Rabid (2 page)

“It’s six o’clock at night.”

“Like I said.”

Ah, the grousing of the overworked, underpaid grad student, the lament voiced by all those who sacrifice to raise themselves, to chase fame and the betterment of humanity. Her complaining warmed the barnacles on Conroy’s heart.

Yes, barnacles, not cockles. A cockle is too small a shellfish to describe Conroy’s arterial deposits. Barnacles encrusted his cardiac system, sessile barnacles and other crustaceans, a whole, flashy coral reef. Even his cholesterol plaques dreamed big. His genes had preprogrammed him for a hull-scraping before the age of sixty, less than a decade away. “Finished that mutant virus yet?”

Leila’s trim eyebrow dipped. “Almost.” Her mouth firmed into a scowl.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Her glace was an acidic glare. She drummed her fingers on the Porsche’s black armrest. Outside the car, dark university buildings sped backwards.

He slid the car to a stop. Snow-dandruffed gargoyles clung to the stone walls of Medical Laboratories. His lab’s windows, halfway up, were dark.

Leila unlatched her unretracting seatbelt and opened the door. Black-ice January air swarmed into the car. She toed the asphalt outside like an unsteady foal. “See you tomorrow, Dr. S.” She slammed the car door, hesitated with a glance behind the car, and swiped her keycard through the card-reader by the building’s door without looking back.

Tomorrow, they would be student and PI again, just the way she said that she liked it, just the way he said he liked it: a professional relationship in the lab and a casual fuck on the side.

He jammed the Porsche into first, ground the gears, tried again, found them, and drove home angry, blazing through yellow lights and swerving around crawling cars that shouldn’t even be on the god-damned road.

~~~~~

The Porsche’s icy door handle needled Leila’s hand through her glove. Headlights crept out of the dark. Someone might see her emerging from Conroy’s ostentatious Porsche, and the department gossip grapevine would rumble and grow fat.

“See you tomorrow, Dr. S.” She slammed the car door and hurried, holding her half-buttoned coat around her.

Behind her, the Porsche’s gears grated and the tires screeched, leaving her alone in the night. Dead bushes of bundled sticks lined the sidewalk. Usually when she worked late, she slipped her handgun into her purse, but Conroy hadn’t turned his back so she could grab it.

Headlight glare caught her against the brick wall.

Her chilled fingers fumbled with her badge in the card reader’s slot. The door clicked, unlocking. She hustled inside. Dangerous types scurry in the night around deserted buildings.

This casual fuck with Conroy was getting dangerous.

She should break it off, break off all her casual fucks, and live celibately, chastely, like a nun, or a priest.

Revolting.

~~~~~

Driving up to the MedLabs building, Malcolm saw a low, red stripe of a tail light wheeling away and that slinky Leila Faris walking in the building door.

“Oy! Leila!” he hollered and waved into the cold night, but she didn’t stop.

Months later, Malcolm might have testified that Leila had emerged from that red, horizontal tail light slash—so obviously Dr. Sloan’s Porsche—into the January dark, but he had forgotten.

Murder trials are never about the dead person anyway.

Strong Scot fatalism would have kept his testimony just the same: that Leila and Conroy were but grad student and mentor, and that if anyone was really to blame, it was the wife or that Papist priest.

~~~~~

Bev’s hands, finger-knotted and pink-knuckled, pressed the confessional’s latticework, and she rapped on the wood. A priest grunted on the other side. Father Nicolai should be in there. His laugh was timid and his piebald hair flopped, like the calm, clean guy introducing puppet shows.

The confessional smelled humid, like sex.

The priest slid open his shutter and mumbled the benediction, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.”

The man’s voice was not Father Nicolai’s voice nor Father Samual’s voice. She had not heard anything about a new priest coming to Our Lady. 

Her skirt hem, tucked under her kneecaps, chafed. “Bless me, Father. I have sinned. It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”

“Yes?” The priest shadow rubbed his face.

Her breath stuck in the hollow at the base of her throat. Not making a good confession would leave her unreconciled, and with a mortal sin on her conscience she couldn’t take communion because her soul offended God by her obsession with her hands strangling a redheaded whore, then a gun shooting a blonde bitch, then a knife slashing tanned, firm, young flesh.

The priest sighed. “You only need to confess-ah the mortal sins.”

“I know that,” and she stopped. The priest’s young voice was not Father Samual’s gravelly bass or Father Nicolai’s timid grumble. His accent was Spanish or something, and wrong.

Her suspicion fused with panic. “Who are you?”

The man said in that odd accent, “The reason for the antique confessional is the anonymity.”

His words were slurred, drunk. Her frantic energy refocused. “You’re not a priest. I’ve heard about people who sneak in and sit on the priest’s side of the confessional.”

His smooth, young voice strengthened. “Madam, I am a priest.”

“We Catholics have to confess to a priest!” She rattled the fragile latticework. “Why would you trick someone?”

The door clicked and she thought she had driven away the imposter, but the curtain on her side jerked back.

A man stood there, a man with curling hair framing a face almost familiar in its beauty, like a painting of a wrathful angel holding a flaming sword. “Madam, come with me.”

His hand slipped under her palm and her fingers slid out of the lattice.

Black sleeve, black whirling cassock, and he pulled Bev past her daughters’ seed pearl-teethed open mouths and shocked eyes, through the echoing cathedral.

