Sometimes, late at night, Ellen played a morbid game of “What if ?” What if she had stood up to her husband and kept the twins in the same school? Then Rouge would have been with Susan on the day she was stolen. The twins had gone everywhere together, needing no one else’s company or conversation. Would Susan have lived, or would both of them have perished?
She stared at the silver bracelet as Rouge slipped it into her hand. When had she seen it last? At the trial? Yes, the bracelet had been used as evidence. The police must have returned it to her husband. She imagined Bradly Kendall quietly walking into this room and carefully setting the small bit of jewelry on his daughter’s desk. And perhaps Brad had sat down on the bed and cried because the bracelet’s circle was so tiny it broke his heart.
Ellen closed her hand over the piece of silver. “The police said this was found in the priest’s room.”
“You mean Paul Marie’s room.” Rouge’s correction was unemotional, but pointed. Considering her son’s quiet ways, this was almost an argument. She had forgotten how much it irritated him when she referred to the child killer as a priest.
But each time she thought of Paul Marie, she saw the trappings of the church, cassock and collar. The man had been so young when she last saw him, barely into his twenties when he stood beside the elder priest at Communion. Nothing interesting had been written on his face yet, no lines of character or personality. Some people had thought him very handsome, she remembered that much, but there had been nothing else to distinguish him. He had been such an ordinary man, uninspired in his sermons and merely adequate as a choirmaster.
But the children loved him.
Ellen’s hands flew up to cover her burning face, as if this thought had been spoken aloud—as though she had just told an obscene joke in church.
three
“I like it.” The appreciation seemed
genuine as he admired her jagged scar and the twisted mouth of bright red.
Ali Cray remembered this priest as a tall man, but slight, almost delicate. The aesthetic’s face had been paler then, ethereal, framed by dark hair and black vestment. When she was ten years old and Paul Marie was in his early twenties, his large, lustrous brown eyes had peered out from a portrait of Lord Byron on a dog-eared page of her poetry text.
Fifteen years older now, the bound man on the other side of the table was well muscled; broad shoulders strained at the seams of his blue denim shirt; and there was a hardness to his face. The chains on his hands and feet did nothing to diminish him, but made him seem even more powerful, held in check only by his manacles. He filled the whole room with his presence.
Ali Cray felt her own personality being crowded up against the wall when he looked at her. Gone were the poet’s eyes;
Good night, Byron.
Lowering her head, she stared at the pages on her clipboard, though she knew each line of print by heart. Her gaze drifted across the table to the jailhouse tattoos on his hands. It was a common trait of the convict, this mutilation of the flesh with pinpricks and ink to while away the days. But his were not typical markings. On the back of the right hand was an
S
, and on his left was an
E;
both were wrought in the style of ornate capitals from illuminated manuscripts.
She looked up at his face, his faint smile.
“The letters stand for
sin eater,
” he said. “A euphemism for sucking on penises. I was forced to do a lot of that while I was in the general prison population.”
“In this prison, all sex offenders are segregated,” she said, as though she had caught him in a lie.
“A clerical error—according to the warden. My paperwork was fouled up.”
Not likely.
She knew that someone would have to use influence or quite a bit of money for a mistake of that magnitude; it was nearly a death sentence for a child molester. Susan’s father could have arranged it. When Bradly Kendall was alive, he had had the necessary political connections and wealth. “But your lawyer would have—”
“He never believed I was innocent. That’s why the little bastard dragged his feet for two years.” Paul Marie shrugged, as though this gross betrayal really mattered very little to him. “The lawyer knew what was being done to me. I think it fit his own sense of rough justice.”
“I gather the Church believed in you. You were never defrocked.”
The prisoner leaned forward, and Ali leaned back.
“The Church has a shortage of priests. I wouldn’t be released from my vows for murdering a little girl. It’s not as if I advocated birth control.”
