Soul Murder

11:30 a.m.

Press conferences were usually humdrum, routine affairs; a few crime correspondents, a couple of detectives, and a department press officer who was underpaid and under-motivated in equal measures.

They’d discuss a bar shooting, a domestic murder, a gang hit. The police would give their side of the story; the reporters would dutifully check names and details; the press officer would make random interjections to remind everyone he existed.

Small-time crimes, small-time meetings. Ninety-nine times over a hundred, they could have convened round a table at Starbucks.

The hacks didn’t tend to question the official version of events. If they did, they’d gradually find themselves frozen out of information and access; then their jobs would go to someone else, someone more prepared to toe the line.

Besides, the public appetite for other people’s disasters was insatiable. It didn’t really matter what the news was, as long as it was bad. Every media man knew the truth of the axiom: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’

But every now and then, those leads slipped from the crime beat to general news.

It could be something shockingly grotesque. There was the floater the cops had pulled from the Monongahela whose skin had slipped off the hands like a pair of gloves; the dog who’d chewed off his owner’s face because she’d died and there was no one to feed him; and, most celebrated of all, most gasped at and laughed over, the schizo who’d cut open his stomach and pulled out his guts before cutting them into neat pieces with a pair of tin snips.

Or it could involve someone important. Someone like Bishop Kohler.

The police department found the largest room available, and even so it was bulging at the seams. Reporters brandishing notebooks and voice recorders annexed every chair going; TV cameras ringed the back and sides of the room like a monk’s tonsure.

Chance led Beradino and Patrese into the room, holding his hands up as he did so; though whether to acknowledge the assembled multitude or shield his eyes from the popping of flashbulbs, Patrese couldn’t tell.

Three chairs had been arranged behind a table. Chance sat in the middle, gesturing that Patrese and Beradino should park their butts either side of him, as though he were Jesus and they the thieves.

Chance’s presence was largely symbolic. He was there for one reason only: to show the police were taking this murder so seriously that an assistant police chief would deign to come and break bread with the masses.

This was a double-edged sword, of course. If Patrese and Beradino found the killer, Chance would share the credit. If they failed, they’d fail alone.

Even though he was the junior man, and even though he’d been up half the night consoling his sisters – both of them predictably devastated by Kohler’s murder – Patrese did most of the talking.

Beradino despised the media, and made little secret of it. He disliked being second-guessed by reporters he considered uninformed at best and irresponsible at worst, and he hated their tacit demands that the police work to news deadlines rather than at an investigation’s natural pace.

Patrese took a more pragmatic approach. He figured that the media were part and parcel of every major homicide investigation, so he might as well accept it. Better to have them inside the tent pissing out than vice versa. The more he could run them, the less he ran the risk of them running him.

Picking questioners with a practiced hand, Patrese performed the traditional detectives’ balancing act in such situations: give enough to keep the media happy, not enough to jeopardize the investigation.

He pointed to a man with a mane of hair that would have shamed a lion.

‘Ed Sharpe, KDKA. You believe these killings are connected?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind, but obviously we’d be foolish not to be looking for connections. Burning bodies isn’t especially common, either as MO or signature.’

MO, modus operandi, is the way a killer goes about his business, the things he needs to do to effect the murders as efficiently as possible. Signature is what he needs to do to make the murder worthwhile, be it emotionally, physically or sexually.

The problem for Beradino and Patrese was this. They couldn’t be sure whether burning was signature or MO without knowing the killer’s internal logic, but finding that logic might be impossible unless they worked out the burning’s significance; whether the killer had burnt Redwine and Kohler because it had been the easiest option available to him, or because he’d felt compelled to.

‘Andy Rose, Post-Gazette. Were the victims alive when they were burned?’

‘Not as far as we can establish.’ Patrese was proud of his poker face. ‘We believe they’d been asphyxiated first, and then set on fire.’

And so, when the crazies started ringing up – as they would, sure as night followed day – and started claiming to have used a silk scarf or gimp ball on the victims, Patrese and Beradino could dismiss them out of hand.

‘Jess Schuring, 60 Minutes. Is it significant that Bishop Kohler was killed in the cathedral? Some kind of religious aspect?’

The poker face stayed on. ‘Again, not that we can establish. Probably just the place where the killer knew the bishop would be at a certain time.’

‘But some of the stained-glass windows had been smashed.’

Patrese thought fast. The broken windows were visible from the street outside, so there was no point trying to deny it. He’d have to give a plausible explanation instead.

‘Preliminary investigations suggest that the heat of the fire shattered them.’

