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Precious Blood(21)

By:Jane Haddam


Gregor bought a copy of the Colchester Tribune at the first newsstand he came to—dodging baskets and green crepe paper streamers to do it—and tucked it under his arm. Cheryl Cass’s body had been found on the first Sunday of Lent, no more than five days after she might have died. That combined with the fact that the Archdiocese of Colchester was taking an interest made it virtually impossible that he would find anything about her in the paper he just bought. From the reports he’d heard, she’d been the next best thing to a bag lady anyway, not the kind of person whose death the media paid attention to. If it had been O’Bannion himself who had died, Gregor would have been able to get all the details he needed from the farm report in Tecumseh, Iowa.

Still, he thought, a paper was a good thing to have, especially in a town you knew nothing about. Colchester seemed to have escaped the great homicidal psychopath wave of the 1980s. While the police departments of every other large- and medium-size city in the country were unearthing unidentified bodies in shallow graves, Colchester must have been relatively quiet. If it hadn’t been, Gregor would have heard about it. That was what he had been doing with his life in those days. Ted Bundy, Donald Miller, John Wayne Gacey, the Zodiac killer, the Green River killer, the Hillside Stranglers. It was an honor roll of some sort, Gregor just didn’t know of what sort. No wonder he had burned out on his job. Even without the terrible months of Elizabeth’s last year, a steady diet of bludgeoned skulls and mutilated faces would have frazzled him eventually. Sometimes, looking back on it, he wished he had been what The Philadelphia Inquirer insisted on calling him: an Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. When Hercule Poirot involved himself in a murder, it was never one of thirty and it was never messy.

He gave passing thought to the possibility that Cheryl Cass had been the first victim of a roving psychopath and then dismissed it. The kind of psychopath who would have been interested in a woman like Cheryl—meaning a man-on the prowl for the weak—would not have used poison. He would have gone for a blunt instrument. In Gregor’s experience, the only psychopaths who used poison were nurses and day-care workers and, like a plague, they killed the very young and the very old.

“Getting old,” he said, under his breath, to that part of Elizabeth that was always with him. “Probably getting stupid, too.”

He thought he heard her say “tcha, tcha, tcha” and sigh. Elizabeth had never had much use for what she called his “tendency to self-denigration.”

Straight in front of him, at the end of a long and very wide corridor, he saw the marble-railed double staircase he had been promised would lead him to the main waiting room and headed for it. With any luck, whoever O’Bannion had sent to fetch him would be waiting with a sign. Otherwise, Gregor thought, they might never find each other at all.





[3]


The man at the top of the stairs wasn’t carrying a sign, but he was wearing a Roman collar and looking from one side of the landing to the other. That would have been enough, if he hadn’t been so unlike the man Gregor had thought he’d be. For some reason—nothing specific and nothing John Cardinal O’Bannion had said—Gregor had assumed he’d be met by Father Tom Dolan, O’Bannion’s chief aide. This man couldn’t be that. He was much too young and much too vague. A cardinal’s chief aide would have to be intelligent. Gregor judged this priest as just borderline bright. He’d probably struggled his way through the seminary on a barely respectable C average and been ordained more for his character than his brilliance. On the other hand, his character had a few flaws in it, too. The reason Gregor saw the priest before the priest saw Gregor was that the priest’s attention was constantly being distracted by a display of chocolate bunnies in the window of a novelty store near the outside door. There was no question at all of where the man had acquired his flab.

Gregor shifted his suitcase from one hand to the other—it was amazing how suitcases got heavier the longer you carried them—and made his way over to the round-faced priest. There was something out of kilter about a face like that on a big, gone-to-seed football player’s body. The face was so cherubic, it belonged on the body of a small china doll.

Gregor touched the priest on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me. I don’t know if you’re who I’m looking for, but my name is—”

“Gregor Demarkian!” The cherubic face lit up. The too blue eyes widened and danced. A hand the size of a Virginia ham shot out and grabbed Gregor’s free one to shake. “Hello. I’m Declan Boyd. Father Declan Boyd. I’m associate pastor at St. Agnes Parish.”