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Sullivan straightened up in his seat.“So you know that I wasn’t involved in Tom’s death,” he said, quietly.
“We can surmise that you weren’tdirectlyinvolved.That wouldn’t preclude someone acting on your behalf, or with your collusion.”
“Tom was myfriend.”
“Well, Mr.Sullivan, I’ve read the emails between you two,” Kate said.“And they don’t sound too friendly.”
“We had a falling out, but -” A look of horror crossed the man’s face.“Wait up, you can’t seriously think that I…”
“Drop dead,” Kate said.“That was one of your comments, wasn’t it?”
“Aw, hell, it’s an expression!I was angry with Tom, we were angry with each other, but… God in heaven, how can you think that I…”
“Spare us the outrage,” Marcus said.“Did you get someone to kill him?”
“No!”
Over the next, tear-stained thirty minutes, Sullivan told them a tale of simple, grubby, human frailty.Told them of how, clinging on to his faith, he’d asked the priest to absolve him of his sins.And Father Thomas had refused, on the grounds that in order to be absolved of sin, the penitent had to be sincere about not doing it again.While all the evidence thus far suggested that Ray Sullivan would do everything, again and again and again.
He hadn’t been totally unbending, though.Father Thomas had given Ray an ultimatum.Get clean.Stay clean for a year.And he’d receive absolution.Ray had quit the confessional in a rage.The way he saw it, without the spiritual boost of absolution, he had no chance of getting clean.And Father Thomas was going way beyond the powers and prerogatives of a priest, imposing his own conditions upon something that was solely the province of God.
Despite that, Ray Sullivan had gone on to gain some mastery over his addictions.He started attending a support group, a few towns away, where no one knew him.A woman at this group began to talk about a difficult relationship.A man she’d sought help from, but developed feelings for.Over the weeks, it became clear that she was trapped in a loveless marriage, and that the man supporting her was a priest.
It also became clear to Ray that this priest was Father Tom.
Ray felt an overwhelming rage which, as on many occasions before, sent him spinning into relapse.Matters came to an ugly head at the County Fair last June, where there was initially a minor dispute between Ray and Father Tom over the scoring in a pétanque match.Words became insults, insults became shoves, shoves became punches.The pétanque team were banned from competing for a year, and a whirlwind of rumors and counter-rumors began to whip around the town.Ray checked into rehab – the first of two visits to The Sanctuary in one year - but continued his quarrel with Tom online, eventually threatening to tell the Bishop about the priest’s infidelities.In response, Tom urged Ray to go ahead and report him.He might have been calling Ray’s bluff.He might have been surprised when, instead of moving him yet again, the Bishop merely told him to remember he was a priest, not one of the boys, and ordered him to concentrate on his sacred duties instead of playing pétanque.Tom might even have had enough of this endless cycle of growing dangerously close to women he could not have, which was an addiction less harmful than any of Ray’s, but an addiction, nonetheless.But no one would ever know, because somebody murdered Father Tom in the ugliest possible way.
Like an old pool toy, Ray had seemed to deflate as every minute of his story went by.By the time he reached the end, he looked tiny, a hunched figure, bowed by the weight of his own confession.Not that he had a great deal to confess.
“What happens now?”he asked, quietly.
“You’ll be formally interviewed in the morning,” Kate said.“However –”
Her phone trilled into life, making everyone jump.It was Winters.
“I have to take this, sorry.”
She nipped out of the office and stood in the corridor.
“Brantley College,” said Winters, abrupt as ever.“Just outside Marburg.”
“I know it.”
“Another fire, another body.Seems to be a Professor Alan Whitman.Do you know the name?”
“The atheist theologian?”
“Similar MO, diesel as the accelerant.Nasty.Brief me.”
She clicked off.Kate leaned up against the wall for a moment.Despite her tiredness and the nagging pain in her shoulder, she felt the urge to get moving, to stay on the trail of this killer.She felt a kind of dread, too.The last murder came with a direct message to her.
And she felt sure that the killer had more to say.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The drive to a crime scene was always an awkward affair.As an investigator, your senses were on high alert; they needed to be in order to process the soon-to-be-revealed evidence, to take it all in, piece by piece, as well as see the vital connections between all those pieces.As a human being, though, you had little relish for what lay ahead: the body, the signs of violence, all the surrounding evidence that reminded you this had once been a person.
Consequently, Kate and Marcus’s journey through the rainy darkness was one of light, almost giddy conversation interspersed by long periods of quiet.Kate had drifted off to sleep for a moment or two and begun yet another fretful, vivid dream in which Denton appeared as both victim and killer.She woke with a start, causing Marcus to swerve ever-so-slightly at the wheel.
