Fighting Chance(23)

“What? Oh, yes. Yes, she did. Right after you left this morning. She got herself a tattoo, can you believe that? A little rose thing, it’s not too bad, but it’s right on her ankle, and I can just see where this is going—”

“Is she still home?”

“As far as I know. I told you, I’m at work. But she was just exhausted. And she said she wasn’t going in to school. And I didn’t know what to do about that, because I had to leave to come here, so—”

“I’m not worried about her being out of school. You can write her a note. But I want her home and in and not on the rampage anytime soon. If you don’t read her the riot act, I will. She’s got to keep a low profile. A very low profile. And not just because our personal pet judge is dead.”

“Oh, Mark. But you can’t think—”

“Of course I can’t think,” Mark said. “Kaitlyn has a motive on the surface. I have a big one. It’ll come out in no time that we were fixing things for Kaitlyn—that I was using Admin Services to fix things.”

“Oh, Mark, for God’s sake. If you did something, you could tell me. I wouldn’t tell anybody and isn’t there some thing where wives can’t testify against husbands? But I need to know, Mark, please, I need to know—”

“If there’s somebody out there listening to this, you’ve just hanged me for real. Because you know and I know that nobody is going to want to see that priest convicted of anything, and a whole hell of a lot of people are going to want me dead as soon as any of this gets out. And it will get out. Because I didn’t find it. And that means somebody else will.”

Mark hung up. His coffee was sitting on the table in front of him. He took off the top and looked into what should have been plain black, but instead seemed to be something white that was congealing. He put the top back on and gave up. After he got his other phone call through, he’d go find a liquor store and set himself up for something lethal to drink.

He punched in the code for the office in New York and got himself ready to tell Carter Bandwood that the shit was about to hit the fan.

3

There was almost nothing Father Tibor Kasparian remembered about this day, except the one important thing, the thing that would change everything forever. It was lodged in his brain more firmly than any memory he had ever had. It was stronger than his memory of Anna dying.

It seemed so long ago, Anna dying. Long ago and far away. That phrase kept running through his head, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But he couldn’t remember who had said or written it. He wasn’t sure why it mattered anyway.

One of the reasons today’s memory was so strong was that it was, in every way, tactile. He could feel the squish of the blood and muscle under his knees as he knelt on the floor. He could feel the wet stickiness on his hands. It had surprised him to realize that he had never been that close to a violent death before. He had witnessed them, but he hadn’t touched them. The touching made all the difference.

After that, there were things he had to do, careful things that had to be done right. He hadn’t finished all of them when that woman had come in, knocking only as a formality. There was something he didn’t know and couldn’t begin to guess. Why did people knock when they weren’t going to wait for an invitation to come in? He did it himself, but he’d never understood it.

The woman had come in and then she was screaming her head off, screaming and screaming. There was something fake and forced about the screaming. She had stood there for what felt to Tibor like a long time. Then she’d started screaming. Tibor hadn’t believed it.

She screamed, and then she ran out into the hall, still screaming.

A moment later, Russ came in, staggering and breathless, and Tibor heard him make the worst sound in the history of the world.

After that, it had all been messiness and blur, and there was no point in listening to it.

There was only one thing Tibor Kasparian could do, and he set about doing it.

They would ask him questions.

He would say, “I have the right to remain silent.”

Then he would remain silent.

He did that over and over again, as if it proved something.

The only time he changed anything was when they asked him if he wanted Russ to act as his lawyer, or if he wanted another lawyer, or if he would talk to Bennis or Donna or Krekor or anybody at all.

When those things came up, he just said no.

Someone had told him what jail he was being taken to, where he was going, what would happen to him next. Everybody was very polite and very careful to let him know everything he needed to know. If this was the way police behaved in America, he didn’t know what people were complaining about.