Night and Day (27 page)

“How did things go with Holstein?”

“Ray was a pig in shit. Made a hefty score and nailed you for murder. It was a good
night for him, all the way around, and he wasn’t shy about letting me know.”

“What about the files?”

“What about them?” Gabriel asked, his voice low.

“You said you were paid to take them and deliver them.” I looked around. “I’m guessing
you did that. Want me to tear this place apart and make sure.”

Gabriel was looking down at his feet. “Not really. You’d be wasting your time. I had
‘em delivered the next day. Got paid. End of story.”

“I don’t need to ask the next question, do I, Eddie? You already know what it’s going to
be.”

“Like I said, there’s things you don’t need to know about.”

“Yeah, but you were talking about your business, not mine,” I said. “In my business, you
need to know about everything. Otherwise you don’t clear the case and nobody’s happy.”

“No happiness either way,” Gabriel said. “What’s done is done. Why don’t you just
leave it alone.”

I sighed. “Look, Eddie, we go back a long way. It will be deeply painful to me if I have
to start using my fists on you. Worse if I have to shoot you. But we both know I can do it.
And just so you’re clear, I will do it. They killed my partner. It looks like they killed a couple
of other people too. They framed me for murder. I’m not going to leave it alone.”

“Either way I’m a dead man.”

I laughed. “Don’t even go there, Eddie. I don’t care. Getting clipped by your friends is a
hazard of the business you choose to be involved in and the people you choose to be involved
with. It’s not my problem.”

“You never used to be so cold, Charlie.”

“I grew up,” I said. “So who did you deliver the files to?”

Gabriel hesitated, searching my face. I guess he didn’t see anything there that would help
him. “Mad scientists,” he said.

“What?”

“The mad scientists,” he said. “I had Vic and Angelo take the files over to them.”

“Who the fuck are the mad scientists?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Some kind of doctors or somethin’. Bloodsuckers. They work
out of that old camp on the other side of the river. The big one.”

“Delta-5?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Gabriel said. “I wasn’t in that one.”

I was. “Why do you call them mad scientists?”

“They got some kind of laboratory or hospital or somethin’ over there. Word is that they
do some fucked up shit there. Angelo said it was like a freak show, all kinds of deformed
people and shit. He wouldn’t go back at night, so anytime we have anything to do with ‘em,
we do it in the daytime. They got some regular people who watch the place while the sun’s
up. Like soldiers or somethin’. Got these blue uniforms, red berets. Mean bastards, don’t say
much, but at least they ain’t deformed.”

Area Governor’s Security Force. Bain’s private army. And commanded, apparently, by
Takeda.

“And?”

“And nothin’. I sent Angelo up with Vic, they dropped off the files, they
got my money, they came back.”

I stood and leaned forward, my knuckles on the desk. “So what else have you done for
the mad scientists, Eddie?”

Gabriel’s face was pale. “Nothin’, I swear,” he said. “Couple of months back, somebody
asked Little Pete Donaggio to heist a truck from Sisters of Mercy Hospital. Little Pete didn’t
have nobody who knew how to drive a truck good, and I owed him a favor, so I sent Angelo to
give him a hand. They grabbed the truck around sundown, when the driver was having some
cheap eats in the hospital cafeteria. Angelo drove it over to the camp, they unloaded it, and he
drove it back. Ditched it a couple of blocks from the hospital. Hospital was happy to get their
truck back. Little Pete was happy to get paid. I was happy to get Little Pete off my fuckin’
back. Only one who wasn’t happy was Angelo, since he hadda see all those deformed
people.”

I straightened. “Maybe you should have gone along, Eddie,” I said. “Maybe they could
have fixed your feet.”

As I turned to leave, Gabriel said, “You owe me for this one, Charlie. Some day, I’m
gonna collect.”

I didn’t bother with an answer.

On the drive to St. Bonaventure, I called the Area Operations Center again. Every time
I’d called, I’d gotten optimistic reports, but they still didn’t seem to be able to find Chelsea
Wilkins.

“No, Mr. Welles, they haven’t located the subject yet,” a woman with a soft, pleasant
voice was telling me. “Would you like me to connect you to Miss Takeda?”

“Not unless she has information that you don’t,” I said.

“I can connect you to Captain Hill,” she said. “He’s the on-scene commander.”

“Do you think he knows something he hasn’t told you?”

The woman was silent for a moment. “No, sir,” she said.

“Thanks anyway.”

I stuffed the phone back in my jacket and kept driving. It was possible that they weren’t
having any luck finding Chelsea Wilkins because she was already dead, killed by whoever had
killed her brother.

Four dead Vees. Joshua, Holstein, Ponittzo, and Cross. Each one decapitated. One by
Takeda. Just maybe all four by Takeda.

It made a certain kind of sense. I didn’t have a motive, but maybe I didn’t know enough
about what was going on to recognize one. It was all about who was connected to who.

Joshua was connected to Ponittzo through the Dowling case, and Ponittzo, and by
extension his bloodfather Jeremy Cross, was connected to one of the uptown mobs. Eddie
Gabriel was also connected, to the uptown mobs and to the mysterious mad scientists, who
were, interestingly enough, guarded by Takeda’s people.

There were still holes, big ones. Where did Jedron Marsch and MaryAnn Klinger fit in?
They were part of it. The theft and delivery of their files to Camp Delta-5 proved that. But
how were they connected?

Carpenter had lied when he said Marsch didn’t work for him. So say that Marsch did
work for Carpenter, in some capacity. Arnie Kaiser was Carpenter’s silent partner. Had
Dowling run afoul of the Kaiser mob and needed Mike Ponittzo to bail him out? Was Marsch
somehow connected to Kaiser? Maybe. Somehow.

