lost his temper and shouted threatening gibberish at several nuns. Detectives interviewed him in a downtown flophouse. A neighbor alibied Frickson, placing him in the flophouse that night of the murder. Detectives were seeking more sources on Frickson’s alibi.
Ritchie Belmar Brown, Caucasian male, age 52, weight 240 pounds, height six feet, four inches. Brown was recently released from King County Jail. He’d served several months after trying to run down the organ player in the Seattle church parking lot where Brown was a Bible studies instructor. Legal action had bankrupted Brown’s struggling taxidermy business. He frequented Sister Anne’s shelter, where he began telling anyone who’d listen that the Catholic Church was the cause of his personal troubles. The detectives who’d interviewed Brown strongly recommended they go back on him because he kept changing his account of where he was the night Sister Anne was slain.
Each of them had a connection to Sister Anne. Before their release, she’d visited each of them in jail, as she had visited many prisoners, to offer spiritual guidance.
Each of these men had access to a shelter knife. Each of them was a smoker, which fit with Grace’s single witness account.
Still, Grace did not like any of them for the murder. Nothing registered with her. They were all violent, dangerous men, but her instincts had not locked on to any of them.
And these four heroes were not her only potential suspects.
The shelter had people who were not regulars, those who drifted in and out. Sister Anne could have been stalked. And there were also “walk-ins.” Strangers who appeared every day, like anonymous ghosts.
Sister Anne also counseled abused women who sought sanctuary. Through these situations, she often came in contact with their vengeful partners. Threats were common in these cases.
Grace faced many possibilities.
She needed solid evidence, a fingerprint that put someone at the crime scene. DNA. A credible witness. Something.
Grace went to her notes and reviewed Sister Anne’s last moments. After leaving the shelter, she took the bus. No one indicated if she was alone, or was followed. Grace and Perelli interviewed the bus driver, who’d helped them find his few passengers. They were regulars and the driver pinpointed their stops and buildings, too. But it had yielded nothing. No one got off anywhere near Sister Anne’s stop.
And the one witness account from Bernice Burnett, who lived next door to the nuns, suggested a stranger had been in Sister Anne’s apartment when she arrived-and was a smoker. She recalled him lighting up in the alley when he left.
Grace flipped through other files. It would take time to collect and analyze cigarette butts from the alley to compare with possible DNA from the suspects who could already be legitimately placed in the vicinity of the crime.
That made for a weak case against the four men she was considering so far. All of that evidence would be challenged in court.
Okay, back to square one.
So the guy’s in her place like he’s looking for something. But what? Nothing’s missing. Nuns have nothing; they vow to live a nonmaterialistic life. Maybe that’s it? He’s a two-bit criminal. Has no idea she’s a nun. He’s getting pissed off that she’s got squat to steal. Sister Anne discovers him and boom, he kills her.
There was the tip from a couple of confidential informants that someone had been talking on the street about a gang thing. It was the same line Jason Wade was working on. Some kind of revenge thing, because Sister Anne had helped some banger in trouble. The fact was she helped anyone who needed it. The “gang connection” to the murder was just talk coming from a gangster named Tango whose crew was devoted to the Sister. About five weeks back, she had comforted one of the members who got stabbed outside the shelter by a rival gangster. Sister Anne had called an ambulance and saved his life. Tango just wanted to put the word out that if it was an act by an enemy, his people would exact vengeance.
So far, nothing came of the gang angle.
It might’ve been a false lead, but it showed how much people loved Sister Anne.
Grace put her head in her hands and took stock of the empty squad room. Perelli and his family smiled at her from the framed photo on his desk. The other detectives had pictures of their kids on their desks, even the divorced dads who lost custody.
No one smiled from a photograph at Grace. Suddenly she felt utterly alone. Everybody had somebody. Everybody belonged to somebody.
It hit Grace that her life was similar to that of the nuns. They had taken a vow to give up any chance of ever getting married, of having children, of growing old with a husband and grandchildren.
But they belonged to the church, worked together doing God’s work. In a sense, Grace worked for God, too. The God of Justice. But outside of being a homicide cop, Grace had no life. Even her attempt to find one with the FBI agent ended in disaster.
He was a married lying bastard.
Grace caught Jason Wade’s byline and felt something stir.
She did have a thing for him. He was a few years younger but she was drawn to him. Something about him attracted her, his intensity, his razor-sharp intelligence. The guy exuded some kind of heat. It felt so right with him. Maybe that’s what scared her. They were both loners, both intense. So why did she break it off with him?
Had she made the biggest mistake of her life?
A wailing siren pulled Grace from her reverie to underscore the urgency of her case. She needed a break, something to put her on the right investigative path.
Grace shook her head at her notes on Sister Vivian, who had yet to provide her with more files on Sister Anne’s past. CALL HER THIS A.M. ! Grace underlined in her notebook.
She stared at Sister Anne’s photograph in the newspapers.
A kind, smiling face.
Grace covered Sister Anne’s mouth with her fingers and looked into her eyes.
I need you to help me. Tell me what to do, where to look. Help me.
Grace’s phone rang and she answered it without removing her eyes from Sister Anne.
“Good, Grace,” Kay Cataldo said. “I figured you’d be in.”
“What’s up?”
“Got a break with the evidence that brings us a step closer to the killer.”
Chapter Eighteen
A fter Jason looked at his grease-stained menu, with higher prices penned over lower ones, he counted four dead flies on the windowsill of his booth at Ivan’s.
He didn’t mind; it was his kind of place. A small, twenty-four-hour diner on a side street off Aurora. The smell of bacon, onions, and coffee mingled with the soft conversations of working people, weary night crews who’d just clocked out and sober-faced day crews about to punch in.
In one corner, a biker couple had fallen asleep. No one cared. No one needed their booth. Jason’s old man said he’d meet him here at 7:30 A.M. It was 7:50 A.M. Give him a bit more time, he was likely tied up in traffic.
Jason looked through the window’s grime to the street and thought, maybe this would be it? Maybe his dad would tell him whatever it was he was trying to tell him the other night at the Ice House Bar. Before the nun’s murder had eclipsed everything.
“You have to help me, son, I don’t know what to do here.”
Jason shuddered at the memory of his dad poised over a beer. It triggered a torrent of searing images from his life: his mother walking out, his old man showing up drunk in the newsroom that night a few years back. “Where’s my boy? How come you don’t call me, don’t I matter anymore, Jay?” The shame from the final humiliation had forced his old man to face his problem, to get help and to start turning his life around.
And was it all because of what had happened to him when he was a Seattle cop?