~~~~~

In a long pew outside the confessional, Dinah turned to Christine and said, “Wow, I wonder what Mom did.”

Christine, the older, worried child, shrugged and composed her own sins in bloodless, effete terms that would not provoke the strange priest to haul her away.

~~~~~

Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi gripped the woman’s arm and led her through the dollhouse cathedral sliced by narrow stained-glass windows to the library. His head throbbed with jetlag and spun from the plane’s miniscule whiskey bottles.

This parish was supposed to be a university environment, not a small, parochial town where people shied at a new priest and had crow-barred open an antique, claustrophobic, moldy confessional. His sinuses hurt.

In the library, books on mismatched bookcases hemmed in three chairs. Dante’s Italian accent, despite his efforts, broadened, “You can-ah see that I am indeed the priest.”

He certainly looked the part of a Roman priest in his long, black cassock and gold, pectoral cross. Wearing the cossack was common among conservative Jesuits
and
de rigueur
in the Vatican, especially because Dante’s previous boss, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, made it a point to wear the humble, conservative clerical garment.

Tears ran glycerin tracks from her wild, brown eyes down her cheeks
. “Who
are you
?”

He palpated his temple. Alcohol had abraded the skin over his cheekbones and orbitals. “I am Father Dante. I was sent to replace Father Nicolai.”

The woman glanced around, frantic, as if the bookcases might pounce. “Where is he?”

Questions, already. “He was reassigned.”

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Her hands, the nail polish oddly chipped off, climbed over each other as if each were drowning and pulling the other down.

Dante refocused his grimy eyes. This distraught woman was in her mid-thirties, near his own age. The confessional’s latticework had piecemealed her and shown him only a brown eye gathering skin and sun damage spots on her throat. “I am sorry, Madam. And you are?”

She sniffed and wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, dragging a lank of pale brown hair out of the band that gathered it at her neck. “Bev Sloan.”

“Mrs. Sloan, please, sit.” He gestured toward an armchair and hunted among the dusty, musty books for tissues. “Now, what you want to confess?”

Her eyes teared again. “I keep having terrible thoughts.”

Dante found a slim box of paper tissues stashed between two books and extended it to her. She plucked one and wiped her eyes.

He sat and laid the box of tissues on the table between them. The possibility that she was possessed by a demon occurred to him, but he discarded it. Suspecting demons behind every normal neurosis was paranoid. Sometimes, Dante suspected that the Adversary was trying to make him paranoid, but the notion that a harmless priest like Dante warranted Satan’s attention was itself paranoid.

Being an exorcist had its workplace liabilities.

“The thought, it is?”

Mrs. Sloan’s hand-clawing intensified. “Hurting someone.”

He rubbed his stubbled jaw line, trying to massage away the teeth-grinding tension. He had seen demons incite murder. “Who?”

“Some woman, somewhere. I found pink women’s underwear in my husband’s suitcase.” She wiped her eyes.

Ah, provoked. Always, people told him their secrets if given sufficient time. Dante pinched a fresh tissue, pulled it out of the box, and waited.

She said, “He went to Washington. I found a woman’s panties in his suitcase when he came home.”

She reached for another tissue, and he touched her suspended hand gently, in a priestly way, he hoped, then held her fingers. He was just a priest, a muzzled, leashed, caged priest, and no threat to a woman.

Tears wobbled in her wide brown eyes. She reached with her other hand for the tissue and pressed it to the lower half of her face, covering her mouth and nose, stifling herself. Her eyes, still too wide, glanced at his hand, but she did not tug. “He’s having an affair.”

“Oh, yes.” Dante covered their clasped hands with his other hand. The move was priestly, not predatory. “You have talked to him about this?”

“No, he just dropped off the suitcase and went to the hospital. He’s a neurologist.”

It was a monstrous thing, disregarding a spouse and committing adultery, and especially within the ken of doctors. University and medical school, those crucibles of memorization, indulged thoughtless excess. “You need the marital counseling. You know a counselor?”

She shook her head. “Everybody knows everybody at the hospital. People would talk.”

“Father Samual, then.”

She glanced at their warm hands clasped on the table. “He’s such a gossip.” Her hand squeezed his within their Gordian knot of fingers. “You could counsel us.”