“There was a mess?” Gregor asked. Then he waved this away. “Of course there was. Don’t pay any attention to me.”
“There was blood all over everything,” Garry said. “The front pews. The carpet. The Communion rail. Head wounds bleed the worst. They must have gotten professionals in to do this kind of job. It’s impressive.”
“Mmmm.” Gregor paced back and forth in front of the altar again. His first question was answered. There was enough room. Marty Kelly had not been cramped. He looked around at the people in the pews. They were bent over the pews in front of them, their eyes closed, prayer. “The time,” he said. “It was just before Mass?”
“An hour before,” Garry said.
“But the report you gave me said that the Church was full of people,” Gregor said.
“Father Healy lets the homeless people come in here and sleep,” Lou put in. “There’s a shelter around here somewhere, but it gets full fast in the winter. And some of these people would prefer not to go there.”
“It’s nicer here,” Garry said. “And you know, the shelter feels like an institution, and a lot of these people, especially the women, they’ve spent most of their lives in institutions. I’d think they’d want to go back, but they don’t.”
“Jail is jail,” Lou said. “No matter what you call it. And even if you’re crazy.”
“But there were nuns here, too, weren’t there?” Gregor asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Garry said. “They do things. Bring flowers for the altar, that kind of thing. And that girl, Mary McAllister, she was here, too. She gets the homeless people before Mass and brings them out to the soup kitchen. Unless they want to stay for Mass. Then one of the nuns stay in the pews with them to look after them, you know, and somebody takes them over to the soup kitchen for the second breakfast sitting.”
“The place sounds like an airport,” Gregor said. “Did Marty Kelly know all this when he brought his wife here that morning? Did he expect an empty church?”
“I don’t know,” Garry said. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Marty Kelly. Do you think he would have come if he’d realized there would be a lot of people here?”
“I wouldn’t have,” Gregor said. “And there’s another thing. Are you sure he brought her here? She couldn’t have been somewhere on the grounds, out of sight? I know about the forensic evidence from the truck, but that doesn’t really prove anything. She must have been in that truck dozens of times.”
“She was dead better than ten hours when we found her,” Garry said. “If she died on the grounds, you’d think somebody would have run across the body. Or somebody would have smelled something. She had to have vomited. Somewhere. With arsenic—”
“Yes, I know,” Gregor said. “There was no vomit found in the truck?”
“None,” Garry said.
“And none in her home, either, I would presume,” Gregor said.
“She and Marty lived in this trailer park,” Garry said. “Except it wasn’t what you’d think. She kept that trailer as neat as anything. As neat as this church. Everything polished. Everything washed.”
Gregor was startled. “You’re sure that wasn’t done afterward? Somebody could have been cleaning up after—”
“Not like this, they couldn’t have,” Garry said. “It was more than just clean. It was bone clean. You know how those places get. The cooking smells are into everything. The stains. This was spotless.”
“Spotless,” Gregor repeated. He walked back and forth in front of the altar again. “Where did he bring her in?” he asked. “From the side over there, the way we came in? He couldn’t have brought her in the front.”
“We think he brought her in the side, yeah,” Garry said. “But nobody saw him. He could have come in from the basement.”
“You’ve checked?”
“More than once.”
“Okay, walk me through this,” Gregor said. “Let’s say he brought her in the side door. He walked through into the church and he saw it was full of people, but nobody was at the altar. And the homeless people—would they have been mostly sleeping?”
“I’d guess,” Garry said. “A couple of them weren’t. Or said they weren’t, afterward. They said they’d seen him shoot.”
“Okay. So. He brings the body of his wife into the church, he walks to the altar—across this front part?”
“That’s right,” Garry said.