A Necessary Evil

hour and I still don't see what fucking connection this Ellison guy getting knifed at an art festival in Minneapolis has with the monsignor getting stuck in a toilet at the airport?'

'Do you want me to start from the beginning?'

'No!' Pakula and Carmichael answered in unison.

'Maybe you should just tell us the punch line.' Pakula almost said please. It had to be the exhaustion. 'Come on, what's the connection?'

Now Weston grinned like a guy who knew he was the only one with the secret answer to the puzzle. 'Ordinarily, most people wouldn't see any connection. At least not on the surface. But I happen to be from Minneapolis, so I tend to pay attention. I still have a brother up there. He has a family.'

Pakula groaned and rubbed his eyes. Weston noticed. The grin was replaced with a lifted eyebrow. Pakula wondered if an irritated Weston was any worse than a cocky Weston. He decided he didn't care. He sat back in his chair and stared him down.

'Come on, Weston,' Carmichael finally gave up and broke in. 'We know you're brilliant. Just tell us the fucking connection.'

'I'm trying to tell you. My brother and his family used to attend Saint Pat's where Daniel Ellison used to be an associate pastor for a very short time. He left the church, got married and became an advertising executive.' Finished and looking pleased with himself, Weston sat down on the edge of the desk, his designer-clad butt crushing a stack of reports. He didn't seem to notice. Instead, he seemed to be waiting for his accolades.

'That's it?' Carmichael asked. 'That's your secret connection? That he happened to be a priest?'

'And that he was stabbed in the chest and that it was done in a very public place. This was in the middle of the afternoon, a crowded festival.' Weston was back on his feet. 'Nobody saw it happen. Ellison's wife sort of remembered him bumping into someone and then suddenly slumping over and falling to the ground.' He handed Pakula the folder he had brought with him. 'After you get your autopsy report, just take a look at the two cases.'

'What should I be looking for?'

'I don't know, but I bet there'll be some similarities.'

'And if there are similarities, you think we have a priest killer on the loose?' Pakula shook his head. He wasn't convinced. 'One dead monsignor and a guy who used to be a priest _ sounds more like a coincidence to me.'

'Hey, you called me.' It was Weston's turn to put up his hands as if in surrender. 'You asked me what possible reason Archbishop Armstrong would have for not wanting the FBI involved.'

Pakula saw Kasab in the doorway, waving him over. Normally, he would have yelled for him to just get his butt in here, instead, he saw an opportunity for escape.

'Be right back,' he told Carmichael and nodded at Weston. Before he got to the door, he couldn't help thinking Kasab looked like a guy with his own secret. He wanted to tell him he should never play poker, but after wrangling Bob Weston, Detective Pakula was too tired for more games.

'What's going on?'

'I've got good news and bad news.'

'Okay,' Pakula said. It took a few beats before he realized Kasab was waiting for him to say which he wanted first. 'Okay, good news first.' It was easier to play.

'I was able to get the monsignor's cell-phone record. The only calls he made were one to Our Lady of Sorrow rectory that lasted about a minute and another to Father Tony Gallagher's cell phone. He's the assistant pastor at the church. That one lasted just over seven minutes. It was made about an hour before his flight.'

'So he was probably the last person to talk to the monsignor.'

'Most likely, yes. Outside of anyone at the airport.'

'Sounds like we need to talk to Father Gallagher. Can you arrange that?'

'Oh, sure.'

'So what's the bad news?'

'I went back to the airport to pick up Monsignor O'Sullivan's luggage. Remember they told us they'd intercept it in New York and have it back in Omaha this morning?'

'Let me guess,' Pakula interrupted him, 'it's in Rome.'

'No, it made it back to Omaha, but someone picked it up before I got there.'

'You gotta be kidding. What numb nut gave it to someone without any authority?'

'Actually the desk clerk was told it had been authorized.'

'Who the hell told him that?'

Kasab flipped his notebook pages, checking, wanting to be accurate. 'It was a Brother Sebastian. Said he was with the Omaha Archdiocese office. And like the guy told me, who's not going to believe someone sent by the archbishop?'

CHAPTER 12

Washington, D.C.

It was on mornings like this that Maggie O'Dell wondered if perhaps something was wrong with her. Here it was another beautiful day, after rains had washed everything clean, the beginning of a holiday weekend and she had nothing to cancel. No plans to change. No friends or family or lover to let down. Even Harvey, who watched her leave with his head still planted on her bed pillow, let her off the hook too easily, it seemed, by allowing her to postpone their gardening and lounging in the backyard. What was worse, she actually looked forward to this autopsy. Not exactly looked forward to it in the same way someone would relish a good time. But rather, her mind had already begun plucking at the puzzle pieces, trying to place them in some order and needing more details, more pieces. So much so that she had awakened at two in the morning and pulled out the copies of the case files.

Dismemberment cases bothered even the most seasoned of veterans, and Maggie certainly wasn't immune. Dismemberment cases and ones involving dead kids usually had a way of staying with her long after the killers were arrested, tried and convicted. Sometimes she still had nightmares that included body organs stuffed in take-out containers courtesy of Albert Stucky. And then there were those with dead little boys, naked and blue-skinned, left in the mud and tall grass along the Platte River. Albert Stucky was dead and buried. She had seen to it personally. However, Father Michael Keller had gotten away scot-free, escaping to South America, and even the Catholic Church didn't seem to know where he was.

Maggie paused at the door to the autopsy suite to clear her mind and to finish her Diet Pepsi. Stan Wenhoff was known to expel anyone for as little as unwrapping a candy bar during one of his autopsies. Not a bad rule, though perhaps Stan's claim that it was out of respect for the dead might be a bit disingenuous. After all, this was the same guy who yelled things like, 'Just scoop it up.'

It felt like walking into a refrigerator. Maggie grabbed two gowns off the pile and said hello to Stan who only grunted. Julia Racine wasn't in a much better mood. She looked to be in her usual futile hunt, searching through the pile for a size smaller than the X–Large that Stan stocked for his visitors.

'Why is it so fucking cold in here?' Racine complained.

'We have a choice, Detective. We either deal with the cold or we deal with the maggots crawling all over us.'

Maggie couldn't remember Stan ever using the air-conditioning before this. The basement autopsy suites had recently been renovated, but the old steel ducts had not. Turning on the heat or the A/C during an autopsy could compromise evidence by adding debris. So Stan usually had it turned off for the hour or two during the autopsy. Evidently he would rather deal with the debris and the cold than with the maggots.

Racine didn't answer. Instead, she glanced at Maggie, who was putting on the second gown on top of the first. Racine followed her lead and took another off the pile. Racine needed to wrap both gowns several times around her tall, thin body almost like a mummy. Only then did Maggie notice that the usually athletic and fit detective looked as if she had lost weight since Maggie had seen her last. She had heard that Racine had been making frequent trips between the District and Connecticut to visit her deteriorating father even before Racine's