The Death of an Irish Sinner (4 page)

CLIMBING OUT
of the Rover in front of the house, McGarr removed the Walther PPK that he kept in a holster that was fixed beneath the driver’s seat. He inserted a clip of seven cartridges into the butt.

“Do you think you’ll need that?” the priest asked.

“Here?”

“Not if you think Mary-Jo’s death wasn’t murder. Here.”

The priest could not have known that in the pocket of his jacket, McGarr also kept an Advantage Arms model 422, a derringer-type weapon that held four .22-magnum rounds in the four chambers of its one barrel.

Having been modified, the weapon fired all four cartridges with one squeeze of the trigger. It was McGarr’s idea of an insurance policy, what any cop who’d
made enemies of innumerable chancers over the years needed to stay alive.

Fitting the Walther under his belt, he buttoned his jacket over the butt and lowered the car visor, which was equipped with a Garda shield, so the Tech Squad, when they arrived, would know where he was. “How will my people get in?”

“When they pull in by the gate, an alarm will sound, and I’ll be able to let them in from the control panel.”

On his earlier visits to the house, McGarr had not noticed the other security cameras that were concealed at the corners of the building and by the door. “And this control panel is located where?”

“In the control room, of course,” the priest said evenly, while sliding an electronic entry card over the lock of the stout but graceful front door.

The front door belonging to McGarr’s parents-in-law only a half mile distant was locked only when the elderly couple was away on holiday. At other times, workers on the property, friends, and neighbors could open the door and shout, if knocking failed to rouse them.

What had Mary-Jo Stanton feared? Why the need for so much…control? “You locked this door?” After having discovered the woman’s corpse and returned to the house to change into your priestly attire went unsaid.

“No—closing the door locks it.” Having opened the door, the priest demonstrated by pulling it shut. “As doubtless you’re aware, in addition to being known as a person of wealth, Mary-Jo was also a collector. After a robbery back in the eighties, I insisted that she install
a security system, new locks, and so forth. Periodically, the system has been upgraded. It’s state-of-the-art, as you’ll see.”

Having opened the door again, Father Fred stepped into an expansive foyer, McGarr in his wake. The electronic ID was again required to enter the central hallway, which contained a wide serpentine staircase that led to the upper floors and was lit by a crystal chandelier. Double doors to the main rooms of the mansion lined a wide hall.

“All residents and guests, of course, are provided with a new card every morning so they’re not constrained in any way from coming and going. The cards open the doors to their bedrooms and most other doors in the house and around the grounds, including the front gate.”

“But their comings and goings are recorded?” McGarr asked, mindful of the “transcripts” the priest had referred to earlier.

“It’s one of the advantages of the system.” Father Fred moved to a narrow door at the back of the grand staircase. Yet again having to use his electronic passkey, he led McGarr into a low, darkened room that was lit by banks of small video display terminals.

Each seemed to be monitoring some part of the estate—hallways and doors of the house, the main rooms, the kitchens, the front gate, garages, stables, greenhouse, even the pathways of the formal garden. McGarr could make out the shape of Mary-Jo Stanton’s corpse bowed down in death—her white hair, the glint of the gardening trowel.

The small room was quite warm and stank of hot plastic and circuitry.

“What good is all of this if you need somebody in here to watch the screens?” McGarr asked.

“If somebody so much as touches one of the doors without using a pass card first, an alarm will sound both in here and on this.” From the pocket of his clerical jacket, the priest removed the same remote device that he had used to close the front gate.

“As well, all of this is recorded.” He swept a hand to mean the monitors.

“Recorded how?”

“To disk with a tape backup.”

“You mean you have a recording of what went on here?” McGarr pointed to the screen with the image of the woman’s corpse.

The priest’s hand jumped to his jaw in a thoughtful pose. “You know, in the chaos of the…catastrophe, it slipped my mind. But yes! We should have it. What number is that?” He pointed to the screen that pictured the corpse.

In the darkness, McGarr had to squint. “Forty-one.”

At a keyboard, the priest tapped some keys on the control panel and then pointed to the larger screen that obviously serviced the computer. “We’ll see it here.”

As the tape rewound quickly, McGarr and Father Fred appeared in the picture, then Mary-Jo Stanton’s corpse alone for a while, followed by the priest dressed in his bicycling togs and bending over her. They then watched a long sequence of just her lifeless body, then a dark gap, and finally Mary-Jo herself, gardening while the sun was fully out.

“Shall I stop here?” Fred asked.

“Yes. Run it forward, please. Slowly, if possible.”

