MASS MURDER (45 page)

“Another late night rendezvous,” Giorgio said distantly.
“Was the blood on the rock his?”

“It matches his blood type, but we don’t have DNA back yet.
He might have died eventually from the blow to his head, but the pond was convenient and provided the exclamation point at the end of the sentence.”

Giorgio looked up.
“That’s a rath
er poetic statement for a cop.”

Swan shrugged.
“Well, the good news is that we have the rock, but we’ll never get any fingerprints off of it so it doesn’t really help much.
Anyway, chances are O’Leary was killed because he saw who killed Olsen.
Maybe even
Dorman
.”

“If O’Leary saw Olsen’s killer,” Giorgio speculated, “then whoever killed her must have been a monk.”

“How so?”

“Because otherwise, O’Leary would have
told Rocky when he interviewed him
.
On the other hand, he might have
wanted to protect a fellow monk
.
By the way, O’Leary left me a message yesterday.”

“Too bad.”

The sound of rustling papers made them look up.
McCready
stood
in the doorway
.

“When you think about it,” the young cop began, “if O’Leary
had seen
the murderer outside, what are the chances he
could
identify him?
Even Father Frances said he saw someone from an upstairs window but couldn’t tell who it was.”

“
True,” Giorgio agreed. “
It was cloudy that night
,
and I’ve been up there several times now in the dark.
Sightlines are blocked from almost any angle
,
and there’s no light out there.
It’s likely he w
ouldn’t
have been able to
tell
who
it was
. B
ut I bet you twenty dollars he could tell if it was a monk.”

“Only if the monk was wearing robes.”

“Right again
.”
Giorgio shrugged and glanced at his desk.
“But it could have been something else. O’Leary could have known something only the killer knew, maybe something that ga
ve the killer motive or means.”

Swan leaned back and threw his legs onto the desk.
“The forensics report came back on the bottle you found in Olsen’s room.
It was clean.”

Giorgio looked disappointed.
“What about the second bottle I found outside?”

Swan and McCready exchanged a glance.
“No fingerprints, but it showed traces of chloral hydrate,” Swan replied.
“So, I guess you were right.
Whoever killed Olsen carried both her and the bottle outside.”

“Unless he disposed of the bottle later,” Giorgio offered.
“He could have hidden it until the next day and then thrown it into the trees when no one was around.”

“Why would he do that?
Why not get rid of it?”

“Maybe we were supposed to find it.
Maybe it was a red herring.”

“A what?” McCready’s face screwed up into a question.

“A false clue.
Crystal Chardonnay was the same wine served that night by the caterers.
He could have thrown
been trying
to lead us to a co
nference attendee or a caterer.”

“How’d you find that bottle anyway?
We combed that entire area,” Swan wanted to know.

Giorgio dared not look at either man or risk exposing his own doubts about how he found it.
And he wasn’t about to tell them a little ghost had told him.

“That’s what makes me think it was placed there later,” he said, avoiding Swan’s question.

“Otherwise you would’ve found it
.”

He turned to Olsen’s file, which lay on top of his desk.
The distraction worked
,
and there were no follow up questions.
Clipped inside Olsen’s folder were photos of the crime scene taken from every angle.
The supply closet appeared dark and crowded.
Along the left wall was a peg-board covered with hammers, pliers and other small tools used in general repairs.
Two brooms and a mop hung on the
far
wall.
Just beyond the mop was a ladder leaning up against the circuit breaker box.
Built-in shelving along the right wall held bottles of cleaners, rags, light bulbs, blankets
,
and other supplies.
In the corner sat a mop bucket, an electric floor buffer
,
and vacuum.
Across the back was a wall-mounted coat rack.
A green utility jacket hung on the first hook.
Mallery Olsen hung on the third hook, partially
blocked
by the ladder.
The shadows were deepest at that part of the small room and explained why the janitor hadn’t seen her right away.

