Precious Blood(99)

The Cardinal turned and walked away. Tom watched him go, swishing in his robes, ponderous and overfed.

I have never, Tom thought, been spoiled.





THREE


[1]


FOR GREGOR DEMARKIAN, THE worst thing about the murder of Peg Morrissey Monaghan—aside from the obvious, which was a matter of emotion and not what he was getting at; if he let himself get trapped by emotion now he’d never see his way to the end of this—was how almost all wrong it was. For a while, he even thought there was no “almost” about it. The idea that any of the people connected to this case would poison Peg while she was still pregnant was close to unthinkable. They were all, to one extent or another, religious people. With one exception, they were all staunchly opposed to abortion even in the earliest months, which meant they’d see what had just happened as a double murder. Approaching it, they would have had to make up” their minds to commit triple murder, at least in possibility. The press had been justified in calling the rescue of Margaret Mary Monaghan a “medical miracle.” As for the one exception, that was Judy Eagan, whose pro-choice sympathies Gregor had assumed from her two-line minibiography at the back of the St. Agnes Parish Bulletin. Aside from being president of the Parish Council, the holder of an MBA from Columbia University, and the owner of “Judy, Judy, Judy—Caterers,” she was described as “president of the Colchester chapter of Catholic Women for Equality.” Gregor knew about Catholic Women for Equality. The activities of their Philadelphia chapter regularly made The Inquirer. They were one of those liberal Catholic organizations that operated under the belief, held against all evidence, that the Catholic Church could be made to change Her mind about sex.

Pro-choice or not, Gregor reminded himself, Judy Eagan was Peg Morrissey Monaghan’s closest friend. However she might have looked on fetuses in the abstract, she would have thought of the ones Peg was carrying as children, because Peg would have thought that way. These particular fetuses would not have been negligible in any calculations Judy Eagan might have done with the intent of murdering Peg.

The only possible explanation, Gregor knew, was that this third murder was an act of total panic. It had to have been committed with robotic mindlessness, on automatic pilot. They were now dealing with a murderer gone out of control, killing without subtlety or reflection. It was not a comfortable thought. Cheryl Cass had seen seven people on that Ash Wednesday when she had come back to Colchester, seven people she had spoken to at length: Sister Mary Scholastica, Andy Walsh, Judy Eagan, Tom Dolan, Peg Morrissey Monaghan, Declan Boyd, and Barry Field. Two of these people were now dead, along with Cheryl herself. They were the two she had spent the most time with. Peg had given her tea and let her spend over an hour looking through old yearbooks and collections of high-school memorabilia. Andy had seen her once in the morning and again in the early evening. It was dangerous to have spent any time really listening to Cheryl Cass. Gregor wondered who else had done it.

On the surface, this was a question easy to answer. It was all in the police reports of Cheryl’s death, photocopied by John Smith and sent home to Rosary House with Gregor in a brown accordian folder. Scholastica had spoken to Cheryl for quite a while, in the convent living room, about “what a wonderful time it had been all that summer.” Declan Boyd had spoken to Cheryl for half an hour while she was waiting for Andy the second time. According to Boyd, they had talked about “love and how once you love somebody you can never really stop.” The other three—Judy Eagan, Tom Dolan, and Barry Field—claimed hardly to have seen the woman at all. They wouldn’t even have been brought into the investigation if Peg hadn’t mentioned their names to the police, as people Cheryl had said she either had or intended to visit. Judy Eagan said she’d seen Cheryl “for a couple of minutes on State Street and that was it.” Tom Dolan said he “passed Cheryl in the Chancery but wasn’t sure.” Barry Field said he’d spoken to her “at the end of the preaching hour the same as with a dozen other people.” She had come to his studio and been part of the audience for his first sermon of the day.

Gregor didn’t think he could believe any of this, for all it was set down in black and white and police jargon on the pages Smith had given him. The woman was dead, and Barry Field and Judy Eagan, at least, had had good reasons to distance themselves from her death. Field was more aware than most television preachers of the media pit he operated in. The press was hostile to what he did for a living and would have been more than happy to connect him with the suicide of one of life’s losers. The Colchester Tribune, especially, always conscious of its largely Roman Catholic readership, liked to suggest that Fundamentalism was the poisoned opium of the stupid, the despairing, and the socially dead. Judy Eagan, on the other hand, had a very upscale clientele, who liked to think of her as one of themselves. It would do her no good to have someone like Cheryl Cass advertised as one of her “friends.” Gregor knew something about provincial society. Unlike the big-city kind, which had long ago succumbed to the status systems of naked capitalism, it liked to think of itself as based firmly on blood and not achievement.