The priest struck the keys once more, and they watched as the pretty, elderly woman with her white mane bound in a ponytail pottered around her garden in slow motion. She pruned a bush here, transplanted a seedling there, and paused now and then to wipe her brow and glance around her.

Once when a magpie kited down for a worm in a freshly dug section of garden, she paused and seemed to speak to the large, handsome black-and-white bird as it worried the ground, tossing bits of earth this way and that.

“Shall I speed it up?” Father Fred asked.

“Please.”

The screen then showed Mary-Jo Stanton again moving from one spot to another and kneeling down to garden before the picture went dark.

“Stop,” McGarr said. “Go back slowly from there.”

Another series of taps backed up the tape, and they watched as suddenly the screen brightened again, and they saw her down on her knees exactly where she had been murdered, McGarr believed.

In reverse, it appeared that Mary-Jo Stanton had turned her head and said something to somebody behind her, then reached for the water bottle, which she raised to her mouth, before resuming her work. After that the screen went blank.

“Now roll it forward, please. Slowly.”

Again they watched as she turned her head nearly to the camera and opened her mouth, saying something.

In silhouette, as she spoke and then drank from the
bottle, Mary-Jo Stanton showed herself to have had a well-structured face with a long, thin, somewhat aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, and a strong but not overly large chin.

Her skin was sallow, and her hair—brilliant in the full spring sun—had retained the pattern of waves that McGarr now remembered from the press portrait and the photos on the dust covers of her books. They pictured Stanton as a much younger woman.

The screen went dark again.

“How could that happen?” McGarr asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Could you slow it down, please?”

The priest complied, and for the next few minutes or so they watched the dark screen, until it suddenly brightened again, and there lay Mary-Jo Stanton’s corpse as Father Fred had found it. And as it now was.

“They put something over the lens of the camera,” the priest concluded. “Watch.” Tapping more keys, Father Fred backed up the tape so slowly that they could make out the material of what appeared to be a jacket with a label being pulled over the lens.

“Where’s that camera located?” McGarr asked.

“On the garden fence.”

“What would it take to cover it up?”

“A tall person or a ladder. In back of the fence is M. J.’s gardening shed. There’s a pruning ladder in there.”

“I’ll need this tape and all the others.”

“Of course,” the priest replied, leaning toward the bank of monitoring screens. “Oh, and look—the door into Mary-Jo’s floor is ajar.” He turned to McGarr with
furrowed brow. “Do you think that whoever…could also have entered her apartment?”

McGarr did not know what to think, never having been in the apartment or even at the door. But he wondered if he was being led on by the man who, only a scant quarter hour earlier, had asked him not to report the cause of his longtime companion’s death.

“Who else could get into her quarters?”

“Nobody, only Mary-Jo.”

“Who could get in here?” McGarr meant the cramped monitoring room.

“Only Mary-Jo and I. Only our cards allow access.”

“Who else has one of those?” McGarr pointed to the remote device that had opened the gate and was, as reported by Father Fred, also an alarm.

“Again—only we two.”

“Where did Mary-Jo keep her two security devices?”

“The card she kept on a lanyard around her neck. You can’t move around the house or grounds without one. But about this”—he raised his remote device—

“she was most forgetful.”

McGarr glanced toward the screen. “Did you notice either item on her person?”

The priest shook his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t. I saw only the…
cilicio
. As for this”—he waved the remote device—“it might be under her, given the way she’s positioned.”

One thing was now plain: If Father Fred had not murdered her himself, then the killer must have removed the pass card from the body to have entered her quarters. At least if the facts were as reported by the priest.

“How often did Mary-Jo leave her door open?”

“Never, not even unintentionally. She was most private. Leaving her quarters, she locked the door. Always.”

“Who else knows of her death?”

“Only you. That’s why I could put forward the questions I asked you in the garden. And ask you again now.

“Why do we have to sully the knowledge that the world has of Mary-Jo? Can’t we simply say that she died of natural causes, and then you and I can get to the bottom of this? I promise you, I’ll give you every help that I can, and you won’t regret extending the courtesy to us.”

“Us?” McGarr asked.

“Opus…” Father Fred paused. “Let’s just say those of us who loved her.”

McGarr waited, but when no further explanation was offered, he pointed to the screen that displayed the open door. “Take me there.”

AT THE LAST
flight of steps up to what amounted to the third and attic floor of the large house, McGarr touched the priest’s sleeve. “How long has she been living up here in—what did you call it?”

“Her quarters. Nine years, I’d say.”

Before McGarr’s marriage, over a dozen years earlier, Mary-Jo Stanton had thrown a large prenuptial party for Noreen, and McGarr had stayed on that very floor. It had been devoted to guest rooms, exclusively.

