The Man Who Murdered God Read online

  “Eight glorious years,” McGuire replied. He slammed the car’s accelerator to the floor and blasted the horn at two high-school students attempting to jaywalk. “Then Ollie has to go and snap up retirement first chance he gets. Not a day more. Pension comes due and he’s out the door like a tourist with the trots.”

  Lipson sucked on his mint, gripping the dashboard as McGuire swung hard onto Centre Street. “How do you feel about working with me?” he asked.

  McGuire risked a quick glance at the other man. “It’s okay.” He looked back to the road then over at Lipson again. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Well, you were the best damn team in the department, you and Ollie. It’s gotta be a jolt. One week you’re working with Ollie, the next week you’re sharing your office with an overweight Jew you hardly know.” He grinned at McGuire. “So get it out. How’s it feel?”

  McGuire braked hard at a stop sign, throwing both of them forward before squealing the car’s tires and pulling away. “How’s it feel working with an atheist?” he growled.

  Lipson steadied himself with a hand on the dashboard again. “You like pastrami, garlic dills and latkes?”

  “Love ’em.”

  “We’ll get along fine. My mother, she always said there’s nothing wrong with a man who likes good kosher food.”

  The two detectives worked around the body as though it wasn’t there, while the faded blue eyes of Reverend Lynch still studied the stains of his beloved oak ceiling. Other professionals summoned by sudden death added their presence and movements, all muted in quiet competence and familiarity. Photographer, medical examiner, fingerprint team, uniformed police officers, and ambulance attendants wheeling their cart into position were all in constant controlled motion. Only Thomas Lynch was still.

  The medical examiner, a wheezing overweight man named Mel Doitch, approached McGuire and Lipson as they stood taking notes. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “What do you need?” he asked.

  Doitch was generally uncommunicative, a man respected, if not socially embraced, by other members of the homicide division. “Shows what happens when you spend too much time around dead people,” Ollie Schantz had said once about Mel Doitch. “You start repeating the things they say.”

  “How long you figure he’s been dead?” McGuire asked.

  “Not long. Hour, hour and a half at the most.” Doitch raised his heavy Slavic face to look around the church interior as he spoke. “Less than two hours anyway. By the looks of all the blood that pumped out of him, he didn’t go right away. Lived a few minutes.” He glanced back at McGuire. “If that matters.”

  McGuire nodded, and Doitch gestured to the ambulance attendants to remove the body.

  “Can’t tell right away,” Doitch added, snapping his small black leather bag closed, “but I’m betting the shotgun was sawed-off.”

  “What makes you think so?” It was Lipson, glancing up from his notepad.

  “Pellets go deep, so he was hit at fairly close range. I’d say no more than ten feet. But the pattern isn’t tight. Spread all over. Some in the neck, some in the thighs. Full length barrel keeps a tighter pattern than that.” He glanced at his watch, the leather bag in his other hand. “Have a report for you about three. How’s that sound?”

  McGuire said it sounded fine and stood frowning at the priest’s body as Doitch’s footsteps echoed down the aisle.

  From outside the church came the noise of the crowd that had been materialized by the police lines, ambulances and the aura of tragedy, and that McGuire and Lipson had walked through to reach the church. Wide-eyed kids on bicycles. Housewives with arms folded across the front of sweaters pulled hastily over cheap cotton dresses, and with heads inclined towards each other, trading and creating gossip. Unshaven men shifting their weight and their cigarette butts from side to side.

  “That doesn’t fit, does it?” McGuire said, lifting his head and looking at the stained-glass windows. The sun was beaming through them, illuminating a bearded man with a halo and purple robe. Gathered at the man’s feet were other bearded men in robes, and children with golden curls and white wings. Sheep grazed in the fields behind them.

  “Fit? What doesn’t fit?” Bernie Lipson tucked his note pad back into his jacket pocket.

  “The sawed-off shotgun. That’s a strong-arm piece. You don’t go after somebody you’ve got a grudge against with a sawed-off.”

  “A grudge killing? That’s what you figure we’ve got?”

