Gregor asked, although he already knew the answer. “Another what?”
Smith grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. “Another murder. At St. Agnes’s. We’ve got to move. We’ve got to get there before Maveronski hears about it.”
PART THREE
Good Friday to Holy Saturday
This is the passover of the Lord: if we honor the memory of his death and resurrection by hearing his word and celebrating his mysteries, then we may be confident that we shall share his victory over death.
—from the Easter Vigil, Service of Light
ONE
[1]
AT FIRST, GREGOR THOUGHT there had been a mistake. There was no murder at St. Agnes’s. There was some kind of medical emergency, a crisis, a question of life and death as yet undecided. Only that could account for the fact that the ambulances parked at the curb outside the main gate still had their lights spinning and their sirens screaming, and that there were six hospital vehicles and only one police car. Whatever had happened here, it was too complicated for the paramedics. They were milling around in the middle of the courtyard, surreptitiously smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet against the ground. There was still a lot of snow and it had gotten onto the cuffs of their pants, over their boots, so that their feet looked frosted, like misshapen cakes. Beyond them, the door to the convent was open. Women were going in and out, with that brisk walk that is the sole province of emergency room nurses.
Back at Colchester Homicide, Gregor had assumed without thinking that the murder had taken place in St. Agnes’s Church. Now, as Smith threaded his unmarked Ford in and out of the vans and the ambulances, he saw there was no activity around the church at all. The front and side doors were both closed. The windows were empty of light. Smith shot between the black-and-white and a Porsche with doctors’ plates and pulled to a stop in front of the church steps. It was the only available space at the curb, and there wasn’t much of it. Smith had to park with his tail jutting out across Ellery Street.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “What’s going on around here?”
“Whoever it is isn’t dead yet,” Gregor told him.
Smith snorted, cut the engine, and jerked open his door. “If it was nicotine, whoever it is is definitely dead. Has to be.”
Gregor knew this was not strictly true. There were antidotes to nicotine poisoning. The difficulty was that they had to be applied very quickly, almost before the victim began to feel the poison’s effects. In a case of murder, that was the next thing to impossible. The murderer would have had to be there, watching his victim drink his death, and then changed his mind. And he would have had to have known the antidote himself.
Himself, herself, Gregor thought. He shouldn’t let himself get tangled in linguistic presumptions. They had a very nasty way of making you fail.
He got out of the car himself and followed Smith through the gate into the courtyard. Nobody tried to stop him, because there was nobody around who had the authority. The patrolmen who belonged to the beached black-and-white were nowhere in sight. Gregor passed the paramedics and brushed by a nurse going in the opposite direction, toward the ambulances. Then he walked up to the convent’s front door and looked inside.
What he had expected to see, he didn’t know. A lot of people, maybe, milling about and looking important. Instead, there were only John Smith and Sister Scholastica, staring at each other across an empty foyer.
“Jesus Christ,” Smith was saying, “who does that woman think she is? There’s been a death here, for God’s sake.”
“There’s been one death here,” Scholastica said. “Shut up and get out of here. Just shut up and get out of here.”
“I’m not getting out of anywhere, for God’s sake. There’s been another murder here.”
It could go on like this for hours, Gregor knew. Scholastica was hysterical and Smith was close. He wondered what had happened in the brief time Smith had been out of his sight. He wondered at the atmosphere of emergency in the foyer, as thick as smoke, as intoxicating as a drug. It had even started to get to him.
Smith and Scholastica were still facing each other, still oblivious to him watching them from the doorway. In a minute or two, they were going to start shouting again. Gregor cleared his throat.
It took longer than it should have. They were so wrapped up in each other, and they were so reluctant to let it go. In some way, their argument had served as an anesthetic for both of them. While they were engaged in it, they were temporarily protected from the full impact of what had happened here.
Eventually, they both broke. Gregor was standing only a few feet from them. They knew he was there. They turned away from each other and looked at him. Then Sister Scholastica sat down in the foyer’s only chair, put her face in her hands, and started to cry.