Everyone Pays (7 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

MICHAEL

In the end, Dub didn’t give me everything I wanted, but he gave me enough. He said there were four men, some kind of a party. These were the ones I wanted. I got descriptions, locations, who they were, but not their full names. With Dub it was as much as I could expect, as much as he would give.

Four.

And whatever disparate connections there were between them I’d have to uncover. I had to find them, then make them pay.

When it was done, I delivered Dub, sent him on. At that point, would have been crueler if I hadn’t. I said a silent prayer over his body. This sinner would need more than my absolution to walk through heaven’s gates.

I untied the girl, left her waiting on the bed. She’d have to pass his body, and perhaps that might be a message to her, one she’d hear. But I didn’t hold a lot of hope. From the way she fought her ties and the look of her teeth, eyes, and skin, I knew she was already gone. Not that the devil had claimed her yet; she had chosen her path.

She was far down that road.

What I saw as I walked back to the rectory was more of the same: sinners. I saw so many of them in this city, on these streets. Only a small few came to God. Those who came to ask for absolution, such a small piece of the whole, a tiny fraction; it was hard to understand why more didn’t take matters into their own hands. What drew me forward was my love for her and the need to cleanse her for heaven. But I also wanted the men who hurt her to pay.

I did it for Him. In His name. As Sodom and Gomorrah fell, and the flood cleansed the world in Noah’s time, I would do my part to the city’s filth. Whatever I was able.

It was dawn, and the streets had emptied as I headed back, pale light showing only the few homeless who slept in plain sight. Most retreated to alleys, doorways, or underneath whatever they could find.

We offered a place for them in the church for parts of the day, to sleep in the pews. The Gubbio Project. But now they had the shelters and their own haunts. The shelters could only take so many, and they had to be in by a certain hour. The laws helped the city to go on eating itself. Nothing new.

I didn’t have time to stop in and see her, though I wanted to very much. I wanted to see she was all right, that she had slept. Instead, I had my duties: lighting candles and the preparations for morning mass to tend to.

Father Kevin was there, filling the prayer altar with fresh candles. He whistled. He had already set out the sacrament for our service: His body and blood.

Inside the church, protected from the world outside, Kevin was cheerful. Always cheerful.

I wanted to ask him what he made of the sinners on the streets, how he could forgive in the name of the Lord, or how he could even walk past them without getting sick. I wanted to know how he could omit them from his heart, avoid carrying them in it.

Somehow, he did.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.”

We smiled at one another and nodded. Then his face changed. He saw something in me, noticed a scent or a mark or blood. Or perhaps he felt my energy, knew it had changed. Maybe he suspected me of keeping Emily in my room, or heard me slipping out late at night.

“Everything is right with you, Michael?” he asked. Grave concern.

“Yes. Yes. Everything is fine.” I hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the last two days, didn’t know what he might see, or think he saw.

“Sometimes I worry for you,” he said. He stepped to his left, stood in front of me, meeting my eyes. “Since you come here, you do excellent work. Still, I worry. You come in trouble, on drugs. I concerned. Now you with us long time. Still, I ask when I see you not okay.”

“Yes. I understand.” He waited for me to say more. “I can assure you, all is well. Thank you, Father. There is nothing to cause you worry.”

He nodded, though still grim.

Our eyes met, and I smiled. “I am all right.” I reached out to his hands, squeezed them, and he seemed relieved. He smiled too.

“Very well.” He turned then and was gone.

I wondered at his comment, his concerns and what I was showing, but there was no time for that. A long time ago he had saved me. Now was my time to save another.

I doubted if Father Kevin directly heard His word, if anyone did. I was chosen for a reason, for a specific path. Myself alone.

I often wondered at the other fathers: how they could live in this desolation and not become ill with it, how they could tolerate the filth on the streets outside our walls. Somehow, they did not feel forced to do more for Him. He was sick with it, I knew, for He had told me. I needed to do more to make things right.

He didn’t speak to them.

I watched Father Kevin’s back as he walked into the sacristy, whispered after him, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

DONNER

When we were done, we let Debbie Shine go. She was stubborn, refusing treatment for her head injury, as if a visit to the Hall of Justice was more than enough, let alone men in white coats and nurses touching her. I couldn’t entirely blame her. By the time we’d had her sit down with a sketch artist to get a representation of our man’s face, she’d been with us nearly five hours. Open gym at the rec center was long over.

