A Cruel Season for Dying (32 page)

Mrs. Tuminello kept her eyes closed, speaking softly as though to herself. “My husband passed away two years after Constanza
was born. I had to work, but there was no one to keep my baby.” She sighed, releasing Rozelli’s hand. “Then Father Kellog’s
housekeeper had a stroke and couldn’t work anymore. He offered me the job. He even let me bring Connie to work with me.” She
looked up and smiled at her daughter. “For twenty-six years I took care of Father and the rectory. And never a complaint.
He loved my lasagna.” She peered down and observed how her fingers plucked at the yarn of the afghan. “Now I don’t think I
will make it anymore.”

“Mrs. Tuminello, did you know Lucia Mancuso?” asked Johnson.

The housekeeper heaved a ragged breath. “I know the family. I make the Wednesday-night novena with Lucia’s grandmother. Last
May, Lucia made her First Communion. Like a little bride she was. An angel …” Almost immediately she realized the terrible
irony of her words. “Oh God,” she moaned, her hands closing off her face.

It had been unavoidable. Agnes Tuminello, who worked seven days a week at the rectory, had come onto the crime scene unexpectedly.
She had seen lights on and the police cars outside the church, when she arrived at five to start her day. She had gone immediately
over to St. Sebastian, gaining entrance through a little-used door the police had failed to seal.

She had seen Lucia Mancuso hanging above the crèche. The girl’s body moving ever so slightly, trapped in that falsely beatific
pose by the tension of twin monofilament threads. The white wings spread wide but dead in the air.

“Mrs. Tuminello, can you think of anyone who might have done this?” Rozelli asked.

She shook her head violently.

Rozelli reached over and patted the woman’s hand. He gave her another moment. “Mrs. Tuminello, we think it was Lucia the killer
was after, and that Father Kellog was murdered because he surprised the man.”

She looked up, interest in her eyes.

“But we still have to explore every possibility,” Johnson said.

Mrs. Tuminello waited.

“Is it possible that someone might have wanted to kill Father Kellog?” Johnson asked.

“No.” The word almost strangled her.

“I know how you feel, but this person has killed before, Mrs. Tuminello.” Johnson said her next words carefully. “But until
last night, his victims had all been men … homosexual men.”

There was a sharp intake of breath and Mrs. Tuminello’s eyes went wide, her face growing red as the implication about Father
Kellog registered.

“Get out! Get out of my house.”

“Mama, please.” Connie Venza bent and placed her arms around her mother. “I told you I didn’t want her upset.” She looked
over her shoulder at the two detectives. “Please wait in the hall.”

In a few minutes Connie Venza appeared. Her face seemed older in the yellow light of the hallway. “A few days ago Mama gave
me something. I didn’t know what to do with it. Until now.” She reached into a manila envelope. “Here, I want you to have
this.”

Rozelli and Johnson stared at the eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph.

“Mama took that picture from Father Graff’s darkroom.”

Outside the cutting room Sakura glanced at his watch. There were fifteen minutes before this afternoon’s autopsies were scheduled
to begin. Linsky always arrived on time and liked to get to work immediately. The bodies would be ready for him, transferred
from the storage lockers by an attendant and whoever on the staff was assisting with the procedures. Sakura went in, pushing
through black aproned doors.

The remains of Lucia Mancuso and Father Andrew Kellog occupied two tables in the center of the green-tiled space, the priest’s
ruined
skull looking even more ghastly in the cold overhead light. Lucia’s injuries were also more apparent, and except for the marked
lividity in the lower limbs, and the indentations made by the monofilament, her wounds appeared identical to the first five
victims. Sakura was as certain as Darius that a single mind had conceived these murders. But what kind of sick fantasy could
include both homosexual men and an eight-year-old schoolgirl?

Rigor had long passed, and Lucia Mancuso, more than any of the dead he had seen, really did appear to be sleeping. She was
a very pretty child, and unbidden came the image of her winged body hanging above the crèche. It had taken an enormous amount
of planning and athleticism to suspend her from the support beam in that church. It seemed more certain now that the ritual
element of these deaths was posing, a statement that the killer felt compelled to make for himself.

Was that what he was doing here? Making a statement as well? He felt shame at the death of this child. If there were any true
victims in this world, then surely they were children.

Had he not once been vulnerable, his life and happiness at the mercy of what he believed his father’s whims? Certainly, the
upstate New York boarding school, with its lonely prospect, had seemed to be the nadir of his journey when he arrived. But
he had done well there, arriving to a fall and winter as cold as the ones he had known in Hokkaido. He had made friends. Excelled
academically. Gained a measure of control.

