Murder Superior (13 page)

“—and use something that acts quickly so nobody else takes a bite,” Sarabess concluded.

“And there you’ll be!” Catherine Grace was triumphant “It’s really absolutely perfect, Mr. Kevic. It’s like something out of Agatha Christie.”

In Norman Kevic’s mind, it was something out of Edgar Allan Poe, but he wasn’t going to say so.

It just confirmed the feeling he’d had all along that nuns were dangerous, and added to it the conviction that their friends were dangerous, too.

G
REGOR DEMARKIAN WAS NOT
a religious man. He had been brought up in the Armenian Christian Church—which he described to people as “like the Greek Orthodox, but not really,” because it was too complicated to go into the history of millennial Church politics and heresies that might not have been heresies depending on whose side you were on, and he didn’t know it all anyway—but once he had become an adult he had given it up. While he had been married to Elizabeth, he had done all the obligatory things. Weddings and funerals, christenings with the infant in antique lace and the godmother in tears: Elizabeth had determined which of those they were obliged to go to, what present they were obliged to bring, and what did or did not constitute an acceptable excuse on Gregor’s part. According to Elizabeth’s system, Gregor had been forgivably absent from his niece Hedya’s christening because he was on kidnapping detail in Los Angeles. His niece Hedya had been christened in Boston, where Elizabeth’s older sister lived with her husband, and Gregor couldn’t be two places at once. With his niece Maria’s christening, though, he had been in trouble. That had taken place in Washington, where he and Elizabeth were living at the time. It had been Elizabeth’s opinion that he could have found a way to make time on a Sunday morning, no matter what had him tied up in Quantico and the District of Columbia. As it turned out later, what had him tied up was the beginnings of what would become both the definitive case against Theodore Robert Bundy and the establishment of the Behavioral Sciences Department, but Elizabeth didn’t care. Work was never as important as family, even if “work” meant saving the world. The world had been in need of saving for several thousand years. Missing a niece’s christening wasn’t going to help him save it.

Mostly, Gregor Demarkian thought of churches as cultural institutions, like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. He didn’t know enough about faith to comment on it one way or another, but he could see the way Holy Trinity operated on Cavanaugh Street, the way it made it easy for everybody around it to organize their lives, and he understood the need for something like that. He didn’t know if Catholics felt the same way about the Catholic Church. He expected it was a bit more complicated, since ex-Catholics were often so obsessional about what had made them leave. He had noticed, however, that comparing the Catholic Church with the Boy Scouts was ludicrous. The Pentagon, that you could compare it with. Or the State Services Apparatus of the Soviet Union before the fall. Malachi Martin’s International Conspiracy of Everything would be good, too. Gregor meant no disrespect for the Catholic Church. On an organizational level, he thought it was a marvel. It was just that he didn’t understand how a bureaucracy that big managed to stay in operation for as long as this one had without strangling itself.

One of the ways it had done that was by making sure its coordinate parts were as supremely efficient as the central government was reputed to be confused. Gregor Demarkian had heard monologues without end on just how chaotic the Vatican was. Father Tiber’s friend Father Ryan couldn’t make himself stop once he got started. “Just try to get a request processed through Rome,” Father Ryan would say, his eyes beginning to gleam. “Just try it. If it isn’t an ordinary annulment appeal or a request for six copies of an encyclical from the publications office, do you know what you get? Forms! That’s what you get. Forms!”

Gregor was sure Father Ryan got a lot of forms, but he never had to deal with the Vatican. The Catholic officials he did deal with were priests, bishops, and women religious. They not only did not pass out forms, they took to the field like generals promoted from the ranks who didn’t know how to conduct a war without the smell of gunpowder in their noses. It was into this operational mode Gregor saw Reverend Mother General and her Sisters go, after Nancy Hare upended the vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. They went into it instantaneously, and with a precision Gregor would have been surprised to see in a cadre of veteran Bureau agents who had been working together for years. Gregor had seen SWAT teams that worked this well together, once or twice. He had seen an elite unit of the Israeli Army that could do it every time. That these women could do it when they hadn’t seen each other for months and only handled a crisis of this sort once every two or three years, astounded him.