I sat at my desk, drinking coffee, looking at the drawing, feeling the usual brain scramble at the back end of a seventeen-hour shift. A night of hell, to be precise. From the scene at Richard Webster’s apartment to hearing Debbie Shine tell her story not once but twice and then a third time for consistency, drinking coffee all the way through, I felt like someone had run hot lead through my veins and scraped them out. I could barely get my legs to stop twitching.

“You should get home.” Hendricks stood above my desk, jacket on, tie straightened, ready to leave. “We come back and go at this tomorrow early, we’ll have fresh eyes. Be more logical, sensible. I can barely even think straight.”

“Yeah, partner. Maybe you’re right.” I wanted to say more, ask him what he thought of the guy saying he loved her, what he thought it meant about saving her, or the line about “salvation,” but I didn’t.

“Listen, we come back later, put this into the Clip, see what comes back.”

“I hear you.” But I didn’t look away from the drawing. I was trying to get a sense of the guy, burn his face into my memory.

Our perp had dark coloring with hair cut short, a heavy brow, and eyes set apart in an appealing way. He wasn’t bad looking. He had the scruff of a three-day growth, what some considered a beard these days, a Roman nose that most would consider strong. Nine times out of ten, an artist’s rendition from witness testimony carried a look of anger or something resembling fear, but his face appeared calm, at peace. Maybe Debbie Shine’s description had captured something there.

The artist had drawn in the top of his black shirt, just the outline of his collarbones, not even shoulders.

“A preacher,” I said. “A priest.”

Hendricks was gone. I didn’t know for how long. The night squad was coming in and putting their notes together for their shift. They were on the opposite end of a world.

A preacher was what she’d called him. “Father,” Dub had said.

So what if he really was?

I put the drawing down on my desk and exhaled hard from the top of my lungs. Bright fluorescents shone on me from above, and I realized I was barely awake. I needed to get home. I didn’t go anywhere. I was stuck in one of those moments where your mind knows what you’re supposed to do next physically, but your body isn’t ready. I didn’t move.

What happened to time in these moments? I wondered. Does it get counted against you, or are you just on a time-out? What did these moments really mean in our lives?

I suppose I was merely feeling the effects of the night, letting exhaustion work its power. I knew that a part of this thing was him, not only what he’d done, but who he was. I felt like I was starting to put pieces together and make progress.

I was waiting. I waited. Sometimes it can be important to just sit and wait.

But for what?

From whom?

Divine intervention? I don’t believe in anything like that. Instead, I try to figure it all out on my own.

Wish me luck.

In the waiting, important things can come, even if you don’t feel them coming, I believe. These are often the moments that I remember much later as relevant.

That moment, late at night after having a man’s face rendered for the first time, sitting still at my desk, watching the sunlight just start to shine over the East Bay—those moments I still remember. That was when it struck me like a bolt from the sky. You could call it Occam’s razor, or the shortest line between two points, or the inspiration I’d been waiting for.

Basically, I decided to look at things for what they really could be, try the simplest explanation for what Debbie Shine had just told us: that our perp actually could be a priest—a real one. Not just a lunatic, but an actual man of the cloth.

PART TWO

WEDNESDAY

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I blamed Hendricks for leaving, acting like our shift was over and just going home. Sure, I needed to sleep, but whatever it was that made me stay in the chair and wait it out, waiting for
something
, that was the part of me that knew where this was headed, that there was still work to do.

“Hey, hey!” I said, getting the attention of two fresh-faced investigators from the night shift. It was Dale Bennett and Mark Coggins. “Either of you two religious?”

If I’d processed that it was Bennett and Coggins before asking, I wouldn’t have bothered. Bennett was the guy to send out dirty jokes through the departmental email, and Coggins routinely bragged about going home with women he met at investigations, not infrequently describing them as barn animals. “Man, this one hog,” he’d tell us, “we rolled in the mud.”

I could barely stand the sight of him.

They laughed, shaking their heads. Coggins winked. “Ask Meyers,” he said.

I caught Josh Meyers brushing cruller crumbs out of his beard by the coffee machine.

“Yo,” I said. He blanched, maybe more from how I looked than because he’d been caught eating crullers. This was his usual. “Does a preacher wear a robe and a collar?”

“
A preacher
generally refers to one who preaches,” he said. “Someone like a minister or a pastor. No, they don’t wear the robe.”

“How about that nice little white collar that goes at the neck?”

He shook his head. “Not that either. Not usually.
Preacher
usually refers to congregation leaders in the Protestant, Baptist, or Evangelical faiths. So sometimes collar, sometimes not.”

“But a priest, he’s got the collar, right?”

“No. Not so much. The collar isn’t big these days—not since Vatican II.”

