SUICIDAL SUSPICIONS: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mystery Series Book 8) (31 page)

“Wait. There’s another possibility. The guy who attacked me could’ve been hired by Phillip Hartin.” Kate told Judith about her meeting with Nancy Hartin and the less-than-friendly call later from her husband.

Judith cleared her throat. “You do realize that this is one of the most influential men in the area we’re talking about?”

“Hey, I’m just telling you what happened. Why would he object to my contacting his wife? Mrs. Hartin is certainly capable of taking care of herself.” Something else was making Kate’s brain itch besides her dirty scalp. “Hey, that threatening note I got, do you have it handy?”

“Hang on. It’s in my briefcase.” Paper rustling. “I think I know what you’re going to say. This note’s well written, by a person with a better education than our janitor. He dropped out of high school.”

“Yeah, and even if the guy who attacked me wasn’t the janitor, his speech and personal hygiene…” She shuddered slightly at the memory of rank breath against her cheek. “They didn’t imply that he was a well-educated man. So we’ve got at least two people involved, and someone–Phillip Hartin and/or the Catholic Church–is putting on the pressure to keep us from investigating.”

A long silence. Kate was waiting to be chastised for the
us
.

Instead, Judith said, “I never said I was being pressured not to investigate.”

Kate chuckled. “Yeah, well I’m pretty good at hearing what people aren’t saying, Lieutenant.”

A shorter pause this time. “Yes, you are.” Judith’s tone was lighter. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“Will do.” Kate disconnected.

Hearing what people aren’t saying.

Yes, she was good at that, and she had also been raised Catholic, understood the Church and its idiosyncrasies. She might be able to get more out of Father Bill than Judith had. With the police, he’d be likely to give the party line, either because he’d been told by his superiors back then to keep his mouth shut or he considered anything that Josie had told him as confidential.

Or he might claim he didn’t know anything if he was involved in the abuse himself. Kate would certainly prefer that he was the abuser rather than Father Sam. But when she’d re-read the entry yesterday about Father What-A-Waste, it had definitely sounded like Josie liked and trusted him.

Kate put her hand on the table and pushed herself to a stand. Both her head and her back–which had stiffened up from sitting–protested the movement. She took her phone with her as she shuffled back to the bedroom. She needed to call clients to reschedule them. There was no way she would be working tomorrow, and maybe not on Tuesday.

.

It was a delight to be able to eat dinner with her family. After a long afternoon nap, she was starting to feel more like herself again, although still sore and with a splitting headache. Only once did she catch herself wishing the kids were in bed already so she could talk to Skip about Josie’s case. She quickly banished that impatience and refocused on her children’s chatter.

She was still deemed enough of a convalescent by Skip and Maria to be relieved of bedtime duties. She hugged and kissed each of the children before they went upstairs for their baths.

Edie clung to her for a moment. “It’s okay, sweetie,” Kate whispered into her hair. “I’m safe, you’re safe. We’re all safe.”

She felt the child’s head move in a nod against her shoulder. Her heart ached. She wanted to erase Edie’s memory of Friday night, even more than she wished she herself could forget it. She held the child away from her by her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Everybody’s safe and we’re going to stay that way.”

She knew it was a lie even as the words left her lips. Her husband worked in a dangerous profession and there were no guarantees in life. She’d always tried not to lie to her children, but the desire to restore her daughter’s innocence had overridden that for a moment.

She didn’t take the words back though, nor try to explain. She suspected Edie knew they were only a reassurance, not a guarantee. Despite her young age, she’d already been exposed to several examples of the fickleness of fate, and sadly of humankind’s fascination with violence, starting with the senseless death of her biological father before she was born. Kate hugged Edie again and sent her upstairs to Maria, who was running her bath.

Kate made her way to the sofa and was thumbing through the last journal again when Skip came downstairs after story time. He settled down beside her and laid an arm gently across her shoulders.

“Here we devised those nice signals the other night,” Kate said, “and then didn’t even have a chance to use them.”

