Blind Spot (26 page)

“No thanks,” he said, running his eyes down the length of her figure and frowning at her jeans.

“I was so busy going over my notes…”

“Right,” he said dryly.

She closed the door and nodded toward the kitchen. “Let’s sit down.”

He walked into the kitchen, threw his coat over the back of a chair, and waited while she sat down across from him. He dropped down onto his seat. “Man of the cloth? This better be rock solid.”

Man of the cloth.
He’d said it reverently—not flippantly. Was she going to have trouble convincing her boss of a priest’s guilt because Garcia was a pious man? Maybe that’s why he didn’t completely discount her sight: he believed in ethereal things. She didn’t want to criticize Garcia’s spirituality when it could turn him into her ally. She offered him a concession: “Maybe I’m jumping the gun on this priest idea.”

“Serious charge to go throwing around, especially in this town. In case you haven’t noticed, the St. Paul Cathedral sits higher in the city skyline than the State Capitol Building. Catholicism’s a pretty big deal here.”

The only words that came to her mind next were the ones from Sunday school, a Bible verse Garcia had to recognize if he was indeed a person of faith: “If your hand causes you to sin…”

“What’re you saying? A priest is killing people and hacking off their hands as some sort of—what?—divine retribution?”

“I’m open to other possibilities.” She pushed the Olson stack across the table. “Let’s flip through these files. Why don’t you take our pal Hale? See if anything jumps out at you after hearing my theory.”

“My pleasure.” He pulled the pile closer and opened the top folder. She started sifting through Archer’s folder again, in case she’d missed something.

For twenty-five minutes, they read without speaking. Each took a few notes and scribbled a few doodles. Then, without raising his eyes from his papers, Garcia said: “This might be a leap. The Olson case—not his murder, but the one where he’s on trial for murder—has got a priest. Future priest.”

Her head jerked up. “What?”

“That family. The one Olson and his buddies slaughtered.” He looked up from the file. “The only survivor was the son. He was away at college. Ended up in seminary school.”

“What are you looking at?”

“Victim-impact statement. Son’s name is…” Garcia flipped to the second page, third page, fourth page. He continued turning until he found the signature at the bottom of the last page of the lengthy handwritten letter. “Damian Quaid.”

Bernadette dropped her pen, stood up, and leaned across the table. She grabbed the victim’s statement, pulled it toward her, and spun it around so it was right-side-up for her eyes. Her heart started racing. She could taste the adrenaline flooding her mouth, metallic and exciting. Forcing herself to sit down again, she ran her eyes over the page and found neat, almost elegant script—more feminine than masculine. Her sight locked on the signature.
Damian Quaid.
She reached out to touch the name and froze. The papers were photocopies of the letter, she told herself, not the original. She’d get nothing from the writing. She went back to the first page of the statement and saw the date. “I vaguely remember reading about the case. Where would I have been back then? College? Just out of college?”

“Quaid was the first of the three kids to go off to college. He was in school in the Twin Cities when it happened. You’re probably about the same age.”

“Give me the CliffsNotes version,” she said, nodding toward the pile in front of Garcia. “Where’d it happen? What happened? Who were the Quaids anyway?”

Garcia turned some pages, read some more, and announced: “Nobody important. Mother ran an electrolysis business and beauty parlor out of the house. Dad repaired small engines and removed stumps.”

Bernadette: “Sounds like the family of every kid I grew up with. If you didn’t farm and you couldn’t land a job in town, you did a mish-mash of things to make ends meet. Sometimes you farmed
and
worked in town
and
repaired small engines on the side. Where’d they live?”

Garcia rifled through the file until he found a narrative of sorts buried in a criminal complaint. “Quaid’s childhood home was some sixty miles west of Minneapolis, between Dassel and Darwin.” He looked up and added: “Those are dinky rural communities sharing a couple of thousand souls between them, if that.”

“I’m familiar with dinky rural communities.”

Garcia: “Family’s two-story house was tucked into the woods on the north side of U.S. 12. Across the street were railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway.”

Bernadette: “Something tells me those railroad tracks are players in all this.”

“Fall night. Three drifters hopped off the boxcar they’d been riding, darted across the road, and headed for the first house they saw. The Quaids’ place. The front door was unlocked.” Garcia paused in his recitation to offer an editorial comment. “Stupid. Why do people leave their doors unlocked?”

She smiled sadly. “In the country, even careful people leave their doors unlocked. We’re naïve fools, I guess. Trust people not to walk in and butcher us.”

He continued: “Using rope they’d found in the shed, they strapped husband and wife into chairs facing each other. When the robbers couldn’t find the money they wanted, they dragged the daughters upstairs, raped them on their parents’ bed, and sliced their throats with a kitchen knife while the girls lay next to each other. They went downstairs and finished Mom and Dad with the same knife they’d used on the daughters.”

She shuddered. “Horrible.”

“Then the trio went on to the next home down the road.” Garcia ran his eyes down the text and turned to the next page. Grinning grimly, he said: “This is where our three friends messed up big-time. Behind door number two was a family of hunters, with their own arsenal. Two of the robbers were shot dead.”

“Lovely,” she said.

“The third went on trial for the rapes and murders.”

“Olson. What’d he do then? Claim insanity?”

Garcia: “The more reliable and frequently used SODDI defense.”

