“Maybe some days I am, Keith.” I was crossing a line, I knew, trying to remind him by the intimacy of first names of nights we spent sitting on bar stools at dives in the worst part of town, celebrating victories after breaking our asses together on the city’s toughest cases. “This isn’t one of them. Give me a reason.”
“I’m the PC. I don’t have to give you a reason.” He had lowered his voice. We were staring each other down, just inches apart.
“I’m on this case,” I turned my back to him and started to walk, but he grabbed my arm.
“Not if I tell my men not to work with you.”
“This is so not your style, Keith. I didn’t know you had a bit of the bully in you.”
“You need me to spell it out?”
“That would help.”
“How’s your relationship with the cardinal?”
“Not as good as the mayor’s, if I had to guess. I’ve never met the man.”
“Slamming Bishop Deegan in the courtroom, were you?”
“Ah, the fog is lifting a bit.”
“I’m trying to take you out of the frying pan, Alex, before you burn up to a crisp. Back out gracefully. You got the transit rapist, you got the cold case with four victims that’s still likely to grow, you’ve got an endless array of crimes to keep you busy.”
“Is it because I’m a Jew?” I hadn’t raised my voice intentionally, but a door opened down the hall behind me. A detective looked out and Scully brushed him off with a wave.
“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s got to be a man as the lead prosecutor here. Don’t you understand anything about the church?”
“I know you wanted a woman at the wheel when that sociopath killed an eighteen-year-old in Central Park. Compassion and sensitivity and bonding with all the teenage girls who were witnesses. ‘The jury, the public, will identify with a strong woman speaking for the victim.’ Remember that pitch? And I know you pleaded with Battaglia to keep Nan on top when you had the mother-son grifter team who left you to prove murder without a body.”
Keith Scully was really in my face now. “You want to be the distraction in all this, is that what you want? I can’t name five prosecutors in this country besides you who’ve gone after rogue priests. I’m as good a Catholic as they come, and I’m not proud of those guys, but the cardinal would rather not see you as the point person in this case. The mayor is standing with him on this.”
“And Battaglia’s already in bed with the bishop. How convenient. If it wasn’t so twisted, I might laugh.”
“How much do you know about the Vatican’s position on the ordination of women?” Scully asked.
“Absolutely nothing. If it’s your superior wisdom on this issue — and the cardinal’s inside track — I’m happy to say you’ve got me beat. But I’m a quick study, Keith. Asphyxia, the insanity defense, polymerase chain reaction in DNA testing. Ask the cardinal to tutor me for a few days and I promise to pass the tests.”
Scully gritted his teeth. “He doesn’t want to tutor you, Alex. I’ll give you the talking points.”
“Shall I take notes?”
“You won’t forget.” The commissioner’s hands were on his hips, confronting me head-on. “In the summer of 2010, the Vatican issued some new laws.”
That spring, the pedophilia scandals that had rocked America over the past few years had erupted as virulently in England and Ireland and across Europe. I assumed Scully was going back to finger-pointing at my role in that issue.
“You’re right, of course. I had no idea.”
“They actually extended the period during which a clergyman could be tried by a church court, under canon law, from ten to twenty years, starting from the eighteenth birthday of the victim.”
“How enlightened,” I said.
“At the very same time — and I’m not apologizing for this — the Vatican took a tougher position on the ordination of women.”
“How tough?” And why was it any different from Orthodox Jews, who wouldn’t allow female rabbis?
“They’ve bolted the door to women becoming priests. The Vatican declared the attempt at ordination to be a
“Where’s Mike when I need him? My Latin’s no good,” I said, making a half effort at a smile. “Oh, that’s right. You’re going to slap his hand if he tries to help me.”
“It translates as ‘grave crime,’ Alex.”
“You’re kidding me. It’s a grave crime for a woman to try to be ordained in the twenty-first century?”
“The Vatican declared it one of the most serious offenses in church law — as serious as heresy, or as schism. They raised it in punishment to as grave a crime as the clerical sexual abuse of minors.”
This was all new to me. I had no idea of the storm this subject had created.
“Do you understand now, Alex? Do you see why you’re the wrong man for this job?” Scully’s impatience with me revealed itself in his facetious remark.
“I think it’s called misogyny, Keith. Both you — and the church. The Vatican equates women priests with pedophiles?”
“Yes. At the moment, yes it does.”
“This is new?”
“Well, Rome had a different solution until recently. Between us, it actually makes me worried we’ve got a religious fanatic on our hands with this case. The next highest punishment, before excommunication, is called silencing. Any priests or nuns or theologians who took a stand against established doctrine have been forbidden to speak in the church — they can’t teach, they can’t preach, they can’t participate.”
I closed my eyes and thought of the women in our case. “Naomi Gersh, then Ursula Hewitt, and before them, the woman pastor in Wayland, Kentucky. One’s throat slit so deep and wide it hung by a thread, the next decapitated, and this time a severed tongue.”
Keith Scully was convinced he’d made his point. “Wouldn’t you say they’ve been silenced?”
TWENTY-SIX
“DOES Scully think you’re taking yourself off the case?” Mike asked. We decided to use my apartment as a command center for our team’s strategy session. It offered space, privacy, and a well-stocked bar.
“He didn’t wait around for an answer. He’s so damn used to getting his way.”
It was ten o’clock, and we had spread out the police reports and our notes on my dining-room table. Nan was on the phone ordering pizzas, Mike was fixing drinks, and I was opening a bottle of wine. Peterson had banded the four of us with another foursome assembled from different squads and, after a brief discussion with them about how to communicate in the morning, we left to regroup at my home.
“You see what he’s done, Coop. He’s silenced you, too,” Mike said. “First Battaglia clips your wings. Then Scully gives you the boot. Sitting behind the cash register in a restaurant in the south of France keeping count of every escargot the chef sells is looking more and more like your future. The glory days may be behind you.”
“Jack her up, Mr. Chapman,” Nan said. “Just what she needs.”
“I don’t want to be a lightning rod for anything that will affect the case.”
“Running scared.”
“Hardly. How about if I just fade into the background for the time being, let Nan take the lead, and we carry on as usual?”
I poured a glass of white wine for Nan and one for myself. “And I thought you were my pal,” she said. “I get to deal with Battaglia, the archdiocese, and the unhappy mobs. And you?”
“Whatever you need. I can do witness interviews—”
“Find me a frigging witness first, will you?” Mike said, clinking his glass full of vodka against my wine. “I smell what you’re up to. You’ll do everything except having to interface with the bosses. You get the fun part. And then
