Night Sins (44 page)

She tried to gather her composure. She wouldn't give up without a fight. She wouldn't be reduced to the kind of bawling, begging woman she despised.

She reached for the telephone, her hand shaking like a palsy victim's as the migraine expanded in her head like a balloon. As she pressed the receiver to her ear, the dial tone sliced through her brain. Groaning, head swimming, she dropped the receiver and threw up in the wastebasket.

7:42
A.M.
         -19°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -38°

I
saw Josh.”

Father Tom slid into the pew beside Hannah. She had called him at the crack of dawn and asked to see him before morning Mass. The sun had been up barely an hour, sending pale fingers of light through the stained glass windows. Cubes and ovals of soft color flickered shyly on the drab flat carpet that ran down the center aisle. Tom had rolled out of bed and pulled on pants and a T-shirt and sweater. He hadn't bothered to shave. Absently, he combed his hair with his fingers, as unconcerned with his own appearance as he was concerned with Hannah's.

She was pale and wan, her eyes fever-bright. He wondered when she had last eaten a meal or slept for more than an hour or two. Her golden hair was dull and she had swept it back into a careless ponytail. A bulky black cotton sweater disguised her thinness, but he could see the bones of her wrists and hands as she gripped them together in her lap, as delicate as ivory carvings, the skin almost translucent over them. He offered her his hand and she immediately took hold with both of hers.

“What do you mean, you saw him?” he asked carefully.

“Last night. It was like a dream, but not. Like a—a—vision. I know that sounds crazy,” she added hastily, “but that's what it was. It was so real, so three-dimensional. He was wearing pajamas I'd never seen before and he had a bandage—” She broke off, frustrated, impatient with herself. “I sound like a lunatic, but it happened and it was so
real
. You don't believe me, do you?”

“Of course I believe you, Hannah,” he whispered. “I don't know what to make of it, but I believe you saw something. What do you think it was?”

A vision. An out-of-body experience. A psychic something-or-other. No matter what she called it, it sounded like the desperate ravings of a desperate woman. “I don't know,” she said, sighing, shoulders slumping.

Father Tom measured his words carefully, knowing he was treading a fine line through sensitive territory. “You're under tremendous stress, Hannah. You want to see Josh more than you want to breathe. It wouldn't be unusual for you to dream about him, for the dream to seem real—”

“It wasn't a dream,” she said stubbornly.

“What does Paul think?”

“I didn't tell him.”

She pulled her hands back and rested them on her thighs, staring at the rings Paul had placed on her finger to symbolize their love and their union. Was she betraying him with her doubt? Had he betrayed them all? The questions twisted in her stomach like battling snakes, venomous, hideous, creatures over which she had no control. She turned her gaze to the soaring arched ceiling of the church, to the intricate and towering glass mosaic window of Jesus with a lamb in his arms. She stared at the ornately carved crucifix, Christ looking down at the high altar from his place on the cross. Empty, the church seemed a cavernous, cold place, and she felt small and powerless.

“The police asked him to give his fingerprints yesterday,” she murmured in the hushed tone of confession.

“I know.”

“They're not saying it, but they think he's involved.”

“What do you think?” Father Tom asked gently.

She was silent as the snakes wrestled inside her. “I don't know.”

She closed her eyes and let out a shuddering breath. “I shouldn't doubt him. He's my husband. He's the one person I should trust. I used to think we were the luckiest people on earth,” she murmured. “We used to love each other. Trust. Respect. We made a family. We had priorities. Now I wonder if any of that was real or was it just a passing moment. I feel like maybe our lives were set to run on the same plane for just that time and now we've gone in such different directions, we can't even communicate. And I feel so cheated and so stupid. And I don't know what to do.”

She sounded so lost. As capable and intelligent as she was, Hannah was ill-prepared to face this kind of catastrophe in her life. She had lived the kind of life most people dreamed of. She came from a loving family, had been given advantages, had achieved and excelled, married a handsome man and started a nice family. She had never developed the tools to deal with pain and adversity. To him now, she looked stunned and defenseless, and he caught himself cursing God for being so cruel.

