Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (12 page)

He moved quickly around the room. Too quickly, in fact. Papers blew off desks as he slid by, though not before he had scanned each one. On the other side of the room was a desk with an engraved silver nameplate on it—
SHEILA TIMULTY—SUPERVISOR
. He picked up a pile of papers from the “in” box on the desk, and about halfway down, he found what he’d come for.

Nonprofit church organization. Cardinal Henri Guiscard. The name he had seen in Janet’s files. Exact same case. Janet was missing and probably dead. Roger Martin was as dead as you can get. Put two and two together and you still have some gaping holes and one big fucking question . . . Why?

What the hell was there about a nonprofit church organization that was worth killing for? Not that he thought the church was innocent. Far from it; his kind had been through too much with those slavers. But what could these people possibly have done or known to get them killed? And who else was on that list? This Guiscard, most certainly, unless he were the killer. But he wouldn’t be able to find the cardinal until morning at least.

Benedict, the lawyer Meaghan had mentioned?

He was back at Martin’s desk before the thought was completed, the Rolodex was open, and his hand was on the phone.

Only the work number, so he called information. He figured these yuppie lawyer types all wanted to live in the city, keep up appearances don’t you know, so he tried that out. The operator was kind enough to give him the address as well: 14 Brighton Street. Three miles away and practically the damned suburbs. He went to the window and pulled it open. The government must have realized how dismal an employer it really is, because on the seventeenth floor, the windows only opened about an inch. His flesh steamed until only steam was left, drifted out into the cold night air, and re-formed into an entirely new shape on the other side. As he flew away, his thoughts were scattered, searching for a focus beyond two corpses and a mystery he felt he hadn’t even scratched the surface of. Sure, he knew who was behind the murders, but he had no clue yet as to why.

“Shit,” Ted grumbled as his unmarked car rolled onto Brighton Street. He was off duty, but he’d been on a blind date with his sister’s girlfriend Irlene. She was surprisingly pretty, but didn’t have too much upstairs as far as Ted could tell. It certainly wasn’t anything out of “Love Connection.” He’d been right down the street when the call had come over the radio, but he damn well wasn’t the first one there.

Ted rolled to a stop in front of number fourteen Brighton, where a yellow plastic police barrier already blocked the front door. Two uniformed officers were keeping at bay the few neighbors who had bothered to come outside when they saw the blue lights flashing down the street.

“Hey, Donny,” Ted called out to one of the men.

“Hey, Ted.” A pause. “How was the date?”

“How the hell—” Ted began, but stopped. He didn’t want to give Wallace the satisfaction. “It was just fucking grrreeaat.”

“That so, Tony the Tiger? Then how come you’re here.”

“Your wife sent me to ask what you wanted for breakfast, dickhead.”

And then he’d passed Don Wallace, who couldn’t think of a snappy comeback and probably would stay awake all night attempting to come up with one.

Ted heard an engine behind him and turned to see an ambulance pulling in quietly. They were in no rush, that was for sure. There was a rank smell coming from the doorway, and it puzzled him. Unless the guy had been dead awhile, he shouldn’t be able to smell the poor bastard all the way out here. Especially with the cold.

“Save yourself the nightmare,” said an old voice.

George Marcopoulos emerged from the doorway, his breath pluming as Ted’s was into a light mist around his head. It could have been a halo.

“What?” asked Ted. He knew the man, but not well.

“I wouldn’t recommend you go in there unless you absolutely have to. It’s a real mess.”

The ME looked ill, and Ted read that as a sure sign that his advice was best heeded. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing I’ve ever seen before, or hope to ever see again,” Marcopoulos whispered softly enough that Ted wasn’t certain he was supposed to have heard. “Hello, Peter,” the old man said.

Ted jumped. He hadn’t heard Peter come up behind him. His curiosity was piqued. What the hell was going on around here?

“Peter. How’d you get here?”

“I rode in with George,” the detective said, smiling at the old Greek. “Shall we go in?”

“
No!”
George nearly shouted, which Ted thought was pretty weird. “I don’t think you need to see what’s inside. Either of you.”

“I’ll just go in and see what the boys’ve got, but I’ll try to avert my eyes. Okay, Doc?”

Ted went inside.

Peter had been about to argue when he smelled it. The stench of the blood hit him full force and almost brought him to his knees. The carnage inside must be extreme for George to insist that he stay out, but even out here the smell was overpowering. If he went inside, he might lose control. Better not to be tempted.

“Thanks for the cover,” he told George. “I didn’t bring my car tonight. And thanks for the warning—from the whiff I got of what’s in there, I wouldn’t want to see it even if I were human.”

Peter smiled at his friend before he continued. He was happy to have a confidant, someone who knew his secrets, someone to share the truth with. He remembered the night that George first discovered his secret, and how afraid he had been of his reaction.

“He’s been ripped apart, Peter. From the inside. It looks as though someone planted a bomb inside him and he simply exploded. The dog, too. But even if that were possible, we haven’t found a single trace of any explosive.”

There was no humor in the old Greek’s eyes. “Whatever happened here, it’s evident that your experience will be of far more use than mine in finding the answers. I was home when they called me.”

“I figured. I called your office.”

“They called me because they had never seen anything like it.”

“Who found it?” Peter wanted to know.

“That’s the clincher,” George said, looking Peter in the eye.

“Fellow across the street. Williams, his name is. He’s sitting on the John and has a clear view of Benedict’s house from the window. He glances out at the house just as the lights go. He kept looking to make sure the whole block wasn’t going to go, but it’s Just Benedict’s house.”

“Did he see anyone?” Peter interrupted.

