Father Richard Porter was in his thirties, a good-looking guy with rimless glasses and brown hair touching his collar. He’d been on the church’s grounds pruning bushes with an electric hedge trimmer when DeMarco had driven up, and DeMarco had been surprised that the young guy dressed in jeans and an old Duke sweatshirt was not only a priest but pastor of the church.
“I was so shocked to hear about Paul,” the priest said. “He was a wonderful man.”
“Yes, he was,” DeMarco said. Why tell the priest that he barely knew his cousin? “The reason I’m here is I’m trying to settle Paul’s estate and I can’t find his will or the name of his lawyer. I was told he was close to people at your church and I was hoping one of them could help me.”
“Well, let’s see,” the priest said. “Your best bet would be Mary Albertson. She and Paul worked together a lot. And Mary’s the motherly type. If Paul confided in anyone, it would have been her.” The priest placed his hedge trimmer on the ground. “Come up to the rectory and I’ll give you her phone number.”
As they were walking away, DeMarco looked down at the extension cord attached to the hedge trimmer to see if the cord was wrapped with black electrical tape in a couple spots like his was. About every other time DeMarco used his hedge trimmer, he cut the cord; it looked like the padre was a more careful trimmer than he was.
The priest gave DeMarco Mary Albertson’s phone number and asked if there was anything else he needed. After a moment’s hesitation, DeMarco said, “Were you Paul’s confessor, father?”
“Yes.”
“I know you can’t tell me anything Paul told you in confession. I’m Catholic too”-an extremely lapsed Catholic, but there was no point bringing that up-“so I understand that. But can you think of anything Paul might have told you, uh, indirectly, that could give me-and the FBI-some reason as to why he was murdered.”
“I’m afraid not,” Father Porter said. He smiled sadly, remembering Paul. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Paul’s idea of a major transgression was losing his temper if a clerk in a store was rude to him or cursing-mildly, I might add-when someone cut him off in traffic.”
Once again, the FBI’s theory that Paul had been dealing drugs sounded more far-fetched than ever.
Mary Albertson ran a church program that served breakfast to the poor and homeless on weekends, and Paul Russo was always there with her, dishing out bacon and eggs to the needy.
Mary was a big lady in her sixties: six foot, easily two hundred and fifty pounds, cheerful brown face, warm, caring brown eyes. She teared up when DeMarco said he wanted to talk about Paul, but smiled when she talked about him. She’d known him ever since he joined the congregation four years ago and had worked with him on many a church committee. He was one of the few people, she said, who seemed to actually enjoy feeding the poor.
“Most folks, they serve these people and they act all happy and hardy, but they’re really not. They don’t like being near them, the way they look, the way they smell. But not Paul. He realized they were human beings and, but for the grace of God, he could have been the one getting served instead of doing the serving. I appreciated that because there was a time when I was on the other side of that serving line.”
DeMarco’s attitude toward street people was that the majority of them were pain-in-the-ass drunks, but Mary Albertson’s comment made him squirm a bit and she noticed, wise woman that she was.
When DeMarco asked her if she knew if Paul had a lawyer, Mary said she didn’t. She’d never heard him speak of one.
“Shit,” DeMarco muttered and then mumbled, “Sorry,” when he noticed the look Mary gave him. He thanked her for her time and started to leave, but then something occurred to him. “There’s one other thing I’m curious about,” he said. “Do you have any idea who Paul’s last patient was? The lady at the hospice where Paul worked couldn’t give me his name because of medical confidentiality rules, but she did say that something was bothering Paul the last time she saw him at this patient’s house. I really want to talk to the man to see if he knows anything related to my cousin’s murder.”
Unlike Paul, the occasional small white lie-in this case, that DeMarco already knew that Paul’s last patient was dead-didn’t bother DeMarco all that much. For that matter, telling whoppers didn’t bother him all that much either.
“Yes, he was really down about something the last time I saw him too,” Mary said.
“Do you have any idea why?”
She shook her head. “No. When Paul talked about the people he was caring for, he’d usually say there was something beautiful in watching how they accepted that the end was near, how it was inspiring-that’s the word he used-the way they readied their souls to meet their God. This last one, though? All Paul said was that the poor man was tormented, as if he was already burning in Hell, and Paul was trying to help him make peace with himself.”
“You mean he was trying to convert him to Catholicism?”
“Oh, no. Paul wasn’t the type to ram his religion down someone’s throat. But if a person asked for help, spiritual or otherwise, he would have given it.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said. “So do you know who this man is? Like I said, I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re too late for that, Mr. DeMarco,” Mary said. “They held the funeral for him yesterday, paid him the honor he was due. Paul’s last patient was General Martin Breed.”
As DeMarco was walking back to his car, he thought maybe that explained why the FBI had taken Paul’s case away from the Arlington County cops. Maybe there was some connection between Paul’s death and a two-star army general, a man who would have access to a lot of classified information. And maybe that’s why Hopper had searched Paul’s apartment and taken his computer. Yeah. Maybe.
The next thought he had was that if Paul’s death was connected in any way to a Pentagon heavyweight like Martin Breed, he’d be smart to keep his big nose out of it. He should just do what he was supposed to do: find a lawyer to deal with Paul’s four-thousand-buck estate and then go play golf like he’d originally planned.
Yep, that definitely sounded like the smart thing to do.
16
Claire returned to her office, still embarrassed that she had overlooked the Post reporter, Robert Hansen, as the man Paul Russo might have met with. She didn’t know for sure that Russo had met with Hansen, but it sounded right. It felt right. It sang to her.
Russo, this gay altar boy, just didn’t strike her as the type who would have been involved in anything illegal or even underhanded. But what if General Breed-a man privy to the Pentagon’s dirty little secrets-had told Russo something before he died? He might have even told Russo something while under the influence of whatever drugs he was being given, maybe delirious, not even knowing what he was saying.
But what about Martin Breed? The man had been an absolute poster boy for the United States Army. Handsome, charming, articulate, a born leader of men. He’d risen up through the ranks at a meteoric pace and had been involved in all the recent wars. In Afghanistan, he’d even managed to get himself wounded, which is quite hard for a general to do, so he got a Purple Heart to go along with all his other medals.
But there had been nothing in Breed’s career to indicate he was anything other than a good soldier. There’d been no financial scandals-no awards of huge army contracts to pals in big business-and his marriage had been rock solid, as far as anyone knew. Nor had he shown any desire for public office, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have compromised his principles to get himself elected after he retired. Breed’s only known ambition was to reach the pinnacle of his profession: to replace General Charles Bradford as the army’s chief of staff.
Assuming Russo had learned something significant from Breed-which was a hell of a big assumption-what could it have been? What could have been so important that someone would want to kill Russo because of what he’d heard or seen? And then there was the question of how Russo’s killers would have known that Breed told Russo anything?
Too many questions-not enough answers. Insufficient data, as Dillon would say.
Claire called Gilbert and two other technicians into her office and proceeded to issue orders, giving them four hours to do what she knew would take them twice as long.
The first thing she had them bring her was Martin Breed’s medical records, which had been easy to obtain.
