everyone else was at the funeral, and the resulting speeding ticket.

  “Too bad, but they don’t give you a warning when you’re more than ten miles over the limit, never mind twenty-two.”

  “I know. I’m an idiot.”

  “But it is weird that DiAngelo took off like that.”

  “I think Kathleen might have been fudging about when she learned he was leaving. My gut tells me they might have a thing going, and I won’t be surprised if tomorrow she heads south herself—rather than back to Bangor—to meet him somewhere.”

  “So what if they’re involved? Does it really matter?”

  “No, but it will explain a lot.” I was overcome by coughing, wound up breathless.

  “You won’t rest till all the puzzle pieces fit, will you?”

  “Damn straight.”

  * * *

  So that my intended nap wouldn’t be interrupted again, I called Roz with an update as soon as Rufe left and was surprised to hear her singing a variation on his tune.

  “I’m not sure why it matters where DiAngelo’s gone,” Roz said. “The poor man’s closest colleague was murdered. If it had taken him five minutes longer to pack away his vestments last night he would have been in the church when a bomb went off. He and Kathleen have been close in the past, but for all intents and purposes, she’s disappeared from his life at this time of crisis. I can understand why he’d want to get out of Dodge for a few days. He’s a spiritual man. Makes sense he’d go to a spiritual community.”

  “Maybe you’re right, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Philo was onto something. My instincts are screaming at me that something’s going on beneath the surface there.”

  “Last time I talked with Booth, he and Barb Wyatt were planning to go talk to DiAngelo about the incident at Kathleen’s house,” Roz said. “They wanted to see if he’d confirm her story.”

  “Maybe that’s why he skipped town in the middle of the funeral. Didn’t want to wait around for the cops to put him on the spot.”

  I mentioned Christie’s worry that Theo might be massing some high school troops to get in Bozco’s face. I also filled her in on the nasty email from edgar222.

  “It’s got to be Bozco,” I said. “He’s a mean dog with a chewed-up bone. His spittle is almost visible on my computer screen.”

  I told her I’d forward the toxic email. She agreed to sniff around to find out if edgar222 also had Lombard on his email list.

  “I hope not,” she said. “Al was ranting about Peggy the other day, claiming she was masquerading as a devout Catholic but really was a radical feminist whose goal is to see women ordained.”

  “Leah will help you run interference if Big Al tries to convince Salisbury that there’s news to be mined there,” I said. “Peggy’s not accused of a crime. She’s only a public figure in the most limited way. Her rival in the church-closure protest movement—a guy who the police will be questioning about the bombing if not the murder if they manage to find any little bit of physical evidence—wants to use the Chronicle to fling mud at her? A first-year law student would smell a libel suit.”

  “I’ll watch Al. You watch yourself. For a man who was ordered to stay home from work, you’ve managed to stay right in the middle of this today.”

  “I’m on the couch,” I said. “And I plan to stay here.”

  Chapter Thirty

  My plan would have worked but for Theo’s text.

  need 2 talk 2 u.

  I rubbed my gritty eyes. I’m home.

  Cd u come to me. It was a question, I realized, the lack of punctuation notwithstanding.

  Where r u?

  He directed me to a parking lot across the street from a park in Portland where high school kids shot hoops and tried to make time with girls.

  will watch 4 u.

  I cruised past once then made the block. On my second pass Theo was standing on the sidewalk with three other guys. He separated himself from his pack, opened the passenger door of my car and hopped into the front seat. The whole process took no more than three seconds.

  “Thanks for coming. Can we drive?”

  I nodded and put the teenage hangout in
the rearview mirror.

  “This better be important, Theo. I’m feeling both crappy and crabby.”

  “There was no one else I could call.” He looked at his lap instead of at me. I pointed the car back toward Riverside and waited.

  Two stoplights later he cracked his knuckles, a prelude, I knew from experience, to a heavy discussion.

  “How does this off-the-record thing work?”

  “When I’m interviewing someone? If they want to keep what they tell me from being published in the newspaper, they ask if our discussion can be off the record. Sometimes I agree. Sometimes I don’t.”

