Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

Lentini stepped out to make a call, clutching his ever-present clipboard. He was back in a minute. “Take your seats, men. The commissioner’s in the elevator.”

You could almost smell the testosterone in the room as the city’s best murder investigators staked out places and readied their notepads.

Sadly for the victims, not all homicides are created equal. The choice of religious institutions as this killer’s backdrop and tortured young women as his prey ratcheted up the level of interest and outrage of this select team. Gang members, junkies, and the great unwashed dead of the metropolitan area would be shuffled to back burners until this perp was caught.

“Thanks for your patience, men.” Keith Scully entered the room with his first dep and a second man carrying a laptop, and it was as though the spine of each of us around the table automatically stiffened as we mumbled some version of “good evening” to the commissioner. His professionalism was unmistakable, as was the ramrod straightness of his Marine bearing, physically and metaphorically.

I had known Scully for six or seven years, from the time when he had been chief of detectives, on the steady climb up the ladder to the top cop post, which was a mayoral appointment. He was tall and sinewy, with close-cut hair now gone silver, and as many creases etched into his face as there were constant crises thrown onto his lap.

“How many guys you got on this, Ray?” Lieutenant Peterson was the senior man in the room, so Scully started with him.

“A dozen, Keith.” The two privileges the old-timer was allowed were still addressing the commissioner by his first name and smoking his cigarettes inside headquarters. No one else dared do either.

“Double it. By tomorrow’s day shift. Same goes for all of you.”

“Manpower’s an issue,” Peterson said. “My men each got a full plate as it is, and then you sent that new directive about limiting overtime — which, I gotta say, pissed everybody off.”

“Tell them to eat their overtime. Shove it. You’ve got tonight to organize yourselves. Get a good meal and whatever rest you can in the next twelve hours. I don’t expect you to sleep again till you bring this guy down,” Scully said. “Your world turns upside down tomorrow when we let the media know we’ve got an ID on the victim.”

Manny Chirico pushed back from the table. The rest of us were riveted on Keith Scully.

“Her name is Ursula Hewitt.” Scully pointed to his tech aide, who flashed one of the crime-scene photos of her from his Power-Point file onto the wall screen.

If you hadn’t seen the body in the churchyard firsthand, there was nothing like a life-size color blowup to jump-start this crew for a full-on manhunt. I could hear the intake of breath and a few “holy shits” from around the table.

“Female Caucasian,” Scully went on, like he was calling cadence. “Thirty-nine years old. Born in Forest Hills. Flushing Boulevard. Attended church and parochial school there.”

Most of the men in the room were Catholic. That fact was probably intended to juice them a bit more.

“Our Lady Queen of Martyrs,” Mike whispered. He often said that New York and New Orleans were the only two cities in the country in which the devout identified themselves by their parish affiliations, rather than neighborhoods.

The next slide was a photograph of the young Hewitt from her high school yearbook, offering all the freshness and promise of youth. She was slimmer then, and the contrast between her slender neck and the slashed throat of the morning’s scene was horrifying.

“Ursula’s uncle called the mayor’s office at five twenty-three this evening. He lives in San Francisco, but he’s got a high school buddy who works at City Hall. She’d been staying with friends in Manhattan but never made it home last night. It was his birthday, and she was certain to call. Then he heard about the body at St. Pat’s on the radio, but he thought he didn’t have enough reason to call the police. Just that it was one of her favorite churches, which snagged his radar. We went over to compare photographs from the scene with the one from her last visit that her uncle scanned in to his friend at City Hall.”

The next picture went up on the third screen. It was a more recent image of Ursula Hewitt, dressed in flowing clerical vestments. The floor-length alb of white linen was perfectly draped over her, with a scarlet stole on her shoulders that ran down the length of the garment, and a large cross around her neck.

“This is Ursula Hewitt,” Scully said, his lips clamped tightly together as he paused. “Three years ago, when she was ordained as a Catholic priest.”

There was dead silence in the room as we all took in the photo, till a split second later when one of the guys from Manhattan South broke in with a nervous laugh. “Hey, chief. We don’t got lady priests. We got nuns.”

Keith Scully didn’t brook interruptions.

