Charisma (25 page)

“Yes, Father. He’s the man working on the murders of the women, too. He works on everything, you know, because he’s—”

“Chief of Homicide. You told me. I want to talk to him. Do you think you could set it up?”

“I—”

“Of course you can set it up. You have to set it up. I’ll be in New Haven at six. Have Mallory at Queen of Heaven rectory at six thirty. I’ll feed him.”

“Father—”

“Make the call now, John. I have to get moving.”

John Kelly knew he ought to say, “Yes, Father,” but he didn’t feel like it, and he didn’t do it. He just said good-bye.

Half an hour later, having left messages for Pat Mallory from one end of New Haven to the other, having found no trace of the man at all, John Kelly went back to smoking cigarettes. In his desk, he had the text of the sermon he was supposed to rehearse for television this afternoon. He took it out, looked at it, and decided he would never be able to read it. The letters seemed to be fluid, living things, like small fish, that darted from one edge of the page to the other.

The real problem was, if the bishop was going to be at Queen of Heaven rectory at six, he was going to have to be there, too, and he didn’t want to be. All of a sudden, he wanted not a single thing more to do with this mess. It was bad and it was only going to get worse, and that was not what he had signed on for when he became a priest.

S
USAN MURPHY HAD NEVER
seen a splatter movie, but she had heard about them. Mostly she had heard about them from students. Knives and guns, blood and skin and bone,
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
She was standing against the low stone wall at the north end of the Damien House lot, looking out over the rubble and the raw sewage, not looking down. Down was an abyss, even with all these people around her, the people who had come when she had screamed. Out was a lunar landscape, nowhere on earth at all. She was in space. That was why she was so cold.

She felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Pat Mallory beside her, holding out a pack of cigarettes, her own. There was something coming down on her hair and face, something half-frozen and wet, and she realized she wasn’t really wearing much in the way of clothes, not for this weather. Jeans and a turtleneck and sweater and knee socks, that was fine, but instead of shoes on her feet she had a pair of clogs that belonged to one of the girls upstairs and didn’t quite fit her, and she had no coat at all. She had been standing around in the kitchen, listening to Pat Mallory and Francesca talk, and she had felt so useless—so damned wrong. Kids had been coming in and out for breakfast, paying no attention to her. Even the girls she had gone through the mini-retreat with the night before had been behaving as if she were invisible. Cold, cold, cold, she thought now, the word for all of this is cold. Inside of Damien House or out, she was always cold.

On the other side of the low stone wall, more than half buried under a pile of rotting lumber that might once have been the side of a house, was the body of Marietta O’Brien. Susan could see one short fat leg sticking into the wind, the ankle oddly twisted and the foot swollen. The foot was bare and there wasn’t a shoe in sight.

Pat Mallory touched her on the shoulder again, held something out to her again, nodded slightly. Susan made her eyes focus and saw that it wasn’t the pack of cigarettes she was being offered this time, but a single cigarette, lit. She took it and sucked on it, using it for anesthetic.

“Dear sweet Christ,” she said.

Pat Mallory nodded again. “Everybody else is back in the house. I can’t go until the cars get here. Stay and talk to me.”

“Here?”

“We could go back against the other wall.”

The other wall was the one lined with garbage cans. The cans looked too shiny to be real, and the day looked too gray. Susan tried to drag herself back to some semblance of self-discipline and found that it was impossible. She had lost hold on time. She remembered being alone out here and screaming. She remembered being surrounded by people. She could see she was alone now with only Pat Mallory at her side. She would have sworn she had been out here less than a single minute.

“Dear sweet Jesus Christ,” she said. “I must have been looking at it for ten minutes—that foot—and I didn’t even know what it
was.
”

It got better. For some reason, she had expected him to interrogate her immediately—for
some
reason?—but he only pushed her down against the opposite wall and walked away. She watched him go back to where she had been and stand looking down at what she had been trying so hard not to see again, but without any of her paralysis, mental or physical. He paced back and forth against the short stretch of wall that had helped to hide the body of Marietta O’Brien, stopping every once in a while to lean over a little farther or to stand back and cock his head. After a while, she realized he was talking to himself, too. The wind would whip around and bring a word or two of it back to her, intriguing words that were somehow just as cold as everything else. “Position,” he said to himself, and then “progression,” “angle,” “neck.” It ought to have repelled her, being clinical, but it didn’t.

Once, soon after she had told Reverend Mother everything about what had happened on Edge Hill Road, she had requested permission to see one of those priest-psychologists who had become all the vogue after Vatican II. She had seen him twice, just long enough for him to tell her she was desperately in search of a father figure. At the time, she had simply thought he was being snotty and cynical about both her faith and her vocation—which he might have been. That was the time when the professional heretics were coming out of the woodwork, the priests who didn’t believe in God, the bishops who didn’t believe in the Resurrection, the moral theologians who didn’t believe in sin. In those days she had been very devout and very committed to her order. The order was engaged in what amounted to a war against the wholesale laicization of religious women. The first time she walked into the priest-psychologist’s office he had stared at her in surprise and said, “You’re still in habit. We’ll have to make sure you get out of it.”

She had finished her cigarette. She seemed to remember something she had read once, in a detective story, about how bad it was to leave innocent butts lying around the scene of a crime, so she put it out with a pinch of snow and put the butt in the pocket of her jeans. Then she lit up again. She hated to admit it, but the priest-psychologist may have been right—without knowing it and without having had enough time with her to give him just cause for what he was saying. She probably was desperately in search of a father figure. A father figure was what she was turning Pat Mallory into, right this minute, by taking comfort in the size of him and in the way he walked, so purposeful and sure, so quickly and without hesitation. God only knew, she had never felt this way about Reverend Mother, who had been just as purposeful and just as sure.