That still left MaryAnn Klinger. Seventeen year-old runaway. Drained of every drop of
blood in her body and tossed in a dumpster like an empty jug of milk. No obvious mob
connections. No obvious connections with the mad scientists. Just a kid who got caught in
the wrong place at the wrong time by the wrong people.

The only thing that stood out was the way she’d been tapped. The report had described
her wound as coming from an unknown object, possibly a medical instrument. According to
Gabriel, the mad scientists were doctors of some kind. Doctors use medical instruments. It
wasn’t a slam-dunk, but it was the only connection I could make with the information I had.
If I could only believe that the Klinger girl somehow crossed paths with the mad scientists...

I shook my head. That was a real stretch.

Then there was Takeda and her connection to all of it. Right now, I only had two links in
her column. Her sword and four decapitations. And the Area Governor’s Security Force
standing guard for the mad scientists. Neither of those connections was solid.

I’d originally agreed to talk to Father McCray as a way of paying my last respects to
MaryAnn Klinger. I hadn’t been able to find MaryAnn in time to prevent her death. The least
I could do was agree to her mother’s request and talk to the priest.

But now I needed more information. And there was a chance that Father McCray had it.

Chapter Twenty-four

St. Bonaventure was one of the oldest Catholic churches in the city, if not the oldest. It
wasn’t a large, ornate church by any means, certainly not a magnificent cathedral like St.
John’s in midtown. If anything, it was humble, a bit plain, a long red brick building with a
peaked, gray-shingled roof, the walls broken by half a dozen narrow, stained-glass windows.
There was a smaller, square brick building attached to the back of the main church building A
six foot black cast iron fence surrounded the property. It was just another old church, built
before the city closed in around it.

I parked the Jeep on the street in front of the church and went through the open gate. The
front door of the church was open.

It was a little after eleven-thirty and my appointment with Father McCray was for the
afternoon. Hopefully business in the confession booth had been light and he wasn’t still
listening to sins.

I stepped into the dimly-lit church, the smell of incense stinging my nose. There was a
middle-aged Asian priest in short sleeves leaning against the side of a pew, watching the door.
He nodded to me and smiled when I came in.

“Hi, Father,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Is Father McCray still busy with
confession?”

“No, I believe he’s finished,” he said. “Unless you . . .”

“Oh, no, I’m here for something else.”

“You sure?” he asked with a grin. “You look a bit troubled, if you don’t mind me saying
so. Confession might be just what you need.”

I smiled. “I don’t think so, Father. But I would like to see Father McCray if he’s
available.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. He stared at me for a moment, then laughed.

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “Keitaro McCray.”

“Sorry, Father,” I said, shaking his hand. “I was expecting someone a little . . .”

“More Caucasian?” he asked, smiling.

I laughed. “I was going to say older, but that too.”

“You must be Mr. Welles.”

“That’s me.”

“Charlie, isn’t it?” he asked. “I like that name. Good, solid, everyman kind of name.
You mind if I call you Charlie?”

“Not at all.”

“You can call me Father,” he said. He paused a moment, then laughed. “I’m kidding.
Call me anything you like. A lot of the people here refer to me as Father K, which is
something of a relief considering how badly they mangle my given name.”

“Father will be fine,” I said.

“Good, then that’s settled. Let’s head back to the sacristy and crack open a jug of
communion wine, eh?”

He waited for my expression to change as his words sunk in, then burst into laughter and
said, “I’m joking. Priests are allowed to joke, you know. In moderation, of course.” He
turned and started for the door on the other side of the rows of pews. I followed.

As we reached the door, he hollered, “I’ll be in my room, Father Josephs.”

“All right,” came a reply from the direction of the confession booths on the wall next to
the front door.

“Confession is over,” Father McCray explained as he opened the door in the back.
“Father Josephs is just straightening up. We don’t yell back and forth during confession.”

“That’s good to know.”

The sacristy was small, and seemed somehow threadbare. It was clean, and everything
was neatly arranged on a long, cloth-covered table. But the gleaming gold chalice had a
couple of dents, and the censer had seen better days. There were two sets of vestments
hanging on hooks next to the table, both sets clearly washed a few times too many.

“Please,” he said, indicating an open door on the right side of the back wall.

I went into the small room and he followed. It was obviously his personal quarters, and
there wasn’t much there. A small table, barely larger than an end table, with two straight-back
wooden chairs. A bookshelf with twenty or thirty paperback books. A narrow bed against
one wall with a plain white coverlet. Another small table beside the head of the bed, a Bible
and a candle on it.

“Have a seat,” he said.

I sat down in one of the wooden chairs and he took the other one.

“I know you’re dying to ask about my name, so let me save you from asking,
” he said
with a smile. “As you probably guessed, I wasn’t born Keitaro McCray. My parents were lay
people in the Church in Nagasaki. They brought me along with them on a trip to the States. I
was four. They’d corresponded with George and Margaret McCray for years, and they left me
with the McCrays while they made a tour of some nearby churches in Boston. Wonderful city
for churches, Boston.” He paused. “Well, there was an automobile accident, both my parents
were killed instantly, and I was left an orphan, seven thousand miles from home.”

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically.

He smiled. “Don’t be. I have memories of them, but they’re a child’s memories, and I’m
not even sure they’re real.” He smiled again. “Anyway, they didn’t have any family back in
Japan, and not many friends either. They were . . . well, very Catholic in a country where
religion usually means the whole Shinto, emperor-is-a-god thing. They don’t crucify
Catholics in Nagasaki like they used to, but Japanese culture doesn’t exactly celebrate cultural
and religious diversity.”