All the Dead Fathers (2 page)

“There was an article in the
Sun-Times
a couple of months ago. I'm sure I showed it to you, or told you about it. It had a list of names of Chicago priests—some of them ex-priests, I guess—who had sexual misconduct charges against them.”

“It was abuse, wasn't it? Not just charges. And involving children?”

“What the hell, Dugan? You're the lawyer here. The article said there was ‘reasonable cause to believe' the charges were true. Not that all of them were
proven,
like in court or something. And minors, not necessarily children.”

“Minors
are
children. Anyway, I didn't actually read the article. You told me about it, and you felt bad because your uncle Michael's name was there, and— Damn! Was one of the names on the list Thomas Kanowski?”

“Yeah.” She shook her head. “I suppose even if it
is
the same man, there doesn't have to be a connection. I mean, the fact that someone killed him doesn't—”

“They said the body was … what?… ‘mutilated' or something. But no, it didn't
have
to be because he's a pedophile.”

“You don't know that he
was
a pedophile.”

“Yeah, right. Just allegations, which there was ‘reasonable cause to believe,' you said. The cardinal removed them all from their positions, didn't he?”

“But Kanowski wasn't necessarily a pedophile. He could have had sex with a minor, say a seventeen-year-old, not necessarily a young child.”

“You mean like your uncle,” he said. “Anyway, the man's dead. Or
someone
named Thomas Kanowski is dead. And
maybe
it's the same guy.”

“If you were one of the priests on that list, wouldn't
you
be wondering? And maybe scared?”

“If I were on that list I'd have blown my brains out long ago. I wouldn't wanna live inside the skin of someone like—”

“Hey!” It was the cab driver, and the cab wasn't moving.

“Oh,” Dugan said. “Here's my office. You going to yours?” When Kirsten nodded he gave the driver her address. “This nice lady will pay you,” he said.

*   *   *

As he rode the elevator up to his office, it hit Dugan that Kirsten's being actually worried about her uncle Michael pissed him off a little. Jesus. Father Michael Nolan. Dugan hadn't spoken ten words to the guy since he represented him two years ago—but he wasn't about to waste any sympathy on him.

And why the hell Kirsten still cared at all about Michael Nolan he couldn't understand. She said she continued to get together with him from time to time, not because she still felt close to him but because she owed him that much. That made no sense to Dugan. The guy had obviously shredded any familial obligation she owed him. But she seemed to care more than she admitted, maybe more than she
knew.
And now?

Dugan didn't even want to think about where that might lead her now.

3.

Kirsten left the cab at Wabash and Washington and went up to her office on the tenth floor. The painted letters on the plate glass door said:

WILD ONION, LTD.

CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES

PERSONAL SECURITY SERVICES

She paused a moment, key in hand, feeling that odd, familiar mix of surprise and satisfaction those words always stirred up. She unlocked the door and went inside. She'd review her messages, check the calendar, return calls. Take care of her business.

It had never been part of her plan to run her own business. Her dad had been a Chicago cop until shortly before he died and, even though it wasn't happy for him at the end, that was all she'd ever wanted to be. After college she signed up for the police candidate's exam and started law school to kill the time while she waited. She scored high on the exam, endured the MMPI and the so-called POWER test, and the rest of the psychological and physical screening. Then one Friday she got a call to report to the Police Academy Monday if she wanted in on the next class. She and law school had never been compatible and she never set one foot back in the place after that. She didn't even attend Dugan's law school graduation. Which didn't bother him, since he didn't go, either.

She crouched to pick up the mail that had been shoved through the slot near the bottom of the door on Saturday, and took it with her through the tiny reception area, done in pastels and art deco, and into her office. Equally pastel and deco. The decor, which was not really Kirsten's style, was by Andrea Brumstein, a designer whose husband was a very successful diamond merchant. She had been Kirsten's first client.

