The Chill of Night (24 page)

‘With references to the Book of Amos?’

‘Yes. Though that wasn’t the focus.’

‘But you don’t remember that line?’

‘Not specifically, but Amos was all about smiting sinners, so it sounds appropriate.’

‘Interesting.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Are you still interested in biblical scholarship?’

‘I suppose so. It’s what I got my doctorate in. What I taught at the college level before deciding to put my money where my mouth is and start this place. I still do some reading – and writing. When I have time. Which is not often.’

‘Who knows about your paper on the prophetic tradition?’

Kelly heaved a sigh. ‘Y’know, this is getting old. I have no idea. I suppose my thesis adviser might remember it. Maybe my roommate at the time. Why on earth are you questioning me about quotes from Amos?’

‘Is it available on Google?’

‘My paper?’ Kelly looked oddly at McCabe ‘Good heavens, no. It was never published. It wasn’t that good.’

‘Do you still have it?’

Kelly thought about that. ‘It’s probably buried in a box along with the rest of my stuff from grad school.’

‘Where do you keep the box?’

‘I have a summer cottage. No. Cottage is too grand a word. A shack, really. I store a lot of stuff there.’

‘Unheated?’

‘There’s a woodstove. I don’t use the place in winter, though. It’s not insulated. I haven’t been there in months.’

‘Where is it?’

‘On one of the islands.’

‘Which one?’

‘Harts.’

McCabe tried not to let excitement show on his face. ‘Do you have any objections if we take a look at your cottage? Assuming, of course, you have nothing to hide. If you’d rather, we can always get a warrant.’

Kelly looked more puzzled than annoyed. ‘Be my guest. The doors are never locked. Walk right in.’ Kelly told him where the cottage was located. ‘Now why don’t you tell me what all this has to do with Lainie’s death. That is why you’re here, isn’t it? Lainie’s death? Are you suggesting somebody read Amos, took it to heart, and smote her as a sinner?’

‘Smote? Is that the past tense of smite? Not smited?’

‘Smote is correct. Now please answer my question.’

‘Sorry. I can’t. I just needed to check something out. Why don’t we start over?’ He extended a hand. ‘Like I said, I’m McCabe. Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe.’

‘I recognize you. When the kids told me a cop was here, I figured it had to be you.’

McCabe smiled and waved a hand, indicating his civilian clothes. ‘How’d they know?’

‘These kids can sniff out a cop a mile away.’

Just like the kids in New York, McCabe thought. They always knew. Uniform or no uniform. Even when there was no color difference. ‘What makes your kids so good at it? Sniffing out cops, I mean.’

‘Experience. Most of them are runaways, throwaways, and other assorted leftovers from the societal scrap heap. They’ve been bullied, hassled, and chased down by guys in blue suits most of their lives.’

‘I haven’t worn a blue suit in a long time.’

‘It’s not the suit, McCabe. Trust me. They know. Anyway, I’ve been expecting you ever since I heard the news about Lainie.’

Kelly pointed McCabe to one of the folding chairs. ‘Just dump those files on the pile over there.’ He slipped behind the desk and sat down and looked at McCabe. His eyes, even behind the glasses, were hard to ignore. They were even bluer and more intense than they’d seemed in the photo. They radiated energy.
From what I hear he’s a hell of a charismatic guy
, Maggie’d told him,
a real charmer
. His crooked nose looked like it’d been broken more than once. McCabe guessed a scrapper. Sort of like Cleary.

‘Ever do any boxing?’

‘Amateur. As a teenager back in Pittsburgh.’

‘Any good?’

‘Not really. As you can see from the nose, guys tended to hit me more than I hit them.’

‘So what made you do it?’

‘I like defending myself. When I was young, people picked on me. One in particular. I wanted him to leave me alone.’

‘So you hit him?’

‘Just once. That’s all it took. He stopped.’

‘Picking on you?’

‘Yeah. Picking on me.’

‘Do I call you Father Jack?’

‘No. Just John. Or Jack, if you prefer. I’m not a priest anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.’

‘But you’re still a believer?’

‘Yes, but it’s different now. God sets the course by which I guide my life. The pope no longer does.’

