"No need to apologize," Butts assured her. "I'm sorry if we caused your daughter any more distress."
"You were just doing your job."
Butts coughed and looked down at his feet. "Yeah, well, not everyone understands that. I wish everyone was more like you-sure would make my job a lot easier."
"Forgive me," Lee said, "but is there a Mr. Riley?"
Mrs. Riley's mouth tightened. "There was. Not anymore."
She didn't offer any further explanation, so they thanked her and left the house, heading back toward the subway. When they were some distance from the building, they heard footsteps and turned to see Christine running after them. She wasn't wearing a coat, and her cheeks were flushed from cold and exertion.
"Please," she said, catching up with them. "Please-I just can't go any longer without telling someone!"
"What?" Lee said. "What is it you need to tell?"
"They don't want me to tell, but I have to-I just can't keep quiet anymore!"
"Who doesn't want you to tell?"
"My mom-and Marie's parents. They know about it-or at least I think they do."
"What is it they know?" said Butts.
"It's-it's Father Michael."
"What about him?"
"He…he was having an affair with Marie."
"How do you know that?"
"Because he was having sex with me too."
And with that, she burst into tears.
Chapter Eleven
"So you just didn't bother to mention that one little detail, huh?" Detective Butts said, putting his face close to the priest's. "That you were having sex with a girl who just happens to end up dead in your church?"
Father Michael Flaherty sat, hands folded on his lap, staring at the floor. Butts paced around him, his stocky body vibrating with rage.
It was less than two hours since Christine's revelation about the priest's sexual involvement with her and Marie. Lee and Butts were in an interrogation room in the Bronx Major Case precinct house while Chuck Morton watched through the one-way mirror from the hallway outside.
"How many others were there?" Butts continued. "Huh? Pretty good pickings, undergraduate coeds, I guess. You must have had a field day with all those nice Catholic girls. Is it true what the song says, Father? Are Catholic girls more fun?"
The priest stared at his hands. "I'd like a lawyer, please," he said.
"Oh, don't worry-there's one on the way," Butts said with disgust, and plopped down in the chair next to Lee.
Chuck opened the door and motioned to both of them to come outside.
"Okay, that's it-no more questions until he's lawyered up," he said once they were out in the hall. "I don't want to risk losing him, so we go by the book. We don't have anything on him, so unless he confesses, we'll have to let him walk."
"Can we put a tail on him, have him watched?" Butts asked.
"Sure, but I don't know how much good that'll do. He hasn't committed any crime-having sex with these girls was unethical, but it wasn't illegal. They were both over eighteen. I did call the administration at Fordham, and they're going to deal with him on the ethics charges." He turned to Lee. "What do you think? Does he fit your profile so far?"
Lee looked at the priest, who sat staring at the empty space in front of him, hands still in his lap. "My instinct tells me no, but he is the right age and race. And the religious angle fits-almost. But something's not right…I don't think the killer is going to be someone in a religious profession. This is more the work of an outsider, someone who longs for religious absolution, but doesn't quite believe he's worthy of it."
"So if the priest isn't the Slasher, we're back to square one," Butts said.
Butts had nicknamed the killer the Slasher. Lee didn't like the word much, but he and Butts were just beginning to get comfortable with each other, and he didn't want to rock that boat, so he went along with it.
"We've got a search warrant for his rooms, so if the missing necklace is there, we'll find it," Chuck said.
"I don't think you'll find the necklace," Lee answered and turned to Butts. "Remember the boyfriend thought Marie was seeing someone? It must have been Father Michael he was talking about."
"Son of a bitch. Taking advantage of those girls. And you know what really gets me? The families knew about it, and they didn't say anything."
"Well, there are different levels of knowing, and we can't say exactly what they knew-maybe they just suspected," Lee pointed out.
"But why cover up a thing like that?"
"Because they were 'good Catholics,'" Chuck said.
Butts scratched his head. "I don't follow."
"How could they allow themselves to believe their daughter's priest is capable of that?" Lee said. "It throws their whole belief system into chaos."
"Oh, man," said Butts. "That really burns me."
"It's bad, I agree," Lee replied. "But what the killer is doing is worse-much worse."
Chapter Twelve
Lee sat off to the side in the drafty lecture hall at John Jay College, watching his old mentor in action. It was after 3 P.M., but the heat wasn't on in the cavernous room, and the students sat bundled in their down jackets, rubbing their hands and blowing on them. In spite of the chill, though, attendance was good. Nelson's lectures always drew a crowd. This was a new course, something a bit daring for the typical John Jay curriculum: The Psychology and Philosophy of the Serial Offender.
Up on the stage, Nelson paced in front of the podium, hands jammed into his pants pockets. He lectured without notes, and the machine-gun delivery of his lectures had often been parodied by his students. When Lee was a senior at John Jay, the class sketch show included a satire of Nelson, played by a student in a red fright wig, chain-smoking several cigarettes at once and barking out his lectures so fast that they were unintelligible. To his credit, Nelson laughed himself silly over it. He later said it was the most flattering portrayal he had ever seen of himself.
"I want to continue today with a quote from the renowned FBI profiler John Douglas," Nelson said, stopping his pacing to pull down a large projection screen at the front of the room. "In his book, Mindhunter, he writes, 'To understand the artist, look at his work.'"
Nelson perched on the edge of his desk and rubbed the back of his neck. "Now, what exactly does this mean?"
He looked out over the sea of eager faces. "It's been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. If you carry that idea far enough, you might even surmise that beneath every genius lurks a potential madman. And certainly in cases like van Gogh or Lord Byron, you had both. Trying to separate a genius from his 'madness' is like trying to pull dye out of a fabric after it has set. It's a chicken-and-egg question. Who's to say which feeds which? Would van Gogh have painted sunflowers or the garden at Arles if he didn't suffer from bipolar disorder? My guess is probably not. He may have painted-he may even have painted well-but he would not have been van Gogh."
He paused to adjust the slide projector on the desk next to him. The students sat, captured by his intellect and charisma. Lee remembered that when he was a student, there were girls who had crushes on Nelson, following him around between classes, soaking in the heat of his forceful personality.
"So that takes us back to John Douglas," Nelson said, rising from his perch on the desk and picking up a remote control for the slide projector. "'To understand the artist, look at his work.' And if you view a serial offender the same way you would look at an artist, then we can begin to understand what Mr. Douglas is saying. After all, the root for both is the same: obsession. It's only the form and content that differs, the degree of sublimation, of social acceptability."
"Now this," he said, clicking his remote control so that a picture of the garden at Arles appeared on the screen, "is socially acceptable. But this"-another click and it was replaced by a photograph of a young woman with dark red strangulation marks around her neck-" is not."