“What?” Bennis said. “The iconostasis? I look at it all the time.”
“And?”
“And what? It’s an interesting example of Byzantine icon making. Interesting but not particularly good. Lida was talking about going to Armenia to find better ones, now that you can travel there.”
“It’s the saints I’m thinking of,” Gregor said. “Doesn’t it ever make you wonder how many saints of the early Church died bloody and horrible deaths?”
“Not really,” Bennis said drily, “I was raised a debutante Episcopalian.”
“What’s a debutante Episcopalian?”
“A woman with old Main Line money who shows up every week at the Episcopal church to show that she’s still in the Social Register. We weren’t really big on saints dying terrible deaths. But I don’t think most people on Cavanaugh Street are either, and they take religion a lot more seriously than my family did.”
“Do you know what the rule of thumb is in murder cases?” Gregor asked. “Love and money. That’s why people kill. Love and money. For a long time I thought serial killers were an exception to that rule, but they’re not. They’ve just displaced their love, most of them, onto third parties. And even the mass killers, the school shooters, are running on love and money—on status, which is the kind of thing teenagers have as the coin of exchange. Am I making any sense here?”
“Not a lot.”
“Let’s just say that I don’t like the idea that I’m investigating people I don’t understand,” Gregor said. “It bothers me. It bothers me beyond belief. Do you think there’s something about religion that causes people to go off the deep end?”
“Well, Gregor, it’s not just religion. I mean, think of Edith Lawton. A professional atheist. As fanatical about being an atheist as Roy Phipps is about being whatever he thinks he is. There are fanatics of everything. Politics. Religion. Antireligion. Beanie babies.”
“Do you think anybody has ever killed for a Beanie baby?”
“I have no idea,” Bennis said, “but I’ll bet that there are people out there who have wanted to kill because somebody insulted Beanie babies. Would you say that comes in on the love side? Maybe that’s all this is. Somebody is killed because they—I don’t know what I was going to say. Because they insulted the Church, maybe. Or because keeping them alive would mean the Church was harmed. How’s that?”
“Not bad,” Gregor admitted. “We’ll concentrate on Sister Harriet Garrity, of course, because we’re in on the beginning of that one. The markers are still out there for anybody to see. But I wish I had a better handle on the people.”
Bennis unfolded her legs and slipped them back into the clogs she had left resting on the floor. “I don’t think you should have all that much trouble with the people,” Bennis said. “Even Roy Phipps is just a petty dictator with ambitions. What worries me is that it will turn out that he wasn’t the one who did it, and none of his people did either.”
“Why does that worry you?”
“Because, so far, he’s practically the only one of these people I’d want to have done it. At least, as you’ve described them. Everybody else, except Roy and his church pickets, sounds very nice.”
“The Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia?”
“That’s different,” Bennis said. “I wouldn’t want to give Edith Lawton the satisfaction. If it turned out that the Cardinal did it, she’d have an essay up on the Web and in that amateurville freethought magazine in no time at all, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Catholic Church has never been anything but a murderous, hypocritical engine of oppression from the day it was founded until now. And getting half her facts wrong in the process.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
“I’m going to go back to the house and get on the Net. If you come with me, I’ll give you some baklava.”
“You made baklava?”
“Lida did. Also some grape leaves. They’re in the fridge. Oh, and that stuff, the meatballs with the crusts on them. That’s in the fridge, too. With microwave instructions.”
“Marvelous. Lida doesn’t even trust us to know how to heat something up in the microwave.”
“She’s right. You want to come?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. I want to stay here and think. You go eat baklava at eight o’clock in the morning, and I’ll be back later.”
“If Tibor finds you in here, he’s going to declare it a miracle,” Bennis said. Then she shimmied down to the end of the pew and onto the carpet runner that muffled the sounds of her clogs on the floor of the center aisle.