Perfect Match (28 page)

“See, S-E-E. It's the governing diocese hereabouts in Maine, of course.” She li fts her face to Patrick's. “They're the ones who sent the priests to us in the first place.”

Midnight, in a graveyard, with an unearthed casket-Patrick can think of a th ousand places he'd rather be. But he stands beside the two sweating men who have hauled the coffin from the ground and set it beside Father Szyszynski's resting place, like an altar in the moonlight. He has promised to be Nina's eyes, Nina's legs. And if necessary, Nina's hands.

They are all wearing Hazmat suits-Patrick and Evan Chao, Fisher Carrington and Quentin Brown, Frankie Martine, and the medical examiner, Vern Potter . In the black circle beyond their flashlights, an owl screams. Vern jumps a foot. “Holy sweet Jesus. Any minute now I keep expecting the zombies to get up from behind the tombstones. Couldn't we have done this in broad daylight?”

“I'll take zombies over the press any day,” Evan Chao mutters. “Get it over with, Vern.”

“Hokey-dokey.” The medical examiner takes a crowbar and pries open Father S zyszynski's casket. The foul air that puffs from its insides has Patrick ga gging. Fisher Carrington turns away and holds a handkerchief to his face ma sk. Quentin walks off briskly to vomit behind a tree.

The priest does not look all that different. Half of his face is still missin g. His arms lie at his sides. His skin, gray and wrinkled, has not yet decomp osed. “Open wide,” Vern murmurs, and he ratchets down the jaw, reaches inside , and pulls out a molar with a pair of tooth pliers.

“Get me a couple wisdom teeth, too,” Frankie says. “And hair.” Evan nods to Patrick, calling him aside. “You believe this?” he asks.

“Nope.”

“Maybe the bastard's just getting what he deserves.” Patrick is stunned for a moment, until he remembers: There is no reason to believe Evan would know what Patrick knows-that Father Szyszynski was innocent. “Maybe,” he manages.

A few minutes later, Vern hands a jar and an envelope to Frankie. Quentin h urries away with her, Fisher close behind. The ME closes the casket and tur ns to the grave diggers. “You can put him back now,” he instructs, then tur ns to Patrick. “On your way out?”

“In a sec.” Patrick watches Vern go, then turns to the grave, where the two big men have dropped the coffin again and are starting to shovel dirt over i t again. He waits until they are finished, because he thinks someone should. By the time Patrick gets to the Biddeford District Court, he wonders whethe r Father Arthur Gwynne ever existed at all. He's driven from the graveyard, where the body was being exhumed, to the Catholic See in Portland . . . wh ere he was told by the chancellor that their records only showed Father O'T oole coming to visit Biddeford. If Father Gwynne was at the church too, it might have been a personal connection to the Biddeford chaplain that brough t him there. Which, of course, is exactly what Patrick needs to confirm. The probate clerk hands him a copy of the priest's Last Will and Testament, which became a public record a month ago, when it was filed with the court. The document is simple to a fault. Father Szyszynski left fifty percent of h is estate to his mother. And the rest to the executor of his will: Arthur Gw ynne, of Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

Enamel is the strongest material naturally found in the human body, which ma kes it a bitch to crack open. To this end, Frankie soaks the extracted molar in liquid nitrogen for about five minutes, because frozen, it is more likel y to shatter. “Hey, Quentin,” she says, grinning at the attorney, waiting im patiently. “Can you break a dollar?” He fishes in his pockets, but shakes hi s head. “Sorry.” “No problem.” She takes a buck from her wallet and floats i t in the liquid nitrogen, then pulls it out, smashes it on the counter, and laughs. “I ca n.”

He sighs. “Is this why it takes so long to get results from the state lab?”

“Hey, I'm letting you cut in line, aren't I?” Frankie removes the tooth from it s bath and sets it in a sterile mortar and pestle. She grinds at it, pounding h arder and harder, but the tooth will not crack.

“Mortar and pestle?” Quentin asks.

“We used to use the ME's skull saw, but we had to get a new blade every tim e. Plus, the cutting edge gets too hot, and denatures the DNA.” She glances at him over her protective goggles. “You don't want me to screw up, do you ?“ Another whack, but the tooth remains intact. ”Oh, for God's sake.“ Frank ie plucks a second tooth out of the liquid nitrogen. ”Come with me. I want to get this over with.”

