The 24th Letter ((Mystery/Thriller)) (11 page)

“Max, what would I do without you, little lady?”  She kept her eyes closed as O’Brien spoke.  “There’s a bad man out there.  Human life means nothing to him.  I’ve got to find him, and I’m running out of time.  I have to try to save another man’s life.  It’s

my responsibility.  I’ll be leaving soon…you be good, and don’t let Nick pour any beer in your bowl, okay?”

O’Brien watched the fog rolled off the Halifax River, blanketing the mangrove islands and hanging over the marina like clouds descending.  He could see a shaft of light from the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse rotating every minute, its beam giving the fog a momentary illusion of dimension, the figment of ghosts swirling over the sailboat masts as if dancing albino marionettes were pulled by unseen hands.

Soon the ghosts faded and the real nightmares began.  In his dreams, O’Brien saw the dead body of Alexandria Cole.  She was lying on her bed, seven stab wounds in her sternum and breasts.  Her eyes staring at the ceiling.

 He saw a young Charlie Williams, the expression of disbelief in his eyes when the jury read the guilty verdict.  The chilling echoes of his pleas as two deputies led him out of the courtroom, his mother weeping in a back row, her eyes hot and lost.

O’Brien saw Father Callahan lying facedown on the cold marble of the sanctuary.  His three fingers extended, touching the very edge of a postscript written in blood.  His eyes locked on art in stained glass, paintings of salvation backlit by the fractured pulse of lightning.  Images of deliverance cast in a dramatic tragedy, flickering, like a silent movie, off the wide pupils of Father John Callahan’s unmoving eyes.    

THIRTY

Max heard the throaty sound of the twin diesels first.  She cocked her head around the bridge console, peeked through the open isinglass, and barked once.

“Hey, hot dog!” came the voice, coated with a Greek accent thick as olive oil.

O’Brien opened his eyes.  He steadied himself in the captain’s chair, now regretting he had fallen asleep on the bridge.  His back ached, the muscles constricting between his shoulder blades, his foot tingling from the lack of circulation.

Max wagged her tail, jumped on O’Brien’s lap, and licked his whiskered chin.  “Max, thanks for the wake up kiss,” he said, smiling.”  He rubbed her head and set her on the bridge floor.

  She looked at him through wide, excited brown eyes, trotting to the steps leading down to the cockpit.

O’Brien stood, squinting in the morning sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean.  He looked at his watch.  7:39 A.M.

A little more than seventy hours remaining.

“Hey, Sean,” came the Greek accent.  “Got plenty of grouper and snapper.”

O’Brien waved toward Nick Cronus who eased his 48-foot fishing boat,
St. Michael
, into the marina with the skill of an Argonaut.  Cronus stood in the wheelhouse of the
St. Michael
, a boat built from a saltwater pedigree going back two thousand years.  He wore dark sunglasses, his skin the color of creosote, a mop of curly black hair styled

by the wind, bushy black mustache, and forearms like sides of ham.  A life at sea, pulling nets, anchor ropes, diving for sponges and riding out storms had sculpted a man of steel.  And at age forty-three, Nick Cronus showed no signs of slowing down.  He worked hard.  Played harder.  He smiled with his eyes.  O’Brien had once saved Nick’s life, a debt Nick said he would honor forever. 

O’Brien lifted Max under his arm and carried her down the steps to the cockpit.  He headed toward Nick’s slip, which was on the opposite side of Dave Collin’s boat.

Nick backed the
St. Michael
into the slip as easy as a New York cab driver can parallel park.  He cut the diesels and brought twenty tons of boat to a gentle stop. 

O’Brien helped tie the boat to a second piling.  Max scampered up and down the dock, her eyes darting with excitement, the tip of her small tongue showing as she panted in the morning humidity. 

Nick pushed his sunglasses up on the top of his head.  “Sean, you look like hell.”

“And good morning to you, too.”

“Somebody roll you?  Take your money or what, man?”  

“No, Nick.  Nothing like that.”

“You tie one on without ol’ Nicky to join you, huh?”  Nick looked at O’Brien, eyes playful, eyebrows arched and a toothpick in one corner of his mouth.  He knelt down to pick up Max.  “Hot dog, I miss you when I go to sea almost as much as I miss the ladies on two legs.  And even when I’m here, I don’t see you enough.  Tell your papa, Sean, to bring you to the docks more, yeeaah.”