  He cracked his knuckles again, but didn’t speak.

  “I’m not interviewing you, so this isn’t exactly an off-the-record situation.”

  “There’s something important I need to tell you. But before I do, I want to know who you’ll tell.”

  “Jesus, Theo. Spit it out. Do you want me to tell someone else—your mother maybe—something you can’t bring yourself to tell her?”

  “Not my mother.” Long pause. I was getting ready to bark at him again when he spoke. “I want you to tell Chief Wyatt, but I don’t want her to know you got it from me. And I don’t want my mother to know anything about it at all.”

  We were on Main Street in Riverside, and traffic was light. I pulled into a parking space in front of the library and turned off the engine. I put my back against the driver’s door so I could watch Theo’s body language while he mumbled out whatever he’d called me to say. It was apparent he needed another prompt. This time I played good cop.

  “So what’s going on? You know I’ll help however I can.”

  “It’s about the bombs,” he said. “I know who’s been setting them off.”

  “And you want to turn him in anonymously.”

  “No. I want to help him turn himself in, and at the same time keep myself out of it.”

  I hoped to hell Theo had not played even a supporting role in terrorizing the town, but clamped my mouth shut while he spilled the details. As soon as I had the gist of it I put my hands up in a time-out signal and texted Rufe. This was going to be a two-man job.

  * * *

  We were sitting mute in my living room when the big man arrived. The TV was off, the stereo was silent, my laptop was closed. Still, we jumped when his booted feet thundered across the deck.

  “Everybody okay? Your mom?”

  “Everybody’s fine.” I looked at Theo, eyebrows raised, and gave a flick of his head in Rufe’s direction, telling him without words that it was time to share all the fresh hell that had been going on. Theo gestured toward an easy chair. “Sit down, man. It’s a long story.”

  He spilled all the details this time, his blurted confession in my car having primed the pump.

  The bomber was Ryan McCarty, the kid at whose house Theo been so ever-present Christie wondered if he was going to move in. His motivation sounded like a heady mix of adolescent anger and glee.

  “Last year, Ry got into trouble at the end of the year, pulled some dumb pranks and skipped school. The vice-principal and the track coach came down hard on him—way harder than was called for—not understanding that his father would go ballistic, which he did. But the detentions at school and the grounding by his folks only made it worse. He got all sneaky over the summer, hinting around about a research project he’d designed. He spent a lot of time on the computer at the library, even though he has his own laptop. When I asked him why, he said it was important to think strategically. Now I realize he wanted to make sure there was no evidence on his computer that he was researching how to make bombs.”

  Rufe smiled and nodded, signaling Theo to keep talking.

  “When the smoke bomb exploded—the one on the first day of school—I knew right away Ryan was behind it, that he’d spent his summer figuring out how to build homemade bombs.”

  “Did you confront him about it?” I wasn’t taking notes because I didn’t want to freak Theo out, but my fingers itched to write it all down.

  “No. And he didn’t say a friggin’ word. But he acted quietly triumphant, like he’d aced an algebra exam or hit a grand slam, but didn’t want to brag about it. After the second bomb—the dry ice one he put in the dumpster—I got in his face. We were walking to school the next day and I came right out and asked if learning how to build bombs was his summer project.” Theo shrugged. “He admitted it was.”

  “How about the third one—the one that destroyed half the bleachers on the far side of the football field?”

  “He didn’t do that one.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ryan didn’t do that. Some copycat—guys from Portland, maybe—made that pipe bomb and set it off. I know it for a fact, because I was with Ryan when it exploded.”

  “Where were you?”

  “At his house, a good six blocks from the high school.”

  Theo cracked his knuckles so loudly Rufe winced. “Knock off the knuckle noise, dude. It’s making me crazy.”

  Theo stood up and stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets.

  “The bleacher bomb escalated things, because it did some real damage. Ryan took it as an insult, a comment that his bombs were lame. He wanted to set off a bomb that would get even more attention. I tried to convince him to give it up, warned him someone might be hurt or even killed. But Ry said he was really careful not to detonate a device—that’s what he called it, a device, like he was a SWAT dude or something—when anyone was around. A couple of days later he told me he had it built and ready to go, and he’d picked the spot where he wanted to set it off.”

