“Brady, Marquis and Holden,” Mary said.
“A big law firm,” Chickie said with satisfaction.
“Well, all right,” Aaron said. “Let’s say he was designing something at this law firm and he ran across these documents, that still doesn’t explain why he scanned them. And it must have taken a bit of work, too, because he must have either snuck them out of the law firm and then snuck them back in, or else he scanned them onto a disk there and then brought them here and loaded them—”
“Why would he have had to sneak them back in?” Mary asked. “Why not just take them and throw them out?”
“Why not just take them and keep them, then?” Aaron said. “Why bother to scan them at all? The only point to that is that he couldn’t keep the originals of the documents.”
“You’re both turning this into James Bond, and there’s no reason to,” Chickie said. “So Scott was nosy. A lot of people are nosy. I’m nosy.”
“Scott was murdered,” Aaron pointed out.
Chickie shifted in his chair again. Mary bent down and looked at the document on the screen. It was a perfectly ordinary document. It was dated. It was on letterhead memo paper. She shook her head.
“Maybe,” she said, “we ought to tell the police about this. Or that Mr. Demarkian. I mean, if Scott was murdered because of this—why would he be murdered because of this? Chickie’s right. It could be just two drafts and one draft was wrong so the other one was written. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Aaron clicked at the keyboard again, and the printer began to whir. “I’m going to make copies of both of them, just in case. Lots of copies. And I’m going to leave them all over the place. Then I’m going to have a good long talk with Dan. We probably should go to the police, but I want to know what we’re going to say before we do it.”
Mary backed away and went to where Chickie was sitting. He was looking pained and very tired. She thought it might have been a mistake to bring him out here, even though he had wanted very much to come.
“Maybe you should go someplace and lie down,” she told him. “You look exhausted. And you’re not well, even if you think you are.”
“No, no,” Chickie said. “I’ll sleep in a pew. I want to be at that service. In case we get picketed.”
“We won’t get picketed,” Aaron said confidently. “We’ve got an army of police coming down to cordon us off. And he wouldn’t try anything so soon after last night anyway. He’s a smart asshole. He knows when not to push his luck.”
“I’d like to push his luck,” Chickie said. “I used to think he was gay and in the closet, but I’ve changed my mind. Nobody that foul could ever be gay.”
“I think I’d better get back to school before I don’t have any time to study at all,” Mary said. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right? Do you want me to come back and get you and take you home?”
“In the van with the homeless people?” Chickie said.
“Behave,” Mary told him. Then she kissed him on the top of the head, waved good-bye to Aaron, and left.
Out in the parking lot, she saw that she had left the van’s passenger side door open. She did the sensible thing of checking through the backseats to make sure she hadn’t picked up a mugger or a rapist, then she climbed in behind the wheel and started up. She wondered if Chickie really did mind being in the van with the homeless people, and then thought that most people would. They smelled, and they could be frightening. She pulled the van out onto the street and headed back across town to St. Joe’s.
There was a blue crystal rosary hanging from the back of her rearview mirror. It had a Miraculous Medal at the place where the long strand and the short strand were held together, and the Medal glinted every time she passed under another streetlamp. By the time she was four blocks away from St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s, there had begun to seem something eerie about that, as if she was receiving messages in a form of Morse code.
If she was, she thought, they were coming through in a language she didn’t understand, and maybe didn’t want to.
Then she turned her mind firmly in the direction of Aaron and Scott Boardman’s scanned documents, and thought that she would get in touch with Gregor Demarkian about them as soon as she had a minute to spare.
3
At the chancery, Dan Burdock had come and gone, and the tea and coffee things had already been cleared up, when the call from Rome came in. The Cardinal Archbishop had been expecting it for hours—he had, after all, made a call to Rome himself, earlier in the day—but the fact that he hadn’t gotten it hadn’t stopped him from doing what he had just done. He tried to think of what could have stopped him, and decided that the only thing would have been a call from His Holiness himself. Barring, of course, a direct communication from the Almighty. The Cardinal Archbishop did not have direct communications from the Almighty. He had had them, once, very early in his years as a priest, but the lines from heaven had been silent for decades. Some men who experienced that silence became mired in aridity and lost their faith. The Cardinal Archbishop knew that this was just adulthood. When you were young, you heard God talk because you needed it, the way children needed candy, and the Cardinal Archbishop was convinced that children actually needed candy. Once you were grown you were expected to take responsibility for yourself and to worry about your teeth. He was, he thought, almost infinitely tired. It surprised him to remember how exhilarated he had been when he had been told he would be sent here as Archbishop, and made a Cardinal.