Max wagged her tail and licked Nick’s salt and pepper stubble.  “I pick you up now ‘cause I know you won’t pee on me.  Sean, remember that time I held hot dog up

over my head?  We were on your boat, I did a Greek dance with her and she peed all the way down my arm.”

“And if you don’t want a repeat, don’t pick her up.  She hasn’t hit the grass yet.”

Nick laughed.  “She made me jump in the bay.  I didn’t know what’s cleaner—the marina or little Max’s pee pee.”  He sat Max back on the dock.  “Let’s eat.  You couldn’t have no breakfast lookin’ the way you do.”

“Nick, I don’t have a lot of time.  I have—”

“You have to eat, man. You gotta learn to relax more.  I met a girl, and she has this gorgeous sister.  Big tits and—”

“Father Callahan was killed last night.”

“What?”

“Murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“Killed in the church sanctuary.”

Nick made the sign of the cross.  His mouth parted, a sound like a cough lost in the sinew of his throat.

O’Brien said, “There were no witnesses.  I’m trying to find who did it.”

Nick looked out at the water then back at O’Brien.  He rubbed his mustache with a thumb, the smile gone from the corner of his mouth.  “Can’t believe it.  I remember when the priest came to the docks.  I was cleaning fish when he asked me, where’s your boat.  I told him, and then I asked him to bless my boat.  He say a little prayer, and said next time he’s gonna bring holy water.  You two were supposed to go fishin’ but it

stormed and you drank Irish whiskey with the Father.  I brought some Ouzo.  We played cards, the guitar, and sang some good tunes.  Dave Collins was there, too.”

“I remember.”

“Cops know who killed him?”

“No, but it’s related to an old case.”

“What case, Sean...yours?”

“I don’t have time to get into it.  But it’s erupting from an old case I had in Miami years ago.  Two people are dead within the last twenty-four hours, Father Callahan and a man who confessed to him about a murder eleven years ago.”

“This man killed someone?”

“No, but he knew who did it.  And, in a deathbed confession, he told Father Callahan.  Somehow the killer found out and murdered both the guy who confessed and Father Callahan.  To make matters worst, an inmate on death row is going to be executed in a few days unless I can prove he didn’t commit the murder eleven years ago.”

Nick shook his head.  “No wonder you look like hell, you’re livin’ there.”

“I have to walk Max, grab a shower and hit the road.  Father Callahan left a message on the church floor where he died.  He scrawled something in his own blood.”

“What?”

“He wrote the number six-six-six, a circle drawing, the Greek letter Omega, and the letters P–A–T.  Nick, you grew up in Greece.  In a few minutes, tell me all you know about Omega.”

THIRTY-ONE

            Dave Collins sat in a faded canvas deck chair on Nick’s boat and sipped from a mug of black, Greek coffee.   He looked over the rim to see O’Brien approaching with Max trotting down the dock behind him.

O’Brien said, “Thanks for taking care of Max and putting her inside
Jupiter
before you left.  Did you fix your daughter’s plumbing leak?”

“After some trial and error.  Slept in my clothes on her couch.  You were right.  You said Father Callahan might be the next target.  Nick told me what happened.  I’m so sorry to hear that.  Although I’d only met him once on your boat, he was the kind of person that made you feel like you knew him a long time.”

Nick yelled from the galley.  “Sean, get some coffee.  I’m makin’ fish and eggs.”

Max barked once and darted toward the galley, following the smells of frying fish, feta cheese, and black olives. “Good morning, hot dog,” Nick said, tossing Max a small piece of fish. 

O’Brien looked at Dave and shook his head.  He said, “No leads, at least not yet.”

“How was he killed?”

“Shot to death.” 

Dave held both hands around the large mug and inhaled the steam from the coffee.   “You saw it coming.”

“But I couldn’t get there fast enough to prevent it.”  O’Brien told Dave everything he could remember.  He went over the details of the crime scene and Father Callahan’s last conversation with him.

Dave was silent, his mind working.  He finished his coffee and said, “The message Father Callahan left…it’s in there…somewhere.  I’m wondering why he didn’t try to write out something more definitive.  The killer’s name, if he knew it, a physical description.  You don’t need to crack a code to save Charlie William’s life.  You need evidence.  I can see the DA asking, ‘what’s the connection to Charlie Williams?’”   

Nick yelled from the galley.  “Food’s ready.”