Ali looked down at her clipboard again and made a quick note at the bottom of one sheet. She didn’t look at him when she asked, “Did you go on functioning as a priest?”
“Yes—those first two years. I heard confessions and meted out penance.”
Paul Marie’s voice had lost all the gentle tones. She couldn’t take much more of this changeling phenomenon. It was like a little death.
He went on in this voice of a stranger, “There was a man who made a point of saying, ‘Father, forgive me,’ each time I was raped. One day, I beat the crap out of him with a lead pipe. And
then
I forgave him. The pipe scrambled his brains, so he no longer remembers what I forgave him for. But I did keep the sacraments. Though I had to improvise on the penance. One
Hail Mary
equals a broken nose. Three
Our Fathers
is a smashed testicle.”
Nothing remained of her old choirmaster.
“I wish they’d left me in the general population. On this cell block, I only hear the confessions of insects. The perverts share everything with me, all the things they won’t even tell their lawyers.”
“Do they ever talk about the local case? The two girls?”
“Sometimes. But they prefer to reminisce about their own crimes against women and children. They lie in their beds when the lights go out, and they jerk off their cocks while they confess to me in the dark. And then the corridor fills up with the stink of semen.” He pushed back from the table. “But I don’t think you need to hear any of that. Confession isn’t a perk of the priesthood. It’s a kind of hell.”
“Father, I know you won’t remember me. I was—”
“I remember you missed choir practice the week before I was arrested.” He sat back and regarded her with greater attention, making more assessments of her hair, her clothes, the scar. “Father Domina said your family moved out of town.”
So at least a few people had noticed her passing by, taking up space in the world, and she marveled over that for a moment. “My parents never told me about Susan Kendall’s death.” She had been eighteen years old before she learned of the murder.
An uneasy silence prevailed between them. Other noises intruded on the room, sounds from the prison yard outside the window, voices of men and the rhythm of a ball bouncing off the exterior wall. She noted the thrum of heavy machinery. The prison laundry must be close by; she could see the steam escaping past the side of the barred window.
At last, he said, “I used to worry about you, Sally. You were the only child I ever knew who aspired to blend into the walls.”
She understood this perception. As a little girl, she had been neither pretty nor homely, tall nor short, only finding her voice when she sang in the choir.
“My name is Ali now,” she reminded him. Her open wallet of credentials still lay on the table between them, and her altered name was punctuated with a Ph.D. She wondered if he didn’t find that advanced degree quite odd, given the bland child she had been.
He nodded in approval. “Ali suits you better. As I recall, you were in danger of an ordinary life. I’m glad mediocrity passed you by. I imagine the scar had a lot to do with that.”
The choirmaster from her childhood came back to visit with her for a few moments. Father Paul’s eyes were penetrating, gently probing the soft places, silently asking where the hurt was—just like old times. Oh, but now he saw something new in her expression. Had she unwittingly given herself away? Whatever it was, it jarred him. He physically pulled back and cast his eyes down, perhaps in time to rescue himself from discovery.
This morning, a state trooper manned the front desk, displacing the village police sergeant who usually sat behind the glass window with his newspaper and a cup of coffee.
Rouge thought Chief Croft had been a good sport about handing his station house over to the BCI investigators. But then, Charlie Croft had always maintained that he could run the village’s six-man police force from a telephone booth. The chief’s small private office was on the floor above, but the remaining space had been used only for town council meetings once a month, and as a voting place in an election year. Now there were footsteps from many pairs of shoes walking across the ceiling. The ground floor of the station house was almost eerie in the absence of yesterday’s circus of noise and raucous energy. One man sat on a plastic chair in the reception area. A press pass was clipped to the lapel of his suit.
Where had all the other newspeople gone?
Rouge pinned his new identification tag to his jacket and signed the state trooper’s logbook. Then he climbed one flight of the narrow staircase and opened the door to a wide front room and a steady din of conversations punctuated by the ring of telephones. FBI agents and state investigators sat at tables and desks raided from the public library next door. They were taking statements from civilians, while the uniformed officers were hauling reams of paper from one end of the room to the other. A portable radio unit spat out a burst of static and garbled words from the state troopers’ cars out on the road.