  “The fifty yard line,” Rufe said.

  “Right. I told him he couldn’t make any more after that, and he promised he wouldn’t. I was freaking out that he’d get caught, so I snuck out of the house the night he was going to set it off and scoped out the football field myself, you know, to be a second set of eyes, make sure nobody was around.”

  “Jesus, Theo. I was out walking Lou that night, not long before the bomb went off,” I said. “Cops were everywhere. You would have been charged as an accessory if they’d caught you.”

  Theo stretched his hands out, his dark eyes pleading for us to understand. “I was trying to make sure no one got hurt. That’s the only reason I was out there. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “Apparently Ryan lied to you about having only one more device,” Rufe said.

  “That’s the worst part of the whole mess,” Theo said. “We were hanging out in my room the day after the football field blast. Ry got a call from a guy who somehow knew he was the kid who’d been setting off bombs. The guy didn’t give his name. He was a real hard-ass. Demanded that Ryan build two bombs for him. Not for money, to keep him from going to the cops.”

  “Two bombs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me guess,” Rufe said. “The guy wanted a bomb to go off at St. Jerome’s during the wake.”

  “He didn’t say what he was gonna do with them. Just ordered Ryan to build two bombs that would be small and easy to detonate but would cause a lot of smoke. Ryan told him he could buy smoke bombs at any fireworks store. The guy said he wanted more than a smoke bomb—he wanted something that would blow stuff up—but not in a huge way. ‘Enough to cause some minor damage and a lot of ruckus,’ is what he said. Ryan held his phone out when the guy was speaking, so I heard the whole thing.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” I managed to keep my voice calm, but it was an effort.

  “I wanted to,” Theo said. “I slept over at Ry’s house that night and we stayed up until three in the morning arguing about it. I told him he should go to the police and tell them he’d done the first two school bombs—both of which were pretty harmless—and let them figure out who did the bleacher bomb and who this new guy was. But Ryan is sca
red shitless of his father, who’s been threatening to send him to some stupid military school. Ry was convinced he could build a couple of little smoky bombs, deliver them to the guy who was onto him, then quit this bullshit.”

  “Does he know you’re talking with us, and planning on talking with the police?”

  “No.” Theo studied his hands. “After last night, when you ran into the burning church after the bomb went off, I decided it was time to do what I thought was right.”

  My landline rang, a sharp trill that caused my heart to jump.

  “That’ll be Chief Wyatt.” My voice was a wheeze. “You definitely want to talk to her rather than Wrecker Rigoletti.”

  Despite Theo’s magical thinking, he couldn’t whisper what he knew to the cops through me. The police were going to insist on interviewing him personally. Before he could do that, Christie needed to be brought up to speed and into the conversation, which meant I needed to buy some time. I told Barb Wyatt I had a source with solid information about the bombings who agreed to talk with her and only her, privately, at my house, in an hour. She wanted more over the phone, but I insisted on a face-to-face meeting.

  “My source isn’t the bomber. It’s someone with firsthand knowledge of highly pertinent facts,” I said.

  My next call was to Christie.

  “Theo’s here at my house and Rufe’s on his way over to pick you up,” I said. “Drop whatever you’re doing and come here right now. Your boy needs you.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I’d never seen Christie so pale as when Theo told her about his tangential involvement with Ryan and the bombs.

  I’d never seen her so strong as when she stood behind him while he stammered out the story to Barb Wyatt, pleading with her not to come down hard on his friend.

  “Ryan’s bombs really were all about making noise,” he said. “Making a statement, at least in his own mind. He made sure he didn’t hurt anybody.”

  The chief made no promises about the consequences Ryan might face, but it was clear from her questions that her focus was on the church bomber, not the boys. Her top priority seemed to be verifying that there was, in fact, an unknown man who’d coerced Ryan into building the bomb that had been set off the previous night inside St. Jerome’s.