“You’re Mr. Demarkian, aren’t you? I recognize you from your pictures. Could you come here and give us a hand?”
Gregor wanted very much to go up and give the Cardinal a hand. He wanted to do something. This was only the second time in his life he’d been the first man—the first trained investigator, official or otherwise—at a murder scene. The FBI was always called in after the fact, even on murders on federal lands, where it had jurisdiction. It had taken the Hannaford case to make him realize how important it was to get to the body and whatever was around it before the technicians had a chance to muck it up.
In this case, the Cardinal’s soft words about Father Walsh and illness notwithstanding, there was a lot Gregor wanted to see. It was his lack of franchise that was frustrating him. In the Hannaford case, he had not only been first on the scene, but the only one both suitable and capable of taking control. Here, he had no more standing than any other member of the congregation. The police, when they got here, might think he had less. This was a Catholic church in Colchester Archdiocese. It was John Cardinal O’Bannion who had the first and last words.
After Vatican II, most American Catholic Churches had done away with their altar rails. St. Agnes’s was made of marble and more or less part of the floor, so it still stood. There was a gate in the middle of it and another on the left side. On the right side, where the door to the anteroom was, there was no opening at all. Gregor paused at the rail when he got to it, to make sure: If you came out of the anteroom onto the altar platform, to get off you had either to pass the altar itself on your way to one of the gates, or turn around and go back into the anteroom. No, Gregor thought suddenly, that wasn’t exactly true. You could always climb over the altar rail. But if you did that, in front of hundreds of good Catholic laypeople, somebody would be sure both to notice and comment.
Scholastica had finished with the body of Father Andy Walsh. She stood up, brushed off the skirt of her habit, and headed across the altar platform to the anteroom door. Her face was set, but her walk was brisk. She did not look as if she were in shock or in mourning. She could, Gregor thought, have been a nurse in a hospital for the dying, the kind of woman for whom death has become a routine.
“Mr. Demarkian?” Cardinal O’Bannion said.
Gregor opened the gate at the center of the altar rail and went up onto the platform. “Cardinal O’Bannion,” he said, when he got to the lecturn, “it’s nice to meet you. Finally.”
“Nice under these circumstances?”
It was clumsy maneuvering, so Gregor ignored it. He turned to a puzzled-looking Father Tom Dolan and said, “We ran into each other in the anteroom before Mass. I was looking for a way into the church.”
Dolan’s face cleared. “I remember you. I thought I did. I’m sorry. I’m very tired.”
“I don’t see how you could have remembered any of that,” Gregor said. “It was bedlam in there.”
“Tom,” the Cardinal said. He nodded to the back of the church. They all turned, and saw that one of the television cameramen—Gregor thought it was the one from WRSX—had shouldered his Minicam and started shooting. Gregor had forgotten all about the television people. He always did. The press never seemed quite real to him, even when it was in the middle of beating him up.
“Oh, Lord,” Tom Dolan said. “They always do it, don’t they? I wonder how Andy got them here.”
“Andy got them here with the goat,” the Cardinal said.
“I don’t think so,” Tom Dolan said. “Well. All right, Your Eminence. I’ll take care of them. I just hope I can take care of them without getting them mad.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.” Tom Dolan went down the side stairs and out the side gate.
Cardinal O’Bannion turned to Gregor Demarkian and sighed. “What I meant,” he said, “was that the publicity is likely to be the same no matter what kind of mood they’re in. They won’t have much choice, will they?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. Among the other things in my life, I’ve served as the publicity director of an Archdiocese. I know how newspapers work.” He turned around and stared at the body of Andy Walsh. It was hidden from most of the congregation by the altar, but visible from the lecturn. “Well,” he said, “I don’t suppose you think Andy keeled over from a heart attack. That would be too much to ask.”
“It would be too much to ask even of yourself,” Gregor told him. “You don’t think so either.”