In the Wrong Hands, стр. 32
They were approaching the end of the all-important first forty-eight hours. Standard operating procedures had yielded nothing. No irregular or telling cell phone activity. No sketchy relatives. No personal threats. Nothing. Ernie’s earlier speculations were dead-on. All the local Catholics saw Ryan as a savior and adored him. Everyone else saw him as Internal Affairs for the Philly Archdiocese and admired him. Archbishop Fellini had chosen his man well.
Regardless, neither Lynch nor Gomez was ready to explore the possibility that the act was random. The shooter was caught on tape, tagged with a pagan symbol. That was enough to keep them from going down that hellish path. They were, however, more than ready to explore the possibility…the strong possibility…that Bishop Ryan, while the victim, was not the actual target.
Over the previous two days, dozens of boxes filled with Philly Archdiocese hate-mail had been brought into the station and stored in one of the smaller interview rooms. Two of the boxes were now stacked next to Ernie’s desk. He’d piled the first dozen letters from the top box in front of his monitor, save one that he took with him to the toilet.
Potterford did not have a full-time Computer Crimes Division, so Lynch called in a favor and sent the hate-emails to one of his counterparts in Morrisville.
For his part, he decided it was about time he learned more about Archdiocese’s recent legal problems. The information was not difficult to hunt down.
He used newspaper articles as a quick way to establish the sequence of events, then he dug up the police reports associated with each article. He divided all the digital documents into three folders, which he named T_JARVIS, E_BELL, and C_INGRAM. Then he threw out a bigger net to gather documents for a fourth folder that he eventually labeled PORTLAND. He worked through the cases backward from least to most recent. Once he got organized, he was able to see the whole terrible story from start to finish.
PORTLAND
The problems for the diocese actually began in the Pacific Northwest. Eighteen months before everything started locally, a priest from Portland, Oregon was accused, tried, and found guilty of child molestation. There was more than one count. There was more than one boy. There was substantial compensation for the families involved. The families went through great pains to make sure no one outside the closed courtroom knew the exact figure, but the church, in an act of insanity, stupidity, negligence, or sheer genius, allowed the information to leak. On one hand, it utterly sold out the convicted priest who maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings. On the other, it set up reasonable doubt should similar accusations fly later on. There was, of course, no way to confirm how the leak occurred. It very well could have been an accident. To make matters worse, there were several people on both sides of the aisle who believed that the prosecution failed to make their case.
T_JARVIS
The three accusations within the Philadelphia Archdiocese couldn’t have happened in a worse sequence. The first was quickly discovered to be a sham put forth by a pair of unfit and mentally unstable parents. The church was exonerated, but only after an intense series of hearings that wound up putting a nine-year-old boy named Timothy Jarvis into therapy.
Then came the second.
E_BELL
A teacher in one of the Main Line Parochial Schools was accused of attempted sexual assault on a sixteen-year-old boy named Eric Bell. The act was said to have taken place in the locker room showers after a swim meet. The only evidence was Eric’s word along with some bruises on his back and arms. There was no DNA, since the assault was only attempted. Months of investigation and hearings resulted in both sides getting creamed financially as well as tortured with the same questions over and over again. When the case finally went before the Grand Jury, the church went into survival mode and pulled out the money card that they pocketed during the Portland case. This was, obviously, dangerous since the Portland priest was found guilty, but it paid off. All they had to do was attach it strategically to the Timothy Jarvis case to spark reasonable doubt. The final nail in the coffin was a convincing character witness testimony from none other than…
I’ll be damned.
Then the third.
C_INGRAM
An eleven-year-old boy named Charles Ingram returned from a nature retreat…“changed”… as the parents described it. Something had happened. Father Braniff, the priest supervising the retreat, claimed he had noticed the boy’s sudden reclusiveness, but didn’t think much of it. His exact statement was:
Many boys his age discover things about themselves and the world around them when convening with God’s green earth the way we do on these trips.
The statement was boorish with lascivious subtext and under any other circumstances would have set off a battering-ram-style inquiry. In the light of the previous two accusations and their outcomes, however, the parents were viewed by the public and the courts as bandwagoners. Relatively little effort was put into the initial investigation. Ultimately, nothing came of it legally, but that didn’t stop the press form going for the throat. The Philadelphia Archdiocese learned many new meanings for the term “damage control.” After several months, thanks to the efforts of the Archdiocese, things had almost gotten back to normal.
Then Ryan was killed.
Lynch let his eyes blur on the florescent light above him. The sound of water rushing through pipes in the wall caught his attention. Gomez must have flushed. He pulled himself back to his desk and re-opened the E_BELL folder. Ernie entered the room to find his partner lost in thought.
“What’s going on, Jaime?”
“Skeletons Ernie…lots and lots of skeletons. How about you? Any revelations on the crapper?”
Gomez tossed the letter onto his desk and sat down.
“None.”
Lynch neither budged nor responded.
“What’s up, Jaime? Did life just get complicated?”
Lynch exhaled and replied.
“Difficult to say.”
13. 3rd Street
Traci closed her eyes and shivered as the cool air from the river blew across