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only God can judge me
abuse of your position
drop dead!
She got up and stood at the bathroom door.“You think this is the Sully guy that the Waffle Brothers mentioned?”
“Has to be.”
“He’s a big guy.Did you notice that in the photo?Maybe two hundred pounds?”
“And Mrs.Kerrigan, the lady who was coming out of confession – she described someone big heading in…”
“It’s looking to me as if something happened last year.Something that didn’t just make them drop out of the sports league or whatever it was, but something that split the group up.These two had a fight.Sully goes off to rehab, or back to rehab, or disappears on a bender maybe.Father T gets a rebuke from the Bishop.Stop acting like one of the guys.Behave like a priest, kinda thing.No more chances.That’swhy he drops out of the team.”
Marcus shut the water off.“I’m with you.But what did they fight about?”
“I’ve got an idea.”
She told him about her trip to the Diocese, the evasive Gervase, and the woman who’d followed her out of the building.
“Kate.Can I get out of the shower?”
“Sorry.”
She shut the bathroom door and went back to the bed, waiting for him.He came out, wrapped in a white bathrobe.
“So you think maybe Ray Sullivan found out about Tom’s dalliances and was threatening to out him?Or Mrs.Ray was one of the people the priest dallied with…”
“Could be.But Tom also seems to be threatening Ray.See here- “ She read from the screen.“Your own position is highly compromised.If the school board knew the truth…”
Marcus sat on the bed.“It looks like a stand-off.Ray’s got this high-up role in the education department; Tom’s a respected priest.”
“Is he respected, though?Sounds like he’s got a certain reputation by now.”
“True, but the church is standing by him, to an extent.As long as he doesn’t slip up again.And don’t forget, we’ve talked to a lot of people with a high opinion of him.”
She nodded.“Okay, so maybe they’re both kind of trading threats with one another, and then one of them decides to take the lead.Or someone else thinks they both deserve to pay the ultimate price.”
Marcus took this one in.He sucked his teeth, thoughtfully.“Where is Ray right now?”
“Hugh said it was a local rehab place called The Sanctuary.”
“Could go either way,” Marcus mused.“Some of these places are run like Supermax, some of them, it’s more of a hotel with hugs.”
“We’ll talk to the chief, make sure we go in with a bulletproof warrant tomorrow morning.Early.”
They both felt it.A light, fluttery feeling that was trepidation and anticipation in equal quantities.They knew they were getting somewhere, knew that in twenty-four hours’ time, they could even have the killer in custody.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I see you.You’re like teachers the whole world over.Your thin veneer of easy charm.The way you stand in the midst of your young, dumb acolytes, basking in their rapt attention, their trust, their love.You’re the cat that got the cream.You make the same lame jokes with each new class, each new year.Hit them with the same, tired anecdotes about smoking opium with the Buddhist monks in Myanmar, that time you outsmarted the chaplain in the county jail.Ohhh, they wish their moms and pops could be cool like you.But soon, Professor, you’re going to be smoking hot.
He clicked the voice recorder off.Today was the day.Tonight the night.He had the key, and he didn’t need to do any further surveillance on Professor Whitman; he knew the guy’s routine like he knew the inside of his own pocket.But he liked watching him.He enjoyed how unaware the guy was, that these were his last hours on earth.
Right now, the Prof was teaching his undergrad class under a chestnut tree.Of course, he’d do that;hey, let’s take this outside, an instant vote-winner with every student.The earnest boys who hang on his every flippant word, the girls who send him love letters, they all get to sit at his knees.And he gets to sit in the midst of them, back against the tree, like a picture you might see on a pamphlet.The Teacher and His Disciples.The Buddha under the bodhi-tree.
The radical theologian.Wunderkind Whitman.Every two years he’d hit the chattering classes with a fresh, hardback attack on faith.“The God-Neurons” – a network of brain cells that had supposedly lost their original evolutionary purpose, and now made people into fundamentalists.“Swiss Flu” – a study of brain-altering fevers and diseases which could have caused major shifts in religious thought and practice in the 16thcentury.“The Gulshan Gospels” – a collection of stories about a child genius, born to a virgin, written in the area known today as Bangladesh, a century before Jesus.If it was religious, Whitman wanted to prove it wrong, and he did so with a mixture of irreverence, derision, light research, and lame puns.
