It was, Gregor saw, thoroughly adequate for the purpose, sort of a cross between a police station’s interrogation room and a law firm’s conference room. There was a carpet, but no paneling. The table was made of wood but the chairs were made of metal. At least they weren’t bolted to the floor.
“I’ve sent somebody out to tell Miss Hannaford you’re here,” Ed Nagelman said. “As soon as she’s ready, she’ll be brought down.”
“Miss Hannaford?” Henry Lord said.
Ed Nagelman shrugged. “She objects to the use of her first name. I don’t feel like arguing with her. Some of the guards are not so polite. She has quite a manner, though, our Anne Marie.”
“She always did,” Gregor said.
“Yes, I gathered that,” Ed Nagelman said “It’s odd how they are, you know. Of course, most of the prisoners I know are men. The only women I deal with are the ones on death row. But it’s surprising how many of them have an exaggerated sense of their own importance—of their own virtue, I’d guess you’d call it. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve only met one man who hasn’t been convinced that he’s innocent as the day is long, and that was Father Murphy.”
“Father Murphy?” Gregor stopped in the middle of taking off his coat.
Ed Nagelman nodded. “Father Murphy. Brian Murphy. From Our Lady of the Fields. I was thinking about him when Henry told me you were going to come up here. Because the papers have been saying you’re helping the police with a murder at St. Anselm’s, and that was Father Corrigan’s old stomping grounds. Not that Corrigan was ever here, of course. He was dead as a doornail before the lawsuits started.”
Gregor dropped his coat on the nearest chair. “But Father Murphy was here?” he said.
“Oh, sure,” Ed Nagelman said. “For three years. There are people who say he would never have ended up here if it hadn’t been for Corrigan, but I don’t believe that. It isn’t 1964 anymore. Kids who get molested tell their parents, and their parents believe them, and there are laws that prevent anybody from keeping it all quiet. At the time the scandal broke, Murphy had a boy at Our Lady of the Fields, so they could prosecute him, and they did. Gave him ten years. He lasted three.”
“Do you mean he was paroled?” Gregor asked.
“Paroled and shuttled off to a monastery somewhere in Wisconsin, from what I remember. The archdiocese promised he wouldn’t be permitted anywhere near children, and they kept their promise. If you want my opinion, from what I’ve heard about cloistered monasteries, I’d prefer jail. But I’ve got to give this to him. He knew he was guilty. He accepted that he was guilty. He was ashamed that he was guilty. I’ve often wondered if it had anything to do with his being a priest, and if Corrigan would have been the same way. But I doubt it. Corrigan had that look in his eye, you know what I mean? The look that says, as far as he was concerned, the world, the universe and everything came right down to him.”
“Well, Jesus,” Henry Lord said. “What was it in the end. Thirty kids?”
“Exactly sixty-two corroborated,” Ed Nagelman said. “We got that information as part of the package on Brian Murphy. And when I saw it, I hate to say it, but all I could think of was that we’d all gotten lucky. I mean, at least he didn’t kill them. Most of the ones I see, the kids are dead. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
There was the sound of a door opening and shutting in the hall. Ed Nagelman went to the door of the conference room and looked out
“Here she comes,” he said. “Good luck with your conversation. Where you think you’re going to get with it is beyond me.”
2
Here, as in all prisons, inmates were expected to wear the clothes the prison issued them, but Anne Marie Hannaford had found a way to make that uniform appear to suit her self perception. Gregor Demarkian watched her curiously as she came in. She was, he thought, his first extracurricular murderer. If she had not decided to murder several members of her own family, he would not have met her sister Bennis, and he might never have developed this retirement consulting business, which he still insisted to himself was not a business at all. Looking back, he remembered thinking that an “ordinary” murderer ought to be different than the serial killers he was used to tracking. Now he knew that she was not different at all. Like the most intelligent of the serial killers—the ones, like Ted Bundy, who were not schizophrenic or bipolar or otherwise mentally impaired—she lived in a world of her own making, where nothing really existed but herself. It was the first requirement of murder, that ability to blank the rest of the human race out of existence at will, and that was why Gregor had always thought it was hogwash, the idea that anybody could be a murderer. Anybody could kill in the heat of passion, or if they were afraid for their lives and panic—that was true. Most people could not do what Anne Marie Hannaford had done, or what was being done now at St. Stephen’s and St. Anselm’s.