“Well, we can remedy that.” He turned her face toward him and kissed her tenderly.

When they came up for air, she said, “I talked to Judith today.” She recounted the conversation to him. “We’re pretty sure that janitor was my attacker, but there’s no way to prove it.”

Skip’s jaw was now tight. “We’ll prove it, somehow.”

She read his thoughts. “Don’t you go after him, not after all the scoldings you’ve given me about doing dangerous things.”

He gave her a grim smile. “How ’bout if I take Manny and Mac? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind helping me.”

She shook her head. Her insides were trembling at the thought of Skip up against that knife. He could hold his own and then some in a fist fight, but knives were a different matter entirely. “Let’s see if the law can come up with something first.”

Time to steer the subject away from the attack on her. “I’m wondering if I can get more out of the former priest than Judith did. I could take Manny with me and have him stay in the next room. I doubt this Coleman guy would talk in front of him.”

Skip frowned. “I’ll go talk to him.”

“Well, I was thinking that I have the advantage of a Catholic background. I know what buttons to push.”

 “Maybe, but I’m pretty good at getting men to talk, one guy to another.”

“So you think your advantage is greater than mine?”

He wiggled his hand back and forth in a maybe, maybe-not gesture. “Probably about the same, but different. Tell you what. You take the follow-up session with the nun and I’ll tackle Coleman. Then if we both come up with
nada
we’ll switch off and try yet again. They really are our best bet at finding out what happened at that church and who would be willing to kill to cover it up. But don’t even think about going anywhere near Coleman without Manny.”

“Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll call Sister Michelina tomorrow and tell her I’m coming instead of you.”

“Might be better if you just show up,” Skip said. “She was pretty resistant to rescheduling the appointment.”

“Hm, that says she does know something.”

“Well, something she doesn’t want to talk about. It may or may not be related to Josie’s death.”

Kate thought of something that Skip would need to know if he was going to interview Bill Coleman. “I rechecked the reference to Father What-A-Waste in the journal. It doesn’t indicate whether or not Josie actually interacted with Coleman much at the high school. She may have just admired him from afar.”

Skip was tilting his head to one side. “I didn’t know there was any connection in high school. And what the hell is a Father What-A-Waste?”

Kate chuckled. “See, that’s what I mean. Catholicism is its own little subculture. Catholic girls often call the young, handsome priests that behind their backs.”

Skip grinned. “Okay, I get it, because of the whole celibacy thing.”

“Right. Anyway there was a reference to Josie and her friends calling Father Bill that. He’d been transferred to the girls’ Catholic high school by then and was in the administration. She refers to him as seeming ‘heroic’ but she doesn’t explain that.”

“If she saw him as a hero then it’s unlikely he was one of her abusers.”

Kate nodded, her chest aching at the thought that Father Sam was most likely the janitor’s accomplice. He was the only other man at St. Bart’s at the time who the Church would work so hard to protect.

Images flashed into her mind, snippets of memories from her childhood–wiggling in a pew, her starched dress scratchy against her skin; a younger Father Sam beaming down at her, as she showed him a picture she had drawn in Sunday School; staring in awe at the statue of the Virgin Mary above the votive candles; her excitement the day of her First Holy Communion. Then other memories flooded back–a nun’s ruler smacking her knuckles, when she couldn’t remember how to spell one of the words on that week’s vocabulary list; the sense of free-floating guilt as she tried to think of something to tell the priest in confession.

She had been taught to love the Church as a child. But in her teens, she had found it lacking. Parting ways with it had been more a sin of omission than a conscious decision. Once away at college, she had slept in on Sundays like many of her classmates.

Skip cleared his throat. “Are we done comparing notes so we can move on to the other signal?”

She mustered a smile for him. “Afraid not. Going through the most recent journal again, I realized there’s a page missing after the last entry.”

Skip rubbed his chin. “So it wasn’t the last entry after all. Is that the journal?” He pointed to the book that she had placed on the coffee table. “Judith said it was okay to keep it?”