The old landmark building had retained its fifteen-foot ceilings, but long tubes of fluorescent lights marred this one remaining detail. The exposed brick of the walls had been painted over to disguise the building material as something more plastic, less sturdy. According to Chief Croft, the new color of the walls was “puke-green” and
not
“essence of willow,” as the painter had asserted. Movable partitions of padded fabric had been brought in by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation to divide the fringe space into cubicles, and computers sat on every surface as more solid reminders that the world had changed overnight.
Rouge was surprised to see Marge Jonas at her desk this morning. The civilian secretary was the only other survivor of the State Police takeover. She was wearing her platinum-blond hair this morning. Marge had wigs in every color except her own natural iron-gray.
He would have said hello, but the secretary was immersed in a technical manual. By her muttered obscenities, he knew she was deep into the latest computer glitch to plague the new system installed by the BCI task force. Beneath her chin, three rolls of flesh jiggled to the rhythm of her bobbing head as she looked down to the manual and then up to the lighted screen of scrambled text.
He walked on by, and she called after him, “Not so fast, Rouge Kendall!” Marge only used his full name if she was irritated.
He stopped dead and turned to face her. “Hey, Marge.”
One pudgy finger marked her place in the closed manual as she leaned over her desk to stare at his legs. “When I told you to come in wearing street clothes, I meant a
suit.
Are those your Sunday-go-to-meeting jeans? I notice they’re still sort of blue.”
“It’s all I had.” His late father’s tweed jacket had fit perfectly, but his mother could do nothing with the old man’s trousers, tailored for legs two inches shorter than his own.
“You need work.” Marge stood up to display two hundred and twenty-five imposing pounds of authority as she rolled one hand to motion him closer. “Honey, come here. Let me fix that.” Her dexterous fingers quickly undid the sloppy knot below the collar of his shirt. “We don’t want Captain Costello to know you’ve never worn a tie in your life.”
This was close to the truth. He had always worn a uniform to work and lived a blue jeans existence after hours. And so he stood by her chair, in docile surrender, while she properly knotted his father’s silk tie. A brown suede jacket lined with sheepskin was slung over one arm. This was his own, but purchased in his college days and showed some wear and shine.
Marge stepped back to admire her handiwork. “Now you look like a BCI investigator.”
“Hey, I’m just reporting for a plainclothes detail.”
“Don’t contradict me, hon. I typed up your press release this morning.”
“My what?”
She shot him a warning glance and nodded toward the private office appropriated by the BCI commander. The man standing in the open doorway had been a familiar sight in Makers Village for more than a decade. Captain Costello kept a summer house on the lake, but he frequented the shops and restaurants in every season. Many villagers had come to regard him as a local man, one of their own, though they found him somewhat aloof. Over the past ten years, the captain had never set foot in this local police station—and now he ruled it.
Costello was walking toward them. The man did not look happy, and neither did he look like anyone’s idea of a top cop in the BCI. The captain might have stood five feet ten on his tallest day, but the permanent slouch had made him inches shorter in middle age. Small in the bones and introspective in demeanor, he seemed better suited to academic work.
Yet when Costello addressed his troops en masse, his voice took on a workingman’s character, a rough and colorful vocabulary so at odds with his physique and the bow tie. In more personal conferences, rumor had it, he could cut off a larger man’s balls in ten words or less.
Rouge wondered if this came naturally, or was it art?
Captain Costello slapped a newspaper down on the secretary’s desk with the crack of a rifle shot. Marge jumped, Rouge didn’t; he was staring down at a five-year-old photograph of himself in the baseball uniform of the Yankees rookie league. The headline said, “Local Hero.” A companion photograph showed him carrying Sadie Green’s bicycle.