Before meeting Andrea, Kirsten had been on the fast track in the police department. She became an investigator in the Violent Crimes Division, and was high on the list to make sergeant. Exactly where she wanted to be. Except as time went by she started to feel the job—the one she thought she loved—physically squeezing the heart out of her body. That's the only way she could describe it. So she quit.

By then her job skills were pretty limited. She joined a private security firm that bored her to death, then quit that and started Wild Onion, Ltd. That's when Andrea came along. Her case had to do, of course, with diamonds, among other things; and it had to be kept secret, of course, from Andrea's husband, among other people. Andrea was more than pleased with the result. She got Kirsten a great deal on this office, which had been carved out of her husband's retail showroom. She also paid twice the fee Kirsten asked for. “The secret, darling,” Andrea confided, “is to imagine a really outrageous fee, then double it. You'll get
such
a better class of clientele.”

As hard as she tried, Kirsten was never quite able to carry that off.

*   *   *

There were no e-mail or phone messages worth responding to, and her schedule showed no clients on the horizon. But there were no bills to pay, either. “I'm doing very well, thank you.” She spoke those encouraging words out loud, to nobody but herself. That's who needed to hear them.

The only item on her calendar for the whole week was on Thursday: “Dinner, Michael.” They'd become something of a burden over the last couple of years, those almost-monthly dinners, ever since the lawsuit and the revelation of what he'd done.

Way back when Kirsten was a toddler and he was an uncle she rarely saw, Father Michael Nolan had done something priests vowed not to do. Worse yet, he'd done it with a very mixed-up young girl, not yet eighteen years old, who'd been sinking in a sea of problems and had reached out to him. He'd been alcohol-dependent at the time, and in no shape to help anyone—and he sure didn't help that girl. Almost at once it was over and she was pregnant and he was sliding faster and deeper into his own downward spiral. A month later the girl was dead, and her family raged and hated him. And when money passed from the archdiocese to the girl's family in a confidential settlement, the payment eased none of their anger or ill will.

After the money, time passed, too. With therapy and rehab and AA, Michael Nolan finally managed to grab hold of the life that was slipping past him, and to hang on and drag himself into it. Growing up, Kirsten came to know him as her priest-uncle—her mother's only brother—who once had a drinking problem he'd overcome, but she never heard about the pregnant girl who killed herself. He joined them on holidays and was pleasant to everyone, even though her mother and father barely spoke to him, and would never tell her why. He worked at various churches, all of them in the most poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the city. When he was finally named pastor of a parish he turned the rectory into a shelter for homeless families and lived in a storage room in the back of the church.

By then, too, Michael was far more to Kirsten than just her kindly uncle. He was the rescuer who'd gotten her through the lowest, loneliest, most frightening time of her life. An episode she'd kept bottled up inside her ever since, never revealing it to anyone—though God knows she'd tried to tell Dugan a hundred times. Meanwhile, and especially after her father died, Michael became like a second father to her. A week seldom went by when they didn't see each other or at least talk on the phone.

Then, two years ago, it all fell apart. The dead girl's family got a new lawyer and sued to set aside the decades-old settlement as “inadequate, fraudulent, obtained under duress, and coercive.” The suit made terrible claims about what Michael had done so many years in the past. He was frightened and ashamed and was yanked out of his position as pastor. When Kirsten heard, she
knew
it couldn't be true, and she got Dugan to represent him. Then, when Michael
admitted
everything, she'd been shocked beyond belief, and hurt and terribly angry. And those feelings still lingered.

Michael, of course, hadn't had a dime to pay the girl's family. So it was the lawyers for the archdiocese—that's where the money was—who did all the legal work in the lawsuit. Since it was filed nearly thirty years after the suicide and the family had long ago received money to settle the matter, the suit was dismissed in short order. Dugan said that didn't bother him so much because that was, after all, the law. It also didn't bother him that he never had to deal with Michael again.