“Yeah. She said it had already been handled enough that there was no use sending it to the lab.”

His brow puckered. “Even so, that’s not proper procedure.”

Suddenly she knew why Judith had let her keep the journals. She turned a little more toward Skip. “I’ll bet she’s afraid if they’re at the police lab or in the evidence room, they’ll disappear, and they really are our only evidence as to what Josie was up to before she died.”

He frowned. “Yeah, they might disappear if somebody in the police department is helping with the cover-up, which is quite possible since she was pressured to leave the case alone.”

“But who in the police department would do that?”

He shrugged. “Someone who was involved in the original cover-up maybe? Like a beat cop who got wind of what was going on at the church but was bribed to keep quiet. And now that cop may be amongst the brass.”

Kate sat up straighter. “Bribery might not have been necessary if the cop was a good Catholic.”

“What do you mean?”

“Say the cop sees something, or is told something by one of the children at St. Bart’s. It’s unlikely that Josie was the only victim there. And a priest or a bishop tells him not to report it, that the church will deal with it quietly. It will be better for the children if they don’t have to go through a trial, yada, yada.”

“Yeah, that probably wouldn’t fly today.” Skip picked up the journal. “But it might have in the early nineties. The whole scandal about abuse in the church was just beginning to come to light then.”

He leafed through the pages. “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

He returned with a pencil in his hand and sat next to her again. “Oldest detective trick in the book, no pun intended.” He started rubbing the side of the pencil point gently over a page in the journal.

She sucked in her breath in horror. Then she saw the faint white letters appearing and realized what he was doing. “Doesn’t that screw it up as evidence in court?”

“No more than the fact that you’ve handled it repeatedly and carried it around in your briefcase.”

She leaned over to get a better look at what his efforts were producing. Her back screamed at her. She sat back and tried to wait patiently for him to finish.

He finally put the pencil down, looked the page over quickly, then held the journal up for her to see.

She squinted at it. There were a few clear words, but not many.

....... kid ..... over again....... terrified ...... .confronti..g........................ no danger............ not listening.

I .......................... wrong. That’s ........................ write his name,.................. journal. ....... find out..................................... paranoid ....................................... days for informa......................... hands................ to slander...................m wrong.

The next paragraph started with something that looked like a smiley face.

W......... in case th.................. I’m wrong,.. told Sphinx where ... going... lol.

“Who’s Sphinx?” Skip asked.

“Her dog.”

“Great. So she told her dog where she was going, and then makes a joke about it. Was she an idiot?”

Kate bristled and pulled away from him some. “No, but when she was feeling even somewhat manic… Well, people with bipolar, when they’re manic, can sometimes feel invincible. I don’t think she was quite there, but she obviously underestimated the danger of this confrontation she was going to have.”

“Obviously.” Skip wrapped his arm around her shoulders again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult your client.”

Her flash of anger melted. “I’m the one who should apologize. I’m being hypersensitive.”

He was silent for a minute, staring into space. “You know, I think that’s one of the things I love about you. It was certainly something that impressed me when we were dating, that you’re so fiercely protective of your clients. Once you take on a case, you’re really dedicated to helping them any way you can.”

“Yeah, well it makes the job more stressful sometimes. I should probably work on not being quite so ‘fierce’ about it.” She made quote marks in the air.

He tilted his head to one side. “Nah, then you wouldn’t be you.”

Her chest swelled with warmth. It spread downward. She smiled up at him. “I think it’s time for that other signal now.”

He looked down at her, his eyebrows slightly raised. “You sure?”

“Yeah, but you need to be very gentle. I’ve still got a jackhammer doing its thing in my head.”

He grinned. “I can do gentle. And maybe I can make you forget the jackhammer for a bit.”

~~~~~~~~

Kate jolted upright in bed. Searing pain ricocheted inside her skull. She put a hand on each side of her head, praying it wouldn’t explode.

Her memory had coughed up the answer to at least part of her niggling feeling.