“Oh, Hannah,” he murmured. He didn't try to stop himself from brushing a lock of hair back from her cheek. He was well-schooled in the art of compassion, but if he had ever held any wisdom, it deserted him with this woman. There was nothing he could offer her that was more than empty words . . . except himself.

She turned to him, put her head on his shoulder. Her tears soaked into his sweater. Her muffled words tore at him.

“I just don't understand! I'm trying so hard!”

To deal with something that should never have touched her life.

Tom folded his arms around her and held her protectively, tenderly. He looked around his empty church at the votives—small tongues of flame in cobalt glass, symbols of hope that flickered out and died unanswered. The fear that yawned inside him made him tighten his arms around Hannah, and Hannah's arms stole around him, her fingers curling into the soft wool of his sweater. He rubbed a hand up and down her back, up into the fine hair at the base of her skull. He breathed in the clean, sweet scent of her, and ached with a longing he had never known. A longing to connect with the kind of love men and women had shared since the dawn of time.

He didn't ask why. Why Hannah. Why now. The questions and recriminations could wait. The need could not. He held her tight, held his breath, prayed for time to stand still for just a moment, because he knew this couldn't last. He brushed a kiss to her temple, and tasted her tears, salty and warm.

“Sinners!”

The charge came like thunder from heaven. But the bellow was not from God; it was from Albert Fletcher. The deacon descended on them from behind the screen that hid the door to the sacristy. He flew down the steps, a wraith in black, his eyes wild, his mouth tearing open, a large stoneware bowl in his hands. At the same time, the doors of the narthex at the back of the church were pulled open. The morning faithful wandered in to be struck dumb by the bizarre tableau in front of them.

Father Tom surged to his feet. Hannah twisted around to face Fletcher. He bore down on her, a madman shrieking like something from a nightmare.

“Sinners burn!” he screamed as he flung the contents of the bowl.

The holy water hit Hannah like a wall and splashed Father Tom. An elderly woman at the back of the church let out a shriek.

“Albert!” Tom yelled.

“The wages of sin is death!”

He was beyond hearing, certainly beyond listening to anything Father Tom had to say.

“Wicked daughter of Eve!”

Fletcher hurled the stoneware bowl at Hannah. She screamed, trying to dive out of the way and ward off the blow at the same time. Tom lunged in front of her, grunting as the missile glanced off his right hip. It clattered down onto the seat of the pew in front of him and bounced onto the floor, shattering with a loud
crack!
Ignoring the pain, Tom launched himself into the aisle, grabbing for Fletcher. The deacon jumped back, just out of reach.

“The wages of sin is death!” he screamed again, backing up the steps toward the altar.

“Albert, stop it!” Tom demanded, moving toward him aggressively. “Listen to me! You're out of control. You don't know what you're doing. You don't know what you saw. Now, calm down and we'll discuss it.”

Fletcher moved continually backward, up another step, onto the level of the altar. His narrowed eyes never left Father Tom.

“‘Beware of false prophets who come in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves,' ” he quoted in a low monotone. He backed into the altar, his hands behind him, fingers searching. His face was waxy white and filmed with sweat, the muscles drawn against the bone as tight as a drumhead, twitching spasmodically.

Father Tom eased up onto the last step, reaching out slowly. Should he have seen this coming? Should he have done something sooner to prevent it? He had always thought of Albert Fletcher as obsessive, not insane. There were worse obsessions than God. But madness was madness. He reached out with the intention of pulling his parishioner back across that line.

“You don't understand, Albert,” he said quietly. “Come with me and give me a chance to explain.”

“False prophet! Son of Satan!” He swung his arm and caught Father Tom hard in the side of the head with the heavy base end of a fat brass candlestick.

Stunned, Tom fell to his knees on the steps and couldn't stop himself from veering backward, sideways, down. He had no control of arms or legs. What senses hadn't been knocked out entirely were a hopeless jumble in his pounding head. He tried to speak but couldn't, tried to point as people rushed up to surround him, gaping at him in astonishment. Albert Fletcher fled out a side door.

