So: Joanne was barely speaking to him at home, his name was mud down at the precinct, and Danny Gordon was still in agony here in the hospital.
Renny wondered why he stuck with this job. He had his twenty years. He should have got out then.
"Are they saying Danny's gone crazy?" Renny said to Father Bill.
"Not so much crazy as shutting down parts of his mind. The human mind can experience only so much trauma and then it begins to draw the blinds. The doctors say he's not really experiencing pain on a high level of consciousness."
"That's a blessing," Renny said. "I guess."
The priest gave him a sidelong glance.
"If they know what they're talking about."
Renny nodded tiredly. "I hear you, Padre."
None of the doctors seemed to know what they were doing in Danny's case. They trooped in and out of that room, new bunches every day, about as much help explaining what was happening to the kid as they'd been explaining what had happened to Lorn. Lots of talk, lots of big words, but when you cleared away all the smoke, they didn't know diddly.
Nick the professor sighed with exasperation.
"You both realize, don't you, that what's supposedly happening with Danny is impossible. I mean it can't be happening. They say they're putting blood and other fluids into Danny and it's simply disappearing. That's patently impossible. Fluid is matter and matter exists. What goes in as fluid may come out as gas but it just doesn't disappear. It has to be somewhere!"
Father Bill smiled weakly. "Maybe it is. But it's not in Danny."
"Wasn't he worked up here before?"
"Completely. Everything one hundred percent normal."
Shaking his head, Nick glanced at his watch and stood up.
"I've got to run," he said, shaking hands with the priest. "But I can be back tonight if you want me to spell you with Danny."
"Thanks, but I'll be all right."
Nick shrugged. "I'll come back anyway."
He waved and left. Renny decided he liked Nick. But he still had to wonder a little. Like, what was the relationship between Nick and Father Bill? An unmarried guy still visiting the priest that took care of him as a kid? What kind of a relationship could they have had when Nick lived at St. F.'s that would hold up after all these years. Renny remembered Father Dougherty from his own days at St. F.'s. He couldn't imagine wanting to pay that cold fish a visit every week, even if he were still alive.
He canned the thought. Just his policeman's mind at work. You got so used to seeing the slimy side of people that when it didn't hit you in the face you went looking for it. But he could see that Father Bill might be a pretty regular guy when he wasn't under this kind of stress, someone you might want to be friends with, even if he was a priest.
"How about Sara?" the priest said when Nick was gone. "Anything on her?"
Renny had been dreading that question. Father Bill had asked it every day, and until this morning the answer had been an easy no.
"Yeah," he said. "We got something. I sent for a newspaper clipping and a copy of her senior page in the U. of T. at Austin yearbook. They arrived today."
"Her yearbook? How can that tell you anything?"
"I do it routinely, just to make sure that the person I'm looking for is really the person I'm looking for."
The priest's expression was puzzled. "I don't…"
Renny pulled the folded sheets from his breast pocket and handed them over.
"Here. They're Xeroxes of Xeroxes, but I think you'U*ee what I mean."
He watched Father Bill's eyes scan the top sheet, come to a halt, narrow, then widen in shock. Renny had had almost the same reaction. The yearbook picture of the Sara Bainbridge who later married Herbert Lorn showed a big, moon-faced blonde. The second sheet was a newspaper clipping of a wedding announcement with a photo of the same big blonde in a wedding gown.
Neither of them bore the remotest resemblance to the woman in the photo the priest had given Renny from the St. Francis adoption application.
Father Bill flipped to the second sheet, then looked up at him with a stricken, befuddled expression.
"But this isn't…"
"Yeah. I know."
The priest dropped the sheets and staggered to his feet.
"Oh, my God!"
He turned and leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the Brooklyn rooftops in silence. Renny knew he'd just been socked in the gut so he let him have his time. Finally he turned around.
"I really screwed up, didn't I?"
There was an impulse in Renny to say, Yeah, you did. But he knew it was just his own anger looking for a convenient target. As a cop he'd had his share of times as target for that kind of anger from citizens and he wasn't going to fall into the trap himself. Besides, what was the point of kicking a decent man when he was down?
"You got taken. You followed the routine and she slipped through. And didn't you tell me you even went so far as to call the woman's old pastor?"
A mute nod from the priest.
"Okay. So how were you to know that the two of you were talking about different people?"
But Father Bill didn't seem to be listening. He started talking to the air.
"My God, it's all my fault. If I'd done my job right, Danny wouldn't be all cut up like that. He'd still be in one piece back in St. F.'s."
"Aw, don't start with that bullshit. It's her fault. Whoever took the real Sara's place is to blame. She's the one who took the knife to Danny."
"But why? Why all the subterfuge, the elaborate plotting, and most likely the murder of the real Sara?"
"We don't know that."
True. They didn't know that. But Renny felt it in his gut: The real Sara was dead.
"Why, dammit? Just to mutilate a small boy? It doesn't make sense."
"I stopped expecting sense a long time ago."
"And what about Herb?"
"At this point I can go either way on Herb," Renny said with a shrug, trying not to remember what the man had looked like the last time he'd seen him. "But my gut instinct is that Herb was a victim too."
The priest's eyes were bleak as he looked at Renny.
"So then it's Sara—the bogus Sara—we're after."
"Right. And we'll find her."
"I'm not so sure about that," Father Bill said softly.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Before the priest could answer, a doctor walked into the lounge, one of the nameless, faceless white coats that had been trooping in and out of Danny's room for days.
"Excuse me. Father Ryan? I want to discuss some procedures we'd like to do on the Gordon boy."
Renny saw the priest's body tense, like an animal ready to spring.
"Tests? More tests? What about his pain? All you do is tests but that child is still in agony in there! Don't come to me with more requests for tests until you've healed his wounds and stopped his pain!"
"We've tried everything we know," the doctor said, "but nothing works. We need to test—"
Father Bill took two quick steps toward the doctor and grabbed the lapels of his white coat.
"Screw your tests!" His voice was edging toward a scream. "Stop his pain!"
Renny leapt from his seat and pulled the priest off the doctor. He shooed the doctor out of the lounge and got Father Bill into a chair.
"Cool it, Father. Just cool it, okay?"
A nasty thought slithered through Renny's mind. In a crime with no witnesses, the first suspects should be the people closest to the victim. He remembered how everyone he'd interviewed at St. F.'s had commented on how attached Father Bill had been to little Danny. What if he'd been too attached? What if the thought of giving the kid up for adoption had been too much for him? What if—?