Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (22 page)

“Gonna share the names when you get them?”

“No.”

“Got the ballistics report yet?” I asked, and counted off five seconds again.

“All three victims were shot once in the head with nine-millimeters,” Parisi said. “Two of the slugs were too damaged to make a comparison, and the intact slug doesn’t match anything on file. With no shell casings found at the scene, there’s no way to tell if more than one gun was used.”

“Maniella’s double was shot with a twenty-five-caliber pistol,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“Doesn’t really tell us anything.”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “Could be different shooters. Could be the same shooter with a different weapon.”

“Can you release the names of the three dead lowlifes yet?” I asked.

“The Winkler brothers, Martin and Joseph, and their cousin Molly Fitzgerald.”

“Part of the Winkler clan from Pawtucket?”

“Yeah. Both guys had records. Peeping and molestation as juvies. Larceny and narcotics distribution as adults. Molly didn’t have a sheet.”

“What else you got?” I asked, and then waited as he considered his reply.

“Neighbors said they saw five or six people coming and going from the apartment the last few weeks.”

“So two or three snuff filmmakers are still on the loose?”

“Looks that way.”

“Learn anything about the three kids found in the apartment?”

“Other than the fact that they’d been repeatedly raped?”

“Aw, fuck.”

“The girl,” Parisi said, “was a ten-year-old who ran away from home in Woonsocket last September. One of the boys was the nine-year-old who vanished on the way home from school in Dighton a couple of weeks ago. The other boy is another story entirely.”

“Oh?”

“The mother’s a heroin addict. Claimed her eight-year-old son was kidnapped from their hovel in Central Falls last month, but she’d never reported him missing.”

“Sounds fishy.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What did she say when you grilled her?”

“Stuck to her story for a couple of hours before she copped to selling the kid for four dime bags and three hundred in cash.”

“Jesus!”

“Yeah.”

“She ID the buyer?”

“All we got is a generic description—white male, average height, brown hair, no distinguishing marks. Showed her photos of the Winklers, but she was too addled to make an ID.”

“Did she know what the buyer wanted her kid for?”

“Says she didn’t. I don’t think she much cared.”

“You charging her?”

“With everything we can think of. Attila wants to put the bitch
under
the jail.”

“Give me a shovel,” I said, “and I’ll lend her a hand.”

38

The Sword of God arrived in pickup trucks—Fords, Chevys, and a couple of Toyotas. Most of them were already there at nine
A.M.
when I pulled Secretariat into the gravel parking lot off Herring Pond Road just north of the little mill town of Harrisville. I parked beside a red Chevy Silverado with a bumper sticker that read: “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.”

It was a clear Sunday morning. The snow cover gathered light from the weak winter sun, magnified it, and hurled it back into the air. The effect was blinding. I plucked my sunglasses from the dash, put them on, and watched members of the congregation climb out of their cabs and greet one another with smiles, hugs, and handshakes.

The church was a converted Sinclair filling station, the two islands where the pumps had been now just parallel humps in the snow. The trademark green brontosaurus had been pulled down from the roof and left where it had fallen. In its place was a plain wooden cross. Out front, one of those portable signs with interchangeable letters sat in the bed of a rusted, 1960s-vintage Dodge flatbed that had probably been towed in. The sign read:

Sword of God Baptist Church

Today’s Service:

The Blessing of the Guns

The men and teenage boys who crunched through the snow toward the church door cradled a variety of long guns. I spotted military assault rifles, deer rifles with scopes affixed, and a couple of shotguns. A few of the women toted rifles, too. Not to be left out, the children, some as young as five or six, lugged what appeared to be Daisy air rifles.

I took my Nikon out of its case, rolled down my window, and snapped a few shots—just in case I decided to write about this. Then I took my grandfather’s gun out of the glove box, held it in my hands for a moment, and put it back. In the unlikely event of trouble, I’d be too outgunned for it to do me any good; and the .45 didn’t need blessing. It had already been washed in my family’s blood.

