Kinderman nodded. He took a deep breath and looked at the body where it lay on the bed underneath a white drape. Beside it, on a tray cart, were twenty-two specimen jars arranged neatly in symmetrical rows. They contained Father Dyer’s entire blood supply. The detective shifted his gaze to the wall behind the bed, where the killer had written something in Father Dyer’s blood:
IT’S A WONDERFULL LIFE
Toward sundown the mystery deepened past reason. Sitting in the squad room, Ryan told Kinderman the results of the fingerprint comparison. The detective looked at him, stunned. “Are you telling me two different people did these murders?”
The prints from the confessional panels did not match the prints from the jars.
THURSDAY, MARCH 17
11
The eye passed on to the brain a hundredth part of the data it received. The odds that what it relayed was due to chance were a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of one percent. One sense datum felt like any other. What decided what ought to be relayed to the brain?
A man decided to move his hand. His motor responses were triggered by neurons, which were triggered by others that led to the brain. But what neuron decided to make that decision? Assuming that the chain in the firing of neurons could be lengthened by the billions of neurons in the brain, when you came to the end of them, what remained that had triggered a man’s free act of will? Could a neuron decide? Prime Neuron Untriggered? First Decider Undecided? Or perhaps the entire brain decided. Would that give to its whole what none of its single parts possessed? Could zero times billions yield more than a zero? And what made the decision for the brain as a whole to make a decision?
Kinderman’s thoughts returned to the service. “ ‘May the angels lead you into paradise,’ ” Father Riley read softly from the book. “ ‘May the choirs of angels be there to welcome you. And with Lazarus, once a beggar, may you have eternal rest.’ ”
Kinderman watched with a wounded heart as Riley sprinkled holy water onto the casket. The Mass in Dahlgren Chapel had ended and now they were standing in a grassy hollow of the Georgetown campus at beginning of day. A new grave had been dug in the Jesuit cemetery. Parish priests from Holy Trinity were there, and the campus Jesuits, who were few; most of the faculty were laymen these days. No family was present. There hadn’t been time. Jesuit burials were swift in their coming. Kinderman studied the shivering men in black cassocks and coats huddled close by the gravesite. Their faces were stoic and unreadable. Were they thinking of their own mortality?
“ ‘A dawning light from on high will visit us to shine upon those who are in darkness and entering the shadowland of death.’ ”
Kinderman thought of his dream of Max.
“ ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ ” Riley prayed. Kinderman looked up at the old red classroom buildings towering above and around them, making them small in this quiet valley. Like the world, they continued their implacable existence. How could Dyer be gone? Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.
The priests began drifting away in silence. Only Father Riley remained. He stood motionless, staring at the grave; then, softly, he began to recite from John Donne: “ ‘Death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,’ ” he intoned with tenderness. His eyes began filling with tears. “ ‘For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me. From Rest and Sleep, which but thy pictures be, much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow; and soonest our best men with thee do go, rest of their bones and souls’ delivery! Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men, and dost with poison, war and sickness dwell; and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well, and better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!’ ”
The priest waited, and then wiped away his tears on a sleeve. Kinderman walked over to him. “I’m so sorry, Father Riley,” he said.
The priest nodded, staring down at the grave. Then at last he looked up and met Kinderman’s gaze, his eyes full of anguish and pain and loss. “Find him,” he said grimly. “Find the bastard who did it and cut off his balls.” He turned and walked away through the hollow. Kinderman watched him.
Men also craved justice.
When the Jesuit was finally out of sight, the detective wandered over to a tombstone and read the inscription:
DAMIEN KARRAS, S.J.
1928–1971
Kinderman stared. The inscription was telling him something. What? Was it the date? He couldn’t piece it together. Nothing made sense anymore, he brooded. Logic had fled with the fingerprint comparison. Chaos ruled this corner of the earth. What to do? He didn’t know. He looked up at the campus Administration Building.
Kinderman went to Riley’s office. He removed his hat. Riley’s secretary tilted her head. “May I help you?” she asked him.
“Father Riley. Is he in? May I see him?”
“Well, I doubt that he’s seeing people now,” she sighed. “I know he hasn’t been taking any calls. But your name, please?”
Kinderman told her.
“Oh, yes,” she said. She picked up a telephone and buzzed the inner office. When she finished talking to Riley, she put down the phone and told Kinderman, “He’ll see you. Please go in.” She gestured toward the door.
“Thank you, miss.”
Kinderman entered a spacious office. The furnishings were mostly of dark rubbed wood and on the walls there were lithographs and paintings of Jesuits prominent in Georgetown’s past. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, stared down mildly from a massive oak-framed oil.
“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant? Want a drink?”
“No, thank you, Father.”
“Please sit down.” Riley gestured at a chair in front of his desk.
“Thank you, Father.” Kinderman settled down. He felt a sense of security in this room. Tradition. Order. He needed these now.
