“It was Sister Scholastica’s idea to have you stay here?”
“It was her idea to have somebody stay here. She couldn’t stay herself because of the children from the school, and she didn’t want Peg to because of Peg being pregnant. I don’t think she much trusts Father Declan Boyd.”
“Nobody does, do they?”
“Trust Dec?” Judy was startled. “I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. He’s just so—young.”
He was also something of an idiot, at least on superficial acquaintance. Cregor had to concede that to the parishioners of St. Agnes’s and the staff of the Chancery. Even if he was the finest priest in the Archdiocese, Declan Boyd would have a hard time getting himself taken seriously. Gregor shifted in his seat. It was made of wood, hardbacked and unyielding. It made him uncomfortable, and he was feeling uncomfortable enough without it. He was always uncomfortable when he felt at sea.
“Tell me something,” he asked Judy Eagan, “when was it Father Walsh first started talking about this goat?”
Judy stopped breathing in middrag. Then she coughed, long and hard. “The goat,” she said, when she was finally able to catch her breath. “You know, that’s very weird. In a sense, Andy never started talking about the goat.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Well, it was like this. I was at the rectory last night, late, going over some last-minute details. There were supposed to be all kinds of things going on today that I suppose aren’t going to happen. Things to do with the school, I mean, like a special auditorium program Andy had worked up about Lent and, I don’t know, a few things else. So I was there, and we talked, and then I left. And when I got home, I had a call from him on my machine.”
“This was late?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t get back until maybe ten o’clock, and Andy’s usually in bed by then. Was. But the message said to call back whenever I got in, so I did.”
“And that was the first you heard about the goat?”
“Exactly. But you know, it wasn’t necessarily the first Andy had heard about the goat. He might have been planning it for weeks.”
“Do you think he was?”
“You’d have to ask what’s-his-name about that. The guy who owns the goat. All I know is, Andy wanted me to pick it up and bring it to the church, first thing in the morning, and he was adamant. Positively adamant. And it was already all set up.”
“Last night,” Gregor repeated.
“That’s what I said. And I didn’t have time to talk to him about it, either. He just told me he was going to bed and hung up. And this morning—”
“He was nowhere to be found.”
“Naturally. Once Andy decided to do something he shouldn’t, he was a regular invisible man.”
Gregor started to shift this through the other information he had heard—the Cardinal’s insistence that Andy had corralled the television reporters with the goat; the Cardinal’s further insistence that Andy was trying very hard not to upset the Chancery—but what he had was still too jumbled and incoherent to be made sense of. The only thing he was sure of was that there was something wrong here.
If he’d had a chance to ask Judy Eagan the next question that came into his head, he might have cleared a little of it up. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a chance. Just as he was opening his mouth, the vestibule door burst open below them, and Father Declan Boyd came running up.
“They’re here!” Boyd was shouting. “They’re here! The ambulance! The police! Everybody’s here!”
Judy Eagan went absolutely white. “Oh, God,” she said, “I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t afford to be seen on television.”
TWO
[1]
NOT ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS are created equal. Gregor Demarkian knew that from his own experience. He also knew that the relative competence of those departments did not depend absolutely on the size of the municipalities that engendered them. The most efficient investigation he had ever been involved in had been run, on the local level, by a “department” of two men—or one and a half, to be precise. The half had been a part-time deputy with a full-time job in the local hardware store and an infinite patience for photocopying. The one had been a man named Richard George Derren, chief of police of the town of Marion, New Hampshire. The case had been a particularly nasty one, as serial murders went, although not as nasty as the ones involving the killing of children. It had concerned the casual slaughter of hitchhiking high-school girls—so many of his FBI cases had involved hitchhiking that Gregor had promised to tie and gag any one of his nieces who tried it—and by the time he’d run into Richard George Derren, it had been dragging on for nearly a year. Nothing dragged on in Richard George Derren’s jurisdiction. Two weeks after arriving in Marion, Gregor had been on a plane back to Washington, D.C. The killer was in the county jail. The physical evidence—and there was a lot of it; Richard George Derren loved physical evidence and he knew how to get it—was all bagged and taped and labeled and in the custody of the state police. Gregor was feeling a little punchy, as if he’d been sleeping with a whirlwind, which maybe he had.