Soul Murder
‘Of course, my child,’ he says, biting down on his annoyance.
‘I won’t keep you long. I know you must want to get home.’
Home, in this case, being an eleven-bedroom mansion set in a couple of acres on the border between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.
Far too large and ostentatious for a man of the cloth, you might think, and you’d be right. I read an interview where he defended his decision to live there. The mansion was given to the church just after the war and has been used by every bishop since; Giovanni Cardinal Montini stayed there once, and later he became Pope Paul VI; it’s useful for meetings and putting up visiting dignitaries; and on and on and on.
And yet he knows, as I know, as everyone knows, that what he should do, if he was as humble and holy as he makes out, is go and live in a seminary among those training to be priests, and sell the mansion, using the profits to help with the church’s work. The place would fetch a couple of million on the open market. Imagine what good could be done with that amount of money.
So forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of Bishop Kohler’s spiritual commitment.
Still, in the same interview, he said he liked to spend time alone in the Cathedral of Saint Paul, the diocese’s mother church out near the university in Oakland; that he preferred on occasion to do the locking-up rounds himself, solo, the better to be alone with God in His house.
Which is why I knew I’d find him here, now, and without witnesses.
Kohler leads me in silence to the confessional. He asks me nothing about myself, I think, the better to maintain the anonymity of the confession. He may know my face, but not my name, nor anything else about me.
He’s not to know that, in a few minutes, all this will have ceased to matter for him.
He motions me into one door of the confessional, and himself steps into the other.
The confessional is in classic style; two compartments separated by a latticed grille on which is hung a crucifix. I kneel on the prie-dieu.
I don’t know how to begin. I’ve always thought confession should be between the sinner and their God, with no other human present, so this is difficult for me.
‘Has it been long since your last confession?’ Kohler whispers.
It’s only the two of us in the entire place, but the near-darkness of the confessional – and of the cathedral itself – seems to make whispering appropriate.
‘Yes,’ I reply.
‘Would you like me to remind you of the purpose of confession?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must confess your sins in order to restore your connection to God’s grace and to escape hell, particularly if you have committed a mortal sin.’
‘What’s a mortal sin?’
‘A mortal sin must be about a serious matter, have been committed with full consent, and be known to be wrong.’
‘What kind of sins are mortal sins?’
‘Murder, for sure. Blasphemy. Adultery.’
He can’t see me, but I smile.
‘And what happens if these sins aren’t confessed?’ I ask.
‘It’s a dogmatic belief of the faith that if a person guilty of mortal sin dies without either receiving the sacrament or experiencing perfect contrition with the intention of confessing to a priest, that person will receive eternal damnation.’ He pauses. ‘These things are known to all Catholics,’ he adds.
‘I’m sorry, Father.’
‘It must have been a very long time since you last confessed, no?’ Another pause. ‘In order for the sacrament to be valid, the penitent must do more than simply confess their known mortal sins to a priest. They must be truly sorry for each of the mortal sins committed, have a firm intention never to commit them again, and perform the penance imposed by the priest. As well as confessing the types of mortal sins committed, the penitent must disclose how many times each sin was committed.’
I know that whatever’s said in the confessional stays there; this is an absolute, inviolable rule, even if to do otherwise might save lives. Doctors and attorneys can break their pledges of confidentiality in extremis; a priest, never.
So I can tell him, even if everything else goes wrong.
‘I have killed,’ I say.
Kohler gasps; in horror, surprise, perhaps both. He must think it unlikely, but perhaps the tone of my voice lets him know that I’m not joking.
‘How many times?’ he asks, more in a croak than a whisper.
‘More than once.’
‘When did you last kill?’
‘Now.’
I’m up off the prie-dieu and out of the door in a flash, pulling the gasoline can from my bag. I throw open the confessional’s other door and see Kohler there, his mouth a perfect circle of outrage at this violation of religious etiquette if nothing else.
I splash the gasoline on him. For an old man, he still looks strong, but gentle too. Years of turning the other cheek have left him useless in a situation like this.
In another two seconds, maybe three, he might have reacted to the danger; but those are seconds he doesn’t have, seconds I won’t give him.
I light the juggling torch and touch it to his face.
His screams echo loud and bounce round the cathedral, and the flames rush from his skin and clothes to the walls of the confessional, leaping orange through crackling wood as I step back and close the door on him, holding it shut for as long as I can stand before the heat drives me back.
It’s not long, but it’s enough.
‘Isaiah chapter fifty-nine, verse seventeen,’ I shout, so he can hear me above his screaming and through his agonies. ‘“For I put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon my head; and I put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and am clad with zeal as a cloak.”’
The screaming stops, and in its place comes a rasped muttering, the words of a dying man, indistinct but their meaning clear if I strain to hear:
‘God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.’
10:12 p.m.