By the time I pushed through the door, most of the parishioners were already seated on folding metal chairs arranged in neat rows on an oil-stained concrete floor. I counted forty-two people in all. I knew one of them, a young guy who’d overdone it, strapping a bandolier across his chest in an attempt to blend in. I caught his eye, and he quickly turned away. I didn’t see an organ or a choir.

I took a seat in back just as Reverend Crenson walked through the door of what had probably been the garage’s office. He was dressed in black and carried what looked to be a Revolutionary War–vintage musket at port arms. He rested its rusted barrel against an oaken lectern that looked as though it had been scavenged from a school auditorium.

“Welcome, my brothers and sisters, to the house of God,” he said, overenunciating so the word came out “
GOD-
duh.” He held out his hands palms up, commanding the congregation to rise, and led them in a spirited off-key rendition of all five verses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Scalici’s hogs could have sung it better, but they were into power ballads and 1970s arena rock. The folding chairs clattered as the members of the congregation returned to their seats.

The order of service was reminiscent of what you might see in any Baptist church: hymn, invocation, pastoral prayer, offering, doxology, hymn, scripture reading, hymn, sermon, benediction, closing hymn. But content was something else again.

“Brothers and sisters,” Reverend Crenson began, “have you heard the troubling news? The loathsome pornographer still walks among us. The avenging angel sent by Almighty God destroyed one of this demon’s disciples, but his work is not yet complete. Bow your heads and pray with me for the death of Salvatore Maniella.”

He paused, surveyed his flock, rested his elbows on the lectern, and clasped his hands in prayer.

“Lord, if it be your will, choke the breath from this vile beast and condemn him to the fiery pit of hell. And while you’re at it, Lord, if it’s not too much trouble, please snuff out the life of our mongrel president, too. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

I’d read about right-wing preachers praying for the death of Barack Obama, but reading about it was one thing. Seeing it in person was quite another. My face was a mask, concealing revulsion.

Reverend Crenson opened his sermon with a declaration that the United States Constitution had been divinely inspired—“as holy a document as any book of the
BY
-a-bil.” That got me wondering why a divinely inspired document had needed to be amended twenty-seven times, but the preacher soon set me straight. The amendments, too, were written “under the guiding hand of
GOD
-duh.” That the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition, and the Twenty-first, which repealed it, were both divinely inspired seemed unlikely to me, but this wasn’t the time and place to make an issue out if it.

The rest of the sermon consisted of a warning that the Second Amendment, which seemed to be the reverend’s favorite, was under attack by liberals, socialists, communists, homosexuals, and “a socialist president who seeks to take our guns away so that he can enslave us.”

Then came the part that I’d come to hear:

“Dear Lord, we have faith that you did not place your children on this earth to be easy prey for the sons of Satan. We thank you for giving us the courage to defend ourselves and our families and to fight for what is right. Joyfully, we thank you for providing us with the tools to do so. Bless our guns, O Lord, and steady our hands so that our aim may be true. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

Afterward, the congregants arranged the chairs in a circle for an hour-long Bible study. Reverend Crenson surprised me with his tolerance for dissent on the topic of the day: whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist, as the preacher believed, or merely one of his minions.

As the members of the Sword of God gathered their guns and headed out, Reverend Crenson stood in the doorway and wrapped each of them in an embrace. When it was my turn, he grasped my right hand in both of his, curled his lips into a smile, thanked me for coming, and urged me to come again.

39

A couple of days later, Fiona joined me for breakfast at the diner.

“We got the names of the pedophiles from the Internet providers,” she said, “and one of them fits the profile.”

“The profile?”

“Yeah. He’s a fucking priest.”

“Oh boy.”

“Father Rajane Valois of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

“Who are the others?” I pulled a notepad from my hip pocket and took notes as she rattled off the names, ages, and hometowns of five middle-aged men from Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Florida; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Andover, Massachusetts; and Edison, New Jersey.

