Pious Deception (8 page)

She circled to the side of the house and checked the street—empty. If Dowd had contacted the sheriff, he would have arrived by now. And he’d still be here. At the back door Kiernan hesitated. She should call the sheriff herself. She smiled. She should call
after
she went through Vanderhooven’s desk again, more thoroughly than she could last night with his mother falling apart, his father trying to foist the woman onto Dowd, and Dowd, with an ingenuity Kiernan hadn’t expected of him, squirming out of pastoral responsibility.

She unlocked the door and stepped gratefully into the cool of the kitchen. The air-conditioning was still on from last night. There was an odd smell to the place, or rather, a
lack
of smell—no lingering trace of coffee or toast, of shampoo or aftershave.

She stepped across the hall and paused at the bedroom door, as she had last night. There was no hint of the rush she had felt then, the momentary queasiness. This time she knew where she was headed. She walked in toward the table Vanderhooven used as a desk.

Someone grabbed her from behind. A hand slammed over her mouth.

Cold metal jammed into the base of her skull, jamming her head forward. She froze. Infinitesimally, the pressure at the back of her head eased. Kiernan thrust her head forward and up, pulled her mouth open, and sank her teeth into the fingers that had covered it. The hand jerked away. The cold metal was gone. She heard a grunt behind her. Before she could turn, she felt the blow on her skull. The room darkened, the walls wobbled; hands grasped her shoulders, shoved her forward through the bathroom door, and flung her toward the sharp edge of the cabinet.

T
HE BATHROOM WAS A
blur of light and colors; the sharp corner of a cabinet came up at her fast. Instinctively Kiernan spun to the right—and landed hard on the side of her face. She lay there, stunned. In the distance a door slammed. Footsteps hit rapidly; there was a bang.

Tentatively Kiernan flexed her fingers, then made a fist. The muscles felt weak, but not useless. She moved her head warily. The top of her skull ached. She put a hand to the sore spot, wincing at the pain.

Pushing herself up, she tried the door. Locked. She banged. No response.
Of course
no response.

She tried the knob. It didn’t move. She slammed her fist against the nearest panel. The impact sent a wave of pain into her skull. The door was oak, she realized, a door that suited the dark green New England bedroom. It was probably the sturdiest door in all of Azure Acres. She wished she were built more like Brad Tchernak: at least a foot taller with an extra hundred and forty pounds of muscle to slam through that door.

Irritably, she glanced around the small bathroom, typical of a fifties tract house. Door at one end, toilet at the other. The window, two feet wide, little more than one foot high, was over the shower/tub combination about five feet above floor level. It slid along a narrow aluminum track set in a slick, tiled window ledge. Even if she pushed one pane across the other the opening would be too narrow for her shoulders.

She smiled. Tchernak would be up shit creek here. But a tough little gymnast could handle the window. She grabbed the shower rod, pushed off the side of the tub, and swung her feet into the glass. It shattered. She kicked out the remaining large pieces, then ran a towel around the edges, poking it into the grooves till the shards were cleaned out.

There was nothing to hold on to on the slick window ledge. She couldn’t slither over it and out head first, not without landing the same way. Going through it feet first would take a taut, slightly arched torso, arms extended overhead, and one solid swing. And luck. Even for her, at barely five foot one and ninety-nine pounds, it would be a close fit. And the chances of coming out without clipping a nipple or nose were slim.

For an instant she remembered the time she had spent in the gym, two hours a day, every afternoon of her junior-high and senior-high days. Two hours of flips on the balance beam, of floor routines that required a balletlike grace she had never quite achieved, of rib busters on the uneven bars that created pain so intense it blocked out the pain of Moira’s death, the pain of neighbors’ suspicions. On the uneven bars she wasn’t “that Moira O’Shaughnessy’s sister,” she wasn’t “that O’Shaughnessy girl who doesn’t go to mass,” she was the coach’s hope for a spot on the state team. Kiernan had worked the bars more than anyone else in the gym, probably more than any other gymnast in the country back in those days, when art and grace were foremost in women’s gymnastics and athletic ability like hers was a necessary unmentionable.