Riley downed a shot glass filled with scotch. It made a muffled little sound as he set it back down on the polished leather hide that covered his desk. “God is great and mysterious, Lieutenant. What’s up?”
“Two priests and a crucified boy,” said Kinderman. “There is clearly some religious connection. But what is it? I don’t know what I’m looking for, Father; I am groping. But besides being priests, what might Bermingham and Dyer have had in common? What connective link might be between them? Do you know?”
“Sure, I know,” said Riley. “Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t. What is it?”
“You. And that goes for the Kintry kid as well. You knew them all. Hadn’t you thought of that?”
“Yes, I had,” the detective admitted. “But it’s surely a coincidence,” he said. “Thomas Kintry’s crucifixion—that’s a statement with no relevance to me whatsoever.” He opened up his hands in a rhetorical gesture.
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Riley. He’d turned himself sideways and was looking out a window. Class had just broken and students were milling toward their next assignments. “It could be that exorcism,” he murmured.
“What exorcism, Father? I don’t understand.”
Riley turned his head to him. “Come on, you know something about it, Lieutenant.”
“Well, a little.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Father Karras was involved in some way.”
“If you want to call dying an involvement,” said Riley. He looked out the window again. “D
amien was one of the exorcists. Joe Dyer knew the victim’s family. And Ken Bermingham gave Damien permission to investigate, and then helped to select the other exorcist. I don’t know what it could possibly mean, but that’s certainly a connection of sorts, don’t you think?”
“Yes, of course,” said Kinderman. “It’s very strange. But then it leaves us with Kintry.”
Riley turned to him. “Does it? His mother teaches languages at the Institute of Linguistics. Damien had brought them a tape recording that he wanted them to analyze. He wanted to know if the sounds on the tape were a language or just a lot of gibberish. He wanted evidence the victim was speaking in some kind of language she’d never learned.”
“And was she?”
“No. It was English in reverse. But the person who discovered it was Kintry’s mother.”
Kinderman lost his feeling of security. This connective thread led to darkness. “This case of possession, Father—you believe that it was real?”
“I can’t be bothered with goblins,” said Riley. “ ‘The poor are always with us.’ That’s enough for me to think about, most days.” He picked up the shot glass and toyed with it absently, turning it around and around with his fingers. “How did they do it, Lieutenant?” he asked quietly.
Kinderman hesitated before answering. Then at last he said softly, “With a catheter.”
Riley kept turning the shot glass around. “Maybe you should be looking for a demon,” he murmured.
“A doctor will do,” answered Kinderman.
The detective left the office and was soon breathing shallowly and quickly as he wearily hurried out the campus main gate. He walked down Thirty-sixth Street. The rain had just stopped and the red brick sidewalks glistened with wetness. At the corner he turned right and went directly to Amfortas’ narrow frame house. He noticed all the window drapes had been drawn. He went up the steps and rang the doorbell. A minute went by. He rang again but still no one came. Kinderman gave up. He turned away from the door and hurried toward the hospital, lost in a maze but moving swiftly as if hoping that action would generate thought.
At the hospital, Kinderman couldn’t find Atkins. None of the policemen knew where he was. The detective went to the neurology charge desk and spoke to the nurse on duty, Jane Hargaden. Kinderman asked her about Amfortas. “Do you know where I can reach him, please?” he said.
“No. He doesn’t make rounds anymore,” explained Hargaden.
“Yes, I know, but he sometimes still comes. Have you seen him?”
“No, I haven’t. Let me check in his lab,” said the nurse. She picked up a phone and dialed an extension. No one answered. She hung up the phone and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Has he maybe gone away on a trip?” asked Kinderman.
“I really couldn’t say. We’ve got messages for him. Let me check them.” Hargaden moved to a rack of pigeonholes and from one of them she plucked a sheaf of message slips. She went through them and then handed them to Kinderman. “You can look at these yourself, if you like.”
“Thank you.” Kinderman examined the messages. One was from a medical equipment supply house regarding an order for a laser probe. All the others were calls from the same individual, a Doctor Edward Coffey. Kinderman held up a slip to the nurse. “It’s the same as some others,” he said. “May I keep it?”
“Yes,” she told him.
Kinderman pocketed the message slip and gave the rest of them back to the nurse. “I’m obliged,” he told her. “Meantime, should you happen to see Doctor Amfortas, or possibly hear from him, you will ask him to call me, please?” He handed her a business card. “At this number.” He pointed it out.
“Of course, sir.”
“Thank you.”
Kinderman turned and walked to the elevators. He pressed the button marked “Down.” An elevator came and after a nurse stepped out he entered it. Then the nurse stepped back inside. Kinderman remembered her. She was the one who had stared at him so oddly the morning before. “Lieutenant?” she said. She was frowning and her manner was hesitant. She folded her arms across her chest and over the white leather purse that she carried.
Kinderman removed his hat. “May I help you?”
The nurse looked away. She seemed uncertain. “I don’t know. It’s sort of crazy,” she said. “I don’t know.”
