“He told her where the party was?”
“At the Meadowbrook Farm. He was wasting his breath; she didn’t even know where the Meadowbrook Farm was. She still doesn’t…”
The young priest adjusted his collar.
“…but I do.”
There were a few moments of silence broken by Father Leo.
“Tell him what you did.”
“About the stupidest thing I could have done. I went to the party. And I went alone. And I didn’t tell anyone.”
Lynch could have responded a dozen different ways, most of them inappropriate.
“Exactly what the hell did you do that for?”
Leo mercifully answered for the young priest.
“Father O’Rourke is ambitious and gets restless. He often feels as though he’s not answering his calling because our parish, to put it simply, doesn’t have many problems to fix. He has trouble understanding that the mere fact that St. Al’s is free of drama demonstrates that we’re doing the job. He saw an opportunity to save some souls, and he took it.”
“Did it work?”
Aiden wiped his brow and snickered.
“No.”
“He almost got his ass kicked.”
“The big guy…Bubbs, I guess…and the hot head with the spiky yellow hair gave me a couple of shoves, but the leader broke it up.”
Lynch dug Samuel’s sketch out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the table.
“Was it this guy? Did this guy break it up?”
Aiden took a look.
“Yes. That’s him. Why do you have this?”
Lynch didn’t want to get off-topic.
“Another case, …”
He tried to ask another question, but Leo interrupted.
“Tell him why you think Kevin took part in the beating.”
Aiden repeated what he told Leo earlier, including his conversation with Reilly as close to verbatim as he could remember.
“What happened afterward?”
“He left.”
“That’s it?”
“He made a call.”
Lynch did a little victorious fist pump under the table. After hitting brick walls for three days, he was amped to feel as though he was making progress on a case, even if it wasn’t his.
“Any idea to whom?”
“His partner, I assumed.”
“Not an option.”
Aiden cluelessly fished about the walls as though the answer would be written somewhere. The break in the action allowed the enormity of the situation to creep back into his psyche. He clasped his hands, and the panic returned to his face.
“Then I don’t know. If he did this thing…what am I saying? Of course, he did this thing. He did this thing, and I helped! Dear God, I helped!”
Leo turned his chair to face Aiden’s, reached over, and spun the young priest to face him, chair and all.
“Knock it off, Aiden! God does not condemn what you’ve done!”
Lynch spoke.
“Neither does the law.”
“You can help! Do you have a guess who Sergeant Reilly may have called when he left St. Al’s?”
Aiden sniffled. The young priest was bouncing up and down like a basketball. Things had gotten loud. No one in the room wanted that. Lynch offered to get him some water, but he meekly refused it. After a few deep breaths, he was ready to continue. He turned back to the table as he answered Leo’s question.
“Someone who owes him a favor, I guess. That could be anybody. I don’t travel in those circles.”
He picked up his head to match eyes with Lynch.
“There’s more, Sergeant…”
Leo curiously raised one eyebrow and folded his arms. Apparently, whatever Aiden was about to say was news to him as well.
The young priest pointed at the unfolded sketch on the table.
“He came to see me the next day.”
By Father Leo’s expression, one would have thought that Aiden had just confessed to being a woman. Lynch slid to the edge of his seat.
“Father, I don’t know how to ask this politely: Didn’t you see the sketch on the news?”
Aiden hadn’t read a newspaper or watched a lick of television since Fellini sent him on his quest, the details of which he was too drained to reveal.
“No, I’ve been … busy. I was at the water cooler, and he just walked up next to me as if he wanted to compare fantasy football scores.”
“Well, dang, what did he say?”
“I’m paraphrasing here…he said that he’d hit a crossroads in his life where he had to choose between a group of people he’d grown to be very fond of, and what he felt was right. Then he whispered something to himself about a misguided a-hole and things not being the way they were supposed to be. I tried to give him some advice, but he said there was no need. Then he thanked me and left.”
“When did this happen?”
“Last March. That’s when the Clean Street Project did the flower beds.”
And when Samuel disappeared.
The revelation caused a dull ache behind Lynch’s eyes. Samuel’s last act before leaving town was confiding in a priest. Why, then, would he come back months later and murder a bishop?
He was getting handed tiny pieces to two puzzles in no particular order.
So…Jeremy Sokol couldn’t have identified Reilly as one of his assailants.
So…Reilly used Father O’Rourke to get to the UJ.
So…Samuel left the UJ and skipped town because it was the right thing to do (whatever that meant).
And?
Aiden allowed his body a moment to send the blood back to his extremities. Leo gave him a comforting pat on the back. The young priest had been absolved of his naivety and ignorance in lieu of sin. Lynch leaned back and rubbed his forehead in an attempt to corral his thoughts.
Was his biggest fear in all this coming to fruition? Was the big white Theban “S” that had been staring at him from the top of his suspect list starting to fade? Even worse, could he now extrapolate that Samuel simply abandoned his trench coat, along with everything else in his life? Was the coat dumpster food? If it was, anyone could have picked it up.
That fucking trench coat.
He just thanked God that Chester County came through on Ryan’s bullet.
He turned his attention back to Aiden, who didn’t have much more to add. It was just as well. The young priest was soon going to
