Mortal Sin (42 page)

The Adams for U.S. Senate campaign headquarters was tucked away in a narrow storefront on a West End side street, in the shadow of the State House perched high atop Beacon Hill. The early afternoon sun reflected off gleaming windows plastered with campaign posters bearing slogans like
Adams for Senate in 2004
and
Tom Adams
—
Standing Tall for Massachusetts
. Inside, fresh-faced, eager young campaign workers stuffed envelopes and typed letters and telephoned voters to enthusiastically urge them to cast their gubernatorial ballots for State Senator Thomas Adams, the Great White Hope of the people of Massachusetts.

Clancy lingered on the sidewalk outside the door. He and Tom Adams had sat on countless committees together, had stood side by side at a downtown soup kitchen, spooning food onto paper plates for the homeless. Together, they’d argued with the Licensing Board—and won the battle—when a local businessman had applied for a permit to open a new strip club in the heart of Chinatown. He’d been to Tom’s house, had dined with Tom’s pretty freckle-faced wife, Bess, and their two giggling daughters. The two of them had played racquetball together on occasion, had met for lunch a few times at Durgin-Park. They’d been friends, and there was nothing of the Tom Adams he knew, the clean-living, hardworking, caring family man, in the Tom Adams Terry had described, a man caught up in sin and darkness and degradation.

Sarah touched his ami, bringing him out of his reverie. “You okay?” she said.

He turned to look at her, wondered if the vulnerability in his eyes matched what he saw in hers. She knew as well as he did that this could be the link that would bring them to Kit. Or it could turn out to be simply another dead end. He took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m fine,” he said. “You?”

“Are you kidding, sugar? I’m a tough old broad. I can handle anything.”

He drank in her sweet face, memorized each line. “Tough, maybe,” he said. “Old, never. And I imagine you can handle just about anything. All right, then, let’s do it.”

A half-dozen smiling young faces looked up when they came in. He chose the nearest one, a twentyish girl with a buzz cut, a variety of earrings, and a Harvard sweatshirt. “Is Tom in?” he said.

“Back office,” she said, “straight ahead.”

He followed her directions to the open door at the back of the room. Tom sat at a polished walnut desk, one hand rubbing the nape of his neck, the phone balanced between his ear and his shoulder. His white dress shirt was wrinkled, open at the collar, his tie loosened. When he saw them, a broad smile crossed his handsome face, and he waved them inside. “I have to go, Jerry,” he said into the phone. “I have visitors. I’ll touch base with you later.”

He hung up the phone and stood. “Clancy,” he said heartily, reaching over the desk to shake hands. “Don’t tell me you’re here to volunteer. We could use a couple more warm bodies to stuff envelopes. Or maybe you’d like to make a campaign contribution.”

Clancy briefly clasped the senator’s hand and managed a weak smile. “Tom,” he said, “this is Sarah Connelly. Sarah, Tom Adams. We need to speak with you.”

While the two shook hands, Clancy glanced through the door into the room beyond, then closed it behind him.

Tom raised an eyebrow. “Why the closed door?”

“I suspect you might net want this broadcast to the entire world.”

Tom’s smile lost a little wattage, but held steady. “Grab a chair,” he said. “Sit down. What can I do for you?”

Silently, Clancy and Sarah settled into metal folding chairs. On one corner of Tom’s desk was a framed photo of Bess and the girls. Sweet, wholesome, smiling. The perfect family.

“There’s no way I can soft-pedal this,” he said, “so I’m just going to jump right in. According to my sources, you’ve recently developed an interest in filmmaking.”

Tom clasped his hands on the desktop and furrowed his brow. “Filmmaking?” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the little home movie you made a couple of weeks ago in Room 17 at the Starlite Motel in Peabody. I’m talking about a man named Rio with a camera, and a woman named Terry with a riding crop. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?”

Tom’s face paled, but his smile remained in place. “You’re kidding, right? This is some kind of joke.”

“I understand there were two other people in the room that night. A sound and lighting technician named Nate, and a blond, blue-eyed sixteen-year-old girl named Kit. The same girl I’ve been looking for since March. The same girl we talked about just a few weeks ago. The one you promised to help me find.”