Giorgio stared at the pictures.
This wasn’t just a mystery anymore, it was a puzzle.
As he recalled, several monks had either been late to compline that night or absent all together.
And because of the time window, the murder could have been committed earlier
, p
erhaps
even
during the five o’clock Mass.
So there was opportunity.
But it didn’t answer the questions of why a monk
would
kill a young woman attending a conference
in the first place
, or how he could pull it off.

“We did check on those gray fibers,” he heard Swan saying in the back
ground.

“Yeah?” Giorgio replied absently, still staring at the photos.

“All of the guest rooms have blue or green chenille blankets.
The monks use heavy gray, wool blankets.”

“Blankets?” Giorgio looked up as if waking from a dream.
“Wh
at did you say about blankets?”

“Remember the gray fibers?
You thought they must have come from something the body was wrapped in.
Well, we haven’t found a gray carpet anywhere, but the blankets are a possibility.”

Giorgio wasn’t listening.
He’d quickly returned to the pile of photos grabbing one from the bottom.
The photo he pulled out showed the right wall of the supply closet with the built in shelving.
He picked it up and peered closely at it.

“You know when I’m reciting, I expect you to listen,” Swan said in the background.
“I’ve been forced to listen to enough of your play rehearsals.”

Giorgio looked over at him with a smile.
“Did you ever read the Purloined Letter in high school?”

“The what?”

“The story about the guy who left the letter in plain sight.
No one found it becau
se they assumed it was hidden?”

Swan looked confused.
“What are you talking about?”

Giorgio got up and
moved around his desk so that he could drop the picture squarely in front of Swan.
“Our murderer has a se
nse of humor, don’t you think?”

Swan dropped his feet to the floor and looked at where Giorgio pointed a finger
−
the dimly lit shelves in the closet
.
One shelf was
filled
with cleaning supp
lies and a single gray blanket.

“
Let’s go get that blanket
.
Then, we need to figure out how a monk got into Olsen’s room without being noticed.”
Giorgio stepped to the window to look out onto the street, talking as he moved.
“We know there are secret tunnels up there, perhaps there are secret connecting doors, too.”

He watched the street outside feeling the warmth of having achieved a small victory.
The police station sat across from the town’s mortuary, a two-story Edwardian looking building with steep front steps.
Giorgio stood with his hands in his pockets thinking about a high school friend whose father was a mortician.
Brady Mandero looked like one of his father’s stiffs: thin and pale, with dark circles under his eyes.
He
’d
fascinated Giorgio with stories about how his dad fixed up dead people to look like they were still alive.
He even gave Giorgio a small tin of mortician’s wax once to play with.
Giorgio remember
ed
the smell of the creamy wax made to look like the translucent color of skin.
Giorgio had experimented with adding several warts to his cheek one summer
,
and once nearly scared his mother to death mak
ing her think he had small pox.

But all memories of the mortuary weren’t fun and games.
Giorgio had gotten lost at night once in the basement of Brady’s mortuary, a cavernous three-story building on the lower east side of New York.
He’d searched frantically through empty hallways in the dark looking for the elevator, but found the casket room instead.
T
he memory still gave him a chill.
Staring at the building across the street now, he pictured the string of bodies brought there recently and envisioned corpses lying behind closed doors along the same sort of narrow hallways that had frightened him as a child
.

“You listening?” he heard Swan say.

Giorgio turned.
“Hunh?”

“How do we find them t
he secret doors
?”

Giorgio turned back to the window
.
Brady Mandero and the ghosts from the mortuary had disappeared.

“We go look for them.”

Chapter Thirty-
Two

An hour later, Rocky joined them at the monastery
. H
e and Swan waited by the car while Giorgio went to find Father Damian.
The day was overcast, but there was no real threat of rain.

Giorgio found
Damian
clipping dead buds from a group of rose bushes clustered in the corner of the gated garden.
An older monk worked nearby pulling leaves from a birdbath, while Father
Frances
sprayed weed killer along the fence line.
Father Damian’s body sagged as he worked, as if all energy had been drained away.
He glanced up when Giorgio and Grosvner appeared through the arbor.
Even at this distance, Giorgio could see the dark beard st
ubble that rimmed his jaw line.