He didn’t mention the crucifixes and icons, of course. Nor did he pass on the fact that the fire had also damaged a print of Michelangelo’s Hand of God Giving Life to Adam – an elderly, bearded God wrapped in a swirling cloak, his right arm outstretched to impart the spark of life into the first man.

Keeping these details quiet was another filter for the lunatics.

‘Hugo Carr, Philadelphia Inquirer. You think the Human Torch has a previous history of arson?’

‘I’m sorry?’ It was Beradino, tight-lipped with anger. ‘The Human Torch?’

‘You know. The Fantastic Four?’

‘Is this some kind of nickname for the killer?’

‘If you like.’

‘No, Mr Carr, I don’t like. I don’t like at all. I don’t like giving some cutesy moniker to anyone who does what this man does. I won’t be calling him the Human Torch or anything else like that. Nor will anyone else working this case. If they do, they’ll be reassigned before they can draw another breath. Is that clear?’

Subdued: ‘Yes.’

Beradino gestured towards Patrese: Go on.

‘We’re interviewing known arsonists in the area, of course,’ Patrese said. ‘We’ve found indications of accelerant at both scenes, but nothing too sophisticated. Certainly nothing that would rule out, you know, anyone but an experienced firestarter.’

Nothing that would need advanced chemistry, either; but Sameera Bayoumi had told them that Mustafa had spent the previous evening with her, had left for Philadelphia first thing this morning, and wouldn’t be back till Thursday.

Patrese looked straight down the lens of the KDKA camera. He knew Pittsburghers would appreciate him addressing them through their own, hometown, channel rather than one of the national networks.

‘I’m asking you, the public, to help us on this one. The police can’t be everywhere. You can; you are. Be our eyes and ears. Please, if you’ve seen anything, heard anything, noticed anything unusual, ring in and tell us. Don’t worry if it seems too small or insignificant or irrelevant. Let us be the judge of that. You never know; your piece of information could be the one that makes the difference.’

That kind of logic – it could be you – got people buying lottery tickets, so Patrese figured it was worth a try here. He knew that too much information could, and often did, swamp homicide task forces, but better too much than too little. Given enough time, manpower and luck, you could always find the needle in the haystack.

But if the needle wasn’t there to start with, you had no chance.

12:57 p.m.

For a man who’d presumably believed that earthly riches were a bar to the kingdom of God, Patrese thought, Bishop Kohler had sure hedged his bets.

He’d been to Kohler’s official residence on several occasions, but it was only now, with the time – and indeed the duty – to search every room from top to bottom, that he appreciated quite how lavish it was.

The house itself was double-fronted, finished in red brick and light gray stone with copper detailing long since oxidized to sea-foam green. Out back, a magnolia tree stood proud in magenta and mauve above perfectly maintained lawns and flowerbeds.

Inside, chandeliers sparkled in shards of silver crystal. Banisters were carved in dark oak and walnut. Intricate reliefs glided across four-square stone fireplaces.

It wasn’t just the quality of the house which struck Patrese, but its size too. Nine thousand square feet over three stories. Eleven bedrooms and six bathrooms, plus a library, a morning room, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a butler’s pantry. Patrese had stayed in smaller hotels than this place.

All for one man, living alone.

It seemed to Patrese a terrible waste – no, more than a waste; hypocrisy and cant of the highest order – for Kohler to have had all this to himself. Sure, part of his job had involved entertaining, and accommodating visitors to the diocese, but still.

Though it was a dull afternoon, the high ceilings and large windows meant that Patrese and Beradino didn’t need to turn the lights on just yet. Quiet draped across the house like a blanket; the city may have been all around them, but it had been reduced to a gentle, distant hum, no more.

They were looking for everything and nothing; something, anything, which might help them discover who’d killed Kohler.

They started at the bottom of the house and worked upwards.

In the basement was a makeshift gym with a treadmill, an exercise bike, and a rack of free weights. The bike’s crank arms were rusty, and a cobweb stretched across the treadmill’s display screen.

The adjacent wine cellar had seen more use. Patrese counted more than five hundred bottles, their racks labeled in Kohler’s copperplate: Goosecross Cabernet, Rutherford Merlot.

But there was nothing which could possibly be relevant to the investigation in either room; nor in the living room, the morning room, the dining room, the kitchen or the pantry.

It wasn’t just evidence towards the murder they lacked, Patrese thought, but evidence of Kohler’s life, full stop. If Kohler had read, it hadn’t been for pleasure; the only books on the shelves were religious ones. The TV set looked like it dated from the Cuban missile crisis. There were no videos, no DVDs. A handful of CDs, classical and choral music. No family photographs, of course; Kohler had had no family.

