Mortal Sin (6 page)

“Phaleanopsis.”

Over the din that shook the Bayside Expo to the rafters, Sarah heard the priest speak, but his words were indecipherable. She stopped, turned, and found him absorbed in one of the exhibits. “Excuse me?” she shouted.

“
Phaleanopsis
. It’s a rare orchid from ” The rest of his words were drowned out by the overhead loudspeaker announcing the winner in a raffle for a dozen bags of topsoil.

“I’m sorry. I can’t hear you.”

He shifted his coat from his left arm to his right, clearing a few inches of space beside him. Beckoning, he said something unintelligible that she loosely interpreted as, “Come and see.”

She squeezed between an elderly woman with blue hair and a young couple pushing a squalling baby in a stroller. “This is like Mardi Gras—” she shouted “—only without the booze.”

“What?”

“I said—oh, never mind.”

The flower arrangement was breathtaking.
Phaleanopsis
was exquisite, with petals of snowy white, daubed here and there with red. It looked like some fancy dessert, a frothy white confection dripping with raspberry sauce.

“They grow these on Maui,” he said near her ear.

“They’ re lovely.”

“I’ve seen them in the wild. Simply breathtaking. Do you want to—”

Once again, the hubbub swallowed his words. She shrugged apologetically, and he inclined his head in the direction of the lobby. She nodded, and they began working their way through the crowd toward the exit.

After the saunalike conditions inside the Expo, the frigid March wind struck her damp skin with such stunning force that she gasped. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling on his gloves. “I should have realized opening day would be a zoo.”

“I think it was the thirteen busloads of senior citizens from upstate New York that tipped the scales,” she said as they strode briskly across acres of parking lot. “But the exhibits were lovely. What I could see of them.”

Eventually, they reached his little blue Saturn sedan. He unlocked the door and she climbed into the passenger seat, grateful for the reprieve from the biting wind. She sat shivering while the engine warmed. Fiddling with the heater, he said, “How long have you been in Boston?”

“Since August. Kit and I moved here right before the start of the school year.”

“Ah. Then this is your first New England winter.”

“And it may well be my last.”

“You’ll adjust. Give it a year or two—”

“Or ten?”

Still engrossed in the heater controls, he glanced up. When he smiled, warmth swam in those golden eyes. “Or ten,” he said, “and your blood will thicken. You’ll start to feel like a native.”

“Right now, I feel like a Popsicle.”

He finally got the heater knobs adjusted, and glorious warmth flowed from the vents. “In another month, there’ll be flowers blooming everywhere.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you because… ?”

“I’m a priest. We’re not allowed to lie. Are you hungry?”

“I’m not sure. Ask me again after I’ve thawed out.”

“I have ninety minutes before afternoon confession. Since it was too noisy to talk at the Expo, we might as well talk over lunch.” He carefully backed out of the parking space. “If you’d like music,” he said, shifting gears, “there’s a little of everything in the console.”

With icy fingers, she locked her seat belt and snugged it around her, then flipped open the hinged console cover to reveal his CD collection. Melissa Etheridge. U2. Bruce Springsteen. Tom Petty. “My, my,” she said, “you have interesting musical tastes.”

“For a priest?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You were thinking it.”

“You have to admit,” she said, working her way through CD cases, “there probably aren’t too many priests around who own the soundtrack to
Saturday Night Fever
.”

“Bite your tongue. That’s a true classic from the good old days when the Bee Gees wielded iron control over the Top Ten, and John Travolta was King of the World. I was twelve years old when I saw that movie, and I wanted to be him.”

She studied him with avid interest. “As I recall. Father, that movie was rated R. How’d you get in at twelve?”

“I had a friend with an eighteen-year-old sister who drove a ‘66 Bonneville. It had the biggest trunk I ever saw. If we squeezed tight, she could fit four of us in there. She used to sneak us into the drive-in.”

“So you were a wild child.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it. I was a rebellious, hardheaded delinquent, determined to ride the fast track to hell.”

“How’d you end up on the road to heaven instead?”

“Sooner or later, we all grow up.”