“Why did she move up here?”

“The simple explanation is that, as Mary-Jo got older, she became rather reclusive. She wished to be alone and closer to God—hence, the move to the top of the house.”

Asking the priest to remain there, McGarr pulled the
Walther from under his belt and mounted the steps on the wall side of the stairs.

The wide paneled door had been left enough ajar that he could squeeze through, and he paused there in the doorway to listen for any noise within the dead woman’s living quarters.

Or rather, her aerie, he decided, as he advanced into the apartment. Even at night, like this, natural light from the half-moon and stars overhead spilled into the hall because of skylights that had been placed regularly along the ridgeline of the gabled roof.

A central hallway ran the length of the large building with—how many?—at least a dozen doors leading off into the rooms of the apartment. More` than a few had been opened, but only one, near the west end of the building, was lighted.

Waiting at least a full minute to accustom his eyes to the darkness, McGarr slowly made his way toward the wedge of brilliance, pausing to listen before crossing in front of an open door. Oil paintings of religious scenes lined both walls.

From the clutter on the floors of the open rooms, he could see that somebody had already conducted a hurried search of the premises, which appeared to be continuing in the lighted room, where something now hit the floor with a thud.

With the Walther raised, McGarr was only a few feet away when he heard the muffled sound of quick feet on the carpet behind him. Swinging round, he caught a glimpse of somebody—a woman—rushing at him with something raised over her head that she now chopped down.

The blow sent the Walther skidding into the baseboard, and McGarr’s wrist felt like it was broken. A second blow to the side of the head starred McGarr’s vision, and he crashed into a painting that fell from its perch.

But before she could swing again—what was it? some sort of long heavy baton—McGarr’s left hand darted out toward the center of her face and he felt her nose snap under his knuckles.

As she staggered back, McGarr took a quick step toward the woman and loaded his weight into a punch that he buried deep in her upper stomach. When she doubled up, he grabbed the back of her head and jerked her face down onto his rising knee. Her body snapped back, and she fell hard on the carpet with her arms splayed to either side.

Spinning around, McGarr searched the shadows for the Walther. Not finding the gun immediately, he teased the Advantage Arms special-purpose pistol from the slit pocket inside his jacket before moving directly to the open door.

He saw a study or a small library that had been tossed. The drawers of a desk had been pulled out and dumped on the carpet, and books from the shelves lay nearby, as did the contents of a row of filing cabinets.

The central processing unit of the computer near the desk seemed to be missing; wires from keyboard, mouse, and monitor were dangling from the edge of a table in back of the desk. And it appeared that somebody had used a knife to cut a painting from a large, ornate frame with a gold nameplate that said, “F. José Maria Escrivá de Balaguer.”

McGarr checked a small toilet off the room, and
then moved to another door that led to a deep closet filled with other rifled file cabinets. But whoever had been in the room when the woman attacked him from behind had fled.

How? He glanced around. The large windows were closed, and it was a long fall to the ground. The person must have gone by him when he was reeling from the blow to the head, the one that had spangled his vision. Already his left eye was puffing, and only now did he feel the pain in his temple, cheek, and the side of his head.

Having come away without handcuffs, McGarr snapped off the chord from the wall connection and then a phone. After turning the unconscious woman over, he slipped the heavy six- or seven-foot stick between her arms and body and tied her hands in front of her. Even if she came to and gained her feet, she would never get through a door.

McGarr found Father Fred where he had asked the priest to remain—at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the dead woman’s quarters. “Who went by here?”

“Nobody that I saw. But then I had to leave to let your people in the front gate. I’ve only just returned.”

“Is there another way down from here?”

Father Fred nodded. “The servants’ stairs. But again, you’d need Mary-Jo’s pass card to open the door.”

“To go out?”

The priest shrugged. “After the break-in, it’s the way she wanted it.”

“Show me, please.”

As the priest led him down the hallway, McGarr asked, “How often were you up here?”

“Every now and then, when Mary-Jo wished me to help her with something—a sticking drawer, to get a book from a high shelf, that class of thing. But never”—his head turned to McGarr—“at night.”

“Who cleaned this place?” As the pain rose, so too did McGarr’s anger.

“She does. Geraldine.”

They had come to the woman, who was still down on her back on the carpet, the baton protruding from under her arms. McGarr played the beam of his pocket torch on her face.

“She’s the…manager here—of the house, the grounds, security. She holds black belts in several of the martial arts. Did she do that to your face?”

The woman’s head was moving as she began to come around, and McGarr hoped she too was in pain. Her body weight on the stick behind her arms could not be comfortable, he imagined, noting through the blood that was flowing from her nose that she had a long, shiny scar on one cheek. A woman in her late forties or early fifties, she kept her hair, which was grayish blond, cut short. “Show me the stairs.”

