“Maybe it is,” Lou said. “Maybe we have one of those serial killers you used to chase, and he’s targeting parishioners.”
“And he starts doing that by following Bernadette Kelly out to a trailer park in Wilmot Township?—wait.”
“Wait what?” Lou asked.
“Arsenic,” Gregor said.
Garry and Lou looked at each other again.
Gregor headed for the side door they’d come in by. He felt good for the first time since he’d started looking into this—not because he had the solution, but because he finally knew that a solution was at least possible. Solutions were not possible in all cases. There were perfect murders, and he had had the misfortune to be on the team investigating one or two. Life not only wasn’t fair. It often didn’t make sense.
Outside, he turned down the path that led around to the back and the rectory, moving quickly because his coat wasn’t buttoned, and he was cold. He had to talk to Father Healy, and after that he had to sit down with some scratch paper and think. Bennis would want him to think on the computer, but at least this time he wasn’t going to listen to her.
The wind was whipping through the courtyard, icy and stiff. His hands were cold. His nose was numb. Only his mind was warmed up and working.
Arsenic, he thought, solved the problem of place.
FIVE
1
Father Robert Healy had had a very hard time sleeping the night before, so hard a time he thought he might not have slept at all. What he remembered clearly was getting up in the dark and the silence to look at his clock. It was three in the morning, and so deathly still he might have been waking in his own grave. It was also deathly cold. He found himself wishing that he had chosen one of those old-fashioned windup clocks that ticked to put on his bedside table. It seemed less important to him, then, that he not be woken by the sound of ticking than that he not feel so thickly encased in isolation when he did wake. He tried closing his eyes and praying silently. He tried opening them and lighting the candle in front of his small statute of the Virgin, as if it might be possible for him to will her to speak. Under ordinary circumstances, he considered most of the traditional prayers to Mary—except, of course, for the Ave—to be embarrassingly overwrought and sentimental. In his room with the candle lit, with his narrow bed and its black horsehair blanket, they seemed to be only reportage, a documentary description of the apocalypse. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. He could remember himself in third or fourth grade, squirming and impatient under the eyes of old Sister Benedicta, while his confirmation class recited the Salve in unison. If he’d been born twenty years earlier, he would have learned that prayer. He would have been happier.
Now, watching Gregor Demarkian come up the rectory walk with the two police detectives he recognized from the night before, Robert was mostly worried that he would fall asleep in the middle of a question and embarrass himself even more than he had already been embarrassed by events. The Cardinal Archbishop had been clear as a bell. He was the chief suspect in three murders, including the murder of Sister Harriet Garrity, which had almost certainly happened by arsenic, like the two others. He had bought the arsenic. He knew all three victims. He was known to be on rocky terms with Sister Harriet—but really, Robert thought, it was hard to take that seriously. Everybody was known to be on rocky terms with Sister Harriet. The woman made a vocation out of being on rocky terms. It disturbed him more that anyone thought he might be responsible for the death of that poor young man across the street, whom he had hardly known except to say hello to once or twice. Only a crazy person killed somebody he didn’t know, or, worse, killed to bring the wrath of God down on the people he thought God ought to condemn. Robert was sure he had never suggested, or even thought, that the wrath of God should come down on the gay men at St. Stephen’s. He had only wanted to be clear in his support of the Magisterium. He had only wanted his position to be impossible to misconstrue.
The detectives all had their coats open, even though it had to be below zero outside. They all had their heads down, but Robert thought that might have been the wind. He looked around the rectory foyer and realized with a certain amount of resignation that it, like the rectory living room, was full of bad art. There was a painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that might as well have been done by numbers on a velvet field. There was another of the Virgin and Child that made the Virgin look like a saccharine sheep and the Child look like a stuffed toy. He never noticed those things when he was in the rectory by himself—if he had, he would have gotten rid of them—but they always impressed themselves on his consciousness as soon as he had company.