  McGuire glanced at his partner, frowning deeper. “Why else would somebody kill a harmless old priest? But that’s the point. You get pissed at somebody, you grab the nearest thing to kill him with, then you go and do it. Why a sawed-off?”

  Lipson shrugged. “Why a priest?”

  McGuire ignored the question. He lifted his head and called out, “Who was the first investigating officer here?”

  A black uniformed cop separated himself from the group of police officers gathered near the front door and strode quickly down the aisle. “I was, Lieutenant,” he said as he approached McGuire. “Dave Baxter, out of the tenth precinct.” He reached into the breast pocket of his tunic and withdrew a wire-bound notebook. McGuire immediately assessed him as a good cop. “You want my notes now?”

  McGuire shook his head. “I’ll get them later. How’d you get in here when you arrived?”

  “Through the front.” The cop tilted his head in the direction of the Gothic wooden doors.

  “They were unlocked?”

  Baxter said they were. Closed, but unlocked, with no sign of forced entry. “And the back door was locked. With a dead bolt you can’t release without a key.”

  “Did you do a sweep of the area?” McGuire demanded.

  “For suspects, Lieutenant?”

  “For anything.”

  “No, sir. I did a cursory check of the immediate interior for any unauthorized individuals. Then I called headquarters and tried to keep Mrs. Kelley calm.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “The lady who found the body.” He nodded in the direction of a door in an alcove near the altar. “She’s there, in the priest’s office.” He elevated his eyebrows. “Practically a basket case. The doctor who was here, the medical examiner, he gave her a shot to calm her down.”

  Bernie Lipson asked, “Anything disturbed when you got here? Did it look like anything was

  taken?”

  The officer shook his head. “It was weird, but, you know, I couldn’t see where anything was disturbed.”

  “What do you mean, weird?” McGuire demanded.

  “Well, spooky, kind of.” He shifted his weight and shrugged. “When I got here, I figured it’s some kind of joke. There’s nobody around except a paper boy riding by on his bicycle. Then I walk in the church, and all I hear is screaming and wailing, and this woman is running around the church, kind of bouncing off walls and crying and pounding things. And there’s the priest, with his insides all blown apart, in the middle of the aisle. And everything else is quiet, you know?” He grimaced and shrugged again. “Weird.”

  “Get two of your buddies and check the interior for anything. Send two more to scout the perimeter of the church, right down to the sidewalk. You find something, don’t touch it. Just come and get us.” He jerked his thumb at the oak door near the altar. “We’ll be in there, talking to the woman who found him.”

  Whatever Doitch had given Mrs. Kelley, McGuire decided when he saw her, it hadn’t been enough.

  The woman, in her mid-fifties, was lying on a leather couch in the priest’s small office, weeping hysterically, her hands fluttering in the air above her head like frantic birds. Another woman, about the same age, was sitting on the edge of the couch beside her, wiping her brow with a damp cloth and making soothing noises.

  The other woman introduced herself as Mrs. Drainie, a neighbour. “She’s bee
n like this for an hour,” she said, standing and stepping aside as the detectives approached. “Poor woman.” She crossed herself and lowered her head. “Poor Father Lynch.” Looking back and forth between the two men, she asked, “Would you be wanting me to leave?”

  McGuire told her no, he’d rather she stayed, and she nodded and stood against a wall.

  “Mrs. Kelley,” McGuire said softly, kneeling to look directly at the woman. “I’m Lieutenant McGuire and this is my partner, Lieutenant Lipson. We’re with the homicide squad. Can we ask you a few questions?”

  The woman turned to McGuire, and he was struck by the agony on her face. He had seen people in pain before, people who were suffering terribly and dying and knew it. Mrs. Kelley wore the same expression, her face contorted in torture, and it seemed to fall apart as she spoke.

  “Who would do it?” she wailed. “Who would kill that man, that perfectly good man?” She reached a fluttering hand towards McGuire and seized the sleeve of his jacket. “He was a saint. He was, sweet and unselfish and . . .” She withdrew her hand quickly from McGuire and reached without looking for a string of prayer beads lying beside her on the couch. Clutching them tightly, she turned her face away and began mumbling, her fingers shifting the beads in spastic motion.

