The Lord Is My Shepherd (23 page)

“Grape juice? You mean I could have had grape juice instead?” Cindy asked.

“Only if you wanted to be treated as a child,” Marie said. Cindy decided right then and there that being friends with the other woman was never going to happen. Eric threw his wife a sharp glance, and Cindy bit her tongue and took a deep breath.

“Now we sing to welcome the prophet Elijah to the table whose coming would signify the coming of the Messiah,” Jeremiah said.

“That's pointless,” Cindy said, still glaring at Marie.

Silence.

Horrified, she realized what she had said. “I'm sorry,” she blurted out, “I didn't mean that.”

Eric smiled at her. “Of course you did. In your eyes, Messiah has already come, so what we are doing now is hollow for you. But, don't worry. I don't think you are used to the wine.”

“I'm not,” Cindy admitted, blushing furiously. “I did not mean to insult you or your traditions.”

“We know that,” Eric said. “Don't worry. After this song we then sing hymns of praise to Adonai.”

“I can certainly get behind that,” Cindy said, still feeling like a complete idiot.

“And then songs about freedom,” Jeremiah said quietly.

“Wonderful,” Cindy said.

“And then we drink the last cup of wine,” Marie said, one eyebrow raised.

Cindy groaned.

When the call finally came it was close to midnight. Mark stood on the front steps, reluctant to enter the house. He knew what he was going to see inside, he had already been warned. Several officers on sight looked like they were going to be sick. One, barely more than a kid, sat on the curb, head in his hands with his body shaking. Five feet from him medical personnel administered care to a young woman who was clearly in shock.

Mark took a deep breath. He had seen his share of pain and horror. He knew the things people were capable of doing to each other. He stepped inside, turned toward the dining room and knew that everything he had seen could never have prepared him for that moment.

His stomach twisted, and he heard blood roaring in his ears. A casual glance around the table might have revealed a dinner party in full swing. But it took only a second to realize how horribly wrong it was.

The first thing he noticed was that everyone was seated on one side of the long table. The second thing that he noticed was they were all dead. There were twelve in total. Six sat on the right and six on the left with the seat in the exact center vacant.

The bodies had been posed to resemble the famous Last Supper painting. The young woman outside had been stuck in traffic or else she would have been the one in the center chair playing the part of Jesus.

M
ARK CONTINUED TO STARE AT THE DEAD MAN'S VERSION OF THE LAST Supper. The people were clustered perfectly, if his memory served. Some were looking toward the center of the table; others were looking toward the ends. Unlike the other murders, though, the bodies were unmarked.

The table was set for Passover. The plates in front of each person were untouched.

“It looks like it was poison. They drank their first cup of wine, or grape juice in the case of the five kids, and it was over in minutes,” Paul said.

“Then he just walked in and took his own sweet time.”

“Except he was missing his centerpiece,” Paul noted.

“What's the girl's name?”

“Olivia.”

Mark nodded. He had been right, but he still had no way of knowing about these families. It was little comfort, though.

“Tell me everything we know about them,” he said.

“Mom, Dad, two kids. Mom's sister, her husband, and their son were over. The other five are neighbors, Protestants.”

“Jews and Christians sharing the Last Supper. Just like the first time, only it was the same people in each group,” Mark said.

Paul stared at him hard. “I think you need to get more sleep.”

“You're right, but this needs attention now. Go on.”

“Timing of everything rules out Oliver as a suspect.”

“I kind of figured that,” Mark said. “If it turns out differently, though, I'd love to hear.”

“As in, what if this Oliver guy is the killer but was clever enough to throw suspicion completely off himself with a fake confession?”

“Something like that,” Mark said.

“Would love that. Unfortunately, I'm not buying it.”

“Yeah, me either.”

“Like before, we're not finding so much as a fingerprint from this guy.”

“I'd be surprised if we did.”

“So, what are we looking at next?” Paul asked.

“That's a good question,” Mark said. “I'm not entirely sure. He might try to portray the whole trial thing or since it's technically now Friday he might just skip straight to the main point.”

“The crucifixion?”

“Exactly.”

“I don't want to be there for that one.”

“I don't want to be here for this one,” Mark said fervently. “But let's do everything we can to make this one the last one.”

He waited in the shadows, like he always did. And he watched, like he always did. He saw Oliver come home. It had been a mistake, having the Last Supper while Oliver was in jail. But how could he have guessed that after so many years the devil would confess to anything? It wasn't part of the plan, and he had already spoiled far too many perfect plans. This time, the show would go on, and the final act would be performed. The curtain would fall, and Oliver would be there. And so would he.

He watched, unseen, while Oliver grabbed a suitcase and frantically threw a few possessions into it. He thought he was going to run again. Just like he always did. This time he was wrong. There was no running, not any more.