She double-bags the tooth in Ziplocs and leads Quentin to the stairwell, all the way to the basement garage of the laboratory. “Stand back,” she says, and then squats, setting the bag on the floor. Taking a hammer out of the pocket of her lab coat, Frankie begins to pound, her own jaw aching in sympathy. Th e tooth shatters on the fourth try, its pieces splintering into the plastic b ag.

“Now what?” Quentin asks.

The pulp is brownish, slight . . . but most definitely there. “Now,” she says,

“you wait.”

Quentin, who is unused to staying up in graveyards all night and then drivin g to the lab in Augusta, falls asleep on a bank of chairs in the lobby. When he feels a cool hand on the back of his neck, he startles awake, sitting up so quickly he is momentarily dizzy. Frankie stands before him, holding out a report. “And?” he asks.

“The tooth pulp was chimeric.”

“English?”

Frankie sits down beside him. “The reason we test tooth pulp is because it ha s blood cells in it ... but also tissue cells. For you and me and most people , the DNA in both of those cells will be the same. But if someone gets a bone marrow transplant, they're going to show a mixture of two DNA profiles in th eir tooth pulp. The first profile will be the DNA they were born with, and th at'll be in the tissue cells. The second profile will be the DNA that came from their marrow donor, and will be in the blood cells. In this sample, the suspect's tooth pulp yielded a mixture.“ Quentin frowns at the numbers on the page. ”So-“ ”So here's your proof,“ Frankie says. ”S omebody else perved that kid.”

After Fisher calls me with the news, I go right into the bathroom and thro w up. Again, and again, until there is nothing left in my stomach but the guilt. The truth is, a man was killed by my own hand, a man who deserved n o punishment. What does this make me?

I want to shower until I don't feel dirty; I want to strip off my own skin. But the horror is at the heart of me. Cut a gut feeling, watch yourself bleed to d eath.

Like I watched him.

In the hallway, I brush past Caleb, who has not been speaking to me anyway. There are no more words between us, each one has a charge on it, an ion th at might attach to either him or to me and push us farther apart. In my bed room, I kick off my shoes and crawl fully dressed under the covers. I pull them up over my head; breathe in the same cocoon. If you pass out, and ther e's still no air, what will happen?

I can't get warm. This is where I will stay, because now any of my decisions may be suspect. Better to do nothing at all, than to take another risk that m ight change the world.

It's an instinct, Patrick realizes-to want to hurt someone as badly as they'v e hurt you. There were moments in his career in the military police that his arrests became violent, blood running over his hands that felt like a balm at the time. Now, he understands that the theory can go one step further: It's an instinct to want to hurt someone as badly as they've hurt someone you care about. This is the only explanation he can offer for sitting on a 757 en rou te from Dallas-Fort Worth to New Orleans.

The question isn't what he would do for Nina. “Anything,” Patrick would ans wer, without hesitation. She had expressly warned him away from hunting dow n Arthur Gwynne, and all of Patrick's actions up to this point could be cla ssified as information-seeking, but even he could not couch the truth, now: He had no reason to fly to Louisiana, if not to meet this man face-to-face .

Even now, he cannot tell himself what is going to happen. He has spent his life guided by principle and rules-in the Navy, as a cop, as an unrequited lover. But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when s omeone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? What's stronger -the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

It has been shattering for Patrick to realize that the criminal mind is not all that far away from that of a rational man. It comes down, really, to the power of a craving. Addicts will sell their own bodies for another gram of coke. Arsonists will put their own lives in danger to feel something go up i n flames around them. Patrick has always believed, as an officer of the law, he is above this driving need. But what if your obsession has nothing to do with drugs or thrills or money? What if what you want most in the world is to recapture the way life was a week, a month, a year ago-and you are willin g to do whatever it takes?

This was Nina's error; she wrongly equated stopping time with turning it backward. And he couldn't even blame her, because he'd made the same mist ake, every time he was in her company.

The question Patrick knew he should be asking was not what he would do for Nina . . . but what he wouldn't.

The flight attendant pushes the beverage cart like a baby carriage, braking beside Patrick's row. “What can I get for you?” she asks. Her smile remind s him of Nathaniel's Halloween mask from last year.

“Tomato juice. No ice.”

