Precious Blood(101)

He picked the paper up to look at it, then started to put it down again. He should have gotten some sleep. In spite of the nonsensical image promoted by television detectives, human beings didn’t operate properly without it. His mind was stuffed full of cotton fluff. His eyes were dry and burning. He couldn’t have made the effort to chew if a three-pound porterhouse was set before him, perfectly cooked. And he still had a full day ahead of him.

“Goats,” he said to himself, picking up the paper again. “Goats.” The names and descriptions floated in front of his eyes, squiggling like worms, alive. He made himself focus and read it through again, hopelessly, because he had been reading it through all night without revelation. Outside in the courtyard, the bell on St. Agnes’s Church was chiming seven o’clock.

“Goats,” Gregor said to himself. And then he stopped. Because he saw it. He was sure he saw it. The only mystery was why he hadn’t seen it before. The damn thing might as well have been flashing in neon on the electronic billboard in Times Square.

“Idiot,” Gregor said, meaning himself. Then he got off the bed and grabbed for his last clean shirt.

John Smith wasn’t due into the squad room this morning at all. Last night he had announced his intention to sleep late and threatened both Gregor and the entire uniformed force of the Colchester Police Department with summary execution for disturbing him before noon. Gregor didn’t care. It was time John Smith got himself out of bed.

It didn’t do much to change Gregor’s mind, of course, that he himself was no longer tired at all.





[2]


At the end of the long Good Friday night, Gregor had asked John Smith and Colchester Homicide to do a few things for him. He knew how the chalice had been tampered with, but he wanted to be able to reproduce the effect himself. He needed an unblessed chalice to practice on, which Smith had promised to ask the Cardinal to get. Gregor would have asked the Cardinal himself, but he had been in no mood to speak to the man. Being in O’Bannion’s company was dangerous to coherent thought. He had also wanted some pieces of some reports collated: all the statements their suspects had made about Cheryl Cass, all the statements their suspects had made about what had gone on in the church in the hour before Andy Walsh had died, and all the statements their suspects had made in regard to the death of Peg Monaghan. These last, Gregor knew, would not necessarily be available, because they would not necessarily have been taken yet. He’d asked Smith to collate them with the others as they came in. This was the kind of work that might take hours, even days. Just asking the Cardinal to produce an unblessed chalice would take time, because Colchester Homicide couldn’t go blazing into the Chancery with an attitude. They would have to use diplomacy, and diplomacy took time.

Arriving once again at Colchester Homicide, Gregor didn’t expect any of what he’d asked for to be done. He was more than a little surprised when Smith met him in the main lobby with a black oblong box balanced on top of an armful of papers. Most of the papers, fortunately, were not the information Gregor had asked for. Having made an appointment to meet Gregor at eight, Smith had gotten in at seven-twenty and cleared a few things out of his file. He had, however, also got hold of the information Gregor had asked for which was contained in the top file on the pile, just under the oblong box. The box was a chalice case.

“We didn’t have to go all the way to the Cardinal to get it,” he told Gregor as they headed for the elevator. “I called the Chancery last night as soon as I got home, and it turns out you can buy the things in any large Catholic religious supply store. There’s one down on State Street about three blocks from the Cathedral. I had one of the uniforms roust the owner out of bed this morning and buy one.”

“How early this morning?”

“Six,” Smith said.

“I thought you were going to sleep in.”

Smith grinned. “What I do when I sleep in,” he said, “is I get up at the usual time and spend the morning doing crossword puzzles. I love crossword puzzles. Everybody around here thinks I love sleep.”

The elevator doors opened, and they stepped inside. Smith pressed the button for the fifth floor, not the location of the Colchester Homicide squad room, and said,

“We’ll use the conference room. It’s supposed to be off-limits without written permission of the Chief of Police, but nobody’s going to be using it on Saturday and it’ll be quieter. While you’re reading through all those statements, I’ll go do what I was on my way to doing when I met you in the lobby. Getting the rest of this mess down to the basement to Records.”