Precious Blood (17 page)

Jenner winced. The notion was ridiculous—Jenner was more than a head taller—but Pyke was his best friend. And he was right.

He stayed silent as Pyke walked out of the room.

“Is he gone yet?”

Jenner slumped down onto the couch.

“Yep.”

She came out of the bathroom, this time without even the turban. She took two steps toward him, then bent over double with laughter.

“Oh, my God! That was so
great
!” She couldn’t catch her breath, holding on to the countertop with one hand, trying to straighten up, gasping. “You should have seen your face!”

She slipped onto his lap and put an arm about his neck.

“You didn’t think it was funny?”

She looked at his face and saw that he didn’t, which set her off into fresh gales of laughter.

Jenner just sat there, mystified.

“Between you and Uncle Douggie, I feel like a Victorian orphan. Damn! I wish I’d thought of that bit in
Blue Velvet
, you know, when she walks across the lawn naked to him in front of all of those people?”

She put on a voice. “
Edward . . . Edward, my secret lover

. . .” And then, prodding him with her finger, “
He put his
disease in me
. . .”

That set her off again, and soon Jenner was laughing, too.

“Seriously, though,” she said, “I should stay with him.

He’ll get over it—he’s just tired. He feels like he’s let my parents down, what with you molesting me and all. I can tell.

I promise I’ll sneak up so we can hang out. And when we’re fooling around, I’ll be shouting out, ‘
But . . . but . . . I’m half
your age!
’ ”

And she collapsed laughing again.

The phone rang.

“Father Patrick Sheehan for Dr. Jenner, please.”

Jenner sat up guiltily, Ana sliding off his lap with a protest-152

j o n at h a n h ay e s

ing squeak. “Good afternoon, Father. This is Dr. Jenner.”

“Pat, Dr. Jenner. Unless you’re about to ask me to hear your confession!”

It seemed Father Sheehan was the jovial type. “Hah. Nothing to confess, thanks. Simon Lescure told me you’d be back today. I’m sorry to interrupt your homecoming.”

“Not at all, not at all! Simon tells me that you are involved in a most intriguing situation concerning some form of Coptic text. Very exciting indeed! I keep telling my students that the ancient languages live on among us, but they never seem to take it in. Nor any of the other pearls I lob at them, I fear!”

The priest insisted they meet the next day. Jenner thanked him, took his address, and hung up.

Ana sat by, smirking and sipping her drink.

“Oh, I think it’s a little soon to be talking with a priest, don’t you? I mean, I know I rocked your tiny world, but it was just one night . . .”

Jenner frowned up at her. “I liked you better depressed.”

She smiled a little smile. “Oh, I’ve kept a little of that aside, just for you.”

She stood, then paused to lean over him and kiss his cheek softly. She whispered, “Thank you,” into his ear, then padded back to the bathroom, mimosa in hand.

monday,

december 9

They met in the stairwell at 10:00 a.m., before Jenner headed out to Yardley to visit Father Pat. She stood on the landing between his floor and Douggie’s, in jeans and a baseball cap, hair gathered into a ponytail tugged through the cap’s backstrap. She asked him how he was. He was fine, she was too.

He had to go: Roggetti was waiting downstairs. Rad had called the night before to tell Jenner that their Columbia guy hadn’t panned out. Apparently, Whittaker had brought him to the morgue to read the text directly from the victim’s back; the professor had barely crossed the threshold of the autopsy room before turning white and having to be helped out onto the street.

Roggetti would drive Jenner to meet Sheehan; he also had pulled Jenner’s tracings from the earlier killings from the Evidence Unit. All of which was fine by Jenner—the tracings were better quality than the photocopies he’d kept, plus he’d save the money on the car rental.

Ana turned to go. Jenner said, “Wait! I have something for you . . .”

He sheepishly handed her the oblong box wrapped in sky blue tissue paper.

“What
is
it?” she asked, genuinely excited.

She tore off the wrapping and dropped it onto the stairs.

She unrolled the tissue paper, and tipped its contents into her palm. It was a handsome Laguiole pocketknife—authentic, not a cheap copy—with a three-inch blade, a stubby smaller blade for scoring the caps of wine bottles, and a corkscrew.