CHAPTER 32

D
AY
10
8:14
A.M.
         -19°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -38°

L
onnie, Pat, check the garage. Noogie, you're with me; we'll take the house.”

They stood beside a pair of squad cars in front of Albert Fletcher's house, the cold pressing in on them, penetrating the layers of Thinsulate and Thermax and goose down and wool as if they were gossamer chiffon. None of the neighbors seemed curious enough about the presence of police to step outside into the cold. Mitch caught the flick of a drape in the rambler across the street. A wrinkled face peered out at them from the window of the Cape Cod next door to Fletcher's house.

“Don't look like he's home,” Dietz said, rubbing his gloved hands against each other. The black fake-fur hat perched on his head looked like some synthetic creature trying to mate with his wig.

“He just assaulted a priest,” Mitch drawled. “I don't think he'd be inclined to roll out the welcome mat.”

Assault with what intent? he wondered. With what motive? Father Tom had explained as much as he could in the Deer Lake Community Hospital ER while Dr. Lomax poked at the gash in the side of his head and made grave doctor faces. Fletcher had seen him with his arms around Hannah and misunderstood the embrace.

An innocent hug hardly seemed enough to catapult a man over the edge of sanity.

Mitch had looked to Hannah for confirmation as she paced the width of the small white room. She was shaking—with cold or with shock or both. Shaking hard.

“I don't know what he was thinking,” she muttered, eyes downcast. “The whole world has gone insane.”

Amen, Mitch thought as he started up the walk to Fletcher's front door. Noogie went around to the back in case Fletcher was home and would try to make a break for it. Wherever the deacon had gone, he had gone on foot. His Toyota sat in the parking lot beside St. E's.

Mitch had assigned half a dozen officers to search the neighborhood on foot and in cruisers. Every other cop in town and the county was on the lookout. He doubted Fletcher had come home, but that might depend on just how far Albert had gone off the deep end. In any event, they had a search warrant. If they didn't get Fletcher, they would at least get a look around.

He pulled open the storm door and knocked hard on the inner door.

“Mr. Fletcher?” he called. “Police! We have a search warrant!”

He waited a slow ten count. Megan would have his hide for doing this without her, but she hadn't been in her office when the call came in, and he couldn't wait. He raised the two-way radio and buzzed Noga.

“Do your thing, Noogie.”

“Ten-four, Chief.”

Mitch figured he was too damn old to be busting exterior doors in with any part of his anatomy. They had a battering ram in the trunk of Dietz's cruiser, but they had something bigger and better in Noga. After the demise of his college football career due to a bum knee, Noga was always happy to crash into something or someone.

The sharp
crack!
of splintering wood cut through the crisp morning air. Seconds later, Noga pulled the front door open from the inside. “Whatever you're selling, I don't want any.”

Mitch stepped into the small foyer. “Really? I'm running a two-for-one special on excessive force this month. Anyone giving me shit gets his ass busted twice.”

Noga's thick eyebrows reared up like a pair of woolly caterpillars. He stepped back into the living room, waving Mitch inside. “You want the upstairs or the downstairs?”

“Up. Be sure to check the basement.”

Mitch took the stairs slowly, knowing he was vulnerable if Fletcher was perched up there waiting for him with a candlestick or an Uzi. There was no predicting what Fletcher might feel driven to do. There was no telling what he might already have done. He may have lost his marbles years ago, but managed to keep a lid on his madness until now. Until he had seen Hannah in the arms of his priest.

The wages of sin is death. Wicked daughter of Eve.

Had he hated her all this time for interfering with his wife's treatment, for trying to cure the illness that had eventually killed Doris Fletcher? Had he killed Doris himself?

“Mr. Fletcher? Police! We have a search warrant!”

There was an arrest warrant as well, though Mitch doubted Father Tom would press charges. It gave them access to him for the time being. The fact that Fletcher had run off with the weapon had been enough for Judge Witt to issue the search warrant.

A floorboard creaked a protest as Mitch stepped up into the narrow hall. A window straight ahead let in butter-yellow morning light through a double layer of sheer white curtains that obscured the view to and from the street. On either side of the hall, matching white six-panel doors led into what would be architecturally matching bedrooms.

