Of Saints and Shadows (1994) (22 page)

“Thank you.” He hung up and turned to look at Candy, who was standing, almost at attention now, waiting like a good little Catholic girl to be excused.

He stepped back toward her and picked up one of the glasses from the top of the bureau. He had something to celebrate. What had for a moment seemed a major roadblock had become simply a more public display of art.

“Please, have a sip with me.”

Her surprise was undisguisable.

“Uh, Father. I’m sorry; I can’t. I’m not supposed to drink on the job. I’ve really got to get back.”

“Please. I insist.” It took only a muttered phrase as he looked directly into her eyes. After all, it was what she really had wanted. What they all wanted in their secret hearts.

“Take off your clothes.”

By the time Father Liam Mulkerrin left the hotel, Candace Dunnigan had been violated many times, by the wine bottle, first whole, then broken and jagged.

Certainly not a breach of his vow of chastity.

JOE COULDN’T STAND IT ANYMORE. IT HAD been an unusually slow day thus far, and nobody had come into the store for more than twenty minutes, even to browse. As long as the customers had been coming in, he could keep his mind off that book. But with no distractions, it was all he thought about. It held a strange attraction for him, called to him somehow. He had never been particularly susceptible to curiosity until now. And yet, something inside of him realized that his growing preoccupation with the book might not be entirely generated from within him.

Still, though, he couldn’t take it. He pulled open the drawer and opened the book about a quarter of the way through. It was gibberish. Well, not precisely gibberish, but he was disappointed nonetheless. No, it was an almost indeciperable Latin, a dead language despite its status as the basis for English and the Romance languages, and one with which he had no more than a passing familiarity.

Joe stared at the page for a full two and one half minutes before beginning to read aloud what was written there. Halfway through the third sentence, he felt it.

A breeze blew through his store, though the door was closed and there were no windows to open. There was a smell on the breeze that he could not quite place, but that he disliked nonetheless. Somehow, it reminded him of all the times he’d failed, and the time when he was six years old and had gotten sick worse than ever before or since. The wind reminded him of that.

And then it stopped. For a moment there was silence. Then the first book,
Buffalo Girls
by Larry McMurtry, jumped off the shelf and hit the floor with a bang. After a moment several other books seemed to jostle about, but did not fall.

And then they all moved.

Tolkein and King slammed together and landed in a heap on the floor. Ludlum and Heinlein drifted slowly across the aisle and took each other’s place. Every other Agatha Christie jumped off the shelf, turned spine in, then slid back into place. Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins, Sidney Sheldon, and so many more circled up one aisle, down the next, and around again at an ever-increasing speed.

Joe was nailed to the spot, finger in his cousin’s book, jaw agape, and a single tear on his cheek.

A bell rang; he had a customer. His head swiveled from the books for but a moment, and his jaws clacked together when he saw his visitor. His cousin the cardinal, Henri Guiscard, whose own mouth now hung open.

Then the complete Sherlock Holmes slammed into Joe’s skull, and he went down, behind the counter. As he sat up, rubbing his temple where blood now ran, he heard Henri’s voice, raised in anger or hysteria.

“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you. Leave this place.”

Joe pulled himself to his feel to see that nothing had changed. The tumult continued unabated.

“By God, in whom I yet place my faith, I command you.”

The books froze in place, whether feet or inches from the ground.

“Leave this place.”

And they fell, in a pile.

Now his cousin was stomping over to him, and Joe was afraid again. The look on the cardinal’s face was one of disgust, of rage. But then Joe saw something else there, a combination of fear and a sorrow so deep it warranted another name, yet had none. Henri slammed the book shut and spoke through gritted teeth, sounding more in pain than angry.

“I thought. I told.
You.
Not. To open. This book,” he growled, thumping the book with the last two words.

Joe didn’t know what to say. Take the guilt a family member can instill, then add the guilt a clergyman can inspire. He wanted to be sick.

“I don’t, uh, suppose there’s something in here that could, um . . . put them back?”

He could see the anger rise again in Henri’s eyes. He’d tried to lighten up the situation—never mind that the situation was impossible, and therefore had never happened. Now he was getting shit and all because he agreed, against his belter judgment, to do a favor for a relative.

“Are you so completely . . .” Henri began, and then rolled his eyes heavenward, turned, and walked toward the books on the floor. “Come on. Four hands can do the work faster than two.”

And the work began, painstaking alphabetizing and categorizing. It would take a while, even with four hands. But one book would remain without its rightful place in the Book Store, Joe Boudreau knew. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong there, on that counter, in that store.

Really, it didn’t belong anywhere.

Peter was extremely happy to be out of the light, but even inside the hotel, he kept on the dark sunglasses that hid his perpetual squint from Ted and Meaghan. George was at work now, at the hospital, probably asleep at his desk. That’s what Peter would do if he actually had a desk to speak of.

Instead he’d made an odyssey across town, in the noonday sun
(mad dogs and Englishmen).
Yes, it was overcast and cold, but to him daylight was daylight. Certainly, thanks to Ted’s timely phone call confirming their destination as the Park Plaza Hotel, the journey was a hell of a lot shorter than it would have been.

“But the day ain’t over yet,” Peter muttered under his breath, prompting quizzical looks from Meaghan and Ted.