When he pulled up in front of a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall near the Expo, she studied its facade with apprehension. The plate glass windows hadn’t been washed in months, and a wide crack marred the plastic sign that said All Day Buffet.

“I know it doesn’t look like much,” he said, shutting off the ignition, “but the food’s marvelous.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“You didn’t have to. You have an incredibly expressive face. Trust me, you’re safe here. They haven’t killed a customer yet.”

Outside the entrance, he paused to flip open the door of a battered newspaper vending machine. He pulled out a folded tabloid and tucked it under his arm, then held open the restaurant door for her. The instant she stepped inside, heavenly smells accosted her from every direction: ginger, soy sauce, Chinese tea and the mouth-watering aromas of frying chicken and pork.

An elderly Asian man led them to a corner booth and poured them each a steaming cup of tea before disappearing through a swinging door into the kitchen. She took a sip of the fragrant hot liquid, warmed her hands with the miniature teacup and studied the man who sat across from her.

His eyes were keen and bold as he returned her assessment. “We can help ourselves to the buffet.”

She set down her teacup. “Then lead the way before I expire from hunger.”

The restaurant may have been small, but the quality and variety of foods on the buffet were surprisingly good. She took her time choosing from the assortment of exotic delicacies, returning at last to the table with a number of familiar items as well as tidbits from several new dishes she’d never tried before. She slid into the red vinyl booth and eyed his heaping plate in astonishment.

“What?” he said.

“How can you eat like that and stay so thin? There’s not an ounce of fat on you.”

He picked up the chopsticks the waiter had left beside his plate and removed them from their paper wrapper. “I have an active metabolism. I could eat all day and not gain weight.”

“If I ate like that,” she said, “I’d weigh six hundred pounds.” She watched his expertise with the chopsticks, eyed the matching pair by her plate, and opted for her fork. “You maneuver those things as if you know what you’re doing.”

“I spent a couple of years in Hong Kong.”

“For the Church?” She nibbled a bite of broccoli.

He lifted his teacup, sipped, shook his head. “Before I entered the seminary.” He set down the tea and picked up the newspaper he’d dropped on the seat beside him. “Are you familiar with the
Phoenix
?”

“No. What’s the
Phoenix
?”

“Back in the early days, it used to be called an underground newspaper. Now the fever of political correctness has changed the term to alternative. It’s aimed primarily at the college crowd. There’s some pretty good journalism, a lengthy arts section—reviews of movies and theater and music and gallery exhibits. And then—” he opened it up, pulled out the innermost section and handed it to her “—there’s this.”

The black-and-white cover photo showed a man and a woman in a mildly suggestive pose. Inside, she found a soup-to-nuts menu of erotic pleasures, categorized for easy reference. Adult personals. Commercial ads for phone sex, exotic dance clubs, sex toys, XXX-rated book and video stores. Grainy photos of huge-breasted women with only the most crucial areas covered. Classified ads for everything from massage and escort services to fantasy and fetish. Spanking. Domination.
Hot young girls want it tonight
.

“Lord love a duck.” She paged through it in horrified fascination. “Forgive me for sounding naive, but isn’t most of this stuff illegal?”

He swallowed a mouthful of food and waved his hand in a
comme ci, comme ca
gesture. “It’s a gray area. Most of it skirts the edges of the law. Pornography—books, magazines, videos—isn’t necessarily illegal. Depending, of course, on local ordinances. Any business that defines itself as an escort service or a massage parlor is in the clear unless you can prove the exchange of money for sexual gratification. And phone sex is an even more shadowy area. Because there’s no actual physical contact, nobody can seem to decide whether or not it’s prostitution. For the most part, the police look the other way. The consensus seems to be that it’s a victimless crime.” He set down his fork, took a sip of tea. “As you can see, sex is big business.”

“I always thought of Boston as staid and reserved. Beacon Hill, old money, and all that.”

“This city was settled by Puritans. It’s been nearly four hundred years, and still we keep our vices well hidden. Don’t get me wrong—we have plenty of vices. We just don’t wave our dirty linens in front of the world. Welcome to Boston.”

She folded up the newspaper. “I assume, Father, that you had some reason for showing me this. Other than shocking me.”

