Blood Rites (36 page)

“We cannot allow this to change our plans. Carrera still has the reports, Richard.”

“Find them after you have the boys.”

“You have given up, yes?”

“I have. Maybe it’s even for the better.”

Stephen stopped pacing and stared at him, a long unblinking look that had all the warmth of an army inspection. “Do you think your death will be quick, Richard?” he finally asked.

“No,” he said softly, but with no less determination to see it through. It would, he reflected, be a hell of a lot quicker than the other one.

“No,” Stephen repeated. “Carrera almost understands what I am. He fears me. I’ve met men like Carrera. Hundreds of them. The questions will start as soon as he has you, Richard. And they will go on and on.”

Dick exploded. “Damn you! I’m not your victim, stop torturing me! Wipe my mind clean the way you did Volpe’s if you think I’ll say anything.”

“And I can feel it happening, if you will let me,” Stephen went on as if Dick had not spoken. “This is not an easy thing for me to request but it is the only solution I can see—I want a part of me in you, something I can hold on to no matter how many miles come between us. I want to share my blood with you.”

Dumbfounded by Stephen’s suggestion, Dick sat looking at the carpet, finally responding, “I thought you never do this.”

“Except for occasional victims, I never have. Given our friendship, experiencing your death will be an extreme form of self-abuse. I will feel it, Richard, exactly as I do when one of my own is destroyed. If there is pain, I will feel that. If there is fear, I will feel that too.”

“And you’re expecting plenty of both, right?”

“I think I can reach them before they kill you, Richard.”

And claim his victim. After everything they’d been through, could Dick really deny Stephen this revenge? Honesty forced him to admit that even if his life wasn’t at stake, he did not want to. “What will you do with the kids?” he asked. “You can’t just drag them to the slaughter.”

“Where do you think Carrera will take you, Richard?”

“The flats. He owns a number of warehouses along the Cuyahoga.”

“Close to town, yes? We’ll get a room in the hotel on the square. I’ll hand the boys the key, send them upstairs, and get my car.” Sensing Dick about to raise another objection, he added with obvious frustration, “All I’m asking is that you allow me to save your life, Richard.”

“Before I decide, I want you to answer one question. If some stranger killed one of your sons in self-defense, what would you do?”

“In this era, in the same circumstances as Carrera, I can honestly tell you that I would do nothing. Richard, I am not the predator I once was.”

“But you’ll kill Carrera?”

“He deserves to die, yes?”

“I’ll do it,” Dick responded, surprised by his own lack of reluctance. “When do we have to start?”

“A few hours before the exchange. Novelty seems to make the bond tighter.”

“Good. I want some time. First I want to call St. John’s and arrange to go to confession tonight.”

“You will not die tomorrow, Richard.”

“Maybe not. But I’m like Volpe. I play it safe.” Dick even managed a quick sincere grin. Now that the main decision had been reached, it was relief to be able to arrange the smaller details. “Then later tonight you and I are going to have that talk about death and souls that we’ve been putting off for the last three years. I thought we’d have it while we were in the mountains. Then Lowell intervened. Now I want to know even more, not just what you believe exists but everything that you can show me.”

“And be convinced of your faith, yes?”

“I’ll admit that I’ve been uncertain for years. I’d like to resolve the doubts.”

Dick called the hotel operator and gave her the number of St. John’s Rectory. As he waited for the connection, he asked, “Would you like to go to church with me?”

An expression akin to pain flashed on Stephen’s face. Dick understood. Stephen had lost a friend at St. John’s. Though the memory of the murder would stay with him forever, he did not need the reminder now.

“I would, Richard,” Stephen said, then asked Dick to make a simple request. “When you speak to the pastor, ask that the east door to the choir loft be left open. The evening light through the rose window will feel wonderful.”

“Like home?”

The instant Dick said the words he regretted them. But though the new memories were even more painful than the old, Stephen merely replied, “Yes, like home.”

She’ll be all right
, Dick thought.
She can’t have endured this much to have it
. . .

“
Nas szekornes
, Richard. We survive.”

