Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

“Hello? Hello, Mrs. Bellin? I’m calling about your son, Daniel. My name is Alexandra Cooper, and I’m a lawyer—”

The line went dead.

“You got a machine?”

“No, I got distinctly hung up on.”

“Get the local cops to her house,” Mike said.

I dialed the area code again, asking for the nonemergency police number and explained our situation to the detective on duty. “He doesn’t know the family,” I said. “But he has my number and they’ll get someone to do it as fast as possible.”

Mike knew how close Mercer was to his minister, who had helped counsel him through a horrendous period after he had been shot by a deranged killer. “Can you call your preacher man and see what he knows about these far-out Pentecostals — these extreme ministries that Faith told Coop and me about this morning?”

“On it.”

Nan was glued to her laptop. “I don’t know if this is anything, but I’m following up on Sergeant Chirico’s body count.”

“Murders in other jurisdictions?” I asked.

“Yes. Pastors, priests, ministers. There are more of these than you’d think.”

“What have you got in the last six months, maybe a year?”

“Tennessee. A minister shot to death by his wife in the parsonage.”

“Not ours.”

“A nun strangled and raped in Baltimore.”

“Solved?” Mike asked.

“No, but appears to be in the course of a burglary.”

“Well, say a prayer for her, everybody. Doesn’t sound like our boy.”

“Here’s a love triangle in Texas,” Nan said. “A pastor hired his own son to kill his wife — the killer’s stepmother. The son’s still on the loose.”

“Cause of death?” Mike asked. He was restless and itching to break through to a solution.

“She was drugged. Then suffocated with a pillow, to look like an accidental overdose.”

“I’ll take the drugging part of it. Our vics must have been drugged to be moved to the killing ground. But accidental isn’t his style.”

“Okay. This next one had me at the headline, but wrong gender. Skip it.”

“Read,” Mike said.

“ ‘ Community Grieves Slain Pastor.’ It goes on to say that he was found inside the large church building — a converted warehouse — his throat slit—”

All of us stopped at those three words and gave our complete attention to Nan. She was cherry-picking phrases from the story. “No known motive. No suspects. Parishioners being questioned.”

“What kind of church?” Mike was running fingers through his hair and barking questions.

“Pentecostal. Happened last November.”

“Any ’scrip of the kind of Pentecostal? Anything about extreme?”

“I’m reading as fast as I can, Mike. I don’t see anything like that.”

“Where’d this go down?”

“The town is called Alpharetta.”

“It’s right outside of Atlanta,” I said.

“Details?”

Nan was pulling the follow-up story. “Beloved pastor. Eleven years at the church,” she said, taking a breath. “Whoops. Some think the killing may be connected to the fact that he just came out to his congregation a month ago. He’s gay. Wanted them to accept it, to welcome his longtime partner. Wanted to continue to serve. Split the community, to put it mildly.”

“There’s your outcast,” I said. “There’s your pariah.”

“Does it say anything about how he was dressed?” Mike asked.

“Fully clothed. Except for his collar.”

Maybe the killer wanted a trophy from his victim, a collar of his own. Maybe he wore it to the courthouse to watch Bishop Deegan testify. Maybe he used it to approach his trusting victims, knowing the simple clerical vestment would disarm them.

“One of the worshippers speculates the killer must have wanted the poor man defrocked.”

“Silenced,” Mike said. “Defrocked and silenced. That’s his signature, all right.”

Istudied the photograph taken at the Chelsea Square Workshop after a performance of Ursula Hewitt’s controversial play.

“The newspaper doesn’t have a credit for that, Alex. One of Hewitt’s friends e-mailed it to her, and she forwarded the downloaded image to the editor herself,” Max said.

“Thanks.” I covered my ears with my hands to think, while Mike tried to light a fire under a small sheriff’s office in Georgia to get police and autopsy reports, and someone who knew the case to talk us through it.

I scribbled a note to Faith Grant on the bottom of the page with the photograph. I had put her e-mail address in my BlackBerry earlier, so I wrote a note above the picture, and asked her to call me as soon as she received it.

“Hey, Max. Would you please scan this for me and get it out?”

“Sure.”

She was back in three minutes and placed the paper in front of me. While I waited for my phone to ring, I kept staring at the four women. There was Ursula Hewitt, basking in the congratulations of her acquaintances. Opposite was Naomi Gersh, who appeared to be engaged in conversation with the others. The photo was so blurred — maybe even taken by a cell phone, from a distance, that it was hard to make out the faces clearly.

Four smart, vibrant women celebrating together in December at a controversial play that would obviously have been offensive to many devout worshippers — and now two of them were dead, victims of torture and mutilation.

“This is Alex Cooper,” I said, answering my cell.

“Hi, Alex. It’s Faith.”

“Thanks for the call. Is everything calm on your end?”

“Just fine, thanks. How can I help?”

“This photograph I forwarded you was taken at the workshop after one of the performances of Double-Crossed . I’m thinking that whoever took it might have more shots from that evening.”