He tried the door on the left first, letting himself into the room cautiously, but the room was vacant in more ways than one. It had been stripped of whatever life it might have held when Doris Fletcher was alive. Mitch felt instinctively the stark monastic quality of the furnishing and decoration was post-wife. The bed was a narrow bunk covered with an army surplus wool blanket made up so tight, he could have bounced dimes off it. The nightstand held a lamp and a worn black Bible. The only other piece of furniture was a chest of drawers, the top bare of the usual personal debris. The only decorations on the stark white walls were a crucifix and a sepia-toned print of Jesus festooned with old palm fronds.

The room across the hall was locked, a situation that was dealt with with the bottom of Mitch's boot. The door swung back on its hinges, banging against the wall. Downstairs, Noogie responded to the sound with a shout, but Mitch was too stunned to answer him.

Blackout shades blocked all light and all vision from the outside world, but the room was aglow with the flames of candles, their waxy scent thick in the air. A single row of sconces lined the walls, the shadows of their flames dancing. Candles in glass holders—some clear, some red, some blue—sat in clusters on side tables. Their light was sufficient to show the room for what it was—Albert Fletcher's personal chapel.

The walls of the room were painted the same shade of slate as the walls of St. E's, and someone had gone to great pains to imitate the intricate stencil patterns that adorned the church. Even the ceiling was painted to simulate the arches and frescoes. Crude renderings of angels and saints looked down from gray clouds, their faces weirdly distorted, grotesque.

At one end of the room stood an altar draped with a white brocade antependium and rich lace runners. On it were arranged all the accoutrements of a Catholic Mass—the thick cloth-bound missal, the golden chalice, a pair of candelabra mounted with more fat white candles. On the wall above the altar hung a huge old crucifix with a painted effigy of Christ as gaunt as a greyhound, dying in agony, blood running from the gory wounds in his hands and the gash in his side.

Artifacts.
The word struck Mitch as he took it all in. These were not homemade imitations, they were the genuine articles. He could envision Albert Fletcher sneaking them up here from the basement of the St. Elysius rectory in the dark of night; cleaning them, his long, bony fingers stroking over them lovingly as he stared at them with the light of fanaticism in his eyes. The candlesticks, the crucifixes, the plaques of the stations of the cross, the statuary.

Perched on mismatched pedestals around the perimeter of the room were old statues of the Holy Mother and various saints whose names he could only guess at. Their sightless eyes stared out from faces that were chipped and cracked. Their human hair was ratty and thin, looking chewed off in places and plucked out in others. They stared over a congregation that was equally unanimated—four small pews of mannequins.

Mitch's skin crawled as he looked at them. Heads and torsos, some with arms, some without. None with legs. The males were dressed in shirts and ties and old castoff suit coats. The females were swaddled in black cloth, sheer black draped over their heads. They all sat at perpetual attention, staring blankly at the altar, the light from the candles flickering over their plastic faces.

And to the side of the altar stood yet another of their silent rank. The mannequin of a boy dressed in a black cassock and dingy white surplice. An altar boy.

A rumble of thunder announced Noogie's ascent up the stairs. He pounded down the hall and came to a dead stop in the doorway of the room, his service revolver pointed at the ceiling.

“Holy sh—shoot.” He stared, wide-eyed, his jaw hanging halfway to his chest. “Man,” he whispered. “I've never seen anything like this. This is creepy.”

“Did you find anything downstairs?” Mitch asked as he bent and ran a hand over the well-worn velvet padded kneeler before the altar.

“Nothing.” Noga remained in the doorway, his gaze skating nervously over the faces of the mannequins.

Mitch rose. “It's not a real church, Noogie. You don't have to whisper.”

The big officer's gaze fixed on the statue of the Virgin Mary with half its face missing. He swallowed hard and a shudder rippled down him. “It's weird,” he said, his tone still hushed. “Downstairs it's like no one lives here. I mean, there's no stuff—no newspapers lying around, no mail, no knickknacks, no pictures on the wall, no mirrors.” His eyes went wide again. “You know, vampires don't keep mirrors.”