She stared at the tiny window now, setting it in her mind. She visualized her swing through. Then she grabbed the shower bar, pushed back off the tub and swung her legs forward and up, skimming the top of the window. Her stomach smacked the aluminum. She fought the urge to bring her hands up, to protect her face. Stretch them back! Head down! Slip right through!

Or almost. Her forehead grazed metal. Then her head was free. Her feet came down planted together, not even a small step required. “Decent dismount,” she muttered, feeling ridiculously impressed with herself.

She squinted against the piercing light. Then she looked around the backyard. Greeting the sheriff as she came flinging through the window would have taken some explaining. And it would require more than her legal arrangement with Stu Wiggins to get her out of a situation like that. But the high fence around the yard protected her. That fence would be a burglar’s delight.

The yard was empty but the window glass hadn’t shattered silently. A neighbor could have called the sheriff. She had no time to lose. She stood listening, but there was no sound of a car, not coming or going. Not yet. Her head throbbed. The heat was making her shaky. She’d have to get some aspirin; it wouldn’t help much, but it would be something.

What had there been in the house to draw her assailant back here so soon after Vanderhooven’s body was found? Had her own arrival panicked him? Had he abandoned his search and run, or had he already found whatever he wanted and been on his way out when she surprised him? Going back into the house now was a risk. Still, there were no car noises. If she moved fast …

She headed across the dry grass to the back door and hurried in, through the kitchen back to the bedroom. The icy air made her dizzy. A wave of nausea rose in her throat; she clamped her teeth. Bracing a hand on the wall she pressed her eyes closed and waited till the throbbing in her skull eased.

At first glance the dark green room looked just as she’d last seen it. The dresser drawers hadn’t been turned out, the closet hadn’t been emptied, the covers were still on the mahogany bed. The photograph of the fleeing wildebeest hung over the book-laden table Vanderhooven had used as a desk. In the bookcase all but one of the books was in place. That one, the last of the five big leather volumes with the Latin titles, lay on the floor, open and empty. It was a shell, and whatever it had concealed was gone.

“Damn!” she muttered. She dragged out the other four books. They were what they seemed: volumes of double-columned Latin. It said something for the quality of Vanderhooven’s hiding place that even a detective had found the books too uninviting to open. And it said something about the thief that he or she hadn’t bothered searching anywhere else.

The throbbing was worse. She felt as if the wildebeest were thundering across her skull.

She picked up the hollow book. The space was large enough to hold two stacks of letters side by side. A small piece from the gummed flap of an envelope had caught in the corner.

She dropped to hands and knees and surveyed the floor.

An envelope lay beside the bookcase. It hadn’t been there last night, she was sure of that. She picked it up and fitted the portion of flap to it. A phone bill. What kind of man, she wondered, hides his phone bill? Vanderhooven was not your average priest in more ways than Sam Chase imagined. For some reason he had made a call he definitely did not want anyone to know about.

But this was no place to hang around and ponder that. She gave the room one last look, then headed to the study to hunt for Vanderhooven’s address book.

Five minutes later she tucked the phone bill between the
M
s and the
N
s and hurried outside. The heat made her head worse. By the time she reached the Jeep she had to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from retching.

She leaned back against the hot seat-cover till the throbbing lessened, then drove around the block and parked up the street from the gas station, where she would see anyone headed to Mission San Leo.

She laid Vanderhooven’s address book on the seat and studied his phone bill. There were eleven Phoenix calls listed, eight to one number, two toll calls to “Wht.Bn.Mtn.,” one collect call from there, and two long-distance calls to an area code she recognized as covering the region between San Jose and San Simeon in California. Finding the numbers in the address book could be a major project, and a disappointing one. After memorizing the Phoenix number Vanderhooven had called most frequently, she started through the address book. She’d reached the
N
s before she found it. Elias Necri! She sighed with pleasure. The same doctor who had falsified the death certificate had received eight calls from Vanderhooven in the last month. How many had he made in return?

It was quarter to one. Necri’s office was in Phoenix, a good half-hour drive. If she left the air-conditioning off, she could make it in twenty-five minutes.

