Pious Deception (12 page)

It was fine to understand Vanderhooven’s mind-set, but that didn’t bring her closer to knowing why he, who could have been the all-American boy, shared her obsessive single-mindedness. And what about him had led to his murder?

“Stu, I need a woman to get on the women’s center van with Beth Landau tonight. The assignment could take a couple days. She may have to be ‘on’ all the time. There’s a small chance of danger.” Kiernan sat in the old-fashioned phone booth in the Howard Johnson’s. Her booth, she was beginning to consider it. The brown plastic shelf was ample for her wallet but too near the phone to hold her fizzing glass of Alka-Seltzer. That she set on the floor.

“Patsy Luca?”

“Can she do it? She’s pretty young, isn’t she?”

“She won’t get up suspicion.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t worry so much. I’ve got a friend who does the legal work down there; I know how they choose who they take to the mountains. I’ll give Patsy a little coaching. Patsy’ll handle the rest.”

“Are you sure—”

“You don’t have much time, Kerry. And I don’t have anybody else to suggest.”

Kiernan downed the rest of the Alka-Seltzer, willing it to work fast. Her head throbbed as she leaned over to put the glass back on the floor. “Okay. Give me her address.”

“No need. I’ll call her.”

Kiernan hesitated. “I need to talk to her too.”

“You mean you need to check her out.” Wiggins laughed, but there was an edge to his voice that the laughter didn’t quite cover.

“Okay, personal failing. Give me one, I’ve had a hard day. I’ve called Dowd three times today and he’s never called back. Philip Vanderhooven was out questioning Beth Landau. You know, Stu, I’m getting a real uneasy feeling about this case.”

B
ISHOP
R
AYMOND
D
OWD SAT
on the pale leather couch in Sylvia Necri’s living room, waiting. The woman was taking her time with her “art work.” But he couldn’t rush her, the expert forger.

Forger! Forgery, maybe murder, how had all this happened? How had he gotten himself so entangled with this woman he didn’t even like and certainly didn’t trust? He still could barely believe he had called Huerta, his parishioner in the sheriff’s office, and gotten the blank death certificate and an interment form, which Sylvia was forging right now. Surely there had been some way short of this to protect the retreat center. He tried to think, but his mind was too foggy. What was taking her so long? He glanced at his watch—4:17. Still plenty of time to get the forms back to Huerta. Dammit, he was an errand boy here! And now with this forgery scheme he was putting his life, his career, in Sylvia Necri’s hands. What would happen if the forms weren’t right, if someone found out? What if … but he couldn’t hold together the strands of possibilities.

He shifted his bulk on the sofa, shifted his gaze to the framed photo on the wall. The figures were blurry; his eyes were too tired to focus. But he’d seen the photo often enough to know it showed Sylvia Necri’s class of architects at Taliesen West, the bunch of them there with Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Dowd had been to Taliesen. He’d seen pictures of the hard chairs, hard benches, that were Wright’s idea of “form follows function.” Well, Sylvia Necri hadn’t become famous like a lot of the others, but she’d sure learned to choose hard furniture—for instance, this sofa.

How had he gotten involved in all this? A bishop of the Church. Was he willing to break his vows for the power the retreat would bring? He looked desperately out the window. He wasn’t going to lie to himself—sure he wanted the power. Sure he’d been disappointed that he hadn’t seen the big-time possibilities young Vanderhooven had and that it was Vanderhooven who’d almost cashed in on them. And—he wasn’t going to deny it, not to himself—the fact that the kid’s death gave him back control of the retreat was okay by him.

But it wasn’t just the power. No. No matter who would think that. And there would be plenty—business types, lawyers—who would never see beyond that. It was for the Church. The Church in Arizona had to have that retreat. Without it the Church would calcify. Already the clergy were dividing into the petrified forest of hardliners and the brushfire liberals, who demanded the ordination of married women. Among the laity, the basis of Church, many were giving up in disgust or despair—they were just plain tired of waiting for the Church to adjust to the twentieth century. Vatican Two—they’d seen those reforms tossed aside. Maybe if Dowd became archbishop … But he’d made his choice. He’d thrown in his lot with the retreat and there was no turning back. The retreat would bring liberal Catholics from across the country, the world. With their money and their press they would resurrect the Arizona Church for the people.

He’d given his life to the Church. The Church was his life. Men carried on about their wives, their children; they didn’t know what commitment meant. He would not let his Church be maimed. No matter what sacrifices that involved.

