Omaha, Nebraska

Tommy Pakula left Clare and the girls outside under the canopy in their backyard. They eagerly excused him so they could discuss plans for the big Fourth of July bash later at Memorial Park without him breaking into his off-key rendition of the Beach Boys, just one of the has-been entertainment lineups for the event.

He didn’t mind. He had the family room to himself. Even better, he had the TV remote to himself. He clicked the TV on, switching channels, and leaving it on Fox News for background noise while he pulled out the file folders he had brought home. He didn’t usually bring home files, but something about this one bugged him and Weston’s taunt only made him anxious.

He pulled out crime scene and autopsy photos along with the reports he had downloaded from the Minneapolis Police Department. With no leads in their investigation they seemed to welcome his inquiries. Right now Minneapolis considered it random, but Pakula wondered if the killer knew that his victim was an ex-priest.

The Douglas County Crime Lab hadn’t much for him yet. It was too early. Medina had, however, tagged and labeled some of the trace she had collected. Locard’s Principle had come through for him many times in the past. No matter how careful a killer was, there was an exchange of debris that took place between the killer and the victim. It was inevitable. Unless the killer came to the scene in a sterilized suit he was bound to leave something—mud from his shoes, fibers from his shirt or if they were really lucky, hairs from his head.

Pakula looked over the plastic evidence bags Medina had included. The first one looked like bread crumbs. He held up the bag to read Medina’s note on the back label:

Location: Front of victim’s shirt.

Lab Test Conclusive—white unleavened bread.

Pakula scratched his head. He still couldn’t figure this one out. Why the hell would there be bread crumbs on the front of the victim’s shirt? No way could he have picked them up from the floor. Did one of the voyeurs who trampled in on the scene have a sandwich? Nothing had been left behind, so it wasn’t like the monsignor had put aside his dinner. Or if he did, was it possible one of the assholes who came in to take a piss, decided to help himself to a half-eaten sandwich? Sounded ridiculous, but he had seen stranger things.

Pakula picked up the next plastic evidence bag. This time he started to get excited when he noticed the short strands of hair. Hair wasn’t always a guarantee for DNA extraction. You needed the root or bulb or a part of it to get anything credible. Even two strands from the same person weren’t always conclusive. Right now with no evidence Pakula would take a single nose hair if it proved to be the killer’s. He read Medina’s label and let out a disappointed sigh. He wanted to toss the bag across the room:

Location: Strands taken from back of victim’s shirt.

Lab Test Conclusive—Canine hair. Breed Unknown at this time.

All his excitement and it was a fucking dog the monsignor had encountered, not the killer.

He glanced out the window. Clare and the girls were still under the canopy, laughing. No serious debates or arguments to bring one of them in, at least not for a while, so the coast was clear. He sorted through the photos and selected several to lay out on the cocktail table in front of him.

One from the crime scene showed Monsignor O’Sullivan crumpled on the floor, lying on his side, his legs twisted, and his crushed eyeglasses beside him. Pakula looked for a close-up of the glasses and quickly found it. They hadn’t broken like that from the fall. Someone had stepped on them. Maybe the killer. Possibly on purpose. He made a mental note to see if Medina had been able to pull a shoe print from either the lenses or from somewhere beside the eyeglasses.

He flipped through Medina’s notes on other traces collected: a stray French fry, a breath mint, several fibers, some tramped in clay and a couple of blades of some kind of weed. Could be all from the floor and have nothing to do with the crime scene. What would you expect from a commercial rest-room floor? Not much to go on. It was as if the killer walked in, stabbed the monsignor and walked back out without even washing his hands. There wasn’t a single bloody paper towel in the trash can. So he walked back out with a bloody knife and no one—not even the guy who thought he bumped into the killer—saw the knife. How was that possible?

Pakula left the photos on the table, but set aside the file folder. Now he was ready for Minneapolis. He scanned the police report. It was just like Weston had said—an outdoor festival during Memorial Weekend. The victim was stabbed in the chest in the middle of the crowd. No one saw it happen. No one claimed to see anything other than ex-padre Daniel Ellison fall to his knees, grabbing his chest. Maybe this one was random.

Pakula tossed several of the downloaded images onto the table alongside the Omaha ones. Not much here, either. He sat back, leaned his head against the soft leather of the sofa and absently watched Fox News top-of-the-hour news report, not really listening, his mind focused instead on the scant evidence.

He was tired and frustrated and mostly he dreaded telling Chief Ramsey that he had diddly-squat. He wondered if Archbishop Armstrong’s only concern was to continue to keep secret the monsignor’s drinking habit. Maybe they didn’t even know what was in the missing leather portfolio. Or could it simply be something embarrassing but not incriminating?

Pakula remembered Armstrong several months ago expelling two students from one of the parochial high schools for accessing porn sites on a school computer, sites the kids claimed their theology instructor—a priest whose name Pakula no longer remembered—had shown them just the day before.

At the time, Pakula thought it was Armstrong’s knee-jerk reaction, an attempt to ward off the slightest suggestion of impropriety in the wake of the sexual-abuse scandals rocking other archdioceses across the country. Armstrong had managed to keep a squeaky-clean record—no criminal reports filed or any civil lawsuits pending.

Just then Pakula noticed the photo of a priest being shown on the Fox News update—his black shirt and white collar grabbing Pakula’s attention even before he could read the caption below. He grabbed the remote and punched up the volume in time to hear only “…was mysteriously stabbed during a fireworks display. No other information is known at the moment. Father Gerald Kincaid was the pastor at All Saints Catholic Church in Columbia, Missouri. He was fifty-two years old.”

Pakula could feel the prickle at the back of his neck and the twist in the bottom of his gut. He grabbed his cell phone and without hesitation dialed the home phone number for Chief Ramsey. No matter how much he hated to admit it, he was beginning to think Bob Weston might be right.

Somebody was killing priests.