The handle was rosewood with ebony inlay, and it had the traditional Napoleonic bee at the base of the blade; he’d spotted it in the window of an antique store after leaving Lescure’s apartment.

She looked at it, beaming. “You know the Chinese say,
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‘Never give a friend a knife’?” She curled her fingers around the elegant handle, then kissed his cheek. “Thanks, Jenner.

It’s beautiful.”

Joey Roggetti was leaning against the car out by the back loading bay, whistling either Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”

or “Hava Nagilah,” Jenner couldn’t tell. Joey insisted on taking the Holland Tunnel; as they neared the entrance, the tuneless whistling turned into tuneless humming.

On the Jersey side, Jenner looked back at the city. He didn’t often take this route, and wasn’t used to the Manhattan skyline without the Twin Towers, like a face without a mouth.

Roggetti had tuned in WDHA, a classic-rock station, that day broadcasting live all day from Asbury Park. Spring-steen’s “State Trooper” came on, and Roggetti sang along, beating the rhythm on the steering wheel.

Old metal bridges carried them high over the barren marshes and derelict factories below, the blighted swamp between Kearney and Secaucus, New Jersey, the saddest place on earth.

Roggetti fell quiet until they reached Pennsylvania, his mood brightening after they stopped for coffee. Ten minutes from Wilkes-Barre, he found a station playing the Stones; he kicked the car up to seventy-five and hit the cruise control.

He hummed the verses to Tom Petty’s “Free Falling,” and sang along with the choruses. Jenner watched the countryside: empty snowy fields, low gray fencing, small industrial buildings and warehouses.

Yardley had the cheery air of a college that had long ago embraced its mid-level status, contenting itself with the ambience, if not the academic achievement, of the Ivy League.

The buildings were brick, solid and handsome, set around
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large, snowy lawns with a central gazebo and beautiful oaks and elms, an elegant, winter-bare forest.

The holiday break was approaching, and the air was festive. From the gazebo, a choir sang carols, and there was a long table where three young women dressed as elves sold mulled apple cider and baked goods for charity. In front of every dorm, groups of students were building large, complex snow sculptures—a Golden Gate Bridge, an airport with planes taxiing on the runway, a model of the United Nations, and the like.

“They take their Christmas pretty seriously here, don’t they, Doc?”

Jenner nodded.

Roggetti shrugged. “You want some cider?”

They walked down toward the table of elves, conspicuous in their dark overcoats and slightly wary expressions.

The cider wasn’t bad. Hot and thick and sweet, heady with cinnamon and clove, the paper cup warm in Jenner’s bare hands.

A snowball fight broke out near the UN; it looked like something out of a J. Crew catalogue.

“Dr. Jenner?”

They turned to see a spry older man with white hair, flushed cheeks, and bright blue eyes standing under the arches. He wore a dark brown hat tilted back on his head, Bing Crosby style, a clerical collar peeking through his un-zipped green parka.

Jenner nodded. “Father Sheehan?”

“Yes. Kind of horrifying to watch, isn’t it?” He gave a crooked grin.

Jenner shook his outstreched hand and introduced Roggetti.

The priest led them back to his rooms, on the ground floor of the dorm with the Golden Gate sculpture. As he closed the door to his bedroom, Jenner caught a glimpse of stacks and stacks of books, overflow from the book-lined study
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where they sat. The room had a warm, dry smell of pipe to-bacco and firewood; it was almost uncomfortably cozy, with deep leather armchairs arranged by the fireplace, where the mantel held a collection of small carved owls in wood and stone.

Jenner and Roggetti sat. They had a perfect view of the quadrangle lawn. The sound of “Deck the Halls” rose from the gazebo.

“There’s no escaping it, is there?” said Sheehan, wryly gesturing to the window. “At Christmas, the whole world turns into some gigantic, awful mall.”

He set a tray of glasses with a decanter on a side table. “I stay sane by telling myself that at least it isn’t ‘It’s a Small World After All.’ Sherry, gentlemen?” He was already pouring.

The priest took a poker and nudged the logs in his fireplace, then sat opposite them. He waited until they had sipped before he drank.