Tom’s complexion had turned to a sickly gray pallor, and he’d begun to sweat. “You have to understand—”

“I expected better of you, Tom. I thought you were an honorable man. But now I realize that the man I thought I knew doesn’t exist. He’s nothing more than a media creation designed to further your political aspirations.”

Fiercely, Tom said, “You have no right to judge me.”

“No,” he said. “Only God has that right. But I do have a right to certain expectations, among them, honesty.”

“I’ve never been dishonest with you.”

“You’ve been dishonest with everyone. You’ve been dishonest with me, with your family, with all the people who are so eager to send you to Washington. How will you answer to them, Tom? What’ll you do if the police arrest Terry for prostitution and your name shows up in the
Globe
as one of her regular Johns? What do you think that would do to Bess and the girls? Have you even thought about them at all?”

Tom’s face went slack as his tough, shiny facade began to crack, one smooth brick at a time. “Jesus,” he said, and buried his face in his trembling hands. “Christ Jesus.”

It wasn’t easy, watching a man he’d trusted, a man he’d admired, a man he’d considered a friend, crumbling like week-old bread. But he sat in silence and waited for Tom to pull himself together.

It took a while. Eventually, Tom got up and walked to the window. He stood looking out, his dress shirt ringed with sweat, his shoulders quivering. Bleakly, he said, “All my life, I’ve done the right thing. Went to the right schools, earned the right degree, dated the right girls. Got the right job. Married the right woman.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and absently jingled a fistful of change. “Bess is pregnant again, you know. Number three.”

He turned away from the window, a rivulet of sweat trickling from his forehead. “I love my wife and my girls,” he said hoarsely. “More than anything. If they find this out, it’ll kill them. If the rest of the world finds out, my career will be down the toilet. It’s such a small thing, really. Once in a while, I just need something a little… more. Something I’d never ask Bess to give me. I—” He paused, looked at them both beseechingly. “Is that really so awful?”

Quietly, Clancy said, “You’re playing with fire, Tom. Did you really think you wouldn’t get burned?”

Tom had aged ten years in the past five minutes. He looked old. Defeated. “She was with Rio,” he said wearily. “I hardly looked at her. We never even exchanged words. I didn’t realize she was the same girl. If I had—” He closed his eyes, shoved his fingers through carefully arranged hair. “I’d never touch a girl that young,” he said. “You know that. She’s not much older than my own girls. I’d kill anybody who touched one of them.”

Clancy leaned forward in his chair. “Then you should be able to understand our determination to get her away from Rio. This man is trouble, Tom. Poison to a young girl like Kit.”

A new thought appeared to occur to Tom. “Good God,” he said. “You mean to tell me it was
Rio
who beat you up?”

“Not in person. But his message came through loud and clear.”

“That son of a—” Tom paused, shook his head. Although his color had begun to return, his cockiness was gone. Clancy suspected it might be some time before it reappeared. If it ever did. “What is it you want?” Tom said. “What can I do to help?”

“You can get in touch with Rio,” Clancy told him. “And set me up for one of his video extravaganzas. With Kit.”

The seconds ticked away while the two men locked gazes. Neither spoke, neither gave an inch until, without a word, Tom reached out and picked up the telephone.

Clancy paced the tiny office, hands in his pockets, and listened as Tom wove an elaborate tale about an out-of-town friend who liked his girls young and blond, and who’d pay whatever it cost to get a couple of hours in front of the camera with the hot young blonde who’d been with Rio the other night. He was so convincing, so sincere, that Clancy nearly believed the story himself. But then, he’d never had reason to doubt Tom’s veracity until now. While he paced, Tom and Rio settled on a price, a time, a location. Tonight, 9:30, the Starlite Motel. Three thousand dollars cash. The price of a young girl’s innocence.

Now there was nothing left to do but wait.

They were both subdued when he dropped Sarah off at Bookmark an hour later. In the privacy of his car, she took his hand in hers, rubbed a soft fingertip over the fleshy base of his thumb, and threaded their fingers together. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know he was your friend.”

He turned their clasped hands upside down and examined their entwined fingers. Brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“Don’t,” she said. “Somebody will see.”

