Precious Blood(56)

Experience or no experience, Gregor’s subconscious still held to the prejudice that big was better than small. Colchester, being a good-size city, ought to be able to run a professional homicide investigation. That Colchester could do nothing of the sort came as a shock.

It was fifteen minutes before twelve, and the crowd was getting restless. Under ordinary circumstances, the Mass would have been over by eleven or before. These people had jobs to go to and appointments to keep. Even encased within the thick brick walls of St. Agnes’s Church, they could tell the weather outside had taken a turn for the worse. Something that sounded like sleet was battering the stained glass windows on the church’s north side. It might have been hail. Wind was whipping across the roof above their heads and making the rafters creak. Getting anywhere from St. Agnes’s, especially with the noon rush hour coming up, was going to be a lengthy and unpleasant ordeal. Besides, they couldn’t see why they were being kept in their pews. The children had been allowed to leave. The altar was occupied by a bewildering array of official personages: uniformed cops, white-coated ambulance men, rumple-suited police photographers, and even Father Tom Dolan for the Archdiocese. Father Tom Dolan was standing next to the chalice, keeping the consecrated wine out of the hands of uniformed cops and technicians, although the congregation only knew that he was there and not why. They also knew something was very wrong. Father Andy Walsh was dead and no one was paying any attention to him at all. His body was still stretched out behind the altar, his head projecting into view at one end. People had begun to make suggestions, cautious but pointed, about what exactly had happened up there.

Gregor thought it was going to be another five minutes before someone said what everyone had started to think: that Father Andy Walsh had been murdered in his own church in full sight of a large contingent of his parishioners, including the entire population of St. Agnes’s Parochial School. In the meantime, it was still possible to avert the breakout of inevitable indignation and panic, if the police moved fast. This they were manifestly not going to do. Gregor wondered if Colchester was one of those places where the uniformed officers were afraid to do anything on a murder investigation until the homicide detectives showed up—and then he wondered where the homicide detectives were. They had had plenty of time to get here. Even assuming someone in Colchester Homicide was being intelligent enough about this to insist on sending the same detectives who had worked on the Cheryl Cass case out here—and after what he had seen in the past hour and a quarter, Gregor couldn’t believe anyone in Colchester Homicide was intelligent enough to keep his hands off the lit burner of an electric stove—they had had more than enough time to get here.

Gregor looked around the church. The Cardinal had come down from the lecturn, but he was still in front of the crowd, pacing and restless between the altar rail and the first row of pews. Tom Dolan, next to the chalice, looked exhausted enough to feint. Every once in a while he forgot the police injunction to “touch nothing” and reached out to steady himself against the altar. Most of the others had simply buried themselves in the congregation. Declan Boyd was sitting next to a bent, ancient woman, patting her hand and whispering in her ear. Judy Eagan had ditched her red coat in an unsuccessful attempt to be inconspicuous—she was so evidently rich, and the people around her so evidently not, she made Gregor think of a Lhasa apso surrounded by wire-haired terriers—and was curled up on a folding chair at the back. Barry Field had made his way to the very middle of the twelfth pew from the back on the Gospel side and was pretending to read the hymnal. Sister Scholastica was standing in a knot of nuns and parishioners near the Holy Water font at the door. Only Peg Morrissey Monaghan was easily found and easily identified. She had taken a place at the center aisle end of one of the pews left vacant by the departure of the children. She had her head on the back of the pew in front of her and her eyes closed.

Gregor had been standing against the wall on the Gospel side of the church. Now he moved away from there—toward the back, to avoid running into the Cardinal—and went up the center aisle to where Peg was sitting. He knelt down next to her pew and said, “Mrs. Monaghan? Are you all right?”

Peg raised her head. “Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. I heard you come up. I should have—done something.” Her eyes were red and bleary, as if she’d been crying and nauseated at once.

“If you’re feeling ill, I could probably get you out of here. They’ve got no reason to keep you, you know. You’re not likely to go running off to Barbados in your condition and they’ll know where to find you if you give them your name and address.”