T
HE TRAFFIC, THE CLUMSY
handling of the Jeep, the smothering heat—everything annoyed her. Her head throbbed. The Pima Freeway passed over a canal, then another. The flowing water looked cool but too shallow to be inviting. According to Stu Wiggins the summer monsoon was late this year. When it did come, the canals would run fast and full. Rain would fill the gutters. It would flow quickly over the cracked clay soil and turn the dry washes under the bridges into rivers. Flash floods would send walls of water down mountain streams and arroyos, and, Wiggins added, sweep away out-of-staters who weren’t prepared.

All that was hard to picture as she looked out at the dry brown grass next to the doctor’s parking lot. Only one space was empty—Necri’s. She took it.

Finding her Jeep in his spot wouldn’t do much for Necri’s mood, but that was fine. She wanted him on edge.

She hurried across the hot macadam to the low white building. Dr. Necri’s waiting room was nearly empty. Only one older man and a woman with a young daughter sat on the tan padded chairs. The receptionist looked at her warily when Kiernan introduced herself—as well she might, Kiernan thought. Her short dark hair was matted with sweat, her yellow shirt stuck to her back, and her jeans were streaked where her stomach had hit the window track. Hardly the garb of a visiting physician.

But when Elias Necri arrived ten minutes later, he didn’t resemble a candidate for the cover of
Physicians’ Monthly
either. His hospital-green scrub pants looked as if they had spent days wadded in the laundry bag and his green scrub shirt was streaked with sweat. Clumps of dark, wavy hair stuck out just a bit above his ears. His tawny skin was grayish; Kiernan suspected the dark circles under his eyes had not been there two days ago. Necri looked like a man worried about whether he had just destroyed his career.

As he crossed the waiting room, he favored each of his patients with a weary smile. Kiernan stood, extended a hand up—the man was nearly a foot taller than she—and said, “Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. You’re expecting me.”

His face tightened momentarily, then relaxed as he looked down at his garb. “Give me five minutes to change.”

“Scrubs are fine,” she said as she headed for the hallway door.

By the time he opened the office door he was smiling that weary, winsome smile again, a smile that accentuated his thin but sensuous lips and finely chiseled cheekbones. Motioning her to the patient’s chair, he settled himself behind the desk. “Now how can I help you, Doctor? It is really Doctor, isn’t it?”

Somehow the question sounded friendly. Necri was going to be a hard man to dislike. But she had no intention of letting him run the interview with that charm. Necri would answer her questions because she knew he’d falsified the death certificate—they both understood that. “Really a doctor,” she said. “And really a detective. The first thing you can do is tell me where you were this morning.”

He looked down at his streaked scrubs. This time he added a shrug to the smile. “Guess you’re better dressed in California. My patients are used to seeing me rush in here from the hospital.”

“But you weren’t at the hospital this morning.”

He hesitated momentarily, his dark eyes half closing. Then he shook his head. “No, dammit. Look, there’s no point in my trying to fool you.”

The smoothly inserted flattery did not escape her. Giving no acknowledgment, she waited for him to continue.

Still shaking his head very slowly, he said, “I haven’t slept since I saw Austin’s body. How long has that been? Christ, I don’t even know anymore.”

“What have you been doing all that time?”

“Worrying, what else?”

“Worrying about …?”

“Austin, of course. I’ve been over every conversation we had, on every run. How he could have been involved in something as bizarre as stringing himself up, and never have given me the slightest hint? This is not your standard hand job. I just can’t believe it. And in the church! Austin was really committed to the Church. He would never have done something like that.”

“But you aren’t sure, are you?”

He shook his head sadly.

“And you were willing to endanger your career by falsifying his death certificate.”

His eyes snapped open. “It was a mistake. Christ! The mistake of my life.”

“That’s what’s been keeping you up, right?”

“Both. My friend is dead, and my entire career is swirling in the toilet. Do you wonder I can’t sleep?” Looking directly at her, he said, “I’m counting on you to clear this up.” This time it seemed not just flattery but an implicit trust that a woman
would
do whatever she could for him. And Kiernan noted with disgust that her first reaction
was
to rush in and take care of him, she who was not known for her bedside manner. The man was a pro.