You couldn’t give your life to God and live among humans, Patrese thought, not if you wanted to do both properly. Making a man go so far from his primal urges wasn’t natural. It certainly wasn’t healthy.

They went into the library.

‘We’ll find something here,’ Beradino said. ‘Read your Agatha Christie.’

He was right. They did find something there; more precisely, in the top drawer of the antique bureau where Kohler had worked on his papers.

It was a photo of a young man, probably fourteen or fifteen, dressed in the College of the Sacred Heart football uniform. He was squatting on his haunches, his helmet dangling from his right hand, and he was smiling up at the camera.

It was a photo of Patrese.

Not just Patrese, when they searched the bureau further.

Hundreds of children. Patrese reckoned they ranged in age from eleven to sixteen, give or take. Many were in Sacred Heart school uniforms, purple blazers with an elaborate crest on the breast pocket. Some were in football gear; others wore choir surplices. Boys outnumbered girls by about two to one.

All of them were fully dressed. There wasn’t even a bare chest in sight, let alone any nudity, and certainly nothing which could be described as in any way sexual.

Beradino was silent, but even so Patrese could sense his relief. He remembered that Beradino, while arguing with Mustafa Bayoumi at the mosque a couple of weeks back, had dismissed abusive priests as bad apples. Beradino believed. It would have devastated him to discover that the bishop himself had been a pedophile; that the apples had been rotten not just to the core but to the top too.

‘You recognize these kids?’ Beradino asked.

‘Some of them, yeah. The ones who were there same time as me, sure.’

‘The ones you recognize; you guys were his favorites?’

‘I guess.’ Patrese riffled through a few prints till he found a couple of other guys in football uniform. ‘Kohler coached the football team. You played football, you were a bit…’ – Patrese sought the right word – ‘special. Yeah, special. We called him the Pigskin Padre.’

‘Pigskin Padre. I like that.’ Beradino laughed softly and let a stack of photos fall gently on to the desk, where they fanned out as though dealt by a croupier. ‘You have favorite teachers as a kid, so why can’t teachers have favorite kids, huh?’

He gestured round the room; not at what was there, but at what wasn’t.

‘He had no one else, did he?’

2: 01 p.m.

They boxed the photos and sent them back by police courier to the North Shore, with orders that every child pictured should be traced and interviewed. The Sacred Heart’s ad ministrative office would have contact details for its alumni; they should start there.

At the edge of the police cordon around the bishop’s house, a woman with immaculately coiffed dark hair was talking urgently to one of the uniforms. He looked in the detectives’ direction. When they’d finished giving the courier his instructions, he hurried over.

‘That lady lives next door,’ he said. ‘She wants to tell you something.’

Patrese sized her up as they approached. Mid-forties, a figure which suggested good genes or a fastidious diet, blouse and skirt tailored just so, and a forehead whose perfection screamed Botox.

Typical Squirrel Hill dame, in other words.

‘Yesterday morning…’ she began.

‘Excuse me,’ Beradino said. ‘You are?’

‘I’m what?’

‘Your name.’

‘My name is Katharine Horowitz. I live there.’ She pointed to the nearest house, thirty yards away. It was half the size of the bishop’s, which still left it four times as big as Patrese’s apartment. ‘Yesterday morning, I heard the bishop shouting.’

‘Shouting?’

‘Yes. Like he was arguing with someone.’

Beradino looked across to Katharine’s house, and then back again. ‘You heard this all the way from there to here?’

‘I was in the garden.’

‘On a Sunday morning in November?’

‘I had some trimming and clipping to finish off before winter sets in for good. Anyhow, it wasn’t that cold yesterday. And so I could see that Father Gregory had a couple of windows open, overlooking his own garden.’

Sunday morning, little traffic noise, no one around. It was entirely plausible she could have heard him at that distance.

‘What time was this?’

‘About ten.’

‘What was he saying?’

‘I couldn’t catch all of it, but something about how this was all dead and buried, you – the other guy – had no right to bring it up now, show some respect and so on. He was really agitated. I’d never heard him like that before.’

‘You said “the other guy”. This was a man he was arguing with?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was he saying? What was this man saying?’

‘I couldn’t hear.’

‘You couldn’t hear what they were saying, or you couldn’t hear the other man’s voice at all?’

‘I couldn’t hear the voice at all.’

‘So how do you know he was a man?’

‘Because I heard his car draw up about three-quarters of an hour beforehand. I’d just started in the garden then.’

‘That might have been the bishop himself, returning from somewhere.’

‘No. I heard the bishop greet him, and the man say something back.’

‘You catch a look at him?’

‘No.’

‘The car?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’

‘Anyone else see this man?’ Patrese asked.

‘How do you mean, anyone else?’

