Declan Boyd shot him a pitying look. “He’ll show up just in time to start celebrating. The Cardinal can’t get to him while he’s in the middle of saying Mass. Then, when the Mass is over, he’ll just disappear.”
“Where?”
“How do I know? Maybe Judy Eagan hides him in her basement. They’re so thick all the time.”
If they were so thick all the time, the Cardinal probably knew about it, which meant Judy Eagan was one of the first people he would question in any search for Andy Walsh. It was logic, but Declan Boyd was not in the mood for logic. Gregor had begun to wonder if the man was even capable of it.
“I’ve got to find Sister Scholastica and talk to her about it,” Boyd was saying. “She’s known Andy forever. Maybe she can get us out of this.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. If I knew how to get us out of this, I wouldn’t need her. She’s smart, Sister Scholastica. She’s very smart.”
“I could tell.”
“Nuns are always smart,” Declan Boyd said, “except for the ones who aren’t.”
With that, Declan Boyd bolted for the door, running into the courtyard in his shirt and slacks, entirely unprotected by the weather. There was a stiff wind out there and the start of a new snow, but he didn’t seem to notice.
The problem, Gregor thought later—much later, after the church bells had struck quarter to ten and he had begun to feel restless—was that Declan Boyd couldn’t stop himself from jumping to conclusions, and once he’d jumped he couldn’t shut himself up. He had started by giving Gregor some very necessary information—the details, as far as he knew them, of what had happened in Black Rock Park—but then he’d rhapsodized about it and beleaguered the point, until all Gregor was absolutely sure of was that Declan Boyd was upset. It was as if Boyd had entered a kind of waking fugue state. And that was too bad. When Gregor had a chance to hear what was coming over the air, he found a lot more to interest him than what he could mine from Declan Boyd’s ravings.
“It’s not just the sin you have to think about,” Andy Walsh had said, “it’s what the sin engenders. It’s what the sin spawns. If you look at the sin you see an incident. If you look at the life that follows the sin, you see a catastrophe.”
Gregor tapped the arm of the couch, annoyed. What had come before that? What had come after? He’d been sitting here since Declan Boyd went running off to St. Agnes’s School, and he hadn’t come up with the glimmer of an idea of what Andy Walsh had been getting at. What was worse, he had the impression that Barry Field hadn’t been able to, either. From the short glimpses he’d got of the pudgy evangelist’s face—and very short glimpses were all you got when Declan Boyd was pacing—he thought he’d detected an uncharacteristic expression of puzzlement. It might even have been relief. He just didn’t know.
What all this reminded him of was a kidnapping case he’d had in Marin County, California, very early in his career at the FBI. It was a very straightforward case and would have been wrapped up in a matter of days, except that the local officer in charge had been a nonstop stream-of-conscious-ness talker and a panicker besides. He’d been scared out of his mind and utterly unable to control himself—and he’d taught Gregor something about himself. Gregor could work under a hundred different pressures and against a thousand different distractions, but he could not think properly when he was being bombarded by an agitated and uninterrupted monologue.
Of course, this situation was very different. There was no frail old woman’s life at stake here. There was no time restriction. He wasn’t going to be woken up at four o’clock in the morning by a junior agent who wanted to tell him that the body had been found within a mile of the place he should have expected it to be to begin with.
He got off the couch, retrieved his coat and scarf from the back of the chair he had left them on, and went out into the foyer. Since Elizabeth’s death, he had been plagued by memory. What he remembered were always his failures, never his successes. There had been many more successes than failures—so many, the press sometimes made the mistake of saying he’d never failed at all—but for some reason they didn’t seem to count. It was the broken bodies he remembered: the kidnapping victims who had not been found in time, the victims of killers who had gone on killing long after he should have stopped them. If he let himself go on with it long enough, he always found himself standing on the lip of that trench that had been dug along the side of the Barnswallow Road outside Corrigan, Massachusetts. In that trench were the bodies of nine small boys, not one of them older than five. In the world somewhere was the man or woman who had killed them, still at large.