  “Was there anyone here when you found him?” McGuire asked gently. “Did you see anybody in the church or outside, hanging around the grounds?”

  She shook her head.

  Over the next ten minutes, with both McGuire and Lipson taking turns with their questions, the detectives assembled Mrs. Kelley’s story.

  She had been Thomas Lynch’s housekeeper for almost ten years. Each morning, at precisely seven-thirty, she would arrive at the back door of the church and let herself in with her key. She would enter the rectory, prepare orange juice, toast and tea and carry it in to Reverend Lynch’s small office, where they were now. Twice a week she would change the sheets on his bed, put clean towels in the bathroom and take his dirty laundry to her home two blocks away. On alternate days she would dust his living quarters, then make his lunch—“Soup and sandwich and tea . . . I would leave the soup on the stove for him to heat . . . he had simple needs, there was nothing demanding about the poor father. . . .”—and be home by mid-morning. For all of this she was paid the same amount as when she had begun, twenty dollars each week. “Oh, but I would have done it for nothing, for the father, for the pleasure of being of service to such an angel, such a good, good man of the faith.”

  On this day she had brought breakfast to his office. It was unusual but not surprising to find the office empty, so she had left the meal on his desk. It was there, untouched, when she returned after tidying his bathroom and replacing the towels. She entered the church to call him.

  “When I first saw him, I thought the poor father had fallen and struck his head on a pew,” she whimpered. “So I ran to him, ran right up to the poor man, and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw his . . . his. . . .” She covered her mouth with her hand, and Mrs. Drainie moved quickly to wipe her forehead with the damp cloth.

  McGuire turned to his partner, his eyebrows raised. Lipson nodded in agreement, and they stood up, thanked the women, and left.

  “What’d you find?” Lipson asked Officer Baxter as they re-entered the church.

  Baxter shook his head. “Nothing,” he replied. “Place is clean as a whistle except for a little mouse shit along the walls. Looking for anything special?”

  McGuire nodded. “A spent shell, I’d hoped. How about the squad outside?”

  Baxter replied that he hadn’t heard anything from them, but he would go and check.

  “They probably scooped it off the floor, the empty shell,” Lipson suggested.

  “Or left it in the gun.” McGuire was returning his notebook to his pocket.

  “Either way, what’s it tell us?”

  “Think about it. You’re used to handling a shotgun, you’re in a mad rage at a priest about something, you walk into his church and fire the gun at close range into his gut. If you’re familiar with using a shotgun, what’s the first thing you do? Instinctively?”

  Lipson nodded in understanding. “Pump it. If it’s a repeater.”

  “Even if it’s a single shot, you pop the Goddamn shell. But you don’t kill the guy in a rage then scoop up the shell and take off with it. People mad enough to kill a priest in his own church don’t get that rational.”

  “So what’re you saying?”

  “That it’s a professional job, somebody cool enough to walk off with evidence. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or somebody who isn’t used to a shotgun maybe. Just left with the shell still in the chamber.”

  “Lieutenant McGuire?” Baxter was back, standing at McGuire’s elbow. “The squad outside reports nothing found. And there’s a Reverend Deeley here. Says the archdiocese sent him over. Wants to talk to you.”

  McGuire looked up as the door opened, flooding the church with morning sunshine and crowd noises. A priest was edging his way past the cops at the door; one of them gestured at the two detectives.

  “Still doesn’t tell us a lot. About the shell I mean,” Lipson muttered, watching the priest approach.

  “It tells us we’re probably not looking for some juiced-up neighbour who has a repeating shotgun he’s used before,” McGuire answered. He paused to watch the reaction of the priest, who was staring in horror at the dark stain in the carpeting where Reverend Lynch’s body position had been outlined in chalk. “Hell, maybe you’re right, Bernie. Maybe it isn’t worth much.”