‘Do most of your kids dress like the girl on the porch? The one who went to find you?’

‘What were you expecting? The Brady Bunch?’

‘She’s what? Fifteen years old?’

‘Tara’s sixteen.’

‘Sixteen, then. Any reason you let her hang out on the porch sucking on butts and looking like a Times Square hooker?’ Not the best way to start off with Kelly, but screw it. The girl was just a couple of years older than Casey. McCabe needed to get it off his chest.

‘Look, McCabe, if that’s where this conversation is going, why don’t you pick yourself up and go on back to Middle Street. My kids aren’t angels, and as a former street cop you ought to know that. A lot of them are vengeful, dirty, unrepentant sinners. All of them are wounded. I can’t change that in a day or a week or even a month. They tend to wear whatever they arrived in plus whatever appeals to them in the donation bags we get from the churches around town. Which, frankly, isn’t much.’

McCabe knew he had pressed the wrong button. He also knew it was dumb. If he was going to get any more out of Kelly, he’d have to back off. Let the anger subside. At the moment Kelly was on a roll, and McCabe figured he was better off letting him finish.

‘If Tara looks like a hooker,’ said Kelly, ‘hey, guess what? You’re right. That’s how she survived for the last year or so, and I’ll bet if you asked, she’d tell you fucking strangers for money was better any day than fucking her father for nothing. Which is what he forced her to do most of her life. At least when he wasn’t beating her silly and telling her she was a worthless piece of shit. The good news is she’s stopped hooking. She’s starting to put her life together. She just hasn’t changed her clothes yet.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I shot my mouth off, and it wasn’t called for. So I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’ Deep breath. Pause. ‘Apology accepted.’ Another deep breath. Another pause. ‘McCabe, you’ve got to understand our first job here is to get Tara and others like her off the streets and convince them their lives are worth saving, worth caring about. Fashion makeovers and smoking cessation, as important as they may be to you, are well down the line as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You’re pretty passionate about all this.’

‘You noticed.’

‘Any truth to the rumor you were abused yourself as a kid?’

‘It’s not a rumor, and yeah, there’s truth to it. It’s not something I try to hide. I was fourteen, and I was raped by my parish priest. The first time it happened I told my old man, and all he did was beat the crap out of me for blaspheming the Holy Mother Church. So I figured I’d have to defend myself. Remember I told you how somebody picked on me? Well, the second time it happened I beat the crap out of the priest. He was bigger and older than me, but I gave him two black eyes and a bloody nose.’

McCabe suppressed a smile. ‘What happened to you for that?’

‘Nothing. He couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done to deserve it. So he just told everyone, including the cops, that he’d been mugged on the street. Told them a couple of big black guys did it.’

‘Naturally. Doesn’t everyone?’

‘I suppose – but y’know what angered me then and still makes me angry now? Knocking the good father silly didn’t really change anything. He just kept on doing the same thing to other kids.’

‘Whatever possessed you to become a priest yourself?’

‘You mean aside from the fact that I felt I had a calling?’

‘Yeah. Aside from that.’

‘Like a lot of others, I had this cockamamie idea I could reform the institution from the inside. Didn’t take long to realize that idea was delusional. In those days, the institution wasn’t interested in reform. It was only interested in avoiding scandal, which it did for decades. It wasn’t until the
Boston Globe
turned the whole thing into national news that the Church really did anything to change. And by that time Sanctuary House was already up and running, and I was gone from the priesthood.’

McCabe remembered the
Globe
series well. In January 2002, a team of investigative reporters from the paper broke the story of pedophile priests wide open, detailing the sins of hundreds of priests, the victimization of thousands of children. The country was shocked. McCabe wasn’t. He’d learned about priestly abuse decades earlier because he knew a kid who was one of its victims. He hadn’t thought about Edward Mullaney in a long time. Fourteen years old. Shy and serious. An altar boy. A pious believer, utterly powerless to resist the God-like figure in a turned-around collar who liked taking him on ‘outings.’ McCabe had often wondered what had become of Edward. He’d found out last year. That’s when he learned Mullaney had been convicted of raping an eight-year-old girl.

‘How many kids do you have living here?’