Dowd inhaled deeply and pulled himself up straighter on the hard sofa. What kind of woman had cushions so damned rocklike in her own living room? No wonder she was an old maid.

He checked his watch again—4:19. He stood up. Once he got these forms back to Huerta he could go home and sleep. His hands were shaky; he could barely see straight. He needed the sleep.

“Here you go.”

Dowd looked up, startled. He hadn’t heard Sylvia Necri walk in. He stood and took the papers from her without looking at them.

“Bishop! You’ve got the death certificate and the interment permit there. Don’t get them mixed up.”

He glanced at the top form and nodded.

“If I do say so myself,” Sylvia Necri did say, her voice surprisingly soft, “I did a helluva job on both of them. And, Bishop, if your man does his job right, once the interment permit is in place we—you, me, and the Church—are home free.”

“And your new death certificate? That saves your nephew’s hide, right?”

“Not just Elias. It clears the Church; it clears you. And if there’s any blame it’ll fall right back on Vanderhooven’s detective.”

K
IERNAN PULLED UP IN
front of the address Wiggins had given her for Patsy Luca, in a development in south Phoenix that backed up against the base of the jagged mountains. The houses here might have been mass produced, Kiernan thought, but their yards were certainly statements of individuality.

The yard to the right of Patsy Luca’s sported a decorative white ironwork fence around a carpet of thick green grass. Here and there ceramic rabbits poked their noses warily up through the dewy mat. A giant cedar shaded a quarter of the yard; a Norfolk Island pine drooped over another.

On the other side, was a “westernized” lawn that looked like a quilt of pebbles and cacti and bricks. No drop of water wasted here.

Probably the only thing that kept the neighbors from each other’s throat was their common disgust with the yard between them—Patsy’s place. Kiernan climbed from the Jeep down into the hundred-and-ten-degree heat and made her way across the barren yard. No grass, no trees, no cacti, not even a weed was still alive. The dry scaly ground was cut with crevasses the size of earthquake faults. Kiernan rang the bell, and waited on the unshaded stoop.

The sun pierced her thick hair and seared her scalp. Her throat felt like parchment. She rang again. Still no answer. Where was the woman? Irritably Kiernan looked at her watch. She was cutting it close anyway, without spending her time baking out here. She could have handled this on the phone and spared herself forty-five minutes of fuming in the rush-hour traffic; she could have trusted Stu Wiggins’s endorsement of Patsy Luca. He hadn’t led her astray before. But if Patsy Luca couldn’t even get to the door …

The intercom gurgled. “Who’s there?”

Kiernan pushed the buzzer, simultaneously trying to wet her tongue enough to speak. “Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. You
were
expecting me, weren’t you?”

“I’m measuring out powder. Come on around back.” The intercom clicked off.

Couldn’t she shake the baking powder off her hands and walk the few steps to the front door? Kiernan trudged across the unshaded path past the double garage. Her feet sweated in the hot running shoes. She slipped on the edge of a crevasse in the side yard, caught herself, and—grumbling—headed to the back door.

She was just about to knock when a voice called, “Out here, Kiernan!”

Kiernan spun to see a blond head poking out of the shack in the back of the yard. The woman standing in the shed doorway was about five six, in her mid-twenties, with bleached blond hair finger-combed back and caught under a yellow headband, pale hazel eyes, and a surprisingly sallow tan for a Phoenician. From a distance her head looked like a small yellow beach ball plopped on top of a sleeveless Harley Davidson T-shirt and tight cutoff cargo pants.

Close up, Kiernan noted that Patsy Luca hardly looked like the weary, desperate, beaten woman needed to pierce Beth Landau’s defenses at the battered women’s refuge. With one muscular arm braced on the doorframe and the other on a hip, Patsy confirmed Wiggins’s appraisal that she could take care of herself. “Come on in out of the heat,” Patsy said, in an easy Western drawl not unlike Stu Wiggins’s.

Kiernan stepped through the doorway and stared. A brace of pistols lay atop a stack of boxes on the west wall. A shotgun was propped against the boxes, and an engraved rifle lay on a towel on top. Target pistols, a .22, a .38, and a .45 automatic were in open boxes on a wooden chest, and ahead, on the workbench, was a turret press with a dusty black scale, a half-filled box of bullets, and a group of empty brass cartridges. Poking into the top of the turret press was a clear plastic colander filled with gray powder. The whole place smelled of dust and linseed oil. “My God! This is an armory!”