They’d arrived at the lobby. “Come, let’s find someplace and talk,” the detective told her.
“I feel silly. It’s just something…” She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know.”
The elevator door slid open. They stepped out and the detective guided the nurse to a corner of the lobby, where they sat down on blue Naugahyde chairs. “This is really awfully stupid,” said the nurse.
“Nothing’s stupid,” the detective reassured her. “If someone now said to me, ‘The world is an orange,’ I would ask him what kind, and after that who knows what. No, really. Who knows what is what anymore?” He glanced at her nametag: CHRISTINE CHARLES. “So what is it, Miss Charles?”
She blew out a breath between her lips.
“It’s all right,” the detective said. “Now, what is it?”
She lifted her head and met his gaze. “I work in Psychiatric,” she said. “The disturbed ward. There’s this patient.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t there when he came in. It was years ago,” she said. “Ten or twelve. I looked it up in his file.” She was fumbling through her purse and now extracted a package of cigarettes. She shook one out and then lit it with a match. It took her several tries to make the match strike fire. She averted her head and blew out smoke in a thick gray column. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Go ahead, please.”
“Well, this man. The police had picked him up down on M Street. He was wandering around in a kind of a daze. He couldn’t talk, I guess, and he had no I.D. Well, at any rate, he finally wound up here with us.” She took a nervous, quick puff of the cigarette. “He was diagnosed as a catatonic, although who the heck really knows. I’m being frank. Anyway, the man never talked for all these years, and we kept him in the open ward. Until recently. I’ll come to all that in a second. This man had no name, so we made one up. We all call him Tommy Sunlight. In the rec room he’d move around all day from chair to chair just following the sunlight. He’d never sit in shadow if he could help it.” Again she shrugged. “There was something sort of gentle about him. But then everything changed, like I said. Around the first of the year, he started—well—coming out of his withdrawal, I guess. And then little by little he began to make sounds like he wanted to talk. It was clear in his head, I think, but he hadn’t used his vocal equipment in so long that it all came out grunts and moans for a while.” She leaned over to an ashtray and stubbed out the cigarette with quick, hard pokes. “God, I’m making such an awfully long story out of nothing.” She looked back at the detective. “In a nutshell, he finally turned violent and we put him into isolation. Straitjacket. Padded cell. The whole drill. He’s been in there since February, Lieutenant, so there’s no way on earth he could be involved. But he says he’s the Gemini Killer.”
“Excuse me?”
“He insists he’s the Gemini Killer, Lieutenant.”
“But you say he’s locked up?”
“Yes, that’s right. I mean, that’s why I hesitated telling you this. He could as easily have said that he’s Jack the Ripper. You know? So what? But it’s just…” Her voice trailed away and her eyes grew troubled and vaguely distant. “Well, I guess it’s what I heard him say last week,” she said, “one day when I gave him his Thorazine.”
“And what did he say, please?”
“ ‘The priest.’ ”
* * *
ADMITTANCE TO the disturbed ward was controlled by a nurse who was stationed in a circular booth made of glass. It was set in the center of a widened-out square space forming the confluence of three halls. The nurse pressed a button now and a metal door slid back. Temple and Kinderman stepped into the ward and the door slid quietly shut behind them. ??
?There’s just no way to get out of here,” said Temple. His manner was irritated and brusque. “She either sees you through the window of her door and buzzes you out or you have to press a four-digit combination that’s changed every week. Do you still want to see him?” he demanded.
“Couldn’t hurt.”
Temple stared in disbelief. “The man’s cell is locked. He’s in a straitjacket. Leg restraints.”
The detective shrugged. “I’ll just look.”
“It’s your nickel, Lieutenant,” the psychiatrist said gruffly. He started to walk and Kinderman followed him to a hallway that was dimly lit. “They keep changing these goddamned bulbs,” grumbled Temple, “and they keep going out.”
“All across the world.”
Temple fished in a pocket and extracted a ring that was heavy with keys. “He’s in there,” he said. “Cell Twelve.” Kinderman peered through a one-way window at a padded room that was starkly equipped with a straightbacked chair, a washbasin, a toilet and a drinking fountain. On a cot against the wall at the end of the room sat a man in a straitjacket. Kinderman could not see his face. The man’s head was bent down low to his chest, and long black hair fell down in oily, matted strands.
Temple unlocked and opened the door. He gestured inside. “Be my guest,” he said. “When you’re finished, push the buzzer by the door. It brings the nurse. I’ll be in my office,” he said. “I’m going to leave the door unlocked.” He gave the detective a look of disgust and then bounded down the hall.
Kinderman entered the cell and pulled the door shut softly behind him. A naked light bulb hung from a wire in the center of the ceiling. Its filaments were weak and it cast a saffron glow on the room. Kinderman glanced at the white washbasin. A faucet was dripping, one slow drop at a time. In the silence their sound was heavy and distinct. Kinderman walked toward the cot and then stopped.