“Right,” I said. “Vatican II. I didn’t know there was a sequel.”

He laughed, then started into a lengthy explanation, but I was quick to thank him and leave him be.

I started my second day of work in a row that morning without going home, just washed my face and brushed my teeth and kept drinking coffee as I put my nose to the grindstone, started making copies of the sketch artist’s drawing and putting them up around the station, faxing them to other districts, and uploading them to the database to go into the Clip.

After that, I started looking through church information online, trying to find a priest who looked like our goon, coming up with lots of nothing. One thing I found out: we’ve got almost five times as many churches out there as police stations. You might think district stations cover a city, especially a big one like San Francisco, but churches cover it that much more. In any case, there were a lot of priests to be checked.

I sat at my desk, making calls, faxing the picture, working with little help from the other investigators, who were all working their own cases, trying to get clearances to up their own solved rates and protect themselves from fresh budget cuts.

I thought about calling in Hendricks, getting him out of bed or back from wherever he was, but didn’t do it. Call it love of a partner or negligence or respect, or just that I was too bleary-eyed from the coffee and lack of sleep to stop long enough to think it through. I guess I needed him more than I knew.

I did what I could, and around six or seven, I retreated to the bunk room—really just an old files closet without windows that had a few cots—and passed out for a couple of hours.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like boot leather and my clothes felt days old, but physically I felt about eighty-seven percent better.

I was headed down to the lockers and a shower when I passed my desk and saw the red message light blinking. I wanted to ignore it, take care of my physical needs, and come back to the desk later, but before I knew it, I was in the chair with the phone at my ear, punching buttons.

I had four messages from cops at different districts, guys who said they could recognize the man in the picture from a church they knew. The first one said he had seen the guy at a church in the Mission, on Van Ness and Twentieth Street. I knew the place, pictured it across the street from a dive hamburger place called the Whiz that I used to walk past when I’d lived in the Mission. Most of the observers I’d seen walking into or out of that church were Mexican cowboy types who wore ten-gallon hats and pointed boots as part of their Sunday best. These weren’t sex workers. These were family folks: the men went to church with their wives and children, holding hands as they walked across the street. This one didn’t have the right fit. Even if they had a priest who fit the description, which I doubted, he wasn’t going to be my guy.

The second was from a cop in the Richmond calling about a Roman Catholic place. He said they had a priest who matched the drawing almost perfectly, but that he had a mustache and different hair. I wasn’t sure how that made him fit the description, especially from an eyewitness account less than forty-eight hours old. And again, not the right fit. Roman Catholic in the Richmond? Maybe Point Richmond in the East Bay, but not north of Golden Gate Park. No, for this guy to care so much and get so involved with hookers, young S&M types, he had to have a close connection.

My third call was from a cop who walked a beat in the Tenderloin. This felt on target right away. He said he knew the priest in our drawing, saw him most days at St. Boniface Church on Golden Gate at Leavenworth. This was a guy he knew from bringing in homeless to the shelter across the street from the church all the time, or bringing them by to get fed. Said the man was reasonable enough, nice as a priest was bound to be, but with maybe an edge on him, like he’d done a few wrong things or been around the block a bit himself before turning to the cloth. I found myself nodding as I listened, but then I got worried when he said he’d take a walk over right away. I skipped to the start of the message and got the patrolman’s name as Officer Cope.

I hung up and dialed the Tenderloin district station, got the duty officer, and told him I was calling from homicide down at the Hall, needed Officer Cope.

While I waited, I tried to get a sense in my head of whether I’d seen this guy. His voice didn’t sound familiar. We went all across the city on cases, but it wasn’t often I remembered the rank and file. Blame my too-intense focus on the details of an investigation and the fact that I tried to avoid anyone who might know Tim.

When he came on the line, I could tell right away he was talking into a shoulder mic, wasn’t in the station. “Donner at the Hall. You’re not at St. Boniface, are you?”

“Not yet. I’m heading over.”

“Don’t. This perp isn’t a guy you want to confront on your own.”

“I talk to him all the time,” he said. “Seems about as vanilla as any other priest in this precinct. Not without his demons, but we’re on a first-name basis, you know?”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m putting together an apprehension team and coming at him myself.”

“I’m less than a block away. They close up for the day in less than twenty minutes. One o’clock. Want me to at least poke my head in and see if he’s around?”

I thought about it for a moment. If this cop stops by all the time, maybe our man wouldn’t think it odd if he came in for a look around, not asking any questions. But I didn’t want to chance it.

“Negative,” I said. “Just get out of there. Stay away from the church until I get there. We’ll find a way in.”