just overnight.
“Lou, old friend,” Jack said with true affection. “Just the man I want to see.”
“Yeah, how’s that?” Lou asked warily, as he sauntered over to join Jack at the coffee machine. They briefly shook hands.
“I never apologized for the ridiculous conversation I forced you to have. Remember? It was about chiropractic.”
“Of course I remember. Why do you think you have to apologize?”
“I was on a mini-crusade, and I think I carried it all a little too far for a couple of people, yourself included.”
“Bullshit, but if you want to apologize, fine! You’re forgiven. Now apologize for coming in here so late. I’ve been here for forty-five minutes thinkin’ you’d be coming through the door any second.”
“I’m off autopsies this week.”
“Christ! Wouldn’t you know! How about letting me know next time?”
“I would have let you know this time if I thought you cared. What’s up?”
“It was a busy night last night, besides the usual mayhem. There was an arsonist’s fire in the West Village, which burnt up three people, two of whom the archbishop tells me you knew.”
“Who?” Jack demanded, although he had a sudden painful feeling he already knew, especially it being the West Village, with the archbishop involved. “Was it on Morton Street?”
“Yeah, it was. Forty Morton Street. How well did you know them?”
“One more than the other,” Jack said, catching his breath. He suddenly felt weak-kneed.
“Good grief,” he added, with a shake of his head. “What happened?”
“We’re still piecing it all together. How did you know them?” Jack handed Lou the coffee he was holding and then poured himself another. “I think we better sit down,” he said. When they had, Jack told the story about Shawn and Sana Daughtry, and that he had known both Shawn and the archbishop in college. Until he knew more from Lou, he didn’t mention the ossuary. “I was at Forty Morton Street last Saturday night for dinner.”
“Lucky you weren’t there last night,” Lou said. “It was a typical arsonist’s blaze. The accelerant was gasoline in the basement, but not a lot of help was needed. The house was an eighteenth-century wood-frame firetrap.”
“Have you made IDs on the three victims?”
“Reasonably, but we’re hoping for confirmation from the OCME. We’re quite sure two of the victims are the owners of the house, but we need to corroborate. Everybody is burnt up to a cinder. The third victim was more difficult to identify. We ended up finding some of his belongings, and he is now the prime arson suspect. His name we believe is Luke Hester, and it turns out he’s one of these religious nuts who lives upstate at a monastery with a dubious reputation that is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. By contacting the monastery, we learned he was on some kind of assignment to the archbishop of New York, who we then roused out of bed. From the archbishop we got the story. Apparently, this third victim, who truly is supposed to have been some kind of religious fanatic, was temporarily living with the Daughtrys. It’s the archbishop’s fear that the religious guy killed both himself and the couple as a kind of martyrdom to keep them from publishing anything negative about the Blessed Mother, Mother of God. Can you believe this? I tell you, only in New York City.”
“How was the archbishop when you spoke with him?” Jack asked. He could hardly imagine what James was thinking. Jack was sure he must be devastated.
“He was not a happy camper,” Lou admitted. “In fact, he was devastated,” he added, as if reading Jack’s inner thoughts. “Right after I told him, he couldn’t talk for several minutes.”
Jack didn’t respond but rather just shook his head.
“Well, I came over here to watch you do the posts,” Lou said. “Just in case some unexpected information becomes available, which you, in particular, are famous for.”
“Who’s doing the three burned cases?” Jack called over to Riva.
“I am,” Riva answered. “But if you want one or two or all three, just let me know.”
“No, thank you!” Jack responded. He had already made up his mind to help James rather than Lou by gathering up all the evidence of the ossuary affair and getting it into James’s hands. “There you go, Lou,” Jack said to his detective friend. “Dr. Mehta is one of the best. I’m certain you will find her more charming than I, and even a bit faster.”
“When are you planning on starting, honey?” Lou called over to Riva. Jack cringed.
Riva didn’t like to be called “honey” by chauvinistic policemen, as evidenced by her not bothering to answer. With his back toward Riva, Jack stepped between her and Lou and made a motion of drawing his finger beneath his chin as if cutting his throat. “No
“Gotcha!” Lou voiced with immediate understanding. He rephrased his question and got an immediate response: fifteen minutes.
“I got a last bit of advice,” Jack said. “Don’t waste a lot of time on this investigation. It’s nothing more than a sad, regrettable tragedy in which everyone was doing what they thought they had to do.”
“I’d pretty much gotten that impression talking with the archbishop,” Lou countered.
“The monk had no criminal record whatsoever. The most curious aspect, though, was how professional he behaved, except at the end, getting burnt up himself. Our arson investigators were impressed. Not only did he use an accelerant, gasoline, but he knew how to vaporize it maximally and also how to use trailers in the basement to take the fire to all areas of the cellar in the quickest time. He even axed a few vent holes to make sure the fire rose through the house quicker than it would have done otherwise. The man was a natural arsonist.”
“I have my cell phone,” Jack said, shaking Lou’s hand again. “Right now I’m going to run over to the archbishop’s and console him. He’s probably blaming himself, since he’s the one who introduced the parties. I can’t understand why he didn’t call me.”
“You’re right about him blaming himself,” Lou said. “He said as much to me. I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.”
“Longer than I’d like to admit,” Jack said. Confident he was leaving Lou in terrific hands, Jack reversed his direction and proceeded back down to the basement, on his way to the office of the motor pool. Although he had some mild concern about irritating Calvin after the fact, Jack had it in mind to borrow a white medical examiner’s transportation team (METT) van with a driver for thirty to forty minutes. When he walked into the motor pool, he wasn’t concerned any longer. All five drivers were sitting around having coffee. Five minutes later, Jack was riding shotgun with Pete Molina driving. Pete had been one of the night drivers with whom Jack had gotten acquainted but who’d recently been moved to the day shift.
They drove quickly up to the OCME DNA building, where Jack had Pete pull into the loading dock and wait. Running inside, Jack had security open the lab the Daughtrys had been using. Locking the door behind him, Jack did not waste any time, lest Lou’s investigative team learn of the lab before Jack could remove the relics. Jack had a sudden urge to see that everything went back to its rightful owner, a job best done by James.
Back into the ossuary went everything: bones, scrolls, even the remainder of the samples Sana had been working on within the laboratory itself. When that was all in place, Jack added two more objects: the codex and Saturninus’s letter, which Shawn had brought from his office two days previously. Jack then loaded the ossuary onto the cart that Shawn had used to bring up all the glass panes.
After checking a second time to be certain he had everything, Jack pushed the cart back down to the service elevator and then to the loading dock. Luckily, Pete was still exactly where Jack had left him. If a delivery had come in, he would have had to move. After showing his ID to another member of security, Jack carried the ossuary onto the METT
van and made sure it was properly secured.
“Okay,” Pete said, starting the motor. “Where to?”
“The archbishop of New York’s residence,” Jack said.
Pete looked at Jack. “Am I supposed to know where that is?”
“Fifty-first and Madison. You can turn left on Fifty-first off Madison and pull over to the curb. You’ll be dumping me off. You don’t have to wait.” Jack didn’t elaborate for two reasons. One, he wanted the least number of people to know what he’d done, and two, he was already deep in thought of what he was going to say to James. Jack knew that had the roles been reversed, he would have been feeling cataleptic.