The death of a surgeon in an upscale condo block had merited one mildly disgruntled local TV crew. The death of the bishop brought the national networks out in force. They crammed up against bumblebee-striped crime tape and turned glaring camera lights on anyone who stepped inside the police cordon.
At the edge of that cordon, a uniformed officer met Patrese and Beradino and checked their credentials. When he saw Beradino’s name, he touched the checkered band on his hat in respect.
‘Have you adapted?’ Beradino asked.
Adapt, in this case, was a police mnemonic rather than a Darwinian evolutionary imperative. ADAPT: arrest the perpetrator, if possible; detain and identify witnesses and suspects; assess the crime scene; protect the crime scene; and take notes.
‘All but the first, sir.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘Passer-by spotted the flames. Kelly Grubb. He’s over there.’ He indicated a middle-aged man sitting on the trunk of a police cruiser.
Grubb’s expression was typical of people who have stumbled across murder scenes; a mixture, in almost exactly equal parts, of revulsion at the sight and excitement at being part of a police investigation.
‘We’ll talk to him later. Did he alter the scene in any way?’
‘Says he called the fire brigade straight off. Didn’t go in, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have let him in once they got there.’
‘OK.’ More degradation of evidence, that was a given once the fire department had done their thing, but there was no point moaning about it. That was their job, to put out blazes, and damn the consequences, forensic or otherwise.
Beradino thought for a moment, looking towards the spot where the fire department had set up an improvised command post. It was right next to where the TV crews had gathered, and a few uniformed policemen were already shooting the breeze there with the firefighters. Beradino turned back to the officer.
‘Throw up another cordon, a hundred feet further out than this one,’ he said. ‘Keep every civilian – TV crews, general public – behind the new one, the outer one. They start moanin’, threaten to arrest them. They keep moanin’, make good on that threat.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good man.’
Patrese understood Beradino’s logic. At big crime scenes like this, cops meet up. They haven’t seen each other for a while and, since they’re used to such situations, they get to chatting, laughing, ribbing each other. They forget there’s a corpse nearby. They forget people get offended when they think police officers are being insensitive round the dead. Most of all, they forget there are TV mics around that pick up every word they say.
Patrese and Beradino left the uniform shouting at a colleague to bring more yellow-and-black, and headed towards the cathedral; twin-towered and Gothic, with a statue of St Paul mounted on the center pediment.
There was a poster by the entrance. St Paul Cathedral, it read: a foundation of faith, building a future of hope.
Patrese shuddered, and stopped. Beradino gripped his forearm.
‘Franco, listen. You want me to take care of this one alone? I understand.’
Patrese shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Come on, Franco. He was a friend of your family’s, this is the place you just buried your parents. You got a thousand-yard stare on you. Let me handle this.’
‘I told you, Mark, I’m fine.’ Patrese managed a weak laugh. ‘Vacant stare’s probably jet lag.’
‘Huh?’
‘Extra hour’s sleep this morning. When the clocks went back.’
‘Yeah.’ Beradino looked at Patrese a moment more, and then shrugged. ‘OK. You win. Come on.’
The cathedral’s main door was open. Before Patrese and Beradino were inside, they could smell the burning – the piquant aroma of woodsmoke and the half-sweet, half-acrid overlay of charred flesh.
Patrese puffed out his cheeks and rolled his head in a circle, counter-clockwise and then clockwise; preparing the body for what the mind was about to suffer.
A few hours ago, he’d been at Heinz Field, watching his beloved Steelers put thirty-four points past the New England Patriots. Now he was at the holding station inside the door, where he and Beradino put on the usual anti-contamination suits, the ones which made the wearer look like a hybrid astronaut cum sewage treatment worker.
Just a normal day in a homicide detective’s life, in other words.
The cathedral’s nave comprised five aisles beneath pointed arches and ribbed vaulting. The detectives walked between silent pews and past crime-scene officers and firefighters, men whose concerns – secular, scientific – usually had little place in here.
Focus, Patrese told himself, with a ferocity which made his teeth clench. Focus. Don’t think about Kohler, and everything he’d been. There’d be time enough for that later. Just work the scene, the way you would any other homicide.
Kohler’s body was prostrate on the floor, a yard or so in front of the confessional’s ruined timbers; too far simply to have fallen when the confessional collapsed.
He’d tried to escape. Died on his feet, as it were; gone towards death rather than simply waited for death to claim him.
You could mix religion up any way you chose, Patrese thought, believe absolutely in the afterlife and kingdoms beyond this realm; but when it came down to it, simple biological imperatives hardwired into humankind made people fight against the dying of the light. It was nothing to do with soul, or faith, or belief; it was the survival instinct, pure and simple, and it was in you for as long as you breathed.
Kohler looked much as Redwine had; arms raised as though to fight, and clothes – in this case, a bishop’s surplice – melted in patches to his skin.