The men sat around a small table and ate pieces of grouper fried in olive oil and mixed with scrambled eggs, feta cheese and onion.  Nick poured dark coffee into three cups and said, “I say a prayer for Father Callaghan.  Lord, help our friend, Sean O’Brien find the man who did this terrible thing to one of your teachers…amen.”  Nick made the sign of the cross and shoved a large spoonful of eggs in his mouth.  “I could use a Bloody Mary.”

O’Brien said nothing.

Dave said, “Amen.”  He sipped his coffee and leaned back on his wooden bar stool. “Sean, I remember Father Callahan as an excellent art historian and a man with a keen ear for linguistics.  There’s something in this last message related to his expertise.”

“What do you mean?” O’Brien asked 

“You said the last thing Father Callahan wrote was six-six-six, the letter Omega, a circle with a something that may or may not have been his attempt at a woman’s profile,

and the letters P – A – T—the T smeared, indicating he’d lost consciousness at that point.”

Nick chewed his food thoughtfully and said, “Spooky stuff.  The six-six-six is from the Bible, the sign of the beast.  Omega, well, in Greece it’s our last letter—the twenty-fourth letter.  But it’s more than a letter.  Like Alpha, which represents the beginning, Omega means the end of something.  The end of a love.  A life.  The end of time, whatever. Gone, man.  Poof!  Maybe that’s why Father Callahan wrote it…the end of his life.”

 “But it doesn’t explain the other things he managed to scrawl,” Dave said.  “Do we try and read it left to right, like reading a sentence, or are the symbols and letters emblematic of a whole picture that will point you directly to the killer?  Sean, can you sketch it out on this paper towel, as close as you can remember, the way Father Callahan wrote the message?”  

“I can do one better than that.  I used my cell phone to take a picture of what Father Callahan wrote on the sanctuary floor.  I can email it to you from right here.  On a larger computer screen, it might make it easier to read.”

As O’Brien reached for the phone on his belt, it started ringing.

“Does that always happen when you retrieve your phone?” asked Dave, as he bit into fish, eggs, and cheese, wrapped in warm pita bread.

  O’Brien looked at the caller ID.  He didn’t recognize the number.

“Sean, this is Dan Grant.  The ME confirms what the surveillance camera pointed us toward when we saw the fake priest enter San Spelling’s room.  Spelling was asphyxiated.  We have a very smart and extremely dangerous killer out there.”

THIRTY-TWO

O’Brien looked over to Dave who raised his eyebrows.  Detective Grant continued on the phone, “Normally I wouldn’t think twice about something like this, but under the circumstances—”

“What do you have, Dan?”

“The guard’s name is Lyle Johnson.  Tried to reach him at the Department of Corrections.  Supervisor said Johnson is on first shift—seven a.m. to three p.m.  He didn’t report for work this morning.  Super tells me that Johnson is always punctual.  But today, no call.  No nothing.”

“Did you try to reach Johnson’s home, his wife, maybe?”

“I called her.  Didn’t get much.”

“What’d she say?”

“Not a lot.  She sounded like she was on some strong medication or coming off a few drinks too many.  But she said something odd, too.”

“What?”

“Said she was going to call in a missing person’s report…but she knew the department wouldn’t do anything until her husband had been missing for forty-eight hours.  I told her she was correct.  Then, out of the blue, she laughed.  It was painful laugh, know what I mean?  The kind that feels fake and all wrong.”

“I know what you mean.”

“She said she might as well skip the missing persons report and wait for them to find his body because she knew he wasn’t coming back home alive.”

“Did you ask her why?”

“She said it was just a feeling she had.”

“Was the call taped?”

“All our calls are taped.  Why?”

“Because she may have incriminated herself in a murder.”

“We don’t have a body.  And I doubt that she killed her husband.”

“I do, too,” O’Brien said.  “But she’s obviously spoken with him…and he apparently told her something.  If he managed to read Spelling’s letter or overhear the confession with Callahan, then he may know the perp’s name.  He might have tried to contact him to cut a financial deal like Spelling had.”

“And if he did?”

“Then he might be dead as Spelling.  You need to talk to her now.  If she thinks she could be tied to her husband’s disappearance, she just might tell us everything he told her.  Check phone records, bank accounts.  See if Johnson had probable cause to contact the perp, then we’re one step closer to finding this guy.”  O’Brien looked at his watch.  “We have sixty-nine hours to stop the execution of an innocent man.  When I was a detective like you, I’d work an investigation by the book, the gut and the mind.  In this investigation we don’t have a lot of time to trace leads.”