The man sitting beside Patrick folds his newspaper. “Tomato juice and vodka ,“ he says, grinning through his thick Texan drawl. ”Yes, ice.“ They both take a sip of their drinks as the flight attendant moves on. The man glances down at his newspaper and shakes his head. ”Ought to fry the su mbitch,” he mutters.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, it's this murder case. Y'all must have heard about it ... there's some fool who wants an eleventh hour pardon from death row because she's found Je sus. Truth is, the governor's afraid to give her the cocktail because she's a woman.”

Patrick has always been in favor of capital punishment. But he hears himsel f say, “Seems reasonable.”

“Guess you're one of those Yankee left-wingers,” the man scoffs. “Me, I thi nk it don't matter if you've got a pecker or not. You shoot someone in the back of the head at a convenience store, you pay the price. You know?” He s hrugs, then finishes his drink. “You flying out on business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

“Me, too. I'm in sales. Hav-A-Heart traps,” he confides, as if this is privileg ed information.

“I'm a lawyer with the ACLU,” Patrick lies. “I'm flying down to plead that woman's case to the governor.”

The salesman goes red in the face. “Well. I didn't mean no disrespect-”

“Like hell you didn't.”

He folds his newspaper again, and stuffs it into the seat pocket in front of h im. “Even you bleeding hearts can't save them all.”

“One,” Patrick answers. “That's all I'm hoping for.” There is a woman wearing my clothes and my skin and my smell but it isn't m e. Sin is like ink, it bleeds into a person, coloring, making you someone o ther than you used to be. And it's indelible. Try as much as you want, you cannot get yourself back.

Words can't pull me back from the edge. Neither can daylight. This isn't some thing to get over, it is an atmosphere I need to learn to breathe. Grow gills for transgression, take it into my lungs with every gasp.

It is a startling thing. I wonder who this person is, going through the motion s of my life. I want to take her hand.

And then I want to push her, hard, off a cliff.

Patrick finds himself peeling off layers of clothing as he walks through th e streets of Belle Chasse, Louisiana, past wrought-iron gates and ivy-trell ised courtyards. Christmas looks wrong in this climate; the decorations see m to be sweating in the humid heat. He wonders how a Louisiana boy like Gle n Szyszynski ever survived so far north.

But he already knows the answer. Growing up among Cajuns and the Creoles was n't all that far a stretch from tending to the Acadians in his parish. The p roof of that rests in his breast pocket, public records copied by a clerk at the Louisiana Vital Records Registry in New Orleans. Arthu r Gwynne, born 10/23/43 to Cecilia Marquette Gwynne and her husband, Ale xander Gwynne. Four years later, the marriage of Cecelia Marquette Gwynn e, widowed, to Teodor Szyszynski. And in 1951, the birth of Glen. Half-brothers.

Szyszynski's will was last revised in 1994; it is entirely possible that Art hur Gwynne is no longer a member of the Belle Chasse community. But it is a starting point. Priests don't go unnoticed in a predominantly Catholic town; if Gwynne had any contact at all with his neighbors, Patrick knows he can p ick up a paper trail and track his whereabouts from there. To this end, ther e is another clue in his pocket, one ripped from the rear of a phone book. C hurches. The largest one is Our Lady of Mercy.

He doesn't let himself think what he will do with the information, once he get s it.

Patrick turns the corner, and the cathedral comes into view. He jogs up the stone steps and enters the nave. Immediately in front of him is a pool of Ho ly Water. Flickering candles cast waves on the walls, and the reflection fro m a stained-glass window bleeds a brilliant puddle on the mosaic floor. Abov e the altar, a cypress carving of Jesus on the cross looms like an omen. It smells of Catholicism: beeswax and starch and darkness and peace, all of which bring Patrick back to his youth. He finds himself unconsciously making the sign of the cross as he slides into a pew at the rear of the building. Four women nod their heads in prayer, their faith settling softly around them , like the skirts of Confederate belles. Another sobs quietly into her hands while a priest comforts her in whispers. Patrick waits patiently, running his hands along the bright, polished wood and whistling under his breath. Suddenly the hair stands up on the back of his neck. Walking along the lip of the pew behind him is a cat. Its tail strokes Patrick on the nape again, and he lets out his breath in a rush. “You scared the hell out of me,” he murmur s, and then glances at the carving of Jesus. “The heck,” he amends. The cat blinks at him, then leaps with grace into the arms of the priest who has come up beside Patrick. “You know better,” the priest scolds. It takes Patrick a moment to realize the cleric is speaking to his kitten. “E xcuse me. I'm trying to locate a Father Arthur Gwynne.”