Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

“You know it, Alex? That’s exactly right. ‘There must be blood.’ ”

“Sounds pretty gruesome,” Mike said.

He was correct about that. And I knew that he realized, as I did, that for at least one evening in the theater, the lives — and perhaps the deaths — of Naomi Gersh and Ursula Hewitt were linked in that milieu.

“What interested her about it?” I asked.

“Everything. Ursula questioned everything. When the word came from Rome that barring women from the priesthood wasn’t a human-rights issue, it was Ursula who stood up to the Magisterium. ‘Is it because we don’t have rights?’ she asked. ‘Or is it because we’re not human?’ ”

“That’s pretty direct,” Mike said.

“Ursula referred to the church as a place of hope — and a place of horror. ‘What does it say about Christianity’—she used to challenge her students—‘what does it say that at the center of Christianity, of all its writings and beliefs, is torture? Torture, and the murder of a man?’ ”

THIRTY

“WHAT is it that you wanted to tell me?” I was leaning forward, trying to get Faith’s eyes to meet mine.

“Mike just asked if Ursula expressed her fears,” Faith Grant said. Her voice dropped and her spirit seemed to flag. “As I said, she didn’t have any that I know of, but I do.”

“So do I, Faith. Want to tell us about yours?”

She took her glasses out of her pockets and played with them while she talked. “I’m afraid that Ursula’s murder had something to do with the fact that she was here, that I convinced her to come to Union.”

“Why would that put her in harm’s way?”

“There are things I said to her, ways that I prodded her that probably put her a bit more ‘out there’ than she needed to be.”

“Doesn’t seem like she needed any prodding,” Mike said. “Are you worried for your own safety?”

Faith Grant had tears in her eyes. “I hope that’s not what has my gut in an uproar. It’s much more self-centered than I like to think I am.”

“Why?”

“Has anyone threatened you?” I asked, pausing for an answer but getting none. “Have you been harassed or stalked?”

“Threatened, yes. And harassed. Neither of those are new to me.”

“But this week? These last two days?”

“Matthew aside,” Mike said, trying to play to Faith’s good humor.

She finally looked at me. “I don’t know. I had an unusual encounter last night.”

“What was that?” Mike asked.

“Maybe nothing, but I can’t shake it. Could just be because it happened right before Ursula’s uncle called.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Mike thinks I see ghosts everywhere. Sometimes I actually have.”

“And I talk to spirits,” Faith said, her dimples reappearing as she braved a smile. “No visions yet, but we’d be quite the pair. Anyway, I left here to go home to make dinner for Chat and me, so roughly around seven. It’s not a very long walk. I sort of just square the campus and it puts me onto Claremont.”

“Was Chat with you?”

“Oh, no. I was alone. At least, I thought so, until I got to 122nd Street. A man started following me from the corner of Broadway.”

“What made you aware of him? Did you hear footsteps?”

“I didn’t hear anything. That’s part of what was so strange. I just had that sixth sense that someone was too close to me. Do you know what I mean?”

“I get that all the time,” I said before Mike could interrupt with his personal view. He preferred hard, cold facts to women’s intuition. “It’s the kind of instinct that has saved a lot of potential victims.”

“I kept walking west but I glanced over my shoulder,” Faith said, looking at the floor again. “No one was there. So I sped up a bit, and I fished my cell phone out of my briefcase. This time I’m sure I heard him speak.”

“Actual words?”

“One word only. A name. I thought he said ‘Ursula.’ That made my head snap around — not because I thought anything was wrong with her, but because I thought maybe she was coming by to surprise me. She’d often drop in if she was around the school. I thought maybe this man saw her, called out to her.”

“And when you looked?” I asked.

“Unless my eyes were playing tricks with me, I saw a fleeting glimpse of a figure — a man, not Ursula — but then he darted into a recessed doorway on the side of one of our buildings.”

“Did you note anything about him?” Mike asked.

“You’ll think I’m stupid, but he was so fast, and he moved so gracefully, I couldn’t make out anything about him. It would have been like trying to catch a shadow and hold it still.”

“Nothing stupid about you. Not your fault,” I said. “What next?”