“They in custody yet?”

“They’re all out of state,” she said, “so we have to turn this over to the FBI. Probably be a couple of weeks before they move on it.”

“The names are off the record till they do?”

“Yeah. Don’t want to tip the bastards off. After that, do me a favor and make them famous.”

“I will,” I said. “It’s a big story. The AP will pick it up and move it on the national wire. The perverts will get to read about themselves on the front pages of their hometown newspapers.”

“Good,” she said.

“Think there’s a connection between the Chad Brown murders and the Providence PD’s child porn raid on Colfax Street a couple of months back?”

“There must be,” she said. “I mean, what are the odds that there were two child porn factories in our little state? The way I figure it, the Winklers were running their operation out of Colfax Street, somehow got away when the bust went down, and moved their operation to Chad Brown.”

“That’s how I figure it, too.”

“Of course, we don’t know for sure,” she said. “The Providence cops are pissed at the way Parisi’s been bigfooting them, so they’re stonewalling us.”

“I don’t suppose Dr. Charles Wayne’s name has come up in any of this.”

That startled her. “Some reason it should?”

So I told her what I’d heard, leaving McCracken and Peggi out of it. “Be nice if we could get a look at his home computer,” I said.

“It would, but we can’t. There’s no probable cause for a warrant.”

We lapsed into silence as Charlie shuffled over to top off our coffees. The silence dragged when he moseyed back to the grill. We were probably both thinking the same thing: We didn’t have a clue who was behind the Chad Brown murders. The body parts at the pig farm were still a dead end. And we had no idea why Sal’s double had been whacked. We were just blundering around in the dark.

We broke the silence at the same time.

“Could it all be connected somehow?” I asked, just as Fiona said:

“What if it’s all connected?”

“Parisi won’t speculate,” I said.

“But we will,” she said.

So we started brainstorming, throwing out ideas that had been bouncing around in our skulls for weeks.

“A war between rival pornographers?” I suggested.

“Maybe. The Chad Brown creeps try to whack Sal so he whacks them.”

“Of course, the creeps could have been working for Sal.”

“In that case,” Fiona said, “maybe Arena and Grasso whacked them all to settle their old strip club beef.”

“Then again, what if this is all the handiwork of the Sword of God?” I said, and started to give her a rundown on Sunday’s service.

“I heard all about that,” she interrupted. “Parisi planted an undercover in the congregation to keep an eye on them.”

“Jimmy Ludovich,” I said.

“How’d you know that?”

“I saw him there Sunday.”

I sipped coffee that was turning as cold as my investigation.

“Got anything solid yet on the Maniellas’ illegal campaign contributions?” Fiona asked.

“Not yet.”

“That’s what you should be concentrating on. You’re a reporter, not a cop. Murder investigations are way out of your league.”

“You’re probably right.”

She picked up her cup of coffee, discovered it was cold, clunked it back on the table, and sighed.

“So we’re still nowhere with all of this,” she said.

“Only thing we can be pretty sure of,” I said, “is that the body parts at Scalici’s farm came from the Chad Brown snuff film factory.”

“No, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be sure of anything.”

40

Christmas Day I didn’t have anything better to do, so I volunteered for a double shift on the city desk again. I edited the annual holiday traffic fatal—a family of five erased in a collision with a snowplow—and was scrolling the AP national wire when a story out of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, caught my eye.

The parish priest at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church had presided over midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but he failed to show up for Mass on Christmas morning. Alarmed, the vicar went looking for him, found the back door of the rectory kicked in, and called the police. Two patrolmen arrived promptly and discovered that the place had been ransacked. They found the priest dead in his bed. Father Rajane Valois had been executed with a single gunshot to the back of his head.

I thought about calling Parisi to see if he’d heard the news, but it
was
Christmas. I figured it could wait a day. Twenty minutes later, Jimmy Cagney’s voice shrieked from my cell phone: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

“Merry Christmas, Captain.”

“Not so merry in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”