Jeremiah was uneasy in his bones. He couldn't shake the feeling, and so at three in the morning he got up. He and Cindy had successfully retrieved her car from the parking lot at the newspaper a few hours earlier. That meant he was off the hook for the morning as far as providing transportation. He was glad Cindy had managed to avoid the press of reporters, especially in light of Oliver's release.

The rest of the Seder had gone well with no more outbursts from Cindy. He didn't blame her. Marie had pushed her buttons from the start. He should have known better. Eric, at least, had maintained a sense of humor about the whole thing.

He realized there was no way he was going to get any sleep.

He decided to go for a jog and clear his head. He pulled on a T-shirt and sweat pants and twenty minutes later was in the park in the center of downtown.

Jogging there during the day was enjoyable, but at night it was almost magical. The city kept lights on all night, which gave just enough illumination to see by but not enough to ruin the beauty and serenity of the dark.

He started out at a nice easy jog, breathing in deeply of the cool night air, allowing it to fill up his lungs. As his muscles loosened, though, he lengthened his stride and began to run. Faster he went, enjoying the freedom, and the release from the physical effort. He ran completely around the perimeter of the park and then turned toward the interior, zigzagging around trees and hurdling benches. His pulse pounded, and the wind whistled by his ears.

He turned to take another bench, realized there were people sitting on it, swerved, and came to a halt as he saw the glint of a sword in the one man's hand. He spun to face them and realized that they were dead. Even in the dim glow from the nearest street light he could see them clearly. The shorter of the two men held a sword, and the taller of the two men had his right ear cut off.

Fifteen minutes later Mark arrived. He looked exhausted. His clothes were crumpled, and his hands shook from fatigue.

“I told you I didn't want to see you again at a crime scene. You know, for a rabbi you sure spend a lot of time at them,” he said by way of greeting.

“Sorry to wake you.” Jeremiah suppressed the urge to return the jab.

“I wasn't asleep.” Given how bad the detective looked Jeremiah was pretty sure Mark hadn't slept in quite a while. The detective stifled a yawn and swayed slightly on his feet.

“And you saved me the trouble of having to wake you,” Mark added after a moment.

Alarm bells went off in Jeremiah's mind. His first thought was for Cindy. He had checked her house out the night before when he dropped her off and had seen no sign of anything wrong. He shook his head. It couldn't be Cindy. He had not been on Mark's call list when she had been in trouble before, and it seemed unlikely that anything would have changed that in the last few hours. “I don't understand. Why were you going to wake me?”

“I just came from another crime scene. It was a party. The oldest daughter had car trouble, called home, and no one answered. When she was finally able to get home she found everyone murdered, seated around the dinner table posed just like in that da Vinci painting everyone makes such a fuss over.”

“
The Last Supper
?”

“That's the one. A perfect tableau, except for one person. We figure the car trouble saved her life.”

It was horrific news, yet did not explain why Mark would have called him in the middle of the night. A terrible suspicion dawned on him. “Last night was a Seder,” he said.

“Yeah. The guests were neighbors, Protestants. But the hosts were Jewish. Rabbi, they were from your synagogue.”

“Who?”

“Family's name was Schuller.”

“Samuel Schuller?”

“Yeah, I hope you didn't know the family too well.”

“I did know them well,” Jeremiah admitted.

Inside him a fire began to burn. It was the same rage that had always filled him when he heard of the senseless death of someone he knew. In America it was easy to forget that
such things happened every day. In America people died of cancer or in car accidents; they weren't brutally slaughtered.

He closed his eyes and for a moment he was back in Israel where everyone died and no one was ever safe. Images that always haunted him floated to the surface: a grandmother shot at the Wailing Wall, a six-year-old killed by a car bomb. Safe.

Cindy craved safety, and he had seen enough to know that no matter what she did, how hard she tried, she could never be completely safe. Some people could live with that truth and some couldn't.

Cindy had been right about a lot of things the last several days, and this time was no exception. Oliver, it turned out, was the audience, not the performer.

“Rabbi, are you all right?” Mark asked.

Jeremiah opened his eyes. “I will be.”

“Okay. Let's see who we have here.” Mark turned toward the two men on the bench. A moment later he made a strangled sound.

“What is it?”

“I know them. They're cops. They are … were … assigned to follow Oliver. They were keeping an eye on him while we tried to flush out the killer.”

“Looks like the killer found them first.”

Mark ran back to his car, and Jeremiah could hear him requesting officers be sent to Oliver's house.

Jeremiah had attended a Seder at Samuel's house the year before. Had he been there last night instead of at Marie's, would he have been able to save them?

Mark returned a moment later.

“How did they die?” Jeremiah asked.

“It looks like he poisoned the wine. He waited until it was over and then went in and posed them.”