“Now. Your problem, Dr. Jenner. . . . ”

Jenner set the large manila envelope of photos on the desk.

Looking at Sheehan sitting in his chair, expectant, anxious to help, at the man’s books and owls around the room, at the snowy lawns and trees through the windows behind him, Jenner felt like a vector of disease, carrying sickness and decay into the heart of the priest’s idyllic little world.

He opened the fastening on the envelope, then hesitated.

“Father. I’m afraid you’ll find these photographs very upset-ting; I’ve been doing this for some time now, and even I find them disturbing.”

The priest smiled softly. “Ah, Dr. Jenner. I did two tours as an army chaplain on the USS
Repose
during the Vietnam War; I assure you, a hospital ship at war quickly hardens the fainthearted. I appreciate your sensitivity, indeed I do; if I have some problems with the material, I’ll speak up.”

Jenner nodded. He presented the cases in detail, as deli-Precious Blood

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cately as he could. Whatever carnage Sheehan had witnessed on the
Repose
, it had been in the context of military conflict, where historic momentum strips away the moral implications of the actions of individuals. The crime scene photos were something inherently more horrific, more intuitively repugnant: brutal acts of torture and dehumanization, committed by one man not in the name of country or survival, but in the name of personal pleasure. As he spoke, he tried to gauge the priest’s reaction, trying to spare him the full horror of the case, yet not wanting to omit anything that might be important.

The priest’s white head remained bowed, his fingers steepled in front of his forehead in concentration. There was no display of emotion, just an occasional nod as Jenner described the three victims, and the violent, ritualistic aspects of their deaths.

“In the Smith and Wexler murders, the heads had deliberately been positioned to shock whoever discovered them. In one instance, the killer poured milk on a countertop, then set the head into the milk.”

At this, the priest’s head jerked upward. Jenner immediately regretted having mentioned it, but when he looked at Sheehan, he saw that his expression was more grim than shocked. He nodded for Jenner to continue, lowering his head again.

Jenner told him what they knew of the killer’s appearance from Ana’s description, and his theories about the physical branding process.

“Which brings us to you . . .” Jenner trailed off.

“Which brings you to me.” The priest sat forward. “May I see the texts, gentlemen?”

Roggetti produced a large folder from his briefcase. He stood portentously, aware it was his moment, and walked to the desk, followed by Jenner and Sheehan.

The detective removed the photographs, eight-by-tens on glossy stock, and set them out: a couple for Delore, several
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for Smith, and a slippery stack of more than two dozen for Wexler.

Roggetti said, “I also brought Doc’s tracing of the first two, if that’ll help.”

The priest put on a pair of half-moon glasses, then leaned over the pictures.

After a few seconds, he switched on the desk lamp and wordlessly pulled a chair over to the edge of the desk, tuning out Jenner and the detective.

He squinted at the Delore photos for a second, then put them aside.

“
Khi ro
.”

Roggetti and Jenner looked at each other. Sheehan turned to scrutinize a 1:1 close-up of Smith’s markings. He picked up a legal pad and uncapped a fountain pen; without looking at the pad, he began to scribble.

“Fascinating . . . ,” he murmured.

Jenner peered at the legal pad, but the priest’s scrawl was as illegible as the killer’s texts. The room was silent except for the crackle and hiss of the fire and the scratch of Sheehan’s pen.

Outside, it had turned dark. Through the window, Jenner caught glimpses of students carrying lit candles, a soft stream of golden lights.

It was Roggetti who broke the silence.

“So, Father, is it Coptic?”

Sheehan ignored the question. He jotted a little more, murmuring words under his breath in a halting, arrhythmic manner.

He turned back to them.

“Yes, it’s Coptic, but it’s very unusual. The letters are poorly formed—skin would be a tricky surface, of course, but the shapes of the letter are uneven in a way that I don’t think can be explained just by the challenge of writing on skin.”

He tapped the first photo with his pen.

“It’s hard for me to make these out. The first one, the single
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letter, seems straightforward. He’s made a box, and written a single character in it; I think it’s a
khi ro
, a Coptic method of referring to dates, specifically the Diocletian era.”