The door there was closed, and the small monitoring light on the yoke for the pass card was green. “Meaning that if whoever was up here went down those stairs, they did it either with Mary-Jo’s pass card or yours?”

The priest nodded, before opening his black jacket and displaying a plastic card attached to an elasticized lanyard.

“Could there be a third or more such cards?”

“I don’t believe so. They’re issued by Avco, the se
curity agency, only to us two, and when a card is lost or damaged, they come here and change the codes.”

“Downstairs on the computer?”

“I believe so, but I don’t actually know how it’s done.”

Could McGarr conclude that whoever had been in the library/study had Mary-Jo’s card? No, not if the priest had been fully away from the door and was telling the truth.

Turning away, he again heard footsteps on the carpet and caught sight of a figure rushing at them. “Look out,” he warned the priest, even as he crouched down to lower his center of gravity.

With her head down and her arms still bound in over the long baton, she was running at them while screaming, “Has it happened? Did it happen? Is that what this is all about?” She struck the two men at speed, knocking the priest off his feet.

Rising from his crouch, McGarr used his arms and shoulders to block her body to one side, where she tripped, slammed into the wall, and fell hard. With the barrel of the recovered Walther pressed to her temple, he asked, “Is there some reason why
it
had to happen?”

Sobbing now, she said nothing.

“Mary-Jo was murdered tonight. You seem to know why.”

Still nothing.

McGarr stood. “If you get up again, I’ll shoot you. Am I understood?” He prodded her ribs with the toe of his shoe, and she let out a wail.

“Am I?”

She cried out again.

“I’ll take that for a yes.”

Geraldine by name, she was the housekeeper and martial arts expert who—along with the myriad electronic gadgets—had been in charge of security for a frail woman in her late seventies. And who had failed.

To the priest, McGarr said, “I need a list of everybody who was present in this house and on the grounds this afternoon. How many other people possess cards to the front gate?”

“Everybody.”

“Everybody who has ever been in residence here?”

“No. The codes change daily, such that a card that can open the gate on one day can’t on the next.”

“How do your guests get these cards?”

“Geraldine slips them under their doors every morning, along with the
Times
.”

Rather like a pricey hotel, McGarr thought. But a curious hotel, to say the least. Certainly Mary-Jo Stanton had been rich, and the house contained objects that had been the target of thieves in the past, according to the priest.

But the security precautions had been excessive and ultimately worthless.

“How many guests are there?”

“Today, only three, not counting me.”

“You mean you consider yourself a guest here?”

“Yes, of course. Mary-Jo owned the house.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Oh”—Father Fred had to think—“nearly twenty years.”

Which would have placed him in his early thirties when Mary Jo was in her fifties.

McGarr was about to ask if the priest had occupied some other religious office for all that time when he heard voices below them, loud and official—obviously the Tech Squad or members of his own staff. Which was good.

Suddenly his wrist and the side of his face were throbbing, and he sorely needed to take something for the pain. Preferably a large whiskey.

There had been a time—pain or no pain—when McGarr would have rounded up everybody in the house and interviewed them one by one—all night, if necessary—before the killer had a chance to formulate an alibi.

But McGarr no longer felt the need to be the chief operative as well as the chief administrator of his agency. He had trained his staff well, and Ward and McKeon—whom he could see in the hallway below him—could conduct the initial interviews, gather information, and deal with the Techies about the physical evidence.

Nor would he put up with banter.

“Would yiz look at him,” Bernie McKeon, his chief-of-staff, said to Hugh Ward as McGarr stepped off the last stair. “Isn’t he forever telling us, ‘Lads—yiz’ve got to use your heads.’”

“But literally, like that?” Ward replied. “He asks too much.”

“It’s leadership by example.”

“There’s a woman up on the third floor who’s to be brought in and charged with assault.”

“On you?”

“Chief—say it ain’t so. Could it be time for the gold wristwatch and the cottage in Tralee?”

“I want the whole thing worked out for me by the morning.”

“After his beauty sleep.”

“Bios of the residents and anybody else on the property today, possible suspects, the initial physical findings, and a rundown of the security system that you’ll find underneath the stairs. Ring up the outfit that installed it. They must offer twenty-four-hour service.

“And finally, I want an inventory. Could theft have been the motive?”

Which quelled their comments. “But this place is huge, and there’re only two of us.”

“Get help.”

Out in the car, McGarr eased into the contour seat that wrapped his back like two soft soothing hands. Bed, of course, would be better.

But it was not to be.