They purchased two nights at the Sheraton Hotel in the terminal, then pocketed their keys and drove to St. John’s. Once inside, Stephen padded silently down the dark aisle and up the stairs to the loft.

Dick approached the confessional with dread. Like Volpe, he’d become sick of the killing, and like Volpe, he knew much more would come. He wished Father O’Maera were here so he could explain everything. The new pastor, young and idealistic, would never understand the shades of evil Dick faced. He might have told the truth to a strange priest but he could not bear to do so to one who knew him. As he looked, perhaps for the last time, at the glory of the windows around him, he began to understand that this place would give him as well as Stephen the strength he would need tomorrow. Stephen and his brother had created these windows, giving homage to a god they did not worship, a treasure to a race that might one day destroy them, an offering of hope for their shared world.

The new pastor was waiting for him. He wore blue jeans with the black shirt and white collar, the stole around his neck the only sign of his priesthood. He looked at Dick with concern and sympathy. “Would you prefer the confessional or to sit with me in the sacristy?”

Dick heard the creak of a hinge on an upstairs door and nothing more. He wanted privacy beyond Stephen’s polite attempts to not hear. “The sacristy, please,” he said and followed the pastor toward the front of the church. At the altar he turned and saw Stephen’s head and shoulders outlined in the light at the base of the great rose window.
Trust
, he thought and turned to follow the priest.

“So you have come back?” the pastor said. “How is the family?”

For a moment Dick didn’t know how to answer, then the grief of that simple question caught in his throat. He took a deep breath and plunged. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .” And as the last of the daylight faded, Dick told what he could of the kidnapping, his plans, even the doubts that followed the doctor’s verdict. The penance seemed strange, though appropriate, Dick must not think beyond tomorrow until the day had ended. “It is not your decision to live or die, but God’s. Now recite the Act of Contrition,” the priest concluded.

As Dick said the prayer and heard the final words of the sacrament, it seemed that the power of grace descended on him as something tangible, a feeling he had not experienced since he’d been a small boy first taking the communion host.

As he left the priest standing near the altar and walked toward the door where he’d entered, the priest called after him, “I’ll leave both doors open tomorrow.” Dick turned back to thank him and saw that the pastor was looking to the shadows beyond him as if he sensed what other troubled soul shared the comfort offered by St. John’s.

I

In the two days since Russ phoned Carrera, he had left the warehouse a number of times but always returned within a half hour. But now, with the exchange set for tomorrow afternoon, he had to make arrangements to get the boys across the border. The details would take time—he didn’t know how long, but Helen was certain, this would be her last chance to escape before he left with the boys. Even before he began getting ready for the trip, she’d found someone to untie her. As soon as he left, she began to call.

Jean Venault was seventeen, athletic with dark good looks and a habit of thinking in both English and French. He’d been returning from a vacation with school friends in Manitoba. His parents had not wanted him to go, but he had pointed out, correctly his mother decided, that a son old enough to attend a college six hundred miles away was certainly able to handle a three-week trip on his own. Though he’d promised to budget his money, his entire plan consisted of sticking forty dollars in the bottom of his clothes bag. On the day before he started home, a problem with the motorcycle drained nearly all of it. Instead of phoning his parents for help, he’d borrowed just enough for food and gas from his friends and rode for twenty hours straight until exhaustion made further travel impossible. With three hundred more miles to travel and a few precious dollars in his pocket, he’d come down to the old docks hoping to find an open warehouse where he could park his cycle and sleep. He’d discovered only a bare mattress in the shell of a trailer behind a burned-out fishery. Though he’d parked the cycle close to the trailer, the drunks who called that trailer home had opened his gas tank and filled it with dirt and stones.

Now Venault stood beside the cycle, his dark hair beaded with the growing evening fog, pulling tools from the cycle’s storage bin, cursing his own stupidity and the distant thunder that threatened rain the minute he began pulling the tank.

