“Why’d she stuff him in a laundry sink?”
“Because it was there,” Gregor said. “It was convenient. It was probably close to where he collapsed.”
Donovan rubbed the side of his face, thinking it over. “What about this last one?” he said. “Why did she bother to do that? All this planning you’re talking about, this last one was bound to get us onto her. I mean, it couldn’t have helped.”
“Oh, it might have,” Gregor said, “if we hadn’t worked all of this out. Even if it couldn’t have helped under any circumstances, though, I think she would have done it anyway. It was her worst mistake. Hate is always a mistake. She had the frame all set up. She should have left it there.”
“Left it where?” Donovan asked.
“There’s something going on up ahead of us,” Gregor said. “I think that’s a state police officer.”
It was a state police officer. The road they were traveling on had given up its bends and curves over the last five miles or so. It now proclaimed itself to be Route 896 and lay flat and straight in a line to the arc lights of the airport. The state police car had been traveling just ahead of them on the two-lane blacktop, doing a leisurely pace. Gregor had noticed Pete Donovan growing frustrated and his fingers itching to get to the siren switch. Then the state police car had bucked, jumped, and taken off, its own siren screaming. Pete Donovan stared after it in amazement for a moment or two and hit the gas.
“Turn on the radio,” he said to Gregor, and they shot down the road. “I turned it off so I could hear the great detective give his explanation.”
“If you weren’t already chief of police, you could get fired for that,” Gregor shouted back.
He turned the radio on and heard the voice of Pete Donovan’s dispatcher, putting out a stream of letters and numbers that even Gregor found easy to translate, in spite of the fact that he had never been part of an investigation in Maryville before.
“They’ve got her,” he said.
“Either that or they’ve got some poor nun on her way to visit her sister in Akron, and there’s going to be hell to pay from the Cardinal.”
Actually, Gregor had never had any trouble of that kind from the Cardinal. There were a lot of things O’Bannion did and didn’t like—and a lot of areas where even Father Tibor Kasparian would have to admit that the Cardinal’s personality could stand improvement—but he was better than fair about the glitches that occurred whenever people tried to do a good job. Gregor pulled his seat belt a little tighter around his waist and wished for an airbag that came out of the glove compartment. Pete Donovan pushed his car up to eighty and then to eighty-five, and didn’t come close to catching up to the statey.
“There’s the gate,” he said, “here we go.”
It was a small airport. There was the one small parking lot and the three small runways. There was the one small waiting building with its one small baggage carousel. Gregor could see a pair of men in overalls pushing baggage through a flap in the wall of the building. He was paying no attention at all to the state police cars crowded together in a knot just beside him, or to the state police officers in their Smokey the Bear hats, or to the nun in abbreviated habit in the middle of them. Pete Donovan braked and cut his engine and jumped out, and Gregor jumped out after him. This was an interview he did not want to miss.
It was not, of course, an interview with Ann-Harriet Severan. Ann-Harriet Severan was not the woman with her hands in her pockets and her feet placed wide apart, looking like she was ready to bolt and make a foot-race run to the Canadian border.
Miriam Bailey was.
Five
[1]
TWENTY-FIVE MILES AWAY, back in the middle of Maryville, Father Michael Doherty was standing on the front steps of St. Mary of the Hill, ringing the doorbell and feeling inexpressibly tired. It was Saturday night and still early, but he had already been out to the county hospital twice. His head was full of the screaming of a woman whose child had just died from drinking a bottle of ammonia. The bottle of ammonia had been left under the main hall staircase by the janitor that served that woman’s apartment building and four others. The janitor drank and Michael Doherty had been trying to get him fired for the last four months. Sometimes it seemed to him that nothing was worth anything, that nothing he did ever did any good. Sometimes he felt he spent his time patching holes in a beach ball that sprung six more leaks every time he got one fixed. The analogy reminded him of the seminary, where it had been used to warn him about what would now be called “parish burnout.” For once in his life, Michael Doherty didn’t care if he was being trite. There were footsteps behind the door and then the sound of the elaborate ritual the Sisters had to go through to get the door opened from the inside without setting off the alarm. Michael sometimes joked to Reverend Mother that she ought to give him the security key, because it was a hundred times easier. The door opened and Sister Gabriel was standing there, smiling. She had checked him out in the peephole.