‘Your husband, perhaps?’

The slightest furrow fought its way through the Botox and rippled the perfection of Katharine Horowitz’ forehead.

‘I live alone, Detective.’

Rich divorcée, Patrese thought instantly; and the look of defensive defiance on her face told him he was spot on.

‘When you heard the bishop shouting; this man was still here?’

‘I presume so. I hadn’t heard the car leave, if that’s what you mean.’

‘OK. Thank you.’ Patrese reached into his jacket’s breast pocket and extracted a business card. ‘You think of anything else, you have any questions, you just ring the number here.’

‘I surely will,’ she said. ‘Such a tragedy. He was the best of men, Father Kohler.’

Beradino and Patrese walked out of her earshot.

‘You phoned Kohler around nine o’clock, you said?’ Beradino asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘So by the time you get off the phone, it’s nine ten, give or take. About nine fifteen, according to Katharine Horowitz, Kohler has a visitor. Forty-five minutes later, they’re having a pow-wow. You’re almost certainly the last person to speak with Kohler before this visitor arrived, you know?’

‘I guess. But it still doesn’t help, does it? Even if Katharine’s timings are a bit out, or mine are, I rang off before anyone arrived.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I didn’t hear a doorbell, or someone else’s voice. Kohler didn’t break off to answer the door, try to hurry me off of the phone, nothing like that.’

Beradino clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Too much to hope for, huh?’

Tuesday, November 2nd. 11:54 a.m.

Patrese and Beradino were supposed to see Mayor Negley at ten. They sat in the antechamber to his office, on the fifth floor of the City-County building, for close on two hours, with one or other of Negley’s PAs appearing every few minutes to extend the mayor’s apologies, reiterate that he’d been caught up in meetings which had gone on much longer than anticipated, and promise he’d be with them as soon as he could.

Standard billionaire behavior. Treat anyone below your own level as supplicants to a medieval king, even when they had a major homicide investigation to run.

Had the meeting just been a progress report, Patrese and Beradino would have gone back to the North Shore long before. If Negley wanted to find out what was going on badly enough, he could make time for them, not vice versa.

But they wanted to see him for another reason entirely.

They’d discovered a connection between him and the two murder victims.

It was almost midday when he finally came bustling in, trailing a comet’s tail of advisers and assistants.

He gave both detectives a double-clasped handshake, his left hand clutching their wrists. Every politician Patrese had met did it, presumably in the belief that it made them seem open and sincere. Patrese thought it as phony as a seven-dollar bill.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen. My apologies. This city is a demanding mistress.’

Interesting choice of phrase, Patrese thought.

Negley ushered them inside his office. Patrese was surprised at how small it was, before remembering it was municipal property. In Negley’s billionaire incarnation, he probably worked out of something the size of Heinz Field.

Negley took a seat behind his desk and directed the detectives to a nearby sofa. They’d be sitting lower than him. Corporate intimidation 101.

A secretary appeared with tea, coffee and cookies. When she’d gone, Negley clapped his hands together.

‘Now. What can I do you for?’ He chuckled at his wordplay.

Beradino held up a brochure. Glossy, high-end, four-color, its cover emblazoned with the words ‘ABRAHAMIC INTERFAITH FOUNDATION’.

‘You’re a member of this foundation’s board, I believe.’

‘Yes, I am. We’re all listed in there, aren’t we?’

‘Bishop Kohler was a director too. We found this in his bureau.’

‘Yes, he was. But if this is something to do with the murders…

The surgeon, Michael Redwine, he was nothing to do with this.’

‘He wasn’t, no. But Abdul Bayoumi was.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Abdul Bayoumi died a few months ago.’

‘Only after Michael Redwine had messed up routine surgery on him.’

Negley’s eyes widened.

‘I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew something tragic had happened in the operating theatre, but not that Redwine had been responsible. I didn’t know Abdul well, I’m afraid. I only saw him at foundation meetings.’ He indicated the brochure.

‘This foundation; what exactly is it that you do?’

Negley switched instantly, perhaps even automatically, into pontificating-politico mode ‘Well, Detective, I believe that conflict between the faiths is second only to climate change in the list of issues threatening our society, and therefore resolving that conflict and promoting co-operation is of paramount importance.’

‘What exactly is it that you do?’ Beradino repeated, deadpan.

Patrese had to bite back laughter, both at Beradino’s sardonic tone, and at Negley’s complete failure to recognize it as such.

‘We facilitate symposiums, joint cultural events, exhibitions, seminars, talks, school programs, those kind of things.’

A lot of jaw-jaw, in other words, thought Patrese; a heap of hot air, and no action.