Ten Plagues (35 page)

Paul was unable to come up with a logical response. Finally he said, “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight if I think you’re in danger. You don’t want to be responsible for me lying awake, do you?”

Rosita laughed out loud. “Good one, Pastor P. I’ll use that the next time I’m telling you not to go jogging in the neighborhood.” In an artificially nervous voice she said, “But Pastor P, I’m losing sleep with worry over you.”

“Rosie,” Paul growled in warning.

“I won’t budge from the hospital,” she promised. “I’m probably safer here, away from the mission.”

“You may be right.” Paul sighed. “Promise me you’ll keep the necklace on I gave you. And don’t head over here alone in the morning. We’ll manage breakfast. I really do want you to be safe, Rosie.”

“I promise.” Then she added, “Speaking of safe, it sounds like you survived the angry lady cop this morning. I knew you could talk your way out of it. Or did she put the bruises somewhere no one can see?”

“Good night, Rosita!”

He was listening to her infectious giggle when he hung up on her.

Paul spent awhile going from table to table pouring coffee. He spoke to everyone, called them by name, asked about their lives. He was particularly careful to speak to the women, reminding them of Wilma’s death and the danger they faced on the streets. He urged them all to sleep in the mission that night. They ignored his warnings.

O’Shea had said another woman was taken. Paul couldn’t pinpoint anyone who was missing—or rather, he noticed several regulars gone and guessed that most of them had just found food elsewhere and slept in their alleys. As he talked to these people who dwelled in so lowly a place in this world, he was more aware than ever of the way they looked and smelled and the terrible waste of their potential.

He had loved trying to reach them, and now he didn’t know why he bothered. His apathy frightened him. If he lost his zeal for the Lighthouse and couldn’t reconcile his Christianity with life as a cop, where did that leave him? Paul didn’t know who he was or what he was supposed to do with his life. He kept talking and serving and wondering how to restore his love for his calling.

After everyone had cleared out for the night, Paul went upstairs. He stood in front of his door, dreading the thought of re-entering his apartment for the first time since they’d found Melody Fredericks. The police had given him the green light to use the place again. After a long struggle, he forced himself to go in. He was met by a much-reduced swarm of gnats.

Moving quickly, he showered then found a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. He looked around his shabby little apartment. The Chicago summer had made the un-air-conditioned space stifling. The smell of death lingered. “How have I been able to stand living here for the last five years?”

Several gnats tickled his face. As he watched them lazily circle, he could feel the gnats he’d inhaled the morning he’d found Melody. He could taste the ones he’d swallowed.

He couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping here. “I could go to the shelter,” he said to the empty room, but he knew he couldn’t do it. Not tonight. He went to his bedroom, picked up the top mattress from his twin bed, and carried it—sheets, blankets, and all—out of his apartment and into his business office across the hall. He tossed it on the floor and dropped down on it.

The office was simply another converted apartment. A dim streetlight cast a shadowy light through the window. He lay there and stared sightlessly at the ceiling in the dark room. He couldn’t relax and he finally figured out why. He hadn’t locked the door. The office, with its old computer and its petty cash, was one of the few doors that was routinely locked.

“The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.” “To live is Christ and to die is gain.”
He waited for God’s peace to settle on him.
“If God is for us, who can be against. “

He believed it. He believed wholeheartedly in God. But he still had to admit defeat and get up and throw the dead bolt. While he was up he doubled-checked the windows. Then he touched his cell phone and the spare Keren had left.

He said to the empty room, “Where are you, Pravus?”

The silence of the room mocked him.

In despair, he whispered, “Who are you killing tonight?”

P
ravus closed his father’s special Bible, the slim one still written in the ancient Latin. Pravus couldn’t read the words, but his father had told him what it said. He remembered everything.

He went to the woman, taped securely to the high table. Pravus looked at the gown hanging beside her. Eamus meus natio meare. Pestis ex ulcus.

Then he looked at her.

Boils.

He’d used burns. It was close enough. The reverend said he was like the magicians copying Moses’ tricks. He’d used that cold, hard policeman voice, and Pravus nearly choked on hate.

Pravus wanted fear.

The reverend had become less afraid in the last few days. The beast whispered that it was because Pravus had abandoned his path of choosing victims to maximize the reverend’s pain.

He’d have to fix that. He’d gotten so involved with the pleasure of the kill and the hunger for more, he’d forgotten his search for freedom for his people.

Pravus waited for full dark, then he left his plague of boils to be found later. It was getting more difficult to dump the bodies.

The police were out in force in the area around the mission. The park was staked out around the clock. He knew from police questioning that the car had been identified, and unless it was an emergency, he kept it out of sight in the underground parking lot beneath a condemned building.

Everyone was watchful. Pravus thrilled at the challenge.

When he had relieved himself of the burden, he wandered about with his typical aimless stroll, walking like he was a weakling, which covered the corded strength he’d gained by hours of exercise. He needed the strength to carry his victims so he could present the plagues to the reverend.

He went into his building determined to change and emerge a new man. Clean and well dressed. The beard that so completely changed the shape of his face, unglued and left behind.

It didn’t happen, though. He couldn’t shave. His hand shook too badly. And the beast pushed him, prodded, prowled, and gnawed.

He needed a new cell phone. But he didn’t have the patience to follow an older couple or search a car in a parking lot or an unlocked garage.

Instead he went to a store and bought one of those phones you could buy minutes with. There was no record of who bought those—the number wasn’t connected to his name, since he paid cash. Untraceable, Pravus was sure.