“Patience, my friend. Yes, Mr. Williams saw someone leaving the house just a few minutes later. And this is what makes this whole thing even more bizarre. The suspect was dressed like a priest. Williams watched him walk to a car that was parked a short way down the block—too far for him to get any details, so don’t bother asking—and drive away.”

“So after a while,” Peter continued for him, “the guy’s curiosity is piqued and he comes over here.”

“Calls first actually, and getting no answer, comes over to find this mess. There is another set of footprints besides Williams’s, but the snow piled up so quick there was no way to get a good look at them.”

What the hell was going on? Peter wanted to know. That branch of the Vatican, which was pretty obviously involved here, had not been so active in a century. And Karl Von Reinman’s killing, though surely unrelated to these murders, must be Vatican work as well. What the hell were they up to?

“Why do you say ‘dressed like a priest’?” Octavian asked Marcopoulos. “Perhaps he
was
a priest.”

Janet Harris. Roger Martin. Dan Benedict. Did the killer know that Peter had been asking the right questions? Most probably, he thought. And so he might be next on the list. He was sure he could take care of himself.

Asking the right questions.

Meaghan had been the one asking the questions.

Ted drove. It had started snowing again.

Meaghan was wide-awake.

“Wide-fucking-awake,” she mumbled angrily to herself.

She stared at the ceiling in a vain attempt to overcome her insomnia and shake the cobwebs from her head, cobwebs that held an image of Peter Octavian that, try as she might, she could not put into focus. In the madness of the last couple of days, the more often she had tried to thrust him from her mind, the more often she had been surprised by his intrusion into her thoughts.

He disturbed her. Not only tonight, when he had left so abruptly, but from the moment they first met. There was something about him that made Meaghan profoundly uncomfortable, as if for some reason, she did not belong. Or perhaps it was Octavian who didn’t belong.

“So what’s the biggie?” she asked herself quietly, a bad habit Janet had often chided her about. “You think he’s a creep, right?”

Ah, there’s the rub, she thought.

She didn’t think Peter Octavian was a creep at all. Sure he made her nervous. But he also created a longing in her that did not originate between her legs. Not to say—she chuckled—that he wasn’t sexy as hell (if you liked the type), but that wasn’t the cause for this longing or for the fascination she felt for him. There was an empty feeling in her stomach when she thought of him.

“Christ’s sake!” she said aloud, and rolled over, sighing heavily, to face the wall. “He’s just a guy,” she told herself. “No matter how peculiar he is, he’s just a man.”

Convinced that she had rationalized quite enough for the evening, Meaghan closed her eyes and attempted to sleep. It was only a moment before she felt it growing again, in the pit of her stomach, like a tear forming in her eye. She had been through it over and over since he’d left.

She wanted him, of that there was no doubt. But that was far from normal behavior for her. Normally, it took her a long time to make that kind of decision, especially now when taking a lover, male or female, could mean risking your life. And it was not like Peter had made any moves on her, beyond some very natural flirting. Her desire was a dark secret weighing on her mind.

Certainly, he had some special quality that had touched a chord within her. But what the hell was it? There was an aura about him that attracted her like musk, but she couldn’t name it.

And then she could.

Finally. Wonderfully.

And maybe now she could sleep.

It was
danger.
Beyond the aura of mystery that surrounded him and the animal attraction she felt for him was a sense of adventure, an almost tangible atmosphere of danger. Tangible yes, and she recognized the electricity it produced. It reminded her of the wire-taut tension in (he air the one time she had fallen asleep at the wheel, waking only to find herself hell-bent for the center guardrail, oncoming traffic heavy. She snapped awake, terror howled in her chest . . . and she could feel it.

That’s the way she felt around Peter Octavian. Not that she was afraid of him, though there was an element of that as well. But the air around him, the room as he moved into it, crackled—no, bristled—with danger.

She felt much better, comforted somehow, that she had finally recognized her attraction. Now that she had, she could concentrate on wondering what it would be like to be with him. At last she was relaxed, sleep right around the corner, and like a naughty child, she hoped she would dream of Peter. . . .

Only when the buzzer rang did Meaghan realize she had indeed fallen asleep. She looked at the glowing numbers on the clock at her bedside; twenty-five to three. She’d been asleep for just fifteen minutes, but she felt groggy. The buzzer rang again, reminding her that someone was trying to get her out of bed at 2:30 in the morning. Under normal circumstances it would have spooked her; with Janet missing, it scared the living shit out of her.

Meaghan got up and threw on a robe. She had been sleeping in her night shirt—an old, faded man’s oxford—and had her socks on, and even with the robe, it was chilly as she crossed the apartment. Before she reached the door, her visitor buzzed again, more insistent this time.

“Hello,” she croaked, half-asleep, as she worked the buttons on the intercom.

Nothing.

“Hello?” she said again.

And now she was awake. What was going on? It wasn’t the first time somebody’d buzzed an apartment at random as a prank or simply in error. But it was two-fucking-thirty in the morning and her roommate was missing and presumed dead by anybody who had half a brain.

“Shit!” She raced for the phone. No reason to take chances. Nine-one-one.

And then the knock.

“Jesus,” she whispered, cursing herself for romanticizing danger. The emergency line rang for the second time. “Answer, you bastards,” she cursed under her breath. “That’s what you’re paid for.”

The third ring and the second knock came simultaneously. This time the knock was longer, more urgent, and she imagined the same for the ring. Almost immediately the knocking became a banging.

“Meaghan,” the knocker shouted.

“Police department, you’re being recorded,” the emergency operator finally answered.

It was Peter at the door.

“Sorry,” she said to the cop who had taken his time to answer the phone. “Wrong number.”

Realizing that he would either wake the whole building—if he hadn’t already—or break down the door, Meaghan ran to unlock it and flung it open.