Precious Blood(115)

“Do you really think Andy expected us to remember what was in that thing?” Scholastica said.

“I don’t think he expected you to remember right away,” Gregor told her. “He did expect his murderer to remember, though, because he talked to his murderer before the Mass. And, I think, jogged his memory. I have a copy of that pamphlet on me at the moment. There are probably several copies still floating around the Archdiocese, in basements and attics, in school libraries and convent archives—”

“We’ve got some,” Scholastica said.

“Are you sure?” Gregor asked.

“Yes, I am. I—found the pamphlet when I was looking for that picture I gave you. The one of our Confirmation class.”

“Did you look in the pamphlet at all? Did you check out what it said about goats as a symbol for saints?”

Scholastica smiled wryly. “I made a whole list of goats as a symbol for saints. None of it did me much good. None of it made any sense.”

“It didn’t make much sense to me for a while, Sister. I was trying to find a motive that fit into the incident at Black Rock Park, that was about the incident in Black Rock Park. By then, I knew Cheryl Cass hadn’t been killed for the obvious reason, to cover up someone’s involvement in what had happened there. But I also knew that there was some connection. I was looking at it backward.”

“Backward?” Tom Dolan said.

He was holding his coffee balanced on one hand, stroking the edge of the saucer with one finger. The cup was still full. “Drink some of that, Father,” Gregor said. “You look tired.”

“I’ve just slept for thirteen hours.”

“You look tired anyway,” the Cardinal said.

Tom Dolan shrugged. “I don’t see what you mean by backward,” he said. “If you’re trying to say one of us killed her, and one of us killed Andy Walsh, and one of us killed—killed Peg, what other reason could there be? What else do we have in our pasts that could possibly be a motive for murder?”

“Nothing,” the Cardinal said.

Dolan took his cup out of his saucer with his free hand, took a long sip from it, then put the cup back. It took a minute. At first he was just as he had been, sitting with his legs stretched out across the carpet, tired and calm. Then he jerked forward, dropped the cup to the floor, and began to choke.

“Dear God,” the Cardinal said, “Tom, what the—”

Scholastica jumped up, grabbed him, and began to hit him on the back. “Get me a glass of water somebody for God’s sake,” she said. “He’s coughing, not strangling. He swallowed the wrong way.”

The Cardinal’s Sister appeared out of nowhere, bearing a glass of water she seemed to have called miraculously out of the void. She pushed Scholastica away from Dolan, got the priest’s head tilted back, and poured water down his throat.

Seconds later, the choking sounds stopped, and Tom Dolan was on his knees on the floor. At first, Gregor thought he was having a physical collapse. Then he realized that Dolan was just retrieving the coffee cup.

“Vinegar,” Tom kept saying. “Vinegar, that was what was in it. Vinegar and—”

“Vaseline,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Tom Dolan stood up.

“You made a ridge of Vaseline in the chalice when you were taking it out to the alter,” Gregor told him, “or after you got there. You poured the nicotine onto the ridge. Nicotine from the plant poison that the Chancery buys in bulk and distributes to the parishes of the Archdiocese. You didn’t need much, as long as you could get it to near the top of the cup. Vaseline is clear and Andy Walsh would not have noticed it because the altar was dimly lit. The ridge would have collapsed when the wine was poured over it, but that didn’t matter. The nicotine would have ended up being in the first of what Andy Walsh drank from that chalice. And you really didn’t have any other way to get it done. It was Holy Thursday. You barely had the time or the freedom to do what you did.”

At the desk, the Cardinal had stopped smoking. Now he stood slowly up and said, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Father Dolan had no reason whatsoever to kill Cheryl Cass or Andy Walsh or anybody else. I’ve already told you. He confessed his involvement in Black Rock Park to me before he was ordained.”

“I told you,” Gregor said, “that this murderer did not kill to keep from being found out as one of the participants in the events at Black Rock Park. Black Rock Park was the catalyst for the motive, but not the motive.” He turned back to Tom Dolan, still standing motionless in the middle of the room. Dolan was smiling in a sick, paralyzed way that looked like a rictus of death.