She knew as soon as she opened her door that there was something out of place, but because of the way the light was coming in from the door she couldn’t tell what it was. Her first thought was that there might have been some vandalism. That would explain why her door was locked. Somebody had gotten in and made a mess. She reached for the light switch and flipped it up, wondering if she was about to find graffiti spray painted across her cabinets.
Instead, she found Sister Harriet Garrity, slumped across the top of her desk, her body weighing down manila file folders stuffed thick with papers and stuck all over with colored Post-it notes. Her face was blue. Her neck was raw and caked with brown blood, as if something had torn at it, trying to rip out her throat. There was vomit everywhere, and as soon as she saw it, Scholastica knew what it was she had first noticed as wrong. It was the smell, that was what it was. The room had been shut up, maybe for hours, with the heat on, and now there was a smell so sweet and intolerable and thick she almost threw up herself.
She reeled backward, out of the room, and dropped to her knees. She was so dizzy, she didn’t think she could breathe. She put her head down between her knees and then all the way to the floor. The floor felt cold and good against her skin. She would have to get Father, she thought. She would have to get Gregor Demarkian.
But right now, all she wanted to do was scream.
EIGHT
If Gregor Demarkian had had a cell phone, John Jackman would have been able to get in touch with him anywhere in the city; and the newspapers would never have had any reason for WPLD to show a picture of Cavanaugh Street looking as if a bomb had gone off there. Instead, Gregor had meandered home from his last interview with the Philadelphia police, stopping at one store to pick up a box of dark chocolate Godiva raspberry crowns for Bennis and at another to buy a copy of the latest Nora Roberts for Tibor, and then walking up one street and down another looking in windows. He saw a sequined and beaded evening scarf, so obviously not made of real silk that it was painful to look at. He saw a giant ostrich costume made out of fake red feathers, left over from New Year’s Eve. Eventually he got a cab, but the driver had the radio turned to a foreign language station. It wasn’t a foreign language he understood. He had a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer and read that instead. There was something very wrong with the water mains near city hall. The mayor was concerned. A study showed that drug use was down among the teenagers of Philadelphia, but since the study had been done by asking those teenagers whether they took drugs or not, he didn’t put much credence in it. He did think over a little of what he had heard about the deaths of Scott Boardman and Bernadette Kelly, but until he had a chance to see the scenes and go through the papers for himself, he didn’t expect to have much of a handle on it. He did worry, a little, about this business of being consulted both by the Church and the police, but he didn’t worry about it long. John Jackman was right. The Church was not paying him, and had not offered to pay him. The Cardinal Archbishop had only asked him to help. He would never have helped in any way that would have concealed the truth, if the truth was not what the Cardinal Archbishop wanted it to be. This was why he never took consulting fees from individuals or private organizations. Real conflicts of interest came at the end, when there was no way to escape the fact that your client was hip deep in culpability.
The cab turned the corner onto Cavanaugh Street, and for a moment Gregor thought he was looking at another of Donna Moradanyan Donahue’s extravaganzas. This time, instead of just wrapping Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in red and white crepe paper, she had put up lights. There were lights everywhere. They illuminated the front of his own small brown brick apartment building. Donna Moradanyan had made something of an extravaganza of that. There was a gigantic heart, studded with red-and-white twinkling Christmas lights, that reached from the windows of the empty top-floor apartment to just above the windows on the first floor. It was good that it was hollow in the middle, or nobody would have been able to see out. How far away was Valentine’s Day?
The cab slowed to a crawl, and Gregor suddenly saw why. The street was full of police cars—three black-and-whites and an unmarked that only a little old lady who never watched anything but Barney reruns could mistake for an ordinary person’s car. There were television people, too, although not as many of them as there might have been. Gregor saw one sound truck and a reporter with a mike being set up in front of hot lights. His stomach lurched. Cavanaugh Street was the safest place in the city of Philadelphia. That didn’t mean it was invulnerable. And there were accidents, too, although this didn’t seem to be one. Gregor scanned the vehicles anxiously, but not one of them was an ambulance.