‘Who could do this?’ Beradino said, and Patrese noted the tremble in his voice. ‘To a man of God, in the house of God…’ He shook his head, as though unable to fathom the limitless depths of mankind’s mendacity, and then turned to Patrese.
‘I know he was a special man, to you and your family…’
‘You could say that.’
‘…and so I promise you, we’ll find whoever did this. Just like when a cop’s killed, Franco, we’ll pull out all the stops. That’s my promise to you, right here.’
Patrese nodded.
The photographer was snapping dispassionately away, a vulture with a Canon. He glanced up from his viewfinder as Beradino and Patrese came to a halt.
‘No chalk fairies, then,’ Beradino said.
No one could draw chalk outlines round the body or any other object until the photographers had been and gone. Photographs had to be representations of the crime scene as it was when the incident was reported, or they were inadmissible as evidence. A good lawyer could get a case thrown out of court for less.
‘None at all,’ the photographer said. ‘You train your cops well.’
‘Sometimes,’ Beradino replied.
Patrese looked around again.
The fire damage was substantially less extensive here than at Redwine’s apartment. Not only had the fire department been on the scene within three minutes of Grubb’s call, but the confessional had also been set against stone walls to one side of the church. Everything else flammable – pews, pulpits, curtains, altar cloths – was far enough away to have prevented the fire from making the jump.
Patrese swallowed hard, and again Beradino noticed; he knew, too, that Patrese hadn’t turned a hair at the sight of Redwine’s body, which had been no less horrific than this.
Patrese looked away, more to avoid Beradino’s quizzical gaze than anything else.
They set to searching the place.
There were several ways of doing this – spiraling out from or into a central point, dividing the area into zones, shoulder-to-shoulder along pre-designated lines – but Beradino’s chosen method was criss-crossing. They’d go up and down the room and then side to side, so that every point was covered twice.
If you missed something the first time, you’d find it the second.
If you missed it the second time, you were in the wrong job.
They used tweezers to pick up objects and bag them, and their elbows to open and close doors. The fewer traces of themselves they left here, the better.
It was lying on the flagstone floor, and Patrese saw it first.
A piece of wood, with what looked like some kind of sculpture attached to it; and broken, that was clear from the ragged edges, smashed rather than cut.
It wasn’t hard to recognize what it was. Half the Western world had one.
A crucifix.
More precisely, the bottom half of one.
The top half wasn’t far away. The break ran diagonally across Jesus’ chest.
‘You got these?’ Patrese asked the photographer.
‘Every which way.’
Patrese squatted down, pulled a transparent plastic evidence bag from his pocket, pushed it inside out and, with the plastic covering his fingers, carefully picked up one half of the crucifix.
It was broken, but not burnt.
Patrese turned it over in his hand.
It felt solid, weighty.
Not the kind of thing which would break if you simply dropped it on the floor.
If you hurled it, yes; but not if you just dropped it.
He looked around again.
Nearby, also smashed, were pieces of wood painted in bright gold and red.
Patrese found three, and could fit them together in his head without needing to check with the photographer again as to whether he could pick them up.
They looked very like the constituent parts of a medieval icon.
‘Mark,’ Patrese said. ‘Look at this.’
‘You look at this, Franco.’
Patrese glanced up; first at Beradino, and then in the direction he was staring.
Beradino was looking at the stained-glass windows high above them; in particular, at the three windows which had been smashed.
11:17 p.m.
Sunday nights in Pittsburgh are more or less traffic-free, so they had a clear run back from Saint Paul to the North Shore.
‘I spoke to him just this morning, you know?’ Patrese said, gliding the car through lights turning back from green to amber.
‘Spoke to who?’
‘Kohler.’
‘You didn’t tell me this.’
‘When could I tell you this? We’ve just been at a murder scene. His murder. I’m telling you now. I spoke to him around nine this morning.’
‘About what?’
Patrese sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
‘You really wanna know?’
‘I don’t ask unless I do.’
‘OK. This is a little personal, which is why I didn’t mention it before. I mean, it’s no big deal, it’s just…I was feeling a bit down, all right? My sisters had gone round to dinner with him the night before. I stayed home, didn’t want to go. Probably drunk a bit too much, felt shitty the next morning, was missing my mom and pop, wanted to talk to someone. Bianca was on shift at Mercy, Valentina…it was Sunday morning, she’d still have been in bed. So I called Kohler.’
‘And how did he seem to you?’
‘Totally normal. I didn’t really pay attention. I was doing most of the talking. He listened. He could have been cooking breakfast at the same time, for all I know.’
‘How long did you talk for?’
‘Six, seven minutes, I don’t know.’
‘You speak to your sisters today?’
‘Went to watch the Steelers with Valentina this afternoon.’
