He took a wad of bills out of his pocket and threw them into the front seat. “Let me out here,” he said. “Keep the change.”
He was at least two blocks away from his own building. On the street, it was cold, but that made it easier. He looked at the little knots of people near him and saw nobody he knew. He looked at his own building and saw nothing in the way of a police line. At last he spotted Bennis, standing on the steps in front of their own building’s front door, talking to a tall black man who had to be John Jackman. He pushed past a couple of other people, including a cameraman for WPCT who was swearing at a minicam, and made it to the clutch of cops standing around the bright yellow fire hydrant as if they were dogs waiting to take their turns. Who had decided to paint fire hydrants yellow?
“Bennis,” he said, reaching the steps.
Bennis turned. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “Here he is.”
“Where have you been?” John Jackman demanded. “Aren’t you on a mobile? What’s the matter with you?”
“Of course he isn’t on a mobile,” Bennis said. “He barely has e-mail.”
“Will you tell me what’s going on?” Gregor said.
John Jackman tugged his arm. “Let’s go. My car. We’ve been looking for you for an hour.”
“That’s what all this is about?” Gregor looked from one end of the street to the other. “You sent three police cars with their lights flashing just to find out where I was.”
“We’ve got a major problem,” Jackman said.
“And what are you doing here?” Gregor let himself be pulled toward the unmarked, unprotesting. “Does the deputy commissioner make a habit of paying personal visits to consultants on homicide cases? What are you doing?”
“Wait,” Bennis said.
She ran down the steps and across the sidewalk and caught Gregor just as John Jackman was about to push him into the car. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek, and said, “Take care of yourself. And say hello to Scholastica for me.”
Gregor pecked air and half fell backwards, because Jackman was pushing him.
“We’ve got a problem,” Jackman said again. “I don’t know where you’ve been, but we’ve had a bulletin out for you on every radio station in the greater metropolitan area. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you even listen to music?”
“The cab driver was listening to salsa,” Gregor said.
Jackman’s driver turned around. “You want to go straight to the church?” he asked.
“Straight,” Jackman said. Then he turned to Gregor. “We’ve had another murder.”
“And that’s it?” Gregor demanded. “That’s why you staged a major siege on Cavanaugh Street? What were you thinking?”
“It’s not about the dead body,” Jackman said.
“Then what is it about?”
Jackman threw himself back on the seat and stared at the car’s upholstered ceiling. “Look,” he said. “Shut up and wait until we get there. You’ll see what it is soon enough. What do you know about the Reverend Roy Phipps?”
“Not a lot.”
“Well,” Jackman said, “you will.”
PART TWO
The first born from the dead
—COL. 1:18
ONE
1
Gregor Demarkian would have spent the ride across the city making John Jackman explain what was going on, but he didn’t have a chance. Almost as soon as they were off Cavanaugh Street and out in real traffic, Jackman was leaning over the front seat, talking frantically into the shortwave radio. Gregor found himself thinking that it would be a good thing if the deputy commissioner’s car was fitted out with a shortwave in the back—and then how idiotic it was that Jackman wanted to go into administration. What was this man going to do behind a desk, with no real contact with ongoing investigations? Jackman was one of the most totally committed officers Gregor had ever met. Even as a rookie, still in uniform and studiously ignored by the men who considered themselves “real” detectives, John Jackman had been unable to approach a crime scene without bonding with it. Some people loved their families. Some people had hobbies they couldn’t live without. John Jackman loved the half-panicked miasma that surrounded a newly found body, the barely controlled chaos that seeped into the bones of everybody responsible for bringing order to the scene. It always looked so well organized on television shows, so much a matter of training and skill and remembered organization. In real life it was a nagging, edgy fear that you would do something wrong, that you would step sideways when you should step back or drop a piece of paper you didn’t even know you had in your pocket and contaminate the crime scene forever.