Dangerous Games (23 page)

“Checking up on me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Did you water my plants?”

“Uh, yeah, I did. Look, I’ve got some news, and it’s not good.”

His tone finally registered with her. “What is it?”

He told her. She listened with the phone at her ear, driving the car without conscious thought.

“Okay,” she said when he was through. “I see.”

“I’m sorry, Tess.”

“Right.”

“It’s not your…well, you know.”

He’d been about to tell her it wasn’t her fault. “I know,” she said, though she didn’t. “Thanks, Josh.”

“How, uh, how’s everything there?”

She couldn’t have a conversation with him now. “Talk to you later,” she said, ending the call.

She drove on, her vision narrowed by a fringe of dampness at the corners of her eyes.

Coming up on her right was the spire of a church. On impulse she swung the Crown Vic into the empty parking lot. She killed the engine and sat in the car, wondering why she’d stopped. There was no reason for her to be here. She hadn’t been in a church in months—not since she’d looked into the trash bin behind the minimart and seen Danny Lopez. She wasn’t sure why she’d stayed away. Maybe she hadn’t felt worthy to go.

But that was the wrong attitude. It wasn’t a question of worthiness. The most unworthy were the ones who were most welcome. The prodigal son and all that. Right?

“Right,” she said.

She left the car and ascended the steps to the main doors. As she entered, she realized she was carrying her gun in her coat. Bringing a gun into church was probably a sin in itself. But she figured she could get away with it. Even in LA, there were no metal detectors in churches—not yet.

Out of habit she bowed at the knee just inside the narthex, then proceeded into the nave. The church was empty. Dim lighting from recessed lamps limned rows of straight-backed pews. Stained-glass windows let in faint daylight, illuminating scenes from the Way of the Cross. Behind the altar hung a small crucified Christ, frozen in his timeless suffering.

She took a seat near the back, reluctant to go forward, feeling like an intruder. She sat motionless, breathing gently in the great quiet.

There was a time when she’d been a stranger to her faith. That was after Paul Voorhees died—the only man she could honestly say she’d loved, in the full sense of the word, not simply as a lover but as a partner in life. For him to have been taken from her was an assault on any meaning, any spiritual purpose in the world.

Slowly, by degrees, she’d allowed herself to rediscover what she’d lost. Other people could bear to exist in a universe leached of values, a random agglomeration of particles and planets held together by blind forces, proceeding only to oblivion. She could not.

Her belief wasn’t what it had been in childhood, the naive acceptance of every tenet and doctrine. She had no particular commitment to theological niceties. She was willing to grant that a great deal of her religion was legend and symbol, ritual and tradition—myth, miracle, and authority, in the words of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Even so, she loved some of the symbols and traditions—the musty smell of the missal, the flicker of candles, the great ethereal music of the mass.

But the surface trappings didn’t really matter. It was odd how people could get so caught up in the rites and the sacred stories, which were no more than the vocabulary of faith, a language of symbols. The symbols varied from faith to faith, and most people accepted whichever ones they were born into, just as they accepted whatever language they were raised in. The particulars were arbitrary, but the underlying meaning was not. The imagery and symbolism were a way of reaching beyond the mundane world, into a transcendent awareness—to escape from pettiness, worry, jealousy, hatred, fear, if only for a few moments, and to lose oneself in something higher, something timeless and perfect. To defeat the ego and find the higher self.

That was the truth behind her faith and behind all faiths, a constant truth, however it had been mythologized and ceremonialized. It was a truth she couldn’t phrase in words or defend with logic, but that was all right. She had enough of words and logic in her working life. She came to church to exercise another part of her being, a part that was neither analytical nor analyzable, but real. Maybe it was the realest part of all.

When she felt ready, she made her way down the aisle and knelt at the altar rail. Eyes shut, she prayed. She wasn’t sure what she was praying for. Yes, she was. She wanted relief. Relief from the load of guilt and self-accusation, the dead weight on her shoulders, dragging her down.