Patsy smiled uncomfortably. “That’s what Stu said. He keeps telling me no one needs more than one pistol and one rifle. But of course that’s Stu, and that’s bullshit. What do you carry?”

“Quick wits.”

“Hmm.” Her face betrayed little, Kiernan could see the effort that that blank expression cost. Despite her wholesome appearance, there was determination in the set of the jaw and the pressure lines beside the mouth. Her lips were pursed in disdain—disdain for the gunless.

Kiernan shrugged. “What I sell is my medical background. I can take care of myself. Once or twice I’ve had to protect clients. But that’s not what they pay me for. If they did, I’d find another line of work.” She watched Patsy’s face, but her expression gave no hint of her reaction. She was good, Kiernan had to admit. Not likeable, but good. Unfortunately, both qualities were necessary for this job.

Patsy leaned back against the workbench. “Well, I don’t plan to be a patsy”—a smile flashed on her face and was gone—“for anyone.” She ran a hand along a rifle barrel. “This is a varmint rifle, a specialized piece of work. It hefts heavy. But its trajectory is flat. Hit a prairie dog at three hundred yards. The guys who carry ’em have ’em because they just like to shoot. They don’t miss often. Some of the city hunters like to use a thin jacket bullet.” She laughed, scornfully. “Taxidermists hate to see them hauling their carcasses in. When those bullets hit, they splatter the innards like foam. Helluva mess trying to clean out the carcass.”

Despite the air conditioner, rivulets of sweat ran down Kiernan’s back. Her headache was back in force. Kiernan let a moment pass before saying, “If you want to play chicken with tales of gore, you’re way outclassed. You want to hear about autopsies where you’ve got a body that’s been lying out in the open, decomposing for months? You want to hear about the smells? Or the maggots?” She caught Patsy’s eye. “Do I make my point?”

Patsy hesitated. “Okay, okay. Truce?” An instant later she smiled. Suddenly, the lines of suspicion seemed to melt and she looked like a giggly girl who would spend her Saturday afternoons handing her boyfriend wrenches and lug nuts while he fiddled with his Harley. She looked like the girl Kiernan needed to tackle Beth Landau—if she could play the role to match.

“Truce.”

Turning back to the workbench, she said, “I’m in the middle of reloading cartridges. I don’t like to leave here with the powder out and the shell casing in the turret press like this.” She pulled up the handle of the six-inch-wide machine. “It’ll only take a minute. See, the problem is that I got a good deal on a new rifle, a real good deal. The guy who makes them is a master, or at least he was. His eyes are going. It used to be that there was no space at all between the stock and the barrel. You couldn’t have pulled a thread through there. Now, well … But for mine he was in top form. It’s perfect.… Anyway, the thing is that the specs on the ammo load for the nearest factory-made gun just don’t work as well for this one. I’ll tell you what I think. Here, let me get the primer in the post.” She fingered the small metal disk. “What I think is,” she said, pouring gray powder into a small funnel at the top of the turret press, “is that the specs for the factory-made job call for a different weight of powder. They say sixty grains, but with sixty weight your trajectory’s too tight.” She pulled down the lever, then lifted it and removed a resized shell. “See, this way I can customize my ammo. Not only that, but it saves me over half the cost per shell—”

“You’ve got to be downtown by six. Let me explain the case while you work, okay?” Stu Wiggins had insisted Patsy was perfect for the job. She damn well wasn’t perfect, but she’d have to do—
if
she could pull off the act.

“Yeah, sorry. I’m not usually so distracted. The rifle was my Christmas present to me. You can see how long I’ve been waiting. That’s another problem with Dale Harmon. Time is nothing to him. And you don’t dare fuss, because old and slow as he is, he’s still got a waiting list years long. There are guys praying Dale lives long enough to get to them. See, he—”

“The
case,”
Kiernan prodded.

“Stu told me about it. You need me to play a battered wife, right? Get on the bus with the rest of them, get into the safe house, and breach their files, right?”

“And be in town by six
P.M.
It means playing your part nonstop for a day or more. You’ve got to be a housewife, someone with no resources, someone ashamed of herself and her husband, ashamed of what she put up with. Someone who’s used every bit of strength she has to drag herself out and get help.” Her gaze rested on Patsy’s biceps, muscles that could fling a menacing husband into the next yard. “There can’t be any cracks in your performance. No one can have any suspicion. Do you think you can do it?”