  “Is this where Reverend Lynch died?” It was the priest, looking at each of the detectives in turn, a painful expression on his face, his mouth slightly open in horror.

  McGuire nodded and stepped aside as the man dropped to one knee beside the outline, crossed himself and bowed his head.

  “Joe? Bernie?” A round-faced man with rimless glasses motioned McGuire to join him at the end of one of the pews. “Got a minute?” The two detectives left the priest as he prayed. They walked between the pews to join the man, who was carefully folding clear strips of plastic into a binder.

  “You get anything, Norm?” McGuire asked the man as they approached. Norm Cooper was a fingerprint specialist, called The Wizard by members of the Boston police force. In one celebrated kidnapping and murder investigation Cooper had managed to locate a partial fingerprint, barely a quarter of an inch wide, on a brass window fixture. The positive identification led to a successful conviction—of the victim’s own stepfather. “Norm Cooper could pull week-old prints off a whore’s ass,” Ollie Schantz observed once, and no one had disagreed.

  “Couple of partials on the inside doorknob look fresh,” Cooper was saying as he packed his paraphernalia into a small aluminum case. “I’ll have to compare them with the victim’s. Go down later and take them, see if we have anything.”

  “The outside of the doorknob, how about it?” Lipson asked.

  “Not a hope,” Cooper said, standing up. “Sorry, Bernie. It’s old cast-iron, pitted to hell. Plus the cop who investigated opened the door with it, rubbed off anything that might have been there.” He shrugged. “We’ll have to make do with what I’ve got, unless there’s some other place to dust.”

  McGuire looked back over his shoulder at the kneeling priest. In his mind he measured the distance to the front door and subtracted ten feet. “I don’t think so, Norm,” he said. “Everything points to the killer opening the door, walking about eight feet into church, then turning around and leaving.” He looked back at Cooper. “Show us whatever you got from the inside knob that’s not the victim’s, okay?”

  When they returned to the centre aisle of the church, Deeley was standing again. McGuire approached, his hand outstretched. He introduced himself and Lipson to the priest, who explained he had been sent over by the diocese to offer any help the dep
artment might need.

  “You have no idea how upsetting this is to the people over on Commonwealth,” he said as he shook Bernie Lipson’s hand. “I mean, aside from the absolute horror of what happened here. Father Lynch . . . Reverend Lynch was a wonderful man, well-loved, well-respected by everyone, even some of the people at the diocese who are not very easy to please.” He shook his head and stared at his shoes, black and finely polished. “This makes no sense, absolutely no sense at all.” He looked up at McGuire and Lipson. “What can I do to help you find the madman who did this?”

  “You know Mrs. Kelley, the housekeeper?” McGuire asked.

  “Yes, I do,” Deeley replied. “Is she here?”

  “She found the body. She can use some help from somebody like you right now.” McGuire jerked his thumb at the door alongside the altar. “She’s in there.” He touched Deeley’s shoulder as the priest began heading towards the office area. “We have to talk to neighbours, find out if anybody heard or saw anything. Can you see us down at headquarters later today? Sometime around two, three o’clock?”

  The priest said he would be there at three sharp. McGuire watched him go, then turned and started walking to the front door. “Come on, Bernie,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s find out who was up with the birds this morning.”

  Chapter Three

  “Go over it again, Bernie.”

  McGuire, his feet on the desk, crumpled the coffee cup and tossed it at the far corner of their cubicle. It struck the side of a filing cabinet and bounced against the wall, then dropped neatly into the wastebasket.

  “How high did they draft you?” Lipson asked. “The Celtics?” He looked up to see McGuire watching him patiently. Shifting his bulk in the chair, Lipson arranged the three pages of notes in front of him and began reading from the paper in a monotone.

  “Victim—Reverend Thomas Henry Lynch. Age—sixty-three. Height—five foot ten. Weight—one hundred and seventy-three pounds. Residence—St. Eugene’s Parish Church, 2134 Roanoke Street. Cause of death—massive hemorrhaging and trauma due to firearm wound, lower abdomen. Estimated time of death—6:30 a.m.”