Meaghan had been wonderful, simply walking alongside him and only noting his discomfort by touching him on the elbow from time to time to share a look of encouragement. And even that he couldn’t believe, after the evening they’d shared the night before. She was either totally in control, and had a lot of class, or she was out of her mind. Either way, Peter figured, she was one of a kind.

On the other hand, the gravity of their situation notwithstanding, Ted had not stopped talking since they’d rendezvoused with him nearly forty-five minutes earlier. Ted alternately cracked jokes, some actually funny, and inquired quite seriously about Peter’s health; what his behavior amounted to was a constant reminder to Peter that he was, indeed, exposed to sunlight. Luckily, Ted didn’t require more than grunts and uh-huh’s in response, otherwise Peter would have had trouble ignoring his every word. Certainly, he had overcome something that to his knowledge, none of his kind had triumphed over in many centuries, but that did not mean that there was no concentration involved, or that he didn’t still have that nagging voice in the back of his head saying, “You ought to have blown up by now, you stupid asshole.”

And of course, more than anything else, there was the fact that it hurt. Oh, yes, did it hurt. But that was to be expected. Until he could completely wipe that programming from his head, the pain would still be there. And he knew that the day would come, just as the day had come when he did not feel weakened by the sun’s rays; one day the pain would be gone. Or almost gone, and in this one instance, almost would be quite close enough.

But now he could take a moment to breathe, and when Ted spoke, he could actually give a cogent answer.

“Your show, Peter. What’s the deal?”

“We’re just visiting, buddy. Unless there’s a problem,” he answered as they approached the portly Asian man a sign declared to be the concierge.

“And then?” Meaghan asked.

“Then we’re all business.”

The three of them must have presented quite a sight to the concierge, Peter realized. A tall, thin, scraggly-looking white guy with a ponytail and sunglasses; a handsome, muscular clean-cut black guy; and a pretty white woman whose every movement declared her status as a businesswoman used to getting answers. The man must be baffled, indeed.

Peter also enjoyed the astonished look on the man’s face when he discovered just who this strange trio were visiting.

“What room is Cardinal Guiscard in, please?” Meaghan asked in a practiced tone, cordial yet demanding, and smiled coolly at the concierge, whose name tag proclaimed him to be Jim Lee.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Lee replied, as polite as can be, “but the cardinal has asked not to be disturbed for the rest of the day. It appears he isn’t feeling at all well.”

“I see,” Meaghan said, smiling again. “Well, we won’t disturb him just now, but I would still like to know his room number for future reference.”

“Ah, well, you understand it is the hotel policy not to give out the guests’ room numbers. Rather, we connect visitors by house phone and leave it to the guests to give their visitors their own room numbers.”

“But you’ve said we cannot disturb the cardinal, which would, I suppose, include a call to him on the house phone to establish his room number. Correct?”

“Just so,” said Mr. Lee.

“Um-hm,” Meaghan said, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Ted. “Theodore . . .”

As Ted flashed his badge and received the cardinal’s room number in response, Meaghan looked at Peter and smiled.

“I’m enjoying this.”

And he could tell she was. But he had a feeling the novelty would be wearing off pretty quick.

“I’m sorry if I was, uh, short in any way. Seems one of my employees has abandoned us in the middle of her shift. The, uh, cardinal is in Room 624.”

They rode the elevator in relative silence, pondering the connection between a serial killer and a Roman Catholic cardinal. When the doors slid open, instincts bred through lifetimes of danger (with one lifetime considerably longer than the other) moved Peter and Ted in front of Meaghan before even they realized they were doing it. They got off the same way and began walking down the hall toward Room 624 with her trailing behind.

After Peter had rapped on the door three times without an answer, he suggested Ted return to the lobby to see if Mr. Lee could be coerced into admitting them to the cardinal’s room without a search warrant. As Ted turned to go Meaghan gave the door a knock of her own, a furrowed brow the only sign of her annoyance. With the impatience of someone refusing to accept that a light is out, a phone rings unanswered, or a door is indeed locked, she jiggled the doorknob.

And looked down in shock, for truthfully, the impatient never really expect the light to work, the phone to be answered, or the door to be unlocked . . . and yet it was. Ted abandoned his quest for the concierge.

“Is there a problem for you coming in here?” Meaghan asked Ted.

“No can do without a warrant,” he answered, confirming her suspicions.

“Which . . .” Peter began.

“ . . . doesn’t prevent
us
from waltzing right in,” Meaghan finished, then smiled at him and started to walk in.

Peter’s left hand was powerful, and when it landed on her shoulder, she stopped in her tracks. She turned around to see him draw his gun with his right hand, then slide past her.

“Me first,” he said. “I’ve got a very bad feeling about this, and if I’m right, we might have reached a dead end for the moment.”

When Meaghan saw the mutilated corpse of Candy Dunnigan, the novelty indeed wore off.

“Oh, shit,” was all she said, and covered her mouth with her hand. Not to keep from vomiting, but to keep from screaming. After all she’d seen thus far, usual and impossible, the sight of the poor young girl before her aroused in Meaghan an emotion she had never truly experienced, something she only now discovered herself capable of: fury.

For the first time in her life, and the hell with questions of morality, she knew without a doubt that she could kill a man. Just as unconsciously as she took her next breath, she could end the life of the creature responsible for the atrocity before her. And it wasn’t the fact of the murder. It wasn’t the waste of a young, beautiful girl’s life. It wasn’t the mutilation or the savage sexuality of the attack.