“I don't think he's a vampire, Noogie,” Mitch said, opening the closet door at the back of the chapel. “Crosses ward them off.”

“Oh, yeah.”

In the closet hung a row of priest's vestments, old and frayed but clean and pressed. Some were still in the plastic bags from Mueller's Dry Cleaning in Tatonka. Black cassocks and red ones, white surplices and mantles in royal purple and cardinal red and rich ivory with elaborate embroidery.

“Mitch!” Lonnie Dietz hollered below. “Mitch!”

“Up here!” Mitch bellowed.

The run up the stairs winded Dietz. His face was ashen, setting off the bright red of his nose. His hat had tumbled off and his wig was askew, looking like a small, frightened animal clinging to his head. He stopped on the landing as Mitch wedged himself past Noogie into the hall.

“I think you better come out here,” Dietz said. “We think we just found Mrs. Fletcher.”

P
at Stevens lifted the dust cover on the mummified remains of Doris Fletcher sitting behind the wheel of her 1982 Chevy Caprice. She was dressed in an old cotton house shift that had rotted away in places where fluids had leaked from the body during one phase of decomposition. Mitch had no idea what she had looked like in life, whether she had been thin or heavy, pretty or homely. In death she looked like something that had been freeze-dried until all fluid evaporated and the tissue and skin shrunk down tight against bone like leather—which was precisely what had happened. Hideous didn't begin to describe her sitting there shriveled inside her dress.

That she had died in the winter had saved her from being ravaged by insects and rot. By the time warm weather had arrived, she had already been partially petrified. Timing had also prevented the neighbors from detecting her fate with their noses. Had Albert Fletcher locked his wife's dead body in a Chevy Caprice in July in Minnesota, he would not have been able to keep the secret three days, let alone three years. But Doris Fletcher had been obliging in death, if not in life.

“How do you suppose he got her here?” Lonnie pondered nervously as he paced back and forth alongside the car. Noogie stood back against the wall of the garage, mouth hanging open in a trance, his winter-white breath the only indication he had survived the shock.

“Religious nut like him, why wouldn't he give her a decent Christian burial?” Pat Stevens asked.

“Apparently, he didn't believe she deserved one,” Mitch said.

He read the note pinned to the front of Doris Fletcher's dress.

Wicked daughter of Eve: Be sure
your sin will find you out.

9:41
A.M.
         -19°         
WINDCHILL FACTOR
: -38°

T
he press buzzards, circling town with their ears tuned to their police scanners, picked up the radio calls and made it to Albert Fletcher's house ahead of the coroner. They clustered in the driveway, moving like a school of fish—drifting in unison, then scattering as their ranks were broken by cops, quickly drawing back into their group.

Mitch swore at them under his breath as he tried to direct his men and the BCA evidence techs between the garage and the house. The photographers and video people were the worst, trying to blend in with the official personnel in order to sneak shots of the body and the chapel.

The scene was trouble enough without gawkers. A three-year-old mummified corpse presented a whole array of logistical problems. The BCA people argued among themselves as to how to handle the situation. Noticeably absent from the discussion was Megan.

Mitch couldn't believe she hadn't beaten a path to the scene the second the call had gone out. She should have been right there in the thick of it as the crime scene unit took Fletcher's house apart board by board; taking notes, making a mental picture, processing the information through her cop's brain to formulate fresh theories.

He turned away from the bickering agents and headed for the side door of the garage. He jerked the door open and nearly ran head-on into a puppy-faced reporter with bright eyes and a stupid-looking grin on his face.

“You'll have to wait outside,” Mitch snarled. “Law enforcement personnel only in here.”

“Chief Holt!” The grin stretched wider and he offered Mitch his gloved hand. “I've had a call in to you since nine
o'clock. That secretary of yours is a real guard dog.”

“Natalie is my administrative assistant,” Mitch said coldly, ignoring the proffered hand. “She runs my office, and if she hears you call her a guard dog, she'll rip your head off and shout down the hole. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.”