“That’s probably true.”

“One of the detectives visited the theater this morning. It’s quite small, and since there was a party of some sort, there’s a chance some other audience members could have been captured in the images.”

Faith Grant took a moment to follow my thinking. “Why, Alex? Do you think the killer was among the guests?”

“We don’t know. I’m not hiding anything from you, Faith. We’re just trying to run it all down. The newspaper editor tells us one of Ursula’s friends supplied the photo. You said you knew women who were there. Maybe it was the night Chat went to see it. That would help us to start tracking back for information.”

I wanted information from these two other women in the photograph. I also wanted to make sure they were not also in the sights of our killer, that they were not currently in danger of being silenced.

“I see.”

“Of course you recognize Ursula.”

“Yes.”

“And the dark-haired woman on the far left is Naomi Gersh.”

“Okay.”

“The caption says one of the others is an ordained minister. By any chance—”

“Yes. I know who that is shaking hands with Ursula. Jeanine Portland, a graduate of this seminary. She’s wonderful, and I’m sure she’ll be helpful to you. I believe she’s at a church in New England.”

“Can you get that contact information for us?”

“Of course. The front office will have it.”

“So that leaves the young woman next to Naomi.”

“I can help you there, too, but she’s no nun. I’ll swear to that on a Bible.” Faith Grant was laughing. “That’s my sister, Chastity.”

I held the paper right in front of me and examined the picture again. “It doesn’t look anything like her.”

“That was her goth period, Alex. Dyed her hair black and straightened it. Lucky for me it was her New Year’s resolution to lose that look.”

My heart raced. I didn’t want her to hear any concern in my voice. “I need to talk to her, Faith. I need to talk to her as soon as I can.”

“I’ll tell her that when she returns my call. I’ve left her a message explaining that I’d like her to spend the weekend here with me in the dorms.”

“And she hasn’t called back?”

“Don’t sound so alarmed about it, Alex. It’s only been a couple of hours. I told you that Chat’s a free spirit.”

“So you haven’t talked to her since she left the seminary this morning?”

“No. It’s just been a few hours, Alex. There’s nothing worrisome about that.”

“Do you know where she is or what she’s doing that was so important she couldn’t stay to talk about Ursula?”

“I don’t keep her on a leash, Alex. And she isn’t responsible for what happened to Ursula, even if I am.”

“But under these circumstances, Faith — I mean with Ursula’s murder, and the fact that Chat spent time with her too—”

Faith Grant was calm and measured, perhaps even a bit annoyed with me. “Do you do this to your friends, too, Alex?”

“Do what?”

“Manage to put the fear of God in them whenever a child gets lost or a man looks at them the wrong way?”

“I didn’t intend to upset you.”

“I guess my calling, my professional training, is all about trust and belief and — well, faith. You don’t trust anyone very much, do you?”

I didn’t even have to close my eyes to recall the sight and the smell of Naomi Gersh’s body on the portico of Mount Neboh Church, or the treacherous slit in Ursula Hewitt’s throat as she lay in the ancient graveyard at Old St. Pat’s.

“I apologize for that. You know Chat’s habits and, of course, I don’t.”

Two of the women in that snapshot with her are dead, is what I wanted to say. Two of them were outcasts and pariahs, one in her church, the other to her family. It was Faith who had described her sister to us as the black sheep of the Grant clan, who told us it was so difficult for her to go home that she hadn’t made it back for Christmas, who alluded to a troubled past that might benefit from my counsel.

“I understand you’d like to have her help you figure out who was at the play that night. Is there anything else, for now, besides that and locating Jeanine Portland’s congregation?”

“Thank you. That’s all I need.”

“Then I’ll call you later.”

It was prosecutorial cynicism that had my wheels spinning. “Chastity Grant is the fourth woman in this photograph. Different hair and stuff, but it’s Chat, all right.”

“What’s your point?” Mike was standing over Max’s shoulder, playing with the words and partial phrases she had cobbled together from Gersh’s scraps of paper.

“Faith isn’t bothered by that at all.”

“Why should she be?”

“Think about what she told us. That they’re often mistaken for each other because they look so much alike.”

“Brilliant, Coop. What next?”

“I’m wondering about the guy who was following Faith to the apartment last night.”

“What of it?”

“That when he finally came at her face-to-face, like he was going to do something to her, he looked at her instead and the only thing he said to her was ‘sorry.’ ”

“The word means nothing out of context.”

“That’s why I’m trying to frame it. Maybe he was sorry because he had mistaken her for Chat. Maybe he was after Faith’s sister because of the contact they had at the playhouse in December. Maybe what’s driving him—”

“Maybe if your aunt had balls, Coop, she’d be your uncle. Stop with the spooks and speculation.”

“I don’t want a third corpse.”

“Nobody does. So far, no churches, no synagogues, no mosques heard from today. Let’s concentrate on solving what’s been done.”