‘Depends. Anywhere from thirty, which is our legal capacity, up to sixty, which is about all we can stuff in. Kids who sleep on the street in the summer sleep here in January. Right now we’ve got them three and four to a room.’

‘They come and go?’

‘It’s not a prison. Kids are always welcome here. Any kid. If they leave, we don’t usually try to hunt them down. Although I have done that with a few I thought were a danger to themselves or to others. Even called you guys for help a few times.’

‘How long’s the average stay?’

‘Some come for one night and then disappear. Others are here for weeks or months, which gives us a chance to work with them. We don’t turn anyone away, and we don’t kick anybody out unless they break our rules.’

‘Which are?’ asked McCabe.

‘We only have three, and, like I said, they don’t include a smoking ban. Number one’s no violence. Against yourself or anyone else. Number two’s no booze or drugs. Here or anywhere else. Number three, everyone has to show everyone else respect. Break a rule once and I’ll usually give you a second chance. Break it twice and you’re out. In return the kids get a place to sleep, food to eat, and an obligation to do some work to help keep this place running. Cooking. Cleaning. Shoveling snow. Plus an obligation to work with one of our counselors to develop a program to turn their lives around. We try to help them get jobs in town. Find permanent housing. Send them to school or tutor them for the GEDs. Thanks to our volunteers we can offer therapy to those who need it. Counseling for the others.’

‘Permanent staff?’

‘Me and three counselors. One’s a young friar who’s been with me a couple of years. The other two are USM grad students studying social work. They’ll rotate out at the end of the semester and be replaced by others. We also have a number of volunteers.’

‘Lainie Goff one of them?’

‘Yes, Lainie was a volunteer. She was also on our board of trustees.’

‘Active?’

‘Very. This organization meant a lot to her.’

‘What was her role?’

‘She did some fund-raising. She was very good at that. She was also our attorney. Pro bono, of course.’

‘Yours or the kids’?’

‘Both. We get hassled by the powers that be all the time – the city, the child welfare agencies. She fended them off. Sometimes abusive parents want their children back. She fended them off as well. Lainie was a tough, smart, take-no-prisoners kind of lawyer. This is the kind of work she should have been doing full-time instead of slaving away in that corporate sinkhole.’

‘Palmer Milliken?’

‘Yes. She was better than that. A better lawyer. A better person, though she probably didn’t know it. The fourteen-hour days she spent there would have counted for a lot more if she’d spent them here.’

‘Why do you think she did it? Work there, I mean? Was it just for the money?’

‘Money was important to her. Too important in my view. See, the thing you’ve got to understand about Lainie is she was insecure. She always needed to prove she was the best. The smartest, the toughest, the sexiest, the most beautiful. Whatever. That’s what drove her. Still, no matter how well Lainie did, and she always did very well, somehow it was never good enough. Insecurity does terrible things to a person. It’s a sad thing to say, but I think the only time I ever saw her genuinely happy was when she was here working with the kids.’

‘Really?’

‘Strange, isn’t it? The tough-as-nails lawyer as surrogate mother. She always seemed to gravitate toward girls like Tara who’d come from sexual abuse situations. They trusted her. She seemed to have an intuitive understanding of what they’d been through.’

She had a stepfather, but I don’t think she’d want him notified of anything.
What Janie Archer said to him now made more sense. ‘Do you suppose Lainie went through an abusive childhood herself?’

‘I don’t know, but that’s what I’ve always thought. Work with these kids long enough and you learn they give off a certain vibe. You can feel it. I felt it in Lainie. I even asked her about it once or twice, but she never wanted to talk about it. She’s a very private person.
Was
a private person.’

McCabe made a mental note to find out more about Wallace Albright. Find out if he was still alive, still in Maine, and maybe still abusing young girls.

‘Lainie only worked with the girls?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Interesting.’

‘If she was abused as a child, I think it fits. She saw males as the enemy. People to be used and manipulated but not to be trusted.’

‘She trusted you, didn’t she?’

‘I think so.’

‘What was your relationship with her?’

‘We were close. As close as she ever let anyone get to her.’

‘Except for the kids?’

‘Yeah. Except for them.’

‘Were you intimate?’

‘You mean sexually?’