“Have I shocked you?”

“Not particularly. I’m thirty-three years old. I’ve been married and divorced three times. I haven’t lived under a rock.”

He raised an eyebrow and studied her with keen interest. “Three times,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean I’m a floozy.”

A smile played about the corner of his mouth. “The thought never crossed my mind.”

“What it does mean,” she said, “is that I have lousy taste in men. I have good intentions, but poor judgment. And why am I telling you this, anyway? I don’t even know you, and I’m sure you don’t give a rat’s behind about my personal life.”

“It’s this clerical collar. You’d be amazed by the things people tell me. Yes, I had a reason for showing this to you, and it wasn’t to shock you. I wanted you to understand a couple of things. First, the sex trade is a complex and pervasive issue with ramifications that extend far beyond the social or moral. There are political and economic cogs in this particular wheel. And street prostitution is only a very small part of the greater whole. The bottom rung of the ladder.” He paused for a sip of tea. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple moved up and down.

“Second,” he said, “Kit’s an extremely attractive girl. Chances are good she won’t be on the street for long.”

Her stomach soured. “You think she’ll be snatched up by some talent scout looking for new blood.”

He picked up his napkin, wiped his fingers. “It’s quite possible. If she ends up working for an escort service, finding her could be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

She exhaled a hard breath. “Then I’d suggest, Father, that we don’t waste any time getting out there.”

A half-dozen customers browsed the bookstore shelves. and a trio of teenage girls clustered around the magazine rack, giggling over the latest photos of the boy band
du jour
. Sarah swept past the register, where Josie was flirting with a middle-aged customer buying the latest Ludlum blockbuster. Josie glanced up and raised her eyebrows, and Sarah tilted her head in the direction of her office.

She nearly tripped over Steve Merino. He was on his knees in aisle three, resetting shelves to make room for the newest Danielle Steel opus. The jeweled studs lining the college student’s earlobes winked in the reflection of the overhead fluorescent lights.

“You were gone long enough,” he said. “We were about to call out the search-and-rescue dogs.”

She knelt beside him, frowned at a book that was shelved out of order, pulled it and reshelved it in its proper place. Eyeing the dreadlocks that had recently sprouted from his head, she said, “I do believe there are wild creatures nesting in there.”

“Very Rastafarian, don’t you think?” He shoved aside a half-dozen books and filled the empty space with glossy pink paperbacks from the box at his side.

“I hate to break it to you, son, but no matter how Jamaican you get, you’ll still be a white boy from the burbs of Boston.” Still on her knees, she followed along behind him, straightening the books he shelved, neatly lining up the spines.

Unfazed, he grinned. “Thanks for the reminder.”

She ran a fingernail along the line of books. Satisfied with their alignment, she stood and dusted off the knees of her jeans, just in time to watch Josie stride briskly down the aisle. At thirty-three, Josie Porter, nee Rafferty, was drop-dead gorgeous, with sleek black hair and deep green eyes, lush ruby lips, and a hard, lean body that looked equally delectable in jeans or in a slinky black cocktail dress. If Sarah hadn’t liked Josie so much, she would have hated her.

“So?” Josie demanded. “What’s the verdict?”

“He’s going to help me look for her.”

“Thank God.” Josie closed her eyes, reopened them. “I knew Clancy’d come through for you.”

“There aren’t any guarantees, Jose. He made sure I understood that. But he has resources and experience I couldn’t begin to replicate. It’s a hell of a lot more than the police offered me.”

“He’ll find her. He has God on his side. And I have absolute faith in him. Clancy’s the most amazing man I’ve ever met.”

“Speaking of which, thanks for the warning.”

“Warning?” Josie raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

“I left here this morning laboring under the misapprehension that I had an appointment with some well-meaning old geezer. It would’ve been nice if you’d prepared me for the reality of the situation.”

Josie’s slender, manicured fingers covered her mouth. “Oops.”

“Oops is right. The man is so—so—” She stopped, unable to find a suitable adjective.

“Priestlike?” Josie offered.

“No, Jose, that’s not quite the word I was trying to think of.”