“But Jewish people know about baptisms,” Clayton interrupted. “My daughter Jenny’s roommate from Sweet Briar was Jewish. When Jenny’s baby had her christening, Rachel was right there with a silver spoon for a present.”
“I’m not saying that Jewish people don’t know about baptisms,” Gregor said. “I’m saying that the phrase in this note is almost tossed off. The writer isn’t making some complicated theological argument. The letter just says, ‘It was my idea to dedicate her to the Goddess, to baptize her in blood.’ Just like that. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
“And you think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by a Jew.”
“No,” Gregor said. “I think that means the letter couldn’t have been written by Zhondra Meyer. It’s not just that Zhondra was brought up Jewish, it’s that she was something worse than an agnostic. She was impatient talking about religion no matter what religion it was, and that included the goddess worship that several of her guests were engaged in at the time of Tiffany’s murder. You would have expected her to pay some attention to that after all the mess it seems to have caused.”
“That could have been a ruse,” Clayton said. “That could have been a deliberate attempt to put us off.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “But it’s more than just that Zhondra Meyer didn’t seem to be much interested in religion—it’s that she didn’t think in terms of religion, if you see what I mean.”
“Vaguely.”
“It’s also a question of the way the goddess religion was practiced up here. Have you ever heard anybody up here talking about a baptism in blood in any context whatsoever?”
“No, I haven’t,” Clayton said, “but if they really have gotten into human sacrifice up here, they aren’t likely to just go telling us about it. They’re going to do their best to keep it secret.”
“Of course they’re going to do their best, Clayton, but make sense for a minute. These aren’t professionals you’re dealing with. They’re not psychopaths, either. I know. I’ve met them. Do you really believe that if there had been something going on up here that was commonly described as a baptism in blood—that nobody up here would have made any mention of it in any way, even obliquely?”
Clayton opened his mouth and shut it again. He looked depressed. “No,” he said finally.
“Good,” Gregor told him. “But there’s something else you’ve got to take into consideration here. ‘Baptism in blood’ isn’t just a cute little catchphrase that somebody thought up to throw into the letter. It is something.”
“What do you mean, it is something?”
“I mean it’s a real phrase in real theology—Roman Catholic theology, to be exact, not some pseudoreligion like goddess worship that was made up from whole cloth the day before yesterday.”
“I sometimes wonder how anybody distinguishes between pseudoreligions and the real thing,” Clayton said drily. “It all seems like a lot of religious hocus-pocus to me.”
“Point taken,” Gregor said, thinking that he now knew for certain why there was no religious paraphernalia flung around the police department’s big basement room. “But now back to business. Do you know what a baptism in blood is?”
“No.”
“It’s what’s said to happen to unbaptized people who die in defense of the faith. It’s the baptism of the early Christian martyrs, to be exact. It’s also an attempt to get around the Bible and the tradition, both of which are very sticky on one particular point.”
“What point is that?”
“The point that no one can enter the kingdom of heaven without having been baptized in water and the spirit. There wasn’t any New Testament as we know it at the time of the great Roman persecutions. The Catholic Bible didn’t get put together until after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion in 300-something. When it did get put together, there was that inescapable little problem of baptism, and the equally inescapable little problem of the fact that, historically, so many of the early Catholic saints hadn’t been baptized at the time they were martyred. And we’re talking about horrible martyrdoms here, people who suffered gross atrocities and refused to recant from the faith.”
“Fanatics,” Clayton said.
“Fanatics,” Gregor agreed, “but you can see what the problem is here. The Church didn’t want to say that these people must be damned. How could God possibly be just if he would condemn a man to hell who had just let his eyes be burned out of their sockets rather than declare that Christ had not risen and that the Christian religion was not true?”