“It’s because religious obedience is absolute,” Reverend Mother General had told him, the one time before this he’d seen such an operation.

Sister Scholastica had demurred. “It’s because not one of us wants to mess up and have Reverend Mother mad at us. Not even for one single minute.”

In the long moment after Nancy Hare proclaimed Mother Mary Bellarmine a bitch, Reverend Mother General did not look angry. She did not look surprised, either. She simply stepped into the middle of the receiving line, raised her hand, nodded her head, and watched her Sisters go into action.

The Sister who grabbed Nancy Hare was not one Gregor knew. She was tall and broad and athletic in a way that reminded Gregor of girls’ high-school gym teachers, and she got Nancy by the shoulders and out of the way in no time at all. Nancy ended up looking more confused than alarmed at being manhandled. She had still been holding the vase when Sister pushed her against the far wall. The movement made her addled and she lost her grip on it. Stoneware isn’t china, but if it hits marble from a sufficient height it will shatter. The Sister dived for it and caught it in mid-flight in one hand, keeping Nancy immobile with the other. On the other side of the room, a nun Gregor did know—Sister Mary Alice, Mistress of Novices, whom he’d met in Maryville—was fussing around Mother Mary Bellarmine in that brisk and determined way elementary-school teachers use to calm small boys. Sister Mary Alice didn’t look like she much liked doing it, but she did seem to be good at it. Mother Mary Bellarmine’s veil was soaked through, and there were trickles of green-tinged water running down her face. The veil had prevented much damage to the rest of her habit. Gregor edged closer in the crowd to get a better look. The modified habit of the Sisters of Divine Grace consisted of the veil—it went over the ears and fastened at the back of the neck—and a long black dress that covered the calf but didn’t reach the floor, and a long garment called a scapular. The scapular was a long piece of black cloth with a hole in the middle for the head to go through, that hung front and back from the shoulders to the hem of the habit’s dress. There was some religious significance to the scapular. It had something to do with Saint Simon Stock and the Carmelite Order and the Blessed Virgin Mary, the way practically everything in the Catholic Church had to do with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Scholastica had told Gregor about it during the long days they had spent at the Maryville Police Department, doing their parts to straighten out the mess that results in the aftermath of any murder, no matter how successfully solved. Gregor couldn’t remember the explanation, but he did remember most of the rest of that conversation, and that had been about just how important the scapular was as part of the habit.

“There were Sisters who wanted to go to really short dresses, knee-length, but they wouldn’t have looked right with a scapular,” Scholastica had told him, “and if there’s one thing the old women in this Order want to express, it’s how vital they think it is for Sisters to wear a scapular.”

The point now was that Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular was torn, ripped from the neck hole down the front in one long gash. Gregor couldn’t imagine how it had happened. Of course, he hadn’t been very close when the incident had happened. It wouldn’t have taken long to tear the scapular. It could have been done when his attention was momentarily elsewhere. It still didn’t make sense. Nancy Hare had called Mother Mary Bellarmine a bitch. Then she had emptied the vase of roses on Mother Mary Bellarmine’s head. Then she had stepped back. She had not taken time to rip Mother Mary Bellarmine’s scapular. Gregor was sure of it.

Very young Sisters in long white veils had come into the foyer to clean up. They had a mop and a bucket and a pile of rags. The white veils pegged them as novices. Reverend Mother General emerged from her place in the crowd to supervise their work, nodded a little and said, “Has anyone found Henry yet?”

“Sister Caroline went to get him,” a voice called out. “He’s in the back garden.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Nancy Hare said. “Don’t bring Henry in on this. He’ll act like a jerk.”

“She’s the one who’s acting like a jerk,” a voice said in his ear.

Gregor turned and found that the whisperer was not Bennis Hannaford, whom he’d expected, but Sister Scholastica. Her arms were folded in such a way that they were almost entirely hidden by her scapular and her long dress collar that was so reminiscent of a cape. Her face was wry.

“This isn’t my territory,” she told him, “so the lady is nobody I know, but I have it on good authority that she likes to make scenes.”

