"It's okay. I understand."
Did she? Renny sure hoped so.
The priest! he thought as he raced toward Downstate. Could he have been the one who cut up on that kid?
Nah! Not possible. No way.
And yet…
Renny thought again about how everyone he'd interviewed at St. F.'s had mentioned good old Father Bill's attachment to little Danny, like father and son. How Danny would always sit on his lap. What if that attachment hadn't been entirely on the straight and narrow? You heard about fag priests, about priests molesting kids. It hit the papers every so often. What if the thought of giving the kid up for adoption had scared him? What if he'd been afraid Danny would talk to his new parents about things he'd had to let Father Bill do to him?
Renny increased his speed. He squeezed the steering wheel as he felt his insides tense up.
What if Danny had told the Loms something on Christmas Eve? And what if in their shock and disbelief, in a misguided attempt to give this wonderful and gracious man an opportunity to defend himself, they'd called Father Bill first instead of the police? And what if he cracked when they told him? What if he said he'd come right over and talk this thing out? What if he went completely berserk in the Lorn house? -J
"Jesus!" he said aloud in his car.
It didn't explain everything. Nobody—nobody—was ever going to give Renny a satisfactory explanation of what had happened to Herb Lorn, so he stuffed that incident into a mental limbo. But the bogus Sara—what was her angle? Was she a red herring? Or was she somehow in league with the priest in some plot to get Danny away from St. Francis to a place where the wonderful Father Bill could have freer and more discreet access to the kid?
And suddenly all the pieces started falling into place.
The priest had spent every waking hour by the kid's side, even slept in a chair in the boy's room. Renny had been taken by this show of such deep devotion. But what if it hadn't been anything like devotion? What if the priest had just wanted to be there when Danny started coming out of it? What if he'd wanted to be the first to know if Danny was going to talk again?
And there was more! The priest had been fighting the endless round of tests and procedures all the docs wanted to perform on the kid. Renny had assumed it was for the kid's sake… until now. What if he was really afraid they'd find a way to bring him out of it, or at least get him to the point where he could name his attacker? And now, with the legal machinery moving toward making Danny a ward of the court, the priest was facing certain shutout from having any say in Danny's care. That might have been the last straw. He must have gone into a panic tonight and took off with the kid.
Maybe to finish him off.
Shit!
Renny swerved into the entrance of one of the Downstate parking lots and jumped out of his car. A couple of winos were there. They fairly leapt on him.
"He took the boy!" the shorter one said.
"Who?"
"The Jesuit! He took the boy!"
"You saw him?"
Before the little guy could answer, the bigger wino pushed forward.
"Are you the one?" he said, staring into Renny's eyes.
Renny turned away. He'd heard enough. He flashed his badge at the guy in the guard booth and grabbed the phone. It took a while—he had to go through the hospital switchboard—but he got a line to4he desk at his precinct.
"I want an APB on a Father William Ryan. He's a Jesuit priest but he probably won't be dressed like one. He's wanted for kidnapping and for attempted murder. He'll have a sick seven-year-old kid with him. Get his picture out of the file now and get it to all the papers and all the local news shows. Do the usual bridges and tunnels thing. Have anybody and everybody looking out for a guy in his forties traveling with a sick kid. Do it now. Not ten minutes from now—now!"
Renny stepped out of the booth and slammed his fist against the hood of his car.
How could he have been such a jerk? The cardinal rule in this sort of crime was to put the first heat on the people closest to the victim. The esteemed Father Ryan had been the closest but Renny had allowed himself to be lulled by the Roman collar, by the fact that he'd come out of St. Francis himself. He'd let that bastard priest sucker him in and squeeze him for all he was worth.
I'm so fucking stupid!
Well, no more. Ryan wasn't getting out of this city tonight. It was New Year's Eve and the shift was spread a little thin, plus the usual bunch of cops was tied up doing crowd control at Times Square, but Ryan wasn't getting away. Not if Renny had a damn thing to say about it. The priest had made him look like a jerk, but Renny realized that wasn't what really mattered, what really burned him. It was how he'd started thinking of the priest as a friend, someone he wanted to hang around with. And Renny didn't offer his friendship easily.
He was hurt, dammit.
Something cold and wet landed on his cheek. He looked around. It was beginning to snow. He smiled. The weatherman had predicted a snowstorm tonight. That was good. It would slow traffic, make it easier to spot a guy and a sick kid trying to leave the city.
We're gonna meet again real soon, Father fucking Ryan. And when we do you'll wish you'd never been born.
St. Ann's Cemetery was small and old and crowded, some of the headstones dating back to the early years of the last century. Bill had chosen St. Ann's because it was out of the way and it was consecrated ground.
… bury me… in holy ground…
Now as he drove the deserted street running along the cemetery's north wall he wondered if it mattered.
Consecrated ground, he thought. What does that mean?
A week ago he'd have had no trouble answering the question. Now the whole concept struck him as senseless.
But then, nothing made sense anymore. His whole world had been turned upside down and ripped inside out during the past week. He could smell the rot in the very foundations of his faith, could feel them crumbling beneath him.
Where are you, Lord? There's evil afoot here, pure distilled evil that can't be explained away by happenstance or coincidence or
natural causes. This isn't fair. Lord. Give me a hand, will you?
Only one other time in his life had he come across anything even remotely resembling what had happened to Danny. That derelict… Spano… had reminded him. Almost twenty years ago, in a Victorian mansion on Long Island Sound, he'd seen Emma Stevens die not ten feet in front of him with an ax in her brain. He'd watched her lie in front of him, as lifeless as the rug that soaked up her blood. And then he'd seen her rise and walk and kill two people before slumping into death once again.
He'd explained that away by telling himself that if doctors had had a chance to examine Emma while she was lying on the rug with the ax protruding from her skull, they would have found that she only appeared dead, and that whatever spark of life was left in her had flared long enough to allow her to finish what she'd started just before she was killed.
But an entire medical center staff had had a week with Danny. They all said he should be dead, but somehow he wouldn't die.
Just like Emma Stevens. Except that Emma had hung on for only a few minutes. Danny had been going for a week and showed no signs of weakening. He might possibly go on forever… it won't stop… till you bury me…
Bill wondered if there could be a link between what had happened to Emma and what was happening to Danny. Spano the wino seemed to have hinted at that in the parking lot.
He shook himself. No. How could there be? He was grasping at straws here.
He pulled to a stop in the deep shadows under a dead street lamp. Dead because he'd killed it. He'd bought a CO2 pellet gun yesterday, come out here last night, and shot the bulb out. Took him a whole cartridge before he finally scored a bull's-eye.