“
Come to me
”—the Bible verse drifted through her mind—“
all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest
.”

She crossed herself and said, “Amen.” But she didn’t fool herself. She felt no different. Nothing had changed.

She wanted to leave but couldn’t find the strength. She sank into a pew in the front row and wondered if she’d done something wrong, asked for the wrong thing, or if she really wasn’t worthy, after all.

“Good morning.”

She looked up and saw a young priest bending over her. “I’m all right,” she said automatically, though she knew the tears on her cheeks gave the lie to her words.

The priest regarded her with sympathy. “Is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“I’m afraid it’s a long time since I’ve been to confession.”

“My door is open,” he said with a nod toward a corner of the room.

She had only painful memories of childhood visits to the confessional. And she had nothing to tell this earnest young man. He would never understand the problems she faced, the pressures, the choices, the compromises. He’d removed himself from the world, and she was part of the world, up to her elbows in it, and soiled by it, unclean….

“I thought confession was taken on Saturday afternoon,” she whispered.

“The schedule isn’t carved in stone.”

“I’m sure you’ve got other things to do. I don’t want to waste your time.”

He smiled. “This is what they pay me for.”

She was sure she would say no, but she surprised herself. “Maybe it would help…just for a minute…”

“Drop in whenever you’re ready.”

She wasn’t sure how long she sat in the pew, unwilling either to approach the confessional or to leave the church. Eventually she decided she was being a coward. Cowardice was hateful to her. She sometimes thought it was the only mortal sin.

She got up and entered the small, dark room. Some churches had done away with anonymous confessions, but this one was more traditional. There was the sliding grille, and the heavy darkness, and the strange, floating, disembodied sense of guilt that seemed to hover over the room.

She knelt, her heart beating fast.

The grille slid open, and the priest’s silhouette, limned by dim light, appeared behind the screen. She remembered the ritual, but she wouldn’t open with the traditional request for the father to forgive her sins. She couldn’t say the words. She skipped ahead.

“It’s been years since my last confession,” she said. “Probably twenty years, at least.”

She paused, hoping he would say something, but he was silent.

“I don’t know why I’ve stayed away. Well, that’s not true. I know why. I hate confession. I don’t buy into it at all. I’m sorry, I just don’t. I think it’s a way for the church to exercise control, mind control. I don’t mean to offend you, but that’s the way it seems to me.”

She was talking too much but unable to stop.

“You get people to come in here, and they tell you their secrets, and you forgive them, and that gives you power over them. I don’t mean you personally. I mean that’s the historical reason, the institutional reason for this sacrament. It’s a way of maintaining control. And now people use it as therapy, but it’s not therapy. It doesn’t get to the root of the problem. It doesn’t solve anything.

“So I know why stayed I’ve away. I just don’t know why I’m here now. I guess I just need to talk to somebody, and I’m alone here in LA—no friends in this town, mostly enemies, in fact. Nobody I can really trust. Anyway, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about, because it involves something that happened back in Denver, this case I was supervising—I work for the FBI, I should’ve mentioned that—and there was a case involving a pair of serial killers who were targeting young boys. We identified one of the killers.”

He was Roland Greco, a tall man with hairy knuckles and acne scars, a man who owned two dogs and cleaned carpets for a living and preyed on kids. The plastic cover of the third victim’s school notebook had yielded a thumbprint that matched Greco’s print, on file from a prior conviction.

“We knew who he was. We knew he was our guy. We could have arrested him at any time. But then we might not have gotten his partner, because if the partner got wind of the arrest, he would run. So we had to make a decision—I had to make a decision; it was my call—a decision whether to make the arrest and risk losing the second killer or hold off and try to nab them both.

“I decided we would wait. I ordered a stakeout of the suspect’s residence in the hope that he would go to his partner or his partner would come to him. But what happened…what happened is, the guy was so paranoid he eluded our surveillance. He didn’t know he was being watched, but the next time he went to meet his partner, he took evasive measures out of habit, and he lost our people. And what he did was…”

She swallowed. It was difficult to speak.