Out at the other end of the lot, Pat Mallory seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. Instead of pacing or looking or leaning, he backed up. Then he pivoted on his heel and started walking back to her. Susan watched him come, the way his legs moved inside his jeans, the way his shoulders moved inside the heavy padding of his open jacket, and wondered why he wasn’t in uniform.

He came up beside her and said, “What did you do with the butt from the other cigarette? That can’t be the same one.”

“I put it in my pocket.”

“Good girl.” He sat down next to her on the wall and stretched his legs. “I don’t know if you can hear it yet, but I can. Sirens. Help is on the way.”

“I hope it’s fast. It doesn’t seem right to me, having her lying out there like that.”

“How do you know it’s her?”

“Maybe I don’t. I didn’t move anything, if that’s what you want to know. It was just the leg. Like her leg. She had—such a strangely shaped body.”

“Had.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Susan said, suddenly near tears. “I don’t know what you want me to do. I don’t know anything. I just came out here to get away from all that—all that in the kitchen—and I was walking around and then I stopped, I don’t know why, I was cold and then—”

“He took the trouble to hide her.”

“What?”

Pat Mallory shook his head and stood up again. Now Susan could hear the sirens. They were everywhere, all around her, not only in the air but in the ground. It was as if all other life and sound had stopped to make room for them. She looked automatically toward the road and then away again, feeling foolish. Of course she wouldn’t be able to see anyone coming from here. The view to Congress Avenue was blocked off by what was left of the few other standing structures between here and there. The view in the other direction went nowhere, to a place where nothing could be coming from.

“If it’s her, he took the trouble to hide her,” Pat Mallory said, repeating himself. “You might not know about that. It isn’t classified information, though. It’s been in the papers. He never took the trouble to hide any of the others before this.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“I don’t know.”

“I should think he’d want to hide them, all of them. So that people didn’t—didn’t catch on, if you see what I mean.”

“You’re making the assumption that his primary purpose in life is not to get caught.”

“Nobody wants to get caught.”

“He doesn’t think he can get caught—no, that’s not true.” Pat Mallory stood up and stretched. “That’s what I used to think, when these things started. I used to think I had an ordinary psychopath, religious mania—”

“Does
everything
have to be
religious
mania?” Susan asked, resentful—and that, she thought, was a good sign. Now that she could get angry again she would be back to normal in no time. “You’d think people would have other kinds of manias sometimes, secular humanist manias, evolutionist manias—”

Pat Mallory looked amused. “Holy Mother Church is not opposed to all aspects of the theory of evolution. And he is killing ex-nuns. Marietta was an ex-nun.”

“Yes, she was,” Susan admitted.

“So were the other three. The other three we know about. It’s not all that easy to find ex-nuns if you’re not looking for them. I say four out of four would be too much of a coincidence.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Do you know exactly what it is I could do for you that would make you happy?”

“Take me to bed.”

She said the words and he heard them. They were out in the air before she even knew she was thinking them, palpable, like the rings of Saturn, like a million pieces of ice caught in orbit by centrifugal force. In the meantime, the wind had gotten higher and more violent and the sirens had come closer. Cars were pulling to screeching stops not very far away. “Where the hell do you think the goddamn body is?” someone shouted. Then car doors began to slam and feet began to pound on icy pavement. Somebody fell and used a word that made Susan blush.

Nothing should make me blush, Susan thought. After that, absolutely nothing should make me blush ever again.

Pat Mallory hadn’t left his place on the low wall beside her. He hadn’t spoken and he hadn’t moved. Susan couldn’t imagine what he was thinking and didn’t want to ask. God only knew she didn’t want to look at his face.

The door to the kitchen opened and a uniformed patrolman came out of it. The door to the back lawn opened and another uniformed patrolman came through that. Susan jumped up and went running back to Damien House, alone.

Ten minutes later, Pat Mallory, surrounded by uniformed cops, medical technicians, ambulance men, police photographers, evidence experts and no fewer than four reporters from four different media—newspaper, magazine, television, and radio—finally let himself think about it. It had started to snow in earnest by then. The temperature had dropped, the ground was being rapidly covered by a fall that had never been white, and the scene was a mess—a much bigger mess than the scene at the death of Theresa Cavello had been. It was so much easier on everybody when the bastards left their victims in nice safe buildings. Nice safe buildings could be secured against the ravages of curiosity and greed. They could be secured against the uninvited intrusions of the district attorney’s office, too. Pat was expecting such intrusions any minute now. They always showed up when a crime made the news.

He left the med tech he’d been talking to—position of cut, shape of cut, smoothness of cut, snow in cut—and walked over to Ben Deaver, who had been cornered by a pair of reporters who had started out looking exasperated and were now near explosion. Ben had a positive talent for looking like a media patsy but not being one, and a kind of antitalent for getting rid of jerks. Pat grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away bodily, without apology, because by now there was no way else it could be done.

“Well?” he said, when he got him far enough away for form’s sake. There was no such thing, in this small backyard, as far enough away not to be heard.

“Well, what?” Deaver asked him. “You want it like a litany? Cut on the forehead exactly the same. Knife used probably the same. Neck broken, almost certainly the same—”

“Okay.”

“My point. What’s the matter with you?”

Pat shrugged. He was standing very near the kitchen window, and the light was on inside, which made it easy for him to see into the house. Unfortunately the kitchen was empty and there was no sign that it was going to be full again soon. There was certainly no sign of
her.

“Are you married?” he asked Ben Deaver.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking about something Anton said the other day, about cops and women and work and existential angst.”

“ ‘Existential angst,’ ” Deaver repeated. “I think Klemmer ought to lay off the dead bodies for a while. Existential fucking angst. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m going to go call in.”

“You do that. It’ll keep you from worrying too much about your existential angst.”