His visits home were few, thanks to the face-saving distance. His father called regularly. Elizabeth wrote. He learned to
bear his Christmases in California and was rewarded with summer vacations in Japan, where for that short span of time he was
once again Akira. Even without his grandmother, these summers were his touchstone, an assurance that in a successful adjustment
to America he would not lose himself. He had become content, with only the cloud of his father’s expectations of what course
he should pursue in college. But that, too, resolved itself.

In his senior year a girl from the nearby town had been brutally murdered. Two students, fellow seniors, were accused and
arrested. The boys were not his friends. In fact, he disliked them both, superficially socialized, corrupted by the money
of their parents. He could easily imagine them guilty.

Like everyone else in the school, he’d been gripped by the sheer proximity to tragedy—an attraction like gravity, bending
objects in space with the mere force of its mass. He was fascinated with the procedures of police work, with the detectives
who came to interview them all. The Tao was a web as well as a road, and this death had placed him in the path of his fate.
Circumstances made his involvement in the investigation inevitable. His role in the crime’s solution set the course of his
life. Despite his father’s predictable disappointment, and Susan’s obvious satisfaction with his choice of career, he had
never considered after that time that he would become anything else but a detective with the police.

He stared at the girl on the table. Oblivious, Lucia Mancuso slept on, her lively hair and lashes dark against the marble
of her cheeks. As he looked at her now, her father’s face in all its pain came back to him, and he considered what the man
had said today about his sister’s husband, Tony Paladino, the man who had taken the Halloween photographs. He had real doubts
that there would be anything more to Mr. Mancuso’s suspicions than the bad blood that apparently existed between the two men.
Still, they would have to take a look at him. And at someone else who interested him more.

An eight-year-old female victim had hit like an ace dealt from the bottom of the pack. But what if what the bartender at Marlowe’s
had told him was true, about the comic who’d gotten arrested for exposing himself in the park—the star who’d blown a series
in which Geoffrey Westlake had had a featured part? As soon as the autopsies were finished, he’d head back to the office.
A call to Hanae to explain why he’d not be home tonight, and then he’d put somebody on tracking down Byron Shelton—the one
person who’d surfaced in the investigation with a link to at least one gay victim and a proven predilection for little girls.

I
t was the meeting from hell, Sakura concluded, as he walked down the hall to the relative peace and security of his own office.
Yet if he were Lincoln McCauley, he would have been spitting fire too. His own emotional state was marginal.

What the fuck’s wrong with you, Sakura?
McCauley had bellowed.
Your Japanese stoicism is wearing thin.

He hadn’t gotten even mildly angry at the racial slur but had focused instead on the chief’s use of the word
stoicism.
McCauley’s vocabulary was usually less expansive.

His self-control had to do with preempting McCauley’s interference. At this juncture containing the chief of detectives meant
keeping the three suspects, especially Thomas Graff, under wraps, until the investigation turned up something solid. On a
deeper level his apparent passivity was an attempt at Zen posture—to live precisely in the moment. To block a thousand future
moments from rushing backward into the present.
When you wash the dishes, think only of washing the dishes.

The
Post
headline had intruded:
NO ONE SAFE
!
GAYS TO LITTLE GIRLS
! McCauley had thrown the newspaper at him, complete with lurid cover.
Find the fucking leak,
he’d shouted, his face ballooning above the starched collar of his shirt.
And haul this bitch’s ass in for questioning. For all we know, she might be in contact with the killer. It wouldn’t be the
first goddamn time.

The
bitch
was Zoe Kahn, the reporter whose byline hung with the
Post
exclusive, and a couple of other stories that suggested Ms. Kahn
was on the receiving end of a very accurate pipeline. For an instant he entertained the thought that her source for this latest
story might be Dominick Mancuso. He had shown the man a picture of his daughter, a photograph that closely matched the drawing
on the cover of the newspaper. Had told him about the wings on the other bodies. Had Kahn gotten to Mancuso? He hoped not,
but she was capable of anything.

Whoever had fed Kahn information had seen crime scene photos, or had been inside St. Sebastian Church that night. And this
person knew about the wings. How else to connect Lucia to the other victims? He opened the door to his office, avoiding the
light switch, walking over to the hot plate. He needed a cup of tea. Some downtime to think. He felt sure Mancuso wasn’t Kahn’s
source. The leak was closer to home.

Coming to attention, Detective Walter Talbot did everything but salute as Sakura, with a thin folder tucked under his arm,
walked into the interrogation room, authoritative and neat in his dark suit and tie. As with most interrogations this one
was pure theater, misdirection away from the fact that any suspect not actually under arrest could simply get up and walk.

This morning’s improvisation had been hurriedly scripted. The relationship in the city between the Department and the Catholic
Church had evolved from a time when the hierarchies of both had been packed with Irish. Although that had changed in the last
few decades, the rituals of reciprocal back-scratching remained. This initial session, Sakura knew, might be their only chance
to shake Father Thomas Graff before the higher-ups on both sides got involved.