“Ursula Hewitt was a Catholic priest. She was ordained in a neighborhood church in Back Bay, Boston. She even celebrated Mass a few times at Old St. Pat’s.”

Most of the men looked perplexed, as surprised as I was to hear that fact.

“She was excommunicated by the Vatican a year later, because of that ordination. So we’ve got another outcast on our hands, gentlemen,” Scully said. “Another pariah.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“FORM your pods, guys,” Scully said. “Put your working groups together tonight, figure out a way to keep each other up to speed on anything you discover — one from each team who can be the contact person — and report to the first dep every couple of hours, even if to say you’ve got nothing new. Nobody talks to reporters except Guido. Nobody.”

“The vic’s uncle, Keith. He got any ideas?” Peterson asked.

“The usual. She’s had stalkers, hate mail from the faithful, and worse from the Vatican. He was keeping close tabs on her because she was getting overwhelmed by the way she’d been treated.” The commissioner was going in ten directions at once. “You’re not only looking for the perp himself — or maybe it’s more than one person. Find me an abattoir — a slaughterhouse, a cage of some kind, a basement or rooftop, maybe a commercial van he’s turned into his chop shop. Check for stolen vehicles. A place these killings happen without this bastard calling attention to himself.”

“One more thing, Keith, if you don’t mind,” the lieutenant said. He had earlier told Scully and the group about Mike’s coup on the Fordham campus. “Do like Chapman today. Think outside the box for a change.”

The sergeant from Mounted slapped Mike’s back. “He’s lived an entire life outside the box. That’s all this guy knows. Don’t start giving him credit for it.”

“This wasn’t my original plan for the six o’clock meeting,” Scully said. “But the ID changed the whole point of having you here. Let’s hit the ground running at daybreak.”

Mike, Mercer, Nan, and I huddled with Peterson. He wanted us to have someone familiar with the waterfront, at least two men from South, and anyone Chirico could spare from the Night Watch crew.

“Can you step out for a minute, Alex?” Scully asked.

“Of course,” I said more eagerly than I meant. I figured that he wanted to get some assurance from me that he — not Paul Battaglia — would be calling the shots in this investigation. “Nan too?”

“No. Just you.”

I looked over at my friend for support. She could do no more than raise her eyebrows.

Scully took me into the hallway and around the corner so our voices wouldn’t echo. “I need you to step down from this case, Alex.”

“I can’t believe you just said that. You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“You know me better than that. Step down. I don’t want any further discussion.”

“You don’t want to discuss this? Neither do I, Keith, because there’s really nothing to talk about,” I said, flailing my arms around more than I wanted to be doing. “I don’t work for you, Commissioner. You can’t give me an order like I’m one of your troops and think I’m going to salute you and slink away.”

I could feel the color rise in my cheeks as the anger swelled up inside me. I struggled to keep my temper under control.

“Don’t raise your voice to me, Alex.”

“What are you worried about? That Battaglia might hear you trying to take over his operation? Have you bothered to speak with him yet?”

“I don’t need to do that. This directive comes from the mayor.”

“Is it some kind of grudge match held over from our case at Gracie Mansion?” The mayor had been embarrassed by a crime scene at his official residence, so maybe that had me in the crosshairs. I was furious.

“You’re more insightful than that, Alex.”

“Maybe some days I am, Keith.” I was crossing a line, I knew, trying to remind him by the intimacy of first names of nights we spent sitting on bar stools at dives in the worst part of town, celebrating victories after breaking our asses together on the city’s toughest cases. “This isn’t one of them. Give me a reason.”

“I’m the PC. I don’t have to give you a reason.” He had lowered his voice. We were staring each other down, just inches apart.

“I’m on this case,” I turned my back to him and started to walk, but he grabbed my arm.

“Not if I tell my men not to work with you.”

“This is so not your style, Keith. I didn’t know you had a bit of the bully in you.”

“You need me to spell it out?”

“That would help.”

“How’s your relationship with the cardinal?”

“Not as good as the mayor’s, if I had to guess. I’ve never met the man.”

“Slamming Bishop Deegan in the courtroom, were you?”

“Ah, the fog is lifting a bit.”

“I’m trying to take you out of the frying pan, Alex, before you burn up to a crisp. Back out gracefully. You got the transit rapist, you got the cold case with four victims that’s still likely to grow, you’ve got an endless array of crimes to keep you busy.”