Kirsten, though, felt obliged not to abandon her uncle. She tried to hide the feelings she couldn't get over, and she watched him pretend he didn't know how much everything had changed.

And now? She reached for the phone and tapped out his number.

“Hello. Michael Nolan here.” He couldn't call himself
Father
any more. That was one of the new orders he'd been given—since all the recent publicity about priests and sexual abuse—along with no more saying Mass and no more Roman collar. Not to mention no more job with the archdiocesan Office of Liturgy. They'd dump him entirely, if they could. “Hello?” he repeated.

“Oh … hi. It's me. Kirsten.”

“Oh, how are you? You haven't forgotten Thursday, have you?”

“Of course not.” Where once they'd gotten together almost every week to laugh and cry and share their everyday experiences, now maybe once a month they met and went through the motions. She had no expectation that one day things might be the way they used to be. Because no matter how she tried, she couldn't forgive him, not only for what he'd done, but also for hiding it from her … and for the lack of courage that showed.

“Kirsten?”

“Oh,” she said, “sorry. The thing is … I have a conflict on Thursday night.” Which wasn't true. “So how about today?” He'd been there for her. She had to be there for him. “Are you free?”

“Today? Well, Monday nights I usually—”

“I'm thinking lunch.” She knew Monday nights were AA meetings. “Lambs Farm? Noon? My turn to buy.”

“Sure. That's great. See you there.” He sounded genuinely happy about the change, and she wondered if he'd heard about Thomas Kanowski.

*   *   *

With Lambs Farm maybe twenty-five miles north of the city, Kirsten would need about an hour to go home, get her car, and drive up there. So she had plenty of time. She stripped the rubber bands from the bundle of mail left from Saturday. It was usually 100 percent junk, but once in a while some
real
mail was lurking in there somewhere.

This was one of those times.

It was an ordinary postcard, the kind you buy already stamped. The postmark was Chicago and it was addressed to her “c/o Wild Onion, Ltd.” with a mailing label, but a label that had obviously been cut from another piece of mail, probably a magazine or a catalog, and taped onto the card. On the message side, in penciled block letters, it said:
HERE I COME
.

4.

Three words.
HERE I COME
. Innocuous, really. So why did Kirsten find them so menacing? She thought of calling Dugan, then decided to wait. But until when? Until she knew
who
was coming? Until whoever it was arrived?

And the cops? No way. Even if they considered the postcard a threat worth spending police time and resources on—and they wouldn't—it would take months to get results back from a police lab. Instead, she went next door to Mark Well Diamond Company, Inc., where Mark Brumstein, Andrea's husband, gave her some clear plastic envelopes, the kind he used for sorting gems. They made good evidence bags, one each for the postcard and for every other piece of mail in the bundle. She could take them to Renfroe Laboratories. Any fingerprints Leroy Renfroe found on the card he could check against hers, which he had on file, and against the postal carrier's, which he might find on other pieces of mail. He could also look for any trace substances that might tell them something or could be used for DNA comparison if they ever got another specimen.

If there was anything helpful, Leroy Renfroe would find it. But she didn't go to Leroy's lab. She decided to wait. She was overreacting.

Or was she? Whoever sent that card had taken a piece of her own mail, maybe pulled it out one day through the slot, and cut off the label to tape to the card. The words were:
HERE I COME
. But the message was: “I've been here already.” Like it or not—and she didn't—it spooked her.

She picked up her car and headed north for lunch with Michael. She'd gotten an anonymous note that on its face wasn't even a threat, and she'd learned that a man possibly connected with her uncle—connected in disgrace—had been brutally murdered. Did either she or Michael have real reason for concern? Maybe he and his fellow priests on that
Sun-Times
list did, but
she
certainly didn't. Or was it vice versa? And what perverse stroke of fortune caused both things to happen at the same time?

Yes, she was overreacting. And no, she couldn't keep her eyes off the rearview mirror.