“What other thing?”
Gregor eyed the coffee warily, picked it up, took a sip, and put it down again. Why were the only people he knew who could make palatable coffee women? Especially since women didn’t want to make it any more. For reasons Gregor had to admit were totally justified.
“Several weeks ago,” he told Tibor, “some time between Ash Wednesday and the end of that week, there was a death.”
“A death?”
“The woman who died had been a classmate of Andy Walsh’s in parochial school and a student at the sister school of the boys’ school he attended for high school. Her name was Cheryl Cass. She’d moved out of the parish, out of Colchester in fact, before she ever graduated. As far as anybody knows, she’d never been back.”
“As far as anyone knows?”
Gregor shifted uncomfortably. “You have to understand, Tibor, I’ve got all my information on this thing over the phone—”
“And from John O’Bannion?” Tibor smiled.
“I’m not an idiot, Father. No, I’ve talked to the Colchester police more than once. There’s a lot about this that’s very fishy. It’s just not fishy the way the Cardinal wants it to be.”
“What way is that?”
“Let me explain. Cheryl Cass was dying. She’d had a double mastectomy, and the cancer, according to the coroner, had not been caught in time. She was riddled with it. In all likelihood, she had only months to live. The Colchester police are fairly certain she hadn’t been living in town for any length of time before she was found. She wasn’t known at any of the hospitals and they haven’t turned up a local doctor who’d been treating her, although somebody had been. The body showed signs of extensive radiation therapy.”
“Where had she been?” Tibor asked.
“They don’t know. She wasn’t carrying a driver’s license—”
“Isn’t that very unusual? I thought I was the only person in America without one.”
“She’d been on radiation therapy, remember. And she’d probably been taking painkillers. She probably hadn’t been able to drive for a long time. Unfortunately, without the driver’s license, there’s no way to know where she’d been living.”
“Credit cards?”
“She didn’t have any. Maveronski at Colchester Homicide said she didn’t look like she could have gotten them. Her wardrobe was definitely low rent.”
“A poor woman, then,” Tibor said. “This is very sad.”
“It gets sadder. As far as anyone knows, Cheryl Cass showed up in Colchester on Ash Wednesday and immediately got in contact with several people. Andy Walsh was one of them. So was O’Bannion’s chief aide, Father Tom Dolan. So was the principal at St. Agnes Parochial School, Sister Mary Scholastica, once known as Kathleen Burke. Cheryl went to visit all these people over the course of the day—”
“Did she know them, Krekor?”
“Oh, yes,” Gregor said. “They’d all been at those brother-and-sister schools I told you about. Cathedral Girls’ High and Cathedral Boys’. They were either all in the same year or close to it.”
“That’s very clear, then, Krekor. This is a poor woman who is dying. She goes back to the town of her childhood and visits her old friends. Just one more time. That is understandable.”
“I agree with you. So, by the way, do the Colchester police. They think she went to visit all these people and then walked around town some, maybe disoriented. There were no traces of painkillers in her body and none on her person. They think she may have run out and been wandering around in pain. Anyway, wander she did, clear across town to the hotel district.”
“And?”
Gregor sighed. “Common sense says she should have rented a room, but she might not have been able to afford one. There wasn’t any money found on the body, either, but that doesn’t mean anything. It could have been taken off her where she lay.”
“Krekor, I don’t understand. She was outside?”
“In an alley that connects Schrencker Street with Maydown Avenue, between two of the most expensive hotels in the city, the Lombard and the Maverick. Those, she couldn’t have afforded. The man I talked to in the Colchester Homicide Department says it looked like she’d just lay down on the ground and let herself die.”
“From the cancer.”
“No,” Gregor said explosively. “This is where it gets fishy. From nicotine poisoning.”
Tibor frowned. “But how—?”
“What the Colchester police have decided is that she soaked a few cigarettes in hot water and then drank it. Or that she might have swiped some of the plant poison from the greenhouse at St. Agnes’s Convent—the kind they use there is mostly distilled nicotine. Whatever, they’re fairly convinced she took the stuff herself. In fact, they think she came to Colchester as a kind of farewell gesture before she took something. To put herself out of her pain.”