Bernadette: “Some other dude did it.”

Garcia lifted a copy of a newspaper clipping and read a reporter’s account: “‘Olson blamed his dead colleagues for the murders and testified that he’d unwittingly stood outside while his buddies ran amok inside. His testimony on the stand was punctuated by his own tears; he repeatedly took off his bifocals and wiped his eyes. His defense attorney also pointed to the defendant’s age—at nearly fifty, he was twice the age of his late partners.’”

Bernadette: “Let me guess how this story ends. Since there were no witnesses to the slaughter, and because the defendant had no prior violence on his record, the jury gave the guy the benefit of the doubt. He was found guilty of lesser charges.”

“Juries,” he said flatly.

“If the defendant’s a good actor and he’s got a slick attorney…”

Garcia pointed to the file. “In this case, Olson really lucked out. I recognize the name. Didn’t realize it’d been her case.”

“She’s that good?”

“Cut her teeth on a bunch of tough cases in the boondocks. Ditched the public pretender’s office for a real job. Became a prosecutor for Hennepin County. That’s how I know her.”

“She’s in town, then?” Bernadette returned her attention to the victim-impact statement.

“Got recruited by a law firm in Milwaukee. See her around once in a while. She’s got ties here.”

A dark thought crossing her mind, Bernadette took her eyes off her reading. “She a big gal by any chance? Has a thing for jewelry and nail polish?”

“How’d you know? What difference does it make if she…” Garcia stopped in mid-sentence as it came to him.

“Why don’t I call her law firm with some excuse this afternoon? Something related to a case. That way we don’t raise any alarms prematurely. All we need to do is confirm she showed up for work this week, with her right hand intact.”

“St. Paul PD and our folks are already checking missing persons,” he said.

“Could be no one knows she’s missing yet. The hand turned up over the weekend. If she’s supposed to be on vacation…”

“We should run it through the Milwaukee FO,” he said.

“Nah. Let me deal with it. What’s her name? Name of her firm?”

“We don’t need to scare the crap out of anyone. The case is ancient history. It’s hard to believe that after all these years, the son would—”

Bernadette cut him off. “His entire family was wasted.”

Garcia tore a clean sheet off a legal pad and started writing. “Be discreet.”

“My middle name.”

He slid the paper across the table. She retrieved it and read it. “Marta Younges. Jansen, Milinkovich and Younges. Her name’s on the door, huh?”

He snatched the paper back. “I’ll make the call. I know her. I think I’ve got her firm’s number in my cell’s database.”

Bernadette’s mouth hardened. His mistrust of her was getting tough to swallow. “Whatever you want, sir.”

“I’ll take care of it right now.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Excuse me.”

He pulled his cell out of his pants pocket and walked to the living room, punching in a number as he went. He turned his back to her as he spoke into the phone. She fumed for thirty seconds before returning to her reading.

After a polite opening, the tone of the victim-impact statement took a dramatic turn. The words were beyond angry. They were furious. Vindictive. Righteous. Peppered throughout were Bible verses. Her eyes darted back and forth as she raced to take in each line. No turn-the-other-cheek stuff for this guy.

Garcia turned around and walked back into the kitchen, the cell glued to his ear. “I’m on hold,” he told her.

“Listen to what he told the judge. ‘I can’t taste the food I eat—and I eat only to stay alive. I can’t focus enough to drive a car or watch television or listen to music, let alone do my classwork. I can’t sleep for more than a few hours each night. I am constantly awakened by a recurring noise. I imagine the screams of my mother and my father and my sisters as they beg for their lives.’”

She skipped a few paragraphs and went to the bottom of the page. “Look here. He sees two reasons to live—and he ties them together in the same sentence. Plus, here’s the mention of our lady lawyer. ‘One night of wanton rape and bloodletting by Mr. Olson—and believe me, he was one of the killers, despite what his lying attorney says—has left me less than an orphan. I am a man alone in the world. I have no reason to live except for this religious vocation. It calls to me and pulls me out of the depths of misery. The priesthood—along with my quest for justice—gives me purpose and a mission.’”

She flipped to the last page of the statement. “‘This man—this devil—may be able to walk out of prison one day, but he will never be able to walk away from his guilt and his sin. The Lord will see that justice is served, be it in this life or the next. I only hope it is in this one so I am around to see it and revel in it. I would like to watch him suffer the way he made my family suffer. I pray he shall be compelled to give eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. Most important, life for life.’”

Garcia held up his hand to quiet her. While he spoke into the phone, she glanced across the room at the square of paper she’d slapped into the middle of the white cross.
Life for life.
How had she known to write those three words? What did the phrase mean? Did it mean anything? She quickly looked away from the wall and back at her boss. He was closing his phone.

“What did her office say?”

“She was in the Twin Cities all last week. Shuttled around between friends’ houses. She was supposed to drive back to Milwaukee middle of this week, in time for a deposition today.” He dropped the cell back in his pocket. “She didn’t show up at the office this morning. They’re figuring she’s still on the road, on her way in. Problem is, they can’t ring her up on her cell.”

Bernadette fixed her eyes on him: “Problem is, she’s dead.”

Twenty-eight

“Gotta take a look at this Father Quaid,” said Garcia.

“Know another priest who can give us some inside info on the guy?” asked Bernadette. “Someone who’s been in the business a while? Knows everybody?”