“Bennis and I saw her coming in with her husband when we were in the parking lot. Bennis said she thought she was the kind of woman who liked to have an audience.”

“I always did think Bennis Hannaford had an intelligent voice. Did you happen to see what started all this?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“I didn’t either. It must have been something Bellarmine said in the receiving line.”

“Nancy and her husband went through the receiving line before Bennis and I did,” Gregor pointed out. “That was a good while ago—twenty minutes at least. Do you think it would have taken that woman that long to react?”

“I don’t know,” Scholastica said.

“Do you really think there’s anything Mother Mary Bellarmine could have said in the few seconds she’d have had with the line going past that would have caused this kind of reaction?”

Scholastica smiled. “Mother Mary Bellarmine,” she said, “could cause World War Three in thirty seconds flat if she had a mind to. Does that answer your question?”

“Not a nice woman, I take it.”

“I absolutely refuse to cause the kind of scandal I would have to cause to accurately describe that person while in a habit.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“Here comes Henry,” Scholastica said. “If anybody but Reverend Mother were running this show, I’d say there was about to be a lot of fun.”

Somehow, using the word
fun
to describe Henry Hare didn’t quite cut it. He was thin and fashionable and good looking and athletic, but those qualities didn’t add up to what they were supposed to. Gregor had thought in the parking lot that Henry Hare had an air of middle-aged stodginess about him. He now found his initial impression confirmed. Henry Hare was angry, and embarrassed, and all the other things a man would be when his wife had just pulled a stunt like this. He should have been generating sympathy by the truckload. He wasn’t. He could see the same thought racing through a dozen minds around him.
She behaves like this because he’s just so insufferably smug.

Henry Hare strode into the middle of the foyer, looked at his wife standing against one wall with the tall athletic nun in attendance, looked at Mother Mary Bellarmine standing against the other with her torn scapular, looked at the novices picking up their cleaning things on their way out and said, “Oh, Christ.”

Sixty nuns made the sign of the cross and bowed their heads.

“Mr. Hare,” Reverend Mother General said firmly, “I believe your wife is feeling unwell.”

“Has she been drinking?” Henry Hare demanded.

“Of course I haven’t been drinking,” Nancy Hare said. “There’s nothing to drink. Except mineral water.”

“I didn’t want to ask if you’d been doing anything else.”

“What Mrs. Hare has been doing is feeling unwell,” Reverend Mother said in a voice that brooked no argument. Gregor was willing to bet that Reverend Mother’s voice almost never brooked an argument. “She needs to go home and lie down,” Reverend Mother went on, “and I think you should take her there. The Sisters will, of course, make up a basket so that neither of you will miss any of the lunch we so sincerely wish to provide you with.”

“Oh, good,” Nancy said, and giggled. “A doggy bag.”

“Shut up,” Henry told her.

“I’m not going to shut up,” Nancy said. “That woman is a bitch and you know it. Everybody knows it.”

“I have to do something about my habit,” Mother Mary Bellarmine said. “It’s ripped.”

Reverend Mother General turned. Mother Mary Bellarmine didn’t look like a woman who had recently been attacked. She wasn’t shaken, and she was paying no attention whatsoever to her attacker. In Gregor’s experience, a victim in the same room with her victimizer usually kept a good eye out for another attack, or any sign of irrational behavior.

Reverend Mother General nodded at Mother Mary Bellarmine and said, “You should go change. Is it just your scapular?”

“My veil’s wet.”

“A veil is no problem. There are scapulars and veils downstairs in the supply room, if I remember correctly. Down near the kitchen. Mary Joachim?”

“That’s right, Reverend Mother. There’s a subsidiary supply room downstairs right next to the kitchen. We used this building for a convent back in sixty-four when the original convent had a fire and we had to wait for the new one to be built. We’ve been using that storeroom down there for habits ever since. I don’t know why.”

“Why,” Reverend Mother said, “is the same reason every house in this Order has chicken fricassee every Thursday night. Because once you get started on a path it’s practically impossible to leave it. That’s what I used to tell my novices when I had Sister Mary Alice’s responsibilities. Mary Bellarmine. Do you know your way to the kitchen?”