“He got together with his partner, and the two of them killed another little boy, Danny Lopez, and they left his body in a trash bin.”

She let a moment pass. She wasn’t sure there was anything more to say, but then she knew she’d left unsaid the most important words of all.

“It sounds like an error of judgment, doesn’t it? And I know an error of judgment is not a sin. To err is human—doesn’t the Bible say that? Or was it Shakespeare? Anyway, I know we can’t expect ourselves to be perfect. I understand that. But you see, I’ve gone over it a thousand times, and I’m not sure what my motive was in delaying the arrest. I just don’t know. You could make a valid case for not arresting him until the partner was ID’d, but…

“I think, to some extent, I wanted to pull off a coup. Wanted a feather in my cap. I’d been in charge of the Denver office for only a few months, and this was a way to prove myself, score a major victory. If we nabbed both of them at once, it would be a classic bust, textbook. They would be teaching it at the academy.

“I think that’s why I waited. At least that’s part of the reason. I wasn’t focused on the case. I was focused on myself. I wanted to look good. I wanted to show DC they’d made the right call putting me in charge. And then I looked into the trash bin.

“That little boy would be alive today if not for me. If not for my—I don’t know what to call it—pride, selfishness, stupidity, whatever the word is. He would be alive.

“And even that isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is, we covered it up. We never let on that we’d had the suspect in our sights. We made the arrest as soon as Greco got back to his house, and got his partner a short time later—a woman, as it turned out.”

A drug-addicted hooker named Wilma Brighton. Greco had given up her name almost at once, with no need for any pressure, and the partner hadn’t tried to flee. The stakeout and the delay had never been necessary.

“Then we held a press conference congratulating ourselves on the job we’d done. And Danny’s mother—she came up to me and thanked me, thanked me with tears in her eyes for apprehending the people who had killed her son, and I had to hug her and accept her gratitude and act like a hero, because the Bureau had decided it would be bad for our image if the truth got out.

“So I was a hero in her eyes and in the media stories. A hero.

“I didn’t feel like a hero. I still don’t.

“And then today I learned…Someone called me from Denver and told me Mrs. Lopez—a single mother, raising Danny all by herself, he was her only child—she killed herself. Took an overdose of pills. She couldn’t go on without her boy.

“That’s my confession. I don’t know where in the Ten Commandments you find that particular sin. I don’t know how many Hail Marys I have to say to atone for it. I’m sorry to lay all this on you. I guess I don’t have anything more to say.”

From behind the screen she heard the priest’s quiet voice. “I’m not going to tell you to recite Hail Marys. But it’s obvious to me you’ve suffered over this. You wanted to help your career; I understand that. But you also wanted to apprehend both criminals. You weren’t content to get only one of them off the street. You wouldn’t have felt your job had been done unless you could rid the city of them both. It sounds to me as if you had a mixture of motives. Most of us do, most of the time. I think you probably did the best you could.”

“I didn’t do enough,” Tess murmured.

“None of us ever do enough. We only do what we can. If you hadn’t caught those people, how many more children would they have killed? You did what you could. Probably you could’ve done better. You could’ve put all thoughts of your own advancement out of your mind. So here’s the penance I prescribe for you. Keep doing your job, and do your best to think only of others, not of yourself. You’ll find it’s not easy. It may be impossible. But I want you to try. And spend some time thinking about the ones you’ve saved, not just the ones you lost.”

Her voice was low. “Okay.”

“And remember, you can only do your best. That’s all anyone can ask.”

She nodded, saying nothing.

“I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

Tess made the sign of the cross.

“Go in peace,” the priest said.

She couldn’t remember what to say in response, so she simply told him. “Thank you.”

She left the confessional and the church. She didn’t know if she felt any better. She didn’t know if she’d accomplished anything at all. But somehow she felt able to go on with her day. That was something, anyway.

Maybe it was a lot.

20