“I actually stood my ground. I stopped and called Ursula’s name myself. But there was no one else around. No one answered. So I kept on walking, under the scaffolding now.”

“What scaffolding?” Mike asked. “What’s with all these churches and their scaffolding?”

“Our spirit may be strong, Detective,” Faith said, smiling again. “But our bones are weary. There’s always something to be repaired here. We’re a very old institution. This piece of it runs along the northwest corner of the campus, ending right opposite the entrance to my building.”

Mike’s wheels were turning. His right hand went to his hair and began to comb through it. He was wondering where and how the scaffolding connected to the roof from which the statue just fell, and I was remembering Lieutenant Peterson’s remark that the structures around the never-finished St. John the Divine offered shelter to all the wrong people.

“What next, Faith?”

“I couldn’t see any light in my apartment when I turned the corner onto Claremont. I speed-dialed the number, hoping that Chat would be there and open the window, make contact with me in some way. But no such luck. I broke into a run, and I swear I heard Ursula’s name again. Closer this time, almost above me.”

“Okay. Go on.” I didn’t want Mike belittling this experience, which had obviously shaken Faith deeply.

“I looked back again.”

“Did you hear anything, any noise from the scaffolding?” Mike said.

“That’s what’s so creepy. Nothing like that at all. And yet when I ran across the street with my keys in my hand, the man that I thought I had seen the first time was ahead of me. He’d somehow crossed the street and was coming at me. Directly at me.”

“How could that be?” I asked. “How could he have gotten past you, if he ran into the street?”

“That’s sort of why I worried about telling anyone. It sounds incredible.”

“Look, the figure you saw behind you the first time, you told us you hadn’t even noticed anything about him then,” Mike said. He stood up now, pacing back and forth, trying to make Faith articulate facts from which he could work. “What do you mean it was the same man?”

“Well — I—uh, I couldn’t describe features or recognize him from a photograph, Detective,” she said, becoming more flustered as he pressed her. “But it was his shape, his silhouette that was identical.”

I nodded my understanding and now Faith looked to me. “Yes,” I said.

“You understand what I mean, Alex? There was something distinctive about his movement. It was almost — well, almost fluid.”

I was thinking of the man who had entered the courtroom to watch some of Bishop Deegan’s testimony. When I enlisted Pat McKinney to look at him, he had disappeared, as if by magic. And when I saw him again — as I was certain that I had — he had glided down the aisle and out the door of St. John the Divine, as gracefully as Faith described.

“Did you see his face?” I asked, hoping that angry red blisters might have been visible under the streetlights, if he was the man I thought.

“Barely. I think he was white-skinned. And no eyebrows. There was something weird about his look. Almost — well, phantasmagorical.”

Mike rolled his eyes. He probably thought Faith was being a bit too dramatic.

“Hair?” I asked, hoping for the long ponytail that I had noticed.

“Dark. Just dark. Which is why it was so weird that I couldn’t see eyebrows.”

“Long or short?”

“I only saw him from the front. I don’t know.”

“Anything else about his skin?”

“No. I was just drawn to his eyes, because it was such a bizarre contrast with the dark hair.”

The man in the courtroom two days ago had been wearing sunglasses. I had no idea whether he had eyebrows or not.

“Do you know how he was dressed?”

“A winter coat, I guess.”

“I don’t want you to guess, Faith,” I said. “Just give us what you remember.”

“Outerwear of some sort. A long jacket or coat.”

The last thing I wanted to do was put words in her mouth. I knew Mike would kill me for suggesting it but I couldn’t help myself. “By any chance, was he wearing a clerical collar?”

Mike threw his hands up in the air in mock despair of my methodology. I was grateful to have such an honest witness who was not willing to be led.

“I’m not sure I would have noticed that, Alex. Riverside Church is my back door. Between that and the seminary, I see collars on everyone most of the day. Stay long enough and I’ll think both of you have them too.”

“Of course,” I said, disappointed in her answer. Maybe I was trying to push pieces of the puzzle into shapes they didn’t fit. How could someone so brutal and ferocious be at the same time so graceful and fluid?

