'Our Lady of Miracles, a church and girls convent-an orphanage for girls. Not too far from my place.'
'But why?'
'It was the return address on the first package I received, remember?'
'No, I don 7 remember.'
'And the delivery was made by someone sporting a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform, according to Tebo.'
'You never told me any of this.'
'But you were there, at my place, when Chang and I were talking about it.'
'No, I wasn't all there. I was extremely upset that night, and I didn't pay close attention, not after what I'd been through, not that night. Tebo saw a Catholic schoolgirl deliver the package?'
'I'm not sure she was a girl. He seemed to think she was heavily made up, older than a schoolgirl, but she wore a Catholic school uniform.'
Meredyth considered this, picturing the killer luring some young woman to do his godless bidding for him.
'I'm fairly sure it's just a ruse to send us on a wild-goose chase, so I haven't given it top priority. But at the moment, I'm at a loss for what our next step should be, so…'
'So, let's go see the nuns. Ask them if they've noticed any unusual person hanging around the school.'
On their way out of the precinct house, going past the front desk, Lucas was stopped when Stan Kelton called out to them. Stan gestured for them to come near.
'What's up, Stan?' he asked the big Irish sergeant.
Kelton had come around his front desk and whispered conspiratorially, 'That address on Lowe…'
'Yeah? You got it pinned down?'
'Morte de Arthur's.'
'A restaurant with medieval cuisine?' guessed Lucas.
'No, it's a mortician place, funeral home-a chain mortuary.'
'What's a chain mortuary, Stan?'
'A chain of mortuaries. Supposed to be cheaper way to send off your loved one. They're listed with penny stocks. Have their own website where, if you like, you can bury your dead on-line. Don't ask me how that works. The lady said she'd happily send over brochures.'
'I'm sure she did. A chain-store undertaker's you can buy into? A franchise?' asked Lucas, amazed. 'What'll they think of next?'
Meredyth, listening in, tried to put the fact of the mortician and convent as return addresses together with the return address on her two packages-both indicating her downtown office. She tried to put it all together with the various poems and the CD. 'Creep is just yanking our chains, Lucas, having a gay ol' time.'
'Then I guess we follow where the yanking chain takes us.'
'Play his game out to the end? That could be dangerous.'
'What choice have we at this point? He's holding all the cards damned close to his chest, so come along, Mere.'
'All right.'
'If there's time enough, we'll visit Morte de Arthur's after we visit the house of miracles and nuns.'
Kelton waved them off, saying, 'Good luck, you two!'
As they made their way to Our Lady of Miracles-a shimmering fall sun slapping on-off, on-off, on the windshield as the car darted beneath rows of trees-Meredyth asked, 'Lucas, do you know who Our Lady of Miracles refers to?'
'I'm not sure I follow you,' he replied, confused.
The sunlight first dimmed and then disappeared altogether from the windshield, Lucas commenting on the sudden cloud cover.
'The Lady of Miracles, do you know who she was in life, in the history of the Church?'
'I assume the Virgin Mary? Right? I mean doesn't she represent everything to the Catholic believer?'
'Yes, and Our Lady of Miracles is Our Lady of Lourdes-Lourdes. Get it?'
'Whataya mean, as in our victim, Lourdes?'
'A French village, city now…Lourdes, France, Our Lady of Lourdes…the movie they made of it, Song of Bernadette? About the village girl to whom the Virgin Mary appeared, thus Our Lady of Lourdes. She is said to have appeared on several occasions.'
'I've heard of it, of course. Bernadette had visions when she was a child. An angel told her where water would spontaneously appear out of the earth, right?'
'At the mouth of a grotto, yes.'
'A cave.'
'Yeah, like a cavern mouth, and to this day, a spring created by the Angel of Lourdes wells up in the town, and it has been made a shrine to which people the world over make pilgrimages in hopes of a miracle cure for various illnesses.'
'Lourdes, sure. Didn't they make the little girl a saint?'
'Not before she was put through hell. Religious celebrities are put through the ringer by the Vatican.'
'Tell that to Joan of Arc.'
'Eventually, after years of examinations and investigations, Bernadette was made a saint, but by then, she could not live comfortably in Lourdes. She joined a convent and spent her adult life in the service of Christ.'
'So now you're thinking there's a definite link between Our Lady of Miracles convent and our victim, Mira Lourdes, that it's too much coincidence to be just a twist of fate or happenstance?'
'The killer's hand is all over this chance fluke. He gave us the convent as a return address, and he gave us enough of Mira to identify her-her teeth and next her head. And how many times have you told me that you don't believe in coincidences in a murder investigation?'
'Touche. So our killer is a saint killer?'
'Perhaps contemptuous of Catholic icons-pictures, symbols, idols, and saints.'
'So we're chasing someone who might have a history of destroying or disfiguring…say…a statue of Saint Francis of Assisi?'
'Or even a crucifixion cross, or a painting of mother and child-the Pieta-an altar, or an image of the baby Jesus.'
Lucas drove with one hand and used his radio with the other, calling into headquarters and speaking to Kelton. 'Get the word out, Stan, that we're interested in any reports of religious vandalism in Catholic churches, schools, graveyards, anywhere in the city, understood?'
Kelton replied, 'We get calls like that all the time, Lucas.'
'Anything recent, say in the past week?'
'Usually turns out to be corner-hugging teens so bored out of their skulls they don't give one damn thought to the consequences of their actions,' Kelton replied.
'Any unsolved, recent vandalisms of religious icons, gravestones, statues, or paintings, Stan?'
'Fact is, we got an outstanding on a grave site at Green- haven Meadows off Berwyn.'
'Whose grave, Stan?'
'Some guy named Blood…John Blood, as I recall. I can look up the report. Came in from the caretaker. Said the dirt around the grave was disturbed, and the stone was cracked from what had to be a sledgehammer.'
'Anything else? Anything to do with a church?'
'No, nothing.'
'Keep an eye out for such things, Stan.'
'I'm on it.' Kelton was gone.
They drove on in silence under the increasingly overcast sky, each taking silent counsel, she with her training in human nature, he with his grandfather's words in his head, and both weaving what little they knew of the killer with the puzzling scraps they had collected thus far, and now this new notion involving the Catholic Church. Meredyth's profession didn't like coincidences of this size any more than did Lucas's Native instincts. This matter of Our Lady of Miracles being Our Lady of Lourdes, and their victim being a Lourdes. Had the poor young woman paid the ultimate price because she bore the name of the convent?
