“You saw him the night of his death?”
“Who did you suspect?” Meredyth asked at the same time.
She nodded to Lucas. “I told all this to the detectives investigating the case.”
Lucas bit his lower lip and asked, “Did you share drinks or wine with the judge that night before leaving him?”
“Why, yes, I did. He had just returned from a trip to Dallas-Fort Worth where he'd helped to raise a half-million dollars for AIDS research, and he felt like celebrating, or so he said. He was also exhausted. I prescribed a mild sedative and saw to it that he went to bed. He wasn't so old as he appeared, but he had a crippling arthritic condition, and he'd gone prematurely gray, and he had problems remembering things. His days on the bench, he truly missed. He was a lovely man, really…”
“So, who did you immediately suspect and why?” Meredyth asked point-blank.
“Over the past several years, some priest with some weird order was coming around, pretending to be Charles's spiritual advisor.”
“Does this priest have a name?”
“Aguilar. Don't ask me where he lives or where his church is. I don't know, but he was some strange person. I only met him a few times, usually leaving Charles's house. I never quite trusted him.”
Outside the hospital, Meredyth asked Lucas, “Well? Have you had enough? It appears Mootry's friends were devoted to him.”
“Let's go see the priest.”
While Lucas drove, she answered his questions.
“What do we know about the three people Randy came up with for us?”
“Not much. The lawyer likes to dive.”
“Underwater diving, deep-sea diving?”
“Yeah, right.”
“Might mean Dalton's also into spear guns?”
“That sounds like reaching to me, Lucas. But he's also into big-game hunting in Utah, Wyoming, and, get this, South Dakota and North Dakota, as well as Canada.”
“Which may well mean he's had some experience with crossbows?”
“It doesn't say so, but yes… precisely. He is a collector.”
“Collector of what?”
“Weapons.”
“Really?”
“As for Dr. Sterling Washburn… she-how did Randy miss this?-she's a well-respected surgeon with oodles of hours of community service.”
“Naturally,” replied Lucas, skepticism infiltrating each syllable.
“You know what you are, Stonecoat?” she asked. “You're a biased snob.”
“Me, biased? Me, a snob?”
“Bias, prejudice, call it what you like, but you're a snob toward snobs.”
“Oh, that's clever and funny.”
“You think because someone's well-to-do, because someone's successful, and socially successful, at that, then there's something inherently wrong with her.”
“Bingo.”
“God, you can be irritating.”
He ignored her ire. “And the priest?”
“Father Aguilar, according to what Randy's come up with, is, or was, Judge Charles Mootry's best friend and confidant.”
“Sounds to me like they all were his best friend and confidant.”
“Father Aguilar, however, was given heaping donations by the judge, and a good deal of the estate went to Aguilar's church, a monastic church in an older section of the city, the Third Order of the Sacred Sepulcher of Houston, Texas.”
“The Third Order of what?”
“The Sacred Sepulcher.”
“Got it, I think…”
“I don't imagine, nor can you, that Mootry was killed for the sake of the church.”
“If these assassins are stamping out vampires and evil, and can take the vampire's financial holdings, too, why not?”
“I wonder if the Vatican or the FBI knows about this Sepulcher church,” said Lucas.
“Not likely.”
'Tell me more about Father Aguilar. Of the three, he does sound the most tempting as a suspect. Don't ask me why, but I've never fully trusted religious leaders, not even among the Cherokee.”
“Mootry leaned heavily on the priest for spiritual guidance, and he paid him well for his time.”
“Aguilar could have come and gone freely from the house, could have easily gotten close to Mootry.”
“If we're playing guessing games, then maybe he pulled the same scam on Palmer after the tragic death of Palmer's fiancee. Palmer would need all the spiritual guidance he could afford after that, wouldn't you think?”
“I think… I think… I don't know what to think.”
TWENTY-S EVEN
They had arrived at the ancient spired cathedral that was the centerpiece of the monastery. The structure dwarfed them and their little car. It was like looking up at an ominous, squatting dragon ready to breathe fire. They could smell smoke, and looking down an alleyway, they saw smoke spiraling up from a foundry like smokestack that rose skyward.
“Whataya suppose they're burning?”
A street person, her face like a baked apple gone bad, cackled witchlike and replied to Lucas's question, “Don't know what they burn but sins; stinks to high heaven some days. Complain to the cops, but they don't do a damn thing, not once. Off limits, I 'spect.” Then she cackled more.
“Let's step around to the front, shall we?” suggested Meredyth.
“Oh, don't you be so uppity-pissy, missy,” complained the old woman. “Someday, if you live to my age, you'll be as dried-up as I am!” Again the woman erupted in a rooster's cackling as she strode off.
“Grab a cauldron and two more like her, and we can call you Macbeth,” Meredyth told Lucas.
Oddly enough, perched on each of the huge front door handles was a book, a candle, and a stark black raven, all lit by the eye of God. Over the door were some Latin letters, inscribed there from the day the church began, which Meredyth translated loosely to read God brooks no evil here.
“Well, I guess we can go home,” Meredyth joked lightly.
Lucas said nothing, merely rang the bell when he found the doors locked.
“This place is positively medieval.” She kept talking as if it might dispel the gloom that descended over her spirit even here, standing in the blinding, burning sun of a Houston morning. “Everything but a moat,” she continued.
“They say there were more murders per capita during medieval times than there are today,” ventured Lucas on noting a date at the base of the stairs that told them that the place was built at the turn of the century. High overhead, at the pinnacles, gargoyles stared down at them.
A small door, a peephole, opened up in the door and a pair of dark eyes ran over them. “Can we help you?” asked the man behind the door.
“Police officers,” declared Lucas, holding up his gold shield to impress the man. “I'm Detective Stonecoat, and this is Dr. Meredyth Sanger. We're with the Houston Police Department. Here to see Father Frank Aguilar.”
“Really? Indeed? Does Father Aguilar… is he expecting you? Do you have an appointment?”
“No, we're here conducting an investigation into the murder of Judge Charles Mootry, and we have a few questions for him.”
“But you have no appointment?”
Lucas sighed heavily. “No, didn't see the need, but if you like, we can return with a warrant.” Lucas thought the man behind the door was being testy, and he gave him the same.
“Is Father Aguilar in to see us?” Meredyth said in her most pleasant voice.
The eyes behind the door darted about, a pair of pin balls seeking an answer. “I'll ring him, let him know you're here.” He snapped the peephole closed and they heard his footsteps echo off.
After fifteen minutes of standing about the hot stone stairs, they'd located a place in the shade where they might sit. “This place is built like a fortress,” she said.
“Yeah, storming it would be a trick. You've got to wonder if the bars on the windows and the locks on the doors are to keep the rats out or in.”
'To keep the world and evil out, no doubt.”
He nodded. “But evil has a way of seeping through a hairline crack.”
“I wonder where they got this magnificent stone?” She didn't expect an answer, and Lucas wasn't providing one, so when they heard an answer, they both looked up to see a man in a cloak and cowl who had inched the heavy door open.