Precious Blood(111)

“Our friend didn’t. Our friend took a chance.”

“Our friend takes a lot of chances.”

“Yes. This time, there was really no choice. Peg was looking for that book. Our friend knew it.”

“Why did she agree to a meeting?”

“Because she read the evidence wrong,” Gregor said. “If I hadn’t known who I was looking for evidence against, I would have read it wrong, too. It would have been easy.”

“I got the book, by the way.” Smith reached into his jacket again and came up with what was really a pamphlet, its paper cover faded and dirty and torn. Through the grime, Gregor could read the tide without difficulty, Living with the Saints. Stamped under it in blurred ink were the words Property of St. Agnes Parochial School. Under the stamp someone had written, so long ago the ink of the fountain pen she had used was now nearly invisible, “Return to Sister Joseph Bernadette, Room Six.”

“They all had Sister Joseph Bernadette for second grade,” he said, “all seven of them, Peg Morrissey, Barry Field, Tom Dolan, Andy Walsh, Judy Eagan, Kath Burke, and, of course, Cheryl Cass. They had to have had her. The Cardinal told me the school was small in those days. There was only one second grade. He told me about this pamphlet, too. Sister Joseph Bernadette used to, in the Cardinal’s words, ‘make her students memorize it, when it was all a lot of nonsense.’ It all went right by me at the time. I was running around, looking in reference books dug out of the Chancery library, and all I needed was this one pamphlet that there was no question everybody involved in the case had been familiar with it at least at one time.”

“I looked for a copy in Peg’s things when I went over there,” Smith said. “I didn’t find one.”

“I didn’t think you would. Declan Boyd saw Peg Monaghan standing in the anteroom after Andy Walsh’s murder, ‘looking at the books in the bookcase.’ He told everybody on earth, as far as I know. Judy Eagan. The Chancery. I think our friend found a little time one day and just went over and took it out of Peg Monaghan’s bookcase. If she was as organized as you said she was, it would have been easy to find.”

“She had all her old schoolbooks arranged by grade,” Smith said.

Gregor stood up. Through the windows, he could see the sky had gone dark. His watch said five minutes to six, and he was surprised that this late in the year it would already be dark. He kept forgetting how much farther north he was than he was used to being. He kept forgetting how that affected the weather, physical and emotional.

“Maybe we ought to get out of here,” he said. “I’m tired of sitting around. This,” he tapped the fabric over his inside jacket pocket, where he always kept his wallet and where he was now keeping Leroy Merrick’s faxed document, “is really all we need. The motive, pure and simple.”

“We’re not due at the Chancery until six-thirty,” Smith said.

“I don’t care.” Gregor got his coat from the chair he had dumped it on. “We’ll be early. I can’t sit around here any more.”





[2]


They were early by the clock, but they were not early for the company. By the time Gregor and Smith got to the Chancery, the rest of the principles were already there, arranged around the Cardinal’s office like so many cats shut up inside when they would have preferred to be outdoors and free. Judy Eagan had come in slacks and a sweater with her hair pinned to the top of her head. She sat close to Sister Scholastica and looked at her shoes. Tom Dolan was wearing his Franciscan habit again, properly cowled this time. He seemed to be trying to keep as much space as possible between himself and Barry Field. Maybe, Gregor thought, it was Barry Field who was trying to keep his distance. He was standing near nobody else, next to the Cardinal’s window, looking out to the city instead of in to the gathering to which he had probably been dragged, protesting and mulish, only by a personal call from John O’Bannion himself. Gregor had made a point of giving the Cardinal advice on the best way to get Barry Field into this room. He turned his attention to Declan Boyd, and saw that the young priest was unhappy and resentful, no longer excited by his participation in a murder case. Well, Gregor thought, that had to come. That kind of man finds violence intense and interesting in the beginning, and only disappointing in the end. He lacks both intelligence and empathy, and he thinks imagination is a sin.

The Cardinal was sitting at his desk, smoking one of his customary cigars, dressed in the Roman-collared blackness he had affected every time Gregor had seen him during the Tridium. He had apparently been sitting there for some time and paying more attention to that cigar than he usually did. There was a wreath of smoke around his head that was threatening to become a cloud. Gregor and Smith had been led in by the Cardinal’s private secretary, the Sister who would not be allowed to speak until after the vigil Mass to be held at midnight tonight. She had knocked twice and then opened the door to let them enter, entering directly behind them as if to make sure they went directly to the Cardinal. They would have done that anyway. The Cardinal was staring at them.