“To hell with them. To hell with all of them.” There in the parking lot of the Northgate Mall, in broad daylight and in full view of the world, he kissed her with desperate intensity. He buried his face in her hair and drew a hard, shuddering breath. Backed away and tucked her hair behind her ear. “Go,” he said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

His stomach churned all the way back to Saint Bart’s. Melissa took one look at his face and sighed. “I knew it was too good to last,” she said.

He didn’t bother to answer. Inside his study, he locked the door behind him and reached into the candy jar on his desk for a hit of cinnamon and sugar. He plopped heavily onto his chair, picked up a paper clip from the container on his desk, and began twisting and bending it with ferocious intent.

He destroyed paper clip after paper clip as he played and replayed the last twenty-four hours of his life, like a videotape in his head. Play, rewind, fast-forward. Play, rewind, fast-forward. No matter how often he replayed the tape, the pictures always came out the same. Sarah, lush and earthy and sweetly, agonizingly tender. The scent of her perfume
played
in his head like the wispy strains of a half-remembered melody. Velvet skin, velvet sighs, velvet kisses. He’d thought he remembered what it was like, this damning combination of tenderness and lust that brought a man and a woman together in a fiery conflagration, but his memories were dusty, insubstantial. They bore no resemblance to the exquisite reality of loving Sarah. What he’d felt for Meg had been nothing compared to this. He’d been a boy then, hot-tempered and hot-blooded, determined to win the prize no matter what the cost. Now he was a man, with a man’s appetites and a man’s capacity to love. And last night he’d tasted heaven, even though he knew that grasping it was an impossibility.

He pulled a sheet of paper from the desk drawer, crumpled it into a ball, and let it fly. It reached the far wall of his study before it crashed and burned. After years of exposure to the streets and the people who populated them, he’d thought himself beyond idealism, immune to the disappointment one human could cause another. But apparently that idealist still dwelt somewhere inside him. And he was heartsick about this mess with Tom.

They weren’t really so far apart, Tom and he. Not when you looked past the outer trappings and dug down to the heart of the matter. Tom had made a vow to Bess, a vow he’d broken by participating in adulterous sex. Clancy had made a similar vow to God, and he, too, had broken his vow. Did it make him a better person than Tom because he’d broken that vow with a woman he loved instead of a prostitute? A vow was a vow, and come Judgment Day, he didn’t expect he’d be getting any brownie points just because he happened to be in love with the woman in question. God wasn’t the IRS, with exceptions and sub-paragraphs and exemptions from responsibility for those who needed them the least. His laws were clear, straightforward, unbendable.

Elbows propped on the desktop, Clancy raked his hands through his hair. He’d come to Sarah’s bed with a clear head and a clean conscience, and though all the demons of hell might torment him for eternity, he would carry no regrets away from it. For one night, he’d been reminded of what it meant to be fully alive, and he would carry the bittersweet memory with him for the rest of his days. But the ending to their story was already written, cemented by fate and his station in life. Michael had been right. No matter what a man chose to do, no matter whether he chose good or evil or something that lived in the shadowy area between the two, there were consequences to face. There always had been, and always would be, a piper to pay. How he chose to make that payment—and to whom—determined whether or not a man was capable of meeting his own eyes in the mirror each morning for the rest of his days.

He couldn’t have it both ways. He couldn’t continue to live with one foot in the Church and the other in the secular world. It was tearing him apart, and merely prolonging the inevitable. He and Sarah couldn’t be together. Not the way he wanted to be, not if he wanted to remain a priest. It was time to make a choice.

He picked up the telephone and called Bishop Halloran.

She was sitting on the couch, watching
Wheel of Fortune
, with Pixel’s soft muzzle cradled in her lap, when Rio came in whistling. Kit eyed him suspiciously. Ever since the night Gonzales had come to the house, the night Rio’d dragged her out to that awful motel, the two of them had existed in a state of armed truce. She’d treated him with the same distant courtesy she would have shown a stranger. Although he’d wheedled and cajoled and tried just about everything he could think of to win back her favor, she hadn’t budged an inch. She’d been a fool to trust him in the first place, a fool to fall for his boyish smile and his winsome ways. Now she was a prisoner who wouldn’t even be granted parole.