A warehouse down the road caught his attention. It had a recessed door where he could work, and as he pushed the bike closer to it, he noticed fresh tire tracks in the thin layer of dirt that had accumulated in front of its doors. If the place was still used, it might have a night watchman. He could ask permission to park inside and do his repairs. With luck, he’d get a cup of coffee and something to eat out of it, maybe even some gas to get the bike to the nearest station.

Though the outside padlock made it unlikely anyone was working now, he pounded on the warehouse doors anyway.

—Jean.— Did someone call him? He thought he heard his name.

—Jean Venault, help me.—

His name!

He walked around to the side of the building and saw the barred windows. His curiosity had long ago reached its limits and he parked the cycle close to the wall. Gripping a flashlight, he balanced on tiptoe on the cycle seat and played the beam through the room until he found a woman lying on the floor, her hands tied above her. He was no fool. He knew why a woman would be naked and tied like that.

As he scanned the room looking for the rapist, the woman turned her head toward the light and her eyes seemed to focus on his as if she could see his face in spite of the blinding beam. Jean Venault had never seen anyone so beautiful or in so much pain.

—Jean Venault, I am alone now. Help me.—

He looked up and down the deserted street and saw no one who could go for the police. He knew he should make the long run up to the main road and flag down a car but he sensed this was not the help the woman wanted. Young and romantic, he did not question his impulse when he found a piece of scrap metal and began prying the hasp off the doors. The bar slipped and broke, its rusty edges making a deep, jagged cut on his palm. After wrapping his hand in his handkerchief, he pulled a file out of his tool kit and began sawing through the padlock.

How much time had passed, Helen wondered? How much longer before he freed her? Should he continue his work or go for help? Instinct would not answer Helen’s questions, not this time.

II

By the time Russ had picked up the boat, the storm had broken. More show than rain, the choppy waters of the St. Clair and the flashes of lightning made Russ uneasy. He steered the boat as close to shore as he dared, hoping that the old buildings would draw any stray bolts away from him.

The warehouse was located on a sharp outward bend in the river enabling anyone approaching by boat to view the front of the building as well as the rear. Though Russ could not see Venault, the lightning did reveal the cycle parked beside the building. Russ put in at an old pier a hundred yards upriver. Slipping a rope and a pair of handcuffs into his jeans, he grabbed a wrench from the boat’s toolbox and, keeping close to the neighboring buildings, moved in for the kill.

Venault was so intent on the work that he didn’t notice Russ coming up behind him. Helen, concentrating on holding the man’s obsession, detected Russ too late. Though she sent a quick warning, Venault’s response only meant that Russ had to hit him twice instead of once before Venault, unconscious, slipped out of Helen’s grasp.

Russ dragged the young man inside, then wheeled in the cycle and went for the boat, pulling it into the dock beneath the warehouse. By the time he returned, Venault had staggered to his feet and, dazed by the blow, looked numbly at his surroundings and Helen. Venault reacted only when Russ turned on the cycle’s headlight and, knife in one hand, approached him. The Canadian backed away, one hand outstretched in an impotent attempt to ward off Russ’s attack.

Russ responded by lowering his arms. Venault, confused, did the same and Russ had him, sinking the blade deep into Venault’s stomach, following with a quick upward thrust. The cut was skillfully done, not deep enough to reach an artery nor high enough to touch the heart but just enough to assure that Jean Venault would never leave the warehouse alive.

Russ didn’t bother to watch him fall. Instead he spun and faced Helen. “You!” he said, the single word drawn out in an entire breath as he advanced on her. She sensed the full force of his rage, and as she steeled herself for the attack, she heard Patrick’s angry shriek, piercing even through the thick closed door. “Tell him to shut up or so help me, I’ll kill him,” Russ said.

A lie. She knew that Carrera demanded Patrick alive.

A second shriek was accompanied by a loud thud against the door. Though Helen tried to divert his attention from her son, Russ unlocked the door and pulled it open.

And was hit full force by a twenty-pound toddler who, oblivious now to any need to hide, had eyes dark as a hunting cat at midnight and fingers curved and hard. Russ, one side of his face gouged and bleeding, managed to kick the boy away only to see him whirl and advance once more.