True Believers(50)

Harriet got up and went back into the hall. It was empty. Everybody working on this floor was in her office, minding her own business. Harriet walked down the hall to Sister Scholastica’s office. Nobody looked up to see her pass. She went into Sister Scholastica’s office and shut the door. The door’s window had a curtain that could be pulled across it for privacy, just as the window in her own office door had. Harriet pulled it closed. The door itself had a turn lock. It wouldn’t keep a burglar out, but it would stop the casual visitor or the wandering nun looking for something she thought she might have left on Scholastica’s desk. Harriet locked up and went to sit down in Scholastica’s chair. Scholastica wasn’t due back until after lunch. Lunch at the convent was an hour and a half away. Harriet had plenty of time.

It might have been easier if she had known what she was looking for, but she didn’t. She found Scholastica’s discipline in its little cotton bag and took it out, a set of knotted cords that a nun used to strike herself on the back while she was praying the Miserere. It was supposed to be done lightly, over clothes, but Harriet had known sisters who used it on their bare backs until they bled. Her own order had given up the practice when they had given up the habit. She found Scholastica’s Little Office and was surprised at how annoyed she felt that it was so obviously used. Nobody had to pray the Little Office anymore. They prayed the Divine Office together. That should have been enough conformity for anybody. The top of the desk was full of things that nuns were once enjoined from having: pictures of friends and family, a small giftwrapped box of chocolates from which only one piece had been taken, Scholastica’s old varsity cheerleading letter.

Harriet was just tapping into the computer files—so very easy, because all the Sisters of Divine Grace used either Ave Maria or Benedicamus Domine as their passwords—when somebody came to the door and tried the knob. Harriet stopped still, and everything inside her stopped as well. She was so rigid, she might have been an extension of the steel on the chair. When the door wouldn’t open, whoever was there knocked, twice, very loudly.

“Scholastica?” Harriet didn’t recognize the voice.

“Is it locked?” someone else said—Thomasetta, Harriet was sure. “How very odd. Sister never locks up.”

“Maybe she did it absentmindedly,” the first person said, and now Harriet did recognize the voice. It was Mary McAllister. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll come back later. I just wanted to ask her something about that pray-in—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the pray-in,” Thomasetta said, her voice fading slightly. She and Mary must be walking away. “I’ve had it on good authority that there isn’t going to be a pray-in this year, and like everybody else around here I’m very relieved. I mean, really, with that idiot right down the road—”

Harriet sat up straight, and stretched, and forced air into her lungs. It was all right. She had not been caught. She would still be able to get out of here without being found out if she would only hurry.

The problem was, now that she was in the files, she did not want to hurry. She had always been outside the gossip loop in this parish. People didn’t tell her the things they automatically told each other. They saw her as an outsider and a threat. So far, the things she had seen were not very important, or very interesting, but she was sure there had to be something, somewhere, that would allow her to—

What?

She grabbed the desk clock and turned it so that it faced away from her, so that it would not panic her.

She didn’t think she had felt this free, or this exhilarated, since the day she entered the convent.





FOUR





1


For most of the time that Gregor Demarkian was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he thought of murderers at one remove, as if they were objects in a window, on display for purposes of evaluation. It was only near the end, when he was head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, that his attitude had begun to change, and then the change had been gradual. The truth was, homicidal maniacs were not very interesting. He could never understand why millions of people paid good money to read novel after novel about some detective chasing after a serial killer, when most serial killers made as much sense, and had as much relation to the human spirit, as rice pudding. The exceptions were very rare, and never, in his experience, as fascinating as Thomas Harris’s Hannibal. The ordinary run of murderer wasn’t much better, though. He got too drunk or too stoned to think straight, and then he let loose at the first thing that annoyed him and killed it. If that happened to be his girlfriend, or his best buddy, or his girlfriend’s baby, he landed in jail. If that happened to be the store clerk and two of the customers in a convenience store he was trying to rob, he ended up strapped to a gurney while the prison doctor administered a lethal injection. Maybe that was why his opposition to the death penalty had grown, day by day and year by year. There wasn’t enough ceremony to it anymore. It had become a kind of prophylactic, almost a medical procedure. The murderer was a bunion  . The doctor was suited up in hospital green to take the bunion   off.