When he had it ready, he had a few more things to do, then he’d get back to his true purpose—his need to punish the reverend.

“So what’s the deal with you and the preacher?” O’Shea settled his ample backside in his desk chair and talked around a mouthful of meatball sub.

Keren kept her head down by sheer force of will. She was seeing double from hours of going over Caldwell’s phone records—the phone records of the six cell phones he’d stolen so far—his bank records before he cleaned out his accounts, and the videos taken of the crowds at the park. She knew the exact time she’d felt the demon there and she checked her time against the videos. But all the suspects were there and they all walked away together right at that time. It made her even more certain it was one of them, but there was no way to eliminate anybody.

The task force had met again. They’d traced the car to Murray … who had reported it stolen. Fingerprints of three of the men—the ones they could catch up with—had turned up nothing interesting. Dyson had come up with a new profile, but the man seemed real cranky about the generalizations. They’d heard every detail of what Higgins had found about Francis Caldwell’s childhood. Which wasn’t much. His parents were both deceased. Nothing about either death had raised red flags at the time, but now Keren had to wonder.

She made herself very busy fussing with a stain on the report in front of her. It needed to be cleaned up immediately.

She rose from her seat. “I’d better get a damp cloth. We don’t—”

“Sit,” O’Shea barked.

Keren didn’t sit. “You don’t give me orders, Mick.” They’d received a sketchy report that couldn’t be confirmed of a homeless woman, known on the street as Lupe, being snatched. Paul hadn’t been in. There was no report of a phone call. No threat to blow something up. Keren missed talking the case over with him, but she couldn’t stand dragging him back into the investigation.

“Sure I do.” O’Shea smirked. “I’m senior officer around here, and you’re just a little baby girl cop.”

The waiting was driving her crazy. She didn’t need to look up and see double of O’Shea. And she sure wasn’t going to answer his snoopy questions.

Keren resisted the urge to slug him. O’Shea was trying to distract her with his obnoxiousness so she’d quit watching her mouth. “You’re not senior when it comes to asking me questions like that.”

O’Shea took another huge bite of his sandwich and chewed. Way before all the food was swallowed, he asked, “You know what I think?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” Keren enjoyed the tiny flash of caution in O’Shea’s eyes. He’d heard that sweet tone before. He knew his potential for becoming a victim of assault and battery was high and increasing by the moment.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite scared enough. “I think you’re hot for each other.”

“Mick!”

“What?”

“Don’t talk like that. Hot? He’s a man of the cloth for heaven’s sake! And what about me? You know I don’t … I mean no man’s gonna … I mean … oh,
you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” O’Shea held up both hands to defend himself, one clutching the half-eaten sandwich. “Okay, pick another word.”

“Well, I’d say we’re …” Keren caught herself. She’d spent plenty of time with O’Shea in the interrogation room, and she knew how good he was. He could make people admit to crimes they’d just thought about committing. Sometimes the lawyers, who were sitting in on the questioning, broke down and confessed to crimes they’d committed, unrelated to the case at hand. He didn’t usually use his talents on her, though.

She switched to attack mode just to even the playing field. “What’za matter, Mick, your pathetic life so boring you have to entertain yourself by making stuff up about me?”

O’Shea nodded, studying her like she was a menu at Burger King. “Good girl, I almost got you, but you recovered. So …” He returned to his sandwich and the beginning. “What’s the deal with you and the preacher?”

Keren rolled her eyes. She decided the statute of limitations was up on O’Shea’s order to sit, so she plopped back into her chair. “There’s no deal.”

“C’mon, honey, give. This is your old buddy Mick talking. I’ve seen the way you look at each other when you think no one is watching.”

“How does he look at me?” Keren caught herself again. Man, he was good. “I mean, not that you’re right, but tell me, just so I know what you’re imagining.”

O’Shea laughed.

Keren’s cheeks heated up.

O’Shea had, in many ways, stepped in and become a father to her since her own parents had started going to Fort Lauderdale for the winter and traveling extensively in a Winnebago year-round—except she’d have never talked so rudely to her father.

“Is there any chance you might choke to death on a meatball?”

“You don’t have that kind of luck.”

Finally, just to shut him up, she said, “Have you noticed that the preacher man is turning back into a cop?”

“Yeah, and it’s driving him nuts.” O’Shea nodded. “He falls into the lingo, changes his tone of voice and the way he holds himself. His whole attitude changes. Then he freezes up when he says something particularly cold blooded, and I can see the guilt. The poor guy’s struggling.”

“He asked me for a gun the night LaToya was dumped.”

“That was enough to make anyone fighting mad,” O’Shea said grimly.

“He asked for the gun in the heat of the moment, and he regretted it afterward,” Keren continued. “Then, only days later, when we went into Caldwell’s apartment building, he asked again. And this time he meant it. It wouldn’t surprise me if he shows up with a piece at the next dump site.”

“Does he have a license?” O’Shea, ever the cop, asked.

Keren shrugged. “They usually let former cops have one. I don’t know about concealed carry. That’s a little tougher.”

“They’d give him one,” O’Shea said with certainty. “Wanting to blow someone away has gotta be tearing him up inside. The day we first met him, in the hospital, I got the idea he was kind of meek. Strong in his convictions, but no dynamo, if you get what I mean.”

“Well, you were wrong—as usual.” Keren waited for O’Shea to turn red. He obliged her, then she laughed in his face. “He’s a tough cookie, even in preacher mode. But now he’s losing it. He’s a decent guy who left the hassles of law enforcement behind, and now it’s like he’s being taken over by it.”