“I was about to punch 911 into my cell phone, sort of panicked that the man was headed straight at me. I don’t know whether he was put off because he caught me fidgeting with the cell or that he saw one of my neighbors coming out of the building, but he just brushed past me and kept going, as swiftly and quietly as he had come up from behind. By the time it occurred to me that I should have snapped a photo of him, he was gone.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“I don’t want you to think I’m crazy or anything, but he was right in front of me this time. It was so faint that I couldn’t be sure he was saying ‘Ursula’ again, because that’s what I had already heard earlier. Or maybe the noise he made was — was, um — just a hissing sound.”

Faith knew she sounded confused, so she took a few moments to clear her throat, and her mind. “Of course, after I got inside and Mr. Hewitt called, everything began to sound like Ursula.”

Faith Grant dropped her head and clasped her hands, as though she was praying.

“And that’s all you heard?” I was silently repeating Ursula’s name, comparing the sound to a hiss.

“He picked his head up right as he passed me, for just a second. The only other word he said was ‘sorry.’ ”

THIRTY-ONE

“WHAT would be involved in having you move in to a room here in the dormitory, in this quad?” I asked Faith.

“That’s the last thing I’d want to do, Alex. I don’t need the front office to know about this.”

“What if I gave you a choice of having Mike Chapman handcuffed to you for the weekend, or bunking in the dorms?” I said, reaching out to put my hand over hers.

“I’m partial to ministers with dimples,” Mike said. “I might let you out of the cuffs, but I’d hang pretty close to you.”

“There must be some guest rooms, Faith.”

“Yes, we use them for visiting scholars. I really don’t want to do this.”

“Give us the weekend,” Mike said. “There’s nothing I like better than a brave broad who wants to tough things out. But we need you to be safe till we sort through this.”

“Do you think the man I saw last night was the killer?”

Mike hesitated. I guessed that to be because he wasn’t even sure that Faith knew who or what she remembered correctly. She seemed flightier to him than she did to me.

I spoke to assuage her fears. “We’re not sure what we’re dealing with yet, Faith. There have been two vicious slayings in the city — maybe more somewhere else. And both victims here, just twenty-four hours apart, were strong women, outspoken about religious issues. We’d rather know you had some kind of security system in place.”

“Just tell them the heat in your place isn’t working right.”

“That’s not a stretch,” she said, flashing an impish grin at Mike. “You sure I can’t choose the handcuffed option?”

“I’m expensive to feed,” he said.

“And to water. You’ll be replacing the red wine with Absolut or Ketel One. Not to mention how he’ll try to rewrite your sermons,” I said. “I’ll tell you what would help a lot, Faith, is to understand this place, to see how you fit and what you do. If you think you’re a target for this guy, we’d like to know who else might be in danger.”

“I’d be casting a wide net, Alex. We’re such a liberal arm of the church — the most progressive, viewed as the most left-wing.”

“Has that always been true of Union?”

“For a pretty long time. Think of this country’s earliest institutions of higher education — Harvard, Yale, Princeton,” Faith said. “They were all founded as divinity schools. The only reason for a man to be educated at that time was to become a minister.”

“So this seminary was part of a bigger school?”

“We started as a mission school in the early 1800s. Part of Princeton University, which was the most powerful of the group for religious training. But the radical leaders grew to believe that you couldn’t do God’s work on a cloistered campus. The whole point of the ministry was to be in the cities, working with orphans and paupers, immigrants and prostitutes. Princeton was too isolated. So we split from the university, on the theory that cities are the best classrooms for knowing God, knowing Jesus.”

“And Union Seminary was that breakaway institution?”

“Yes, as a Protestant seminary, in the Reformed tradition. At first in Greenwich Village, moving up here in 1908, as the city spread north,” Faith said. “We needed to be where the heathens are, Alex, as they were called in those days. Still, it’s a primal impulse in our ministry to deal with social injustice in our work — to go to the margins.”

“Exactly what some of the Roman Catholics have been silenced for doing,” Mike said.

“Let’s say we’re more welcoming. We’ve got three hundred undergraduate students here, half of whom are women.”

“Is that a new thing?” I asked, trying to gauge the exposure of Faith and her colleagues.

“Not at all. It’s been that way for a couple of decades. A quarter of the group is African American, a fifth is Latino. And we’ve got a large LGBT community.”