“Is it because I’m a Jew?” I hadn’t raised my voice intentionally, but a door opened down the hall behind me. A detective looked out and Scully brushed him off with a wave.

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s got to be a man as the lead prosecutor here. Don’t you understand anything about the church?”

“I know you wanted a woman at the wheel when that sociopath killed an eighteen-year-old in Central Park. Compassion and sensitivity and bonding with all the teenage girls who were witnesses. ‘The jury, the public, will identify with a strong woman speaking for the victim.’ Remember that pitch? And I know you pleaded with Battaglia to keep Nan on top when you had the mother-son grifter team who left you to prove murder without a body.”

Keith Scully was really in my face now. “You want to be the distraction in all this, is that what you want? I can’t name five prosecutors in this country besides you who’ve gone after rogue priests. I’m as good a Catholic as they come, and I’m not proud of those guys, but the cardinal would rather not see you as the point person in this case. The mayor is standing with him on this.”

“And Battaglia’s already in bed with the bishop. How convenient. If it wasn’t so twisted, I might laugh.”

“How much do you know about the Vatican’s position on the ordination of women?” Scully asked.

“Absolutely nothing. If it’s your superior wisdom on this issue — and the cardinal’s inside track — I’m happy to say you’ve got me beat. But I’m a quick study, Keith. Asphyxia, the insanity defense, polymerase chain reaction in DNA testing. Ask the cardinal to tutor me for a few days and I promise to pass the tests.”

Scully gritted his teeth. “He doesn’t want to tutor you, Alex. I’ll give you the talking points.”

“Shall I take notes?”

“You won’t forget.” The commissioner’s hands were on his hips, confronting me head-on. “In the summer of 2010, the Vatican issued some new laws.”

That spring, the pedophilia scandals that had rocked America over the past few years had erupted as virulently in England and Ireland and across Europe. I assumed Scully was going back to finger-pointing at my role in that issue.

“You’re right, of course. I had no idea.”

“They actually extended the period during which a clergyman could be tried by a church court, under canon law, from ten to twenty years, starting from the eighteenth birthday of the victim.”

“How enlightened,” I said.

“At the very same time — and I’m not apologizing for this — the Vatican took a tougher position on the ordination of women.”

“How tough?” And why was it any different from Orthodox Jews, who wouldn’t allow female rabbis?

“They’ve bolted the door to women becoming priests. The Vatican declared the attempt at ordination to be a delicta graviora.”

“Where’s Mike when I need him? My Latin’s no good,” I said, making a half effort at a smile. “Oh, that’s right. You’re going to slap his hand if he tries to help me.”

“It translates as ‘grave crime,’ Alex.”

“You’re kidding me. It’s a grave crime for a woman to try to be ordained in the twenty-first century?”

“The Vatican declared it one of the most serious offenses in church law — as serious as heresy, or as schism. They raised it in punishment to as grave a crime as the clerical sexual abuse of minors.”

This was all new to me. I had no idea of the storm this subject had created.

“Do you understand now, Alex? Do you see why you’re the wrong man for this job?” Scully’s impatience with me revealed itself in his facetious remark.

“I think it’s called misogyny, Keith. Both you — and the church. The Vatican equates women priests with pedophiles?”

“Yes. At the moment, yes it does.”

“This is new?”

“Well, Rome had a different solution until recently. Between us, it actually makes me worried we’ve got a religious fanatic on our hands with this case. The next highest punishment, before excommunication, is called silencing. Any priests or nuns or theologians who took a stand against established doctrine have been forbidden to speak in the church — they can’t teach, they can’t preach, they can’t participate.”

I closed my eyes and thought of the women in our case. “Naomi Gersh, then Ursula Hewitt, and before them, the woman pastor in Wayland, Kentucky. One’s throat slit so deep and wide it hung by a thread, the next decapitated, and this time a severed tongue.”

Keith Scully was convinced he’d made his point. “Wouldn’t you say they’ve been silenced?”

TWENTY-SIX

“DOES Scully think you’re taking yourself off the case?” Mike asked. We decided to use my apartment as a command center for our team’s strategy session. It offered space, privacy, and a well-stocked bar.