“I don’t see how he could have gotten enough money out of Scott Boardman’s settlement to do all the things he was doing,” Lou said.
“He didn’t. His parishioners really do contribute more than the parishioners of St. Anselm’s, because it really does matter that they don’t have families to support. They’re just not Bill Gates. If you check his books, I think you’ll find that he’s been stealing from all six of the men at St. Stephen’s who are part of the pedophilia settlement, and probably from a few of the others. Remember how he’s got that place set up over there. What did he call it? A mutual-aid society. They run a ton of programs—a health-insurance pool, a check-cashing service, a short-term loan service. There’s money going in and out all the time.”
“And Scott Boardman found out what he was doing—” Lou started.
But Gregor shook his head. “No. My guess is that what Scott Boardman found out was that the amount of money he was receiving in his account every month was smaller than the amount he should have been receiving by about a couple of thousand dollars. He found it out from Bernadette Kelly.”
“How?” Garry asked.
“Bernadette Kelly worked at Brady, Marquis and Holden. She was also—sympathetic, I think the word is. She and Scott Boardman talked about his troubles, and his big trouble toward the end of his life was financial. And so I think Scott told her how much he was getting, and she didn’t think that was right, so she checked herself. And at that point, Dan Burdock had two choices—either let his scheme blow up in his face or take care of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly both. If he’d killed only Scott, he’d have had Bernadette suspicious and dangerous right across the street.”
“Okay,” Garry said. “So he gave them mints laced with arsenic—”
“That he’d gotten by picking it up off the floor in the basement at St. Anselm’s, which he could do because there was nothing strange about his being in St. Anselm’s. Even though he and Father Healy didn’t really get along, they cooperated on a practical level on a number of projects.”
“What about Sister Harriet?” Garry asked.
“Oh,” Gregor said. “It wasn’t Sister Harriet per se. It could have been anybody. He could have quit after Scott and Bernadette if Marty hadn’t gone off his head and pulled that stunt in St. Anselm’s. Then all of a sudden, everything was out in the open and very highly visible, and people started asking questions. Especially Harriet Garrity. Think of all those organizations she belonged to. The Seamless Garment Network. The Alliance for Reproductive Rights. The—”
“Gay and Lesbian Support Advisory,” Lou said. Then he blushed. “It didn’t even occur to me.”
“Well, we’re not going to be able to nail him for Sister Harriet,” Gregor said. “I know what happened. She nosed around long enough to figure out something about the way Scott Boardman died. But we’ll never prove it. We will be able to prove the Boardman murder against him. That ought to be enough.”
“What about Father Healy?”
Gregor thought about it. “It depends,” he said. “I’d bet my life that Father Healy died because he saw Dan Burdock take some arsenic from St. Anselm’s basement—or saw Burdock take something and later figured out it was arsenic. That time frame fits. Burdock would have had to get more poison to kill Sister Harriet with. He wasn’t expecting to need any. He wouldn’t have kept it.”
“I hate things like this,” Lou said. “I hate knowing more than I can use. It ends up feeling so damned … incomplete.”
“I still want to know how you knew it was Dan Burdock and not that sleazeball lawyer we’re not even going to be able to arrest until next week,” Garry said. “I mean, look at this. Dan Burdock was stealing small change, even if everything you suspect is true. Ian Holden stole at least a couple of million dollars—”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “Why murder four people? If you’re going to murder anybody at all, murder the first two because they’ve put you in a bind and then just take off. The man had money. He had resources. He didn’t need to stick around here. Dan Burdock did. He didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
“Maybe he’ll confess,” Lou said. “That would make everything a lot simpler than it is now. Why is it they never confess when you need them to?”
Gregor sat down in his chair again and stretched his legs. The reason they never confessed when you needed them to was that you only needed them to when you didn’t have enough to be sure you could convict them. And then they thought they might be able to get off.