‘She say how Kohler was last night?’
‘Said he was fine. In good humor, in fact.’
Beradino made a moue. ‘Little did he know, huh? First Redwine, now…’
‘There’s no guarantee this is even related to Redwine.’
‘True. Could be copycat, could be coincidence. Method’s the same, location’s completely different. Only a few people had access to where Redwine was killed. Here, anyone could have come in off the street, literally. Few buildings more public than a cathedral.’
‘Why the smashing of the crucifix? The icon, the windows? None of that with Redwine, was there?’
‘Someone who hates religion? Someone who hates Christianity, certainly.’
‘Someone like Mustafa Bayoumi?’
Beradino glanced across at Patrese. ‘He seemed pretty hostile to it, for sure.’
‘So we look at Bayoumi first.’
‘Which means we believe the murders are connected, until proven otherwise.’
‘Yeah.’
‘First, we check his alibi. It’s just his mom again, no one else, we get suspicious.’
‘And we look for any connections between him and Kohler. Did they know each other personally? Did Kohler do something to piss him off?’
‘Or not do something to piss him off? Something Bayoumi thought he should have done, but didn’t? Was the diocese in dispute with the Homewood mosque project? Anything like that.’
‘Perhaps it’s something less concrete. If it is Bayoumi, maybe he chose Kohler as a symbol – as the symbol, the head – of the Catholic church in Pittsburgh?’
Beradino was quiet for a moment.
‘Let’s not get too carried away with Bayoumi, Franco,’ he said. ‘Whether it’s him or not, we turn Kohler’s life upside down, as we did Redwine’s. Who had a reason to kill Kohler? Who knew both Kohler and Redwine? We cross-reference every suspect, every witness, every friend, acquaintance, colleague. Some of Kohler’s parishioners must have been Redwine’s patients, and vice versa.’
‘And what else did they share? Were they members of the same country club? Did they play golf together? Were they on the board of the same charity? Were they members of the same professional association?’
‘Exactly. And on, and on, and on. Like I said before, Franco, back in Saint Paul, far as I’m concerned, this is like a cop killing. We give it full beans. You don’t go round burning bishops. Not on my watch.’
Patrese couldn’t help it. It started as a pricking behind his eyes and a flutter in the base of his throat, and then the tears were coming warm and too fast to stop. He wiped angrily at his face, not least so he could keep driving. Tears were weakness.
Beradino was silent, knowing better than to kill Patrese with kindness.
Patrese sniffed hard, twice, and swallowed.
‘What kind of man could do those things?’ he said. ‘What kind of monster?’
Monday, November 1st. 8:22 a.m.
First thing Monday morning, Chance called Beradino and Patrese into a meeting; the three of them in the room, with Mayor Negley on speakerphone like the voice of God.
Howard Negley was a billionaire businessman who’d won the mayoralty a couple of years back. Drawing a token salary of one dollar, he’d proved himself a dynamic presence in City Hall; too dynamic for most of the old stagers there, who’d swiftly found themselves seeking solace in their directorships. Ostentatiously using his business skills and contacts to help regenerate the city, Negley had consciously set himself apart from the endless infighting of career politicos. The public loved him.
‘I’m not having surgeons and bishops murdered in Pittsburgh, you understand?’ Negley said. ‘I will not stand by and see it happen. It’s bad for the city.’
Bad for your popularity, you mean, thought Patrese.
What Patrese could take from Beradino, as good and honest a cop as you’d find anywhere in the Lower 48, sounded false and shrill from an elected official. Besides, why did Negley always have to talk as though he were addressing a political rally?
‘Whatever you need to find the killer, you got it,’ Negley continued. ‘You want more officers, you tell me. You want men from other jurisdictions, I can arrange that.’
It was all Patrese could do not to rotate his tongue in his cheek. To judge from the expression on Beradino’s face, and even Chance’s, he wasn’t alone in his opinion.
Yes, they could have more officers, from inside Allegheny County and outside too, but that wasn’t within the mayor’s power to offer, let alone make happen.
Typical Negley, Patrese thought. No wonder he’d married a Hollywood actress. The only thing more titanic than the mutual appreciation society would have been the clash of egos.
He put it quickly from his mind, and turned his attention back to the room.
‘You should also bring the FBI in on this,’ squawked Negley from the box.
Patrese was about to say he’d suggest the same thing – he knew Caleb Boone, the head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, and thought him a good guy – when he saw Chance look at Beradino, and Beradino shake his head.
‘We don’t think that’s appropriate at this juncture, sir,’ Chance said.
Patrese knew Chance was a political animal; few people rose as high in the force as he’d done without being one. But he was also first and foremost a cop. Therefore, as he’d demonstrated at Patrese’s disciplinary hearing, he was flatly opposed to anything or anyone which threatened the integrity and independence of the police department.