In the Wrong Hands, стр. 28
“Who knew where the Bishop was staying?”
“There was a big foul up when he arrived. I was told he wanted to get together after Mass to talk about the groundbreaking ceremony.”
“At the steak house. Right?”
“Yes. I, however, was not told that he never drove on the highway after dark. Apparently, the church always put him up somewhere in town if he chose to stay late.”
“Who made the arrangements, then?”
“I did, about ten minutes before Mass started.”
“Cutting it close.”
“Tell me about it. That’s usually when I write the Homily.”
The joke was completely lost on Lynch.
“So, who knew?”
“Just Bishop Ryan, Pastor Karney, and me, as far as I know.”
Leo realized how that sounded but figured it would be best to let Lynch ask for an alibi. He didn’t. By the surveillance footage, the police knew when the murder took place. From the server logs, they knew that the church voicemail was checked from Father Pascucci’s office phone twelve minutes later. Even with no traffic and all green lights, (which never happened in Potterford) it would have taken just about that much time to get from the Marriott to St. Aloysius. When they tacked on a few minutes for things like getting from the crime scene to the car, parking at the church, and actually getting to the office phone, Father Pascucci was all but taken off the suspect list. Lynch still asked about Pastor Karney.
“Like today, he was at the Diocese. Someone there can vouch for...”
Suddenly …
BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING BRRING
…the room was overtaken by a deafening alarm. Lynch looked wide-eyed at Leo and hollered.
“Exactly what is that!!? The fire alarm!!?”
“I don’t know!! I never heard it before!!”
They both rose to investigate. The din stopped as Lynch broke the plane of the doorway. The silence revealed screaming…in Spanish.
“I wonder who that could be.”
With hands in pockets, he took a few casual steps to his right, looked to his left, and discovered Gomez having a fist fight with the fire exit.
“The puta went off when I opened the door!!”
Leo returned to his office to call off the fire department. Lynch filled a cup at the water cooler and handed it to his partner.
“Here.”
“Thanks, and by the way, it took me a few minutes, but I realized why you had me interview the landscapers, and I don’t fuckin’ appreciate it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You figured they were Latino.”
“They weren’t?”
“Eastern bloc asshole!”
Leo reappeared. Lynch spoke.
“Father, do you have a key to the rest of these doors?”
“There’s one in the secretary’s office. Why?”
The priest answered his own question. The killer couldn’t have gone out through the fire exit. He would have tripped the alarm. If he entered the hallway, there was only one possibility: He locked himself in one of the other rooms, and if that was the case, he was still there. Leo’s chest revved up again. Lynch spoke slowly and calmly, confident everyone was on the same page.
“Father, Detective Gomez and I have this. Where is the key, exactly?”
“Top desk drawer on the right.”
“Do you remember what you said earlier about finding yourself in this situation again?”
Leo nodded and made his way to the street.
Gomez drew his sidearm and planted himself in the corner of the hallway, while Lynch retrieved the key. The half-century old hard-wood floors and wainscoting amplified Gomez’s voice.
“Okay, jagoff! Here’s the deal! We know you’re in one of these rooms! We are assuming you are armed! Under that assumption, we are going to open all four of these doors, one at a time! If anything moves on the other side of any one of them, we are going to start squeezing triggers! That means that things will go a whole lot smoother for everyone involved if you come out on your own!”
Nothing happened. Lynch walked from the secretary’s office and jingled the key.
“You hear that, jagoff? That’s my partner with the key! Let’s get this party started!”
They opened all the doors. They found nothing. Lynch spoke.
“Let’s get this party started?”
“What should I have said?”
“Not that.”
“Whatever. You wanna hear this?”
Gomez did his interviews with a digital recorder. Lynch normally cursed the device, saying it slowed things down and made two steps out of a one-step process, but he gave in. It was the voice of one of the gardeners, and he might as well have been speaking Spanish.
Dee man come to da door. Den vee vork. Den man ask if vee see a man running. Vee tell him no.
For better or worse, it confirmed Leo’s story.
“How in the sweet name of Elvis did he get out of here, then?”
Crime Scene had arrived, so Gomez went to see if they had any success getting prints from the confessional. Lynch met Father Leo in the parking lot. The priest had kept his word.
“What happened?”
Lynch told him what little there was to tell. Leo replied with five words that he found, considering the day’s events, difficult to say.
“Jim, I have an idea.”
9. A Random Intersection
The elderly couple at the stop light felt compelled to say something. They had their windows up, the radio on, and they still heard the screams coming from the car next to them. At first, they thought something was terribly wrong. The man in the car appeared to be having some sort of mental or nervous breakdown. Muffled waves of guttural agony spilled from within, accompanied sparsely by the thump of his fist against the roof of his car and the staccato honks of his horn as he beat his head against his steering wheel. They feared for the man’s safety and were about to call the police when they curiously realized that he wasn’t screaming; he was laughing. He was hysterically laughing. They went from being scared to being puzzled. They still suspected some sort of psychotic episode