True Believers(30)

Marty looked out at the pews again. The homeless people were still there, but now he made sure that nobody else was. People knew that Catholic churches were open twenty-four hours a day. They came in at all hours of the day and night, to pray for help or to offer repentance. At least, that was the theory. Marty had never actually known anybody who did something like that. He checked the front of the church, and the back. He squinted long and hard at the great double doors. He looked at the empty stretch of floor in front of the Communion   rail. He had never noticed before that the church had so many statues, or that they looked so dead. He made the sign of the cross. Bernadette would have killed him for that last bit. She did not think that statues of the Blessed Virgin were dead.

Somewhere in the back, a light flickered. It happened so fast, he thought he might have imagined it, except that the homeless people seemed to have noticed it, too. The ones that were awake began to move around on the pews. One or two of the ones who weren’t moaned in their sleep.

It was now or not at all. Marty knew that.

He hefted Bernadette higher into his arms and started out across the church proper. Several of the homeless people noticed him, but they said nothing. They didn’t even come to look at what was going on. Where they came from, they probably saw things like this all the time—people too drunk or stoned to walk on their own; people being carried and lifted from one place to another. Marty didn’t think it would occur to them that Bernadette was dead.

He got to the very center of the Communion   rail in front of the altar and put Bernadette down carefully on the floor. There was a good thick carpet there, so he didn’t have to worry too much about her being uncomfortable. He made the sign of the cross in the general direction of the monstrance, where a consecrated Host was kept for the adoration of the faithful. He wondered if the Church counted the homeless people as keeping the Host company through the hours of the night. It was terrible. He knew so little about religion, even after all the time he had spent with Bernadette. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that God hated him, and that he must have hated Bernadette even more. There was no other explanation he could find for why the things that had happened to them had happened to them. God’s love seemed to be reserved for people like nuns and priests and people like Mary McAllister, who came from big houses in the city or the suburbs and went to colleges like St. Joe’s that cost more in one year than most people made in two. He knew that people were not supposed to be born cursed, but he was sure that was exactly what had happened to him.

Bernadette was lying in front of the Communion   rail, her body uncurling slowly, almost as he watched. Marty reached into his pocket and took out the gun. He had bought it on the street for two hundred dollars, along with two rounds of ammunition, and he had no idea if it was what the man who sold it to him had said it was. A .357 Magnum. That was what he had wanted. He was only sure it was a real gun, because he had insisted on test-firing it first.

The homeless people hadn’t noticed the gun any more than they had noticed Bernadette. They might not have been able to see it. Marty looked at the statue of the Blessed Virgin in the Mary Chapel, and then at the cloth-draped marble altar that was made to look like a banquet table in the palace of a prince of the blood. The church ceilings were even higher than the ceilings in the rooms around it. The cavernous space seemed to be full of wind that blew in and out of his ears in hiccoughing gusts.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he said to himself.

Then he put the gun in his mouth and blew off the back of his head.





PART ONE

God is expensive, but he has very good taste.

—SHIRLEY CURRY





ONE





1


For Gregor Demarkian, for most of his life, the inevitable end of a successful criminal investigation did not exist. He had been called into court from time to time to testify to something he had seen or heard or analyzed. When he had been a special agent for the FBI, he had been called to court particularly in kidnapping cases. Later, when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, he had watched other men go to court in his stead. Behavioral Sciences dealt with serial killers, and they went to court far more often than kidnappers did. Gregor had a theory about that, eventually. It was that murderers were almost always entirely self-absorbed. A kidnapper was after money. When he failed to get it, when his plans went haywire and he found himself in custody, his primary objective was to save his skin. If a decent plea bargain would do that, he would take it. Murderers were different. Somebody who killed in the heat of the moment might be willing to listen to reason when he was arrested and in jail, but the kind of murderer who planned it almost never was. That kind of murderer wanted to star in his own movie, to be the focus and center of attention, to have all the world’s cameras trained on him. He wanted people to know how shimmeringly brilliant he had been, even though that knowledge would send him to the electric chair or the gas chamber or, as was more and more often the case now, a hospital gurney with rubber restraints and a lethal injection. Gregor sometimes wondered if they liked it, all the way to the end, the ceremony and solemnness of it. He wasn’t sure, because this was the part he didn’t know about. His objections to capital punishment were moral and practical. He had seen exactly one execution, and he had never been interested in seeing another. He only thought that the old line from Dr. Johnson was not entirely accurate. The prospect of hanging might work wonderfully to concentrate the mind for some people, but for others it only heightened the sense of specialness, of being a chosen instrument, of being the next best thing to God.