WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 12

Wednesday morning, she told herself the same thing when she popped two Dexedrine. It’s too soon for a blood test. The familiar jittery rush of heat went through her when the pills hit her system, and she thought, Okay. I can get through today. She wouldn’t be tempted to drink before early evening, and she’d burn that bridge when she got to it.

It was a relentlessly busy morning; a 7:00 A.M. Eucharist, a stack of phone calls to get through, then a sermon to draft. She struggled with it; Sunday’s gospel was Matthew, the Great Commandment, but her attention kept circling back to the beginning of the passage. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. It brought back the nightmare she had had, with her old SERE instructor quoting scripture at her while Russ’s body burned.

She was grateful when Lois, the church secretary, interrupted her. “Your mother phoned. She asked me to tell you the florist is coming over this afternoon to look at the space and take measurements.” Clare had taken to letting Lois handle as many maternal calls as possible. The secretary actually seemed to enjoy debating the virtues of tulle versus netting for the sugared-almond favor bags. “Magnolia swags and gold-sprayed live oak,” Lois went on. “Very romantic.”

“For Tidewater Virginia in June. Too bad I’m getting married in November in the North Country.” Clare looked down at her crossed-out paragraphs and scribbled notes. “I guess I’m not going to be able to leave until after I’ve spoken to the florist. If I get a call from a Colonel Arlene Seelye, will you keep her on the line and track me down?”

“I will.” Lois retreated down the hall, humming “Here Comes the Bride.”

“No Lohengrin!” Clare shouted.

Her practice of writing her sermon on Wednesday served two functions: It gave her enough time between then and Sunday to come up with something else if her first try was crap, and it made her positively happy to have her solitude broken by the lunchtime vestry meeting.

This week’s meeting was brisk. Twenty minutes to cover Gail Jones’s education budget and the feasibility of an energy audit; forty minutes of Clare listening to Terry McKellan and Norm Madsen and Mrs. Marshall waxing on about their own nuptials. It was sweet and charming, and it made her uncomfortably aware that Russ had been part of this club, too, long married and happy to be so.

Clearly, I should keep out of your business. Like Linda did. God, she was an idiot. As if Russ needed a reminder of the difference between Clare and his late wife. His beloved wife.

She was cleaning up after the meeting when Glenn Hadley stuck his head in the door. “Summun in the sanctuary to see you, Father.”

She was always “Father” to the sexton. She handed him a tray loaded with uneaten sandwiches. “Thanks, Mr. Hadley. Would you put this in the icebox downstairs?”

“Ayuh.”

She sniffed. “Were you smoking?” The sexton’s granddaughter, Hadley Knox, had enlisted Clare’s help in keeping the seventy-six-year-old diabetic away from cigarettes.

“Me, Father? You know the doctors told me not to.”

She rolled her eyes as she walked down the hall toward the church. Short of following him around all day, she didn’t know how anyone could keep the old fellow from indulging. She switched on the nave lights and hauled the oak door open. If a heart attack and a quadruple bypass couldn’t convince him to—

Quentan Nichols was standing in the center aisle.

Clare froze. Behind her, the heavy door whispered closed. Despite the soaring space, the thick stone walls of St. Alban’s seemed to close in around her. Lois was running errands on her lunch hour. Mr. Hadley was in the undercroft. No one would hear her if she screamed.

Nichols took a step toward her. Frowned. She tensed, ready to bolt for the hall.

“Major Fergusson?” His voice was uncertain. He took another step toward her. “I mean, Reverend Fergusson?”

Clare nodded. Cleared her throat. “Chief Nichols. I’m…” Surprised didn’t begin to cover it. “What are you doing here?”

“It is you.” He relaxed, which wasn’t the relief it might have been, since he seemed to be all muscle. He was in mufti—khakis and a turtleneck sweater. “You look different.” He touched his throat. “I mean, beyond the collar and all.”

“I’m growing my hair out.” Idiot. The man was a possible killer, a probable thief, and likely absent without leave as well. And she was talking about her hair. “There are several people here. In the offices. And I’m expecting a visitor any moment.”

He held up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not gonna hurt you.” He took one step, two, and as Clare rocked onto the balls of her feet, ready to run, he sat in the first pew. At the far side of the aisle. He spread his arms across the back of the pew and rested his hands over the smooth, dark wood. “I need your help.”

Well. That, at least, was familiar. “Go on.”

“You knew Tally.”

“Yes, I did.” She relaxed enough to take a more comfortable stance. “I don’t know how you knew that, though.”

“She told me about her therapy group. The doctor, the cop, the Marine and Episcopal priest.” He shrugged. “I Googled ‘Episcopal church in Millers Kill.’ When I saw your name, I figured there’s no way there are two woman priests who were also vets. Leastways not in a dinky town like this.”

“Tally told you about her group.”

“We talked, yeah. A couple times. I was—” He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t know where to start.”

“How about where you helped her steal a million dollars?”

“I didn’t! I mean, yeah, I guess in a way I did.” He looked ahead, at the stained glass triptych behind the high altar. Christus Victor. Christ, victorious over death and sin. “I didn’t mean to.”

This, too, was familiar. A person sitting opposite her, talking around and over and between the problem, taking his time because getting to the point meant getting to the pain. She sighed. Sat down in the pew on the near side of the aisle. Faced Nichols, her hands relaxed and open. Listening. “Tell me about when you met Tally.”

He smiled a little. “It was my second tour. Hers, too. I was stationed at Balad. After the insurgency took hold, it was the most secure airfield in the country. Crazy busy. Planes flying in from everywhere, day and night. Everybody in the world passing through—reporters and security contractors and politicians. I saw that guy from The Daily Show once. Anyway, Tally’s company was staging out of there. They had a construction project going, shoring up some old buildings. Tally told me it was going to be the in-country version of a Federal Reserve Bank. She was going back and forth between Balad and Camp Anaconda, which was stressing her big-time.”

Clare nodded. Ground travel was tense. Taking long trips over the same highways, you figured every time you didn’t get blown up just brought you closer to the time you would.

“We met at the club. She asked me if I knew where she could get some booze, and she just about died when I told her I was a cop.” He glanced at Clare’s collar. “We, um, started spending time together. You know.”

“Uh-huh.” She wondered where Wyler McNabb fit into the picture. “Did she ever mention her husband?”

“She said he was a civilian.” He shrugged. “At the start, I didn’t care. I mean, people were jumping in and out of the sack all the time. Nobody checking for rings. By the end”—he tilted his head back—“I pretty much convinced myself he was history.” He looked at her. Smiled humorlessly. “To look at me, you wouldn’t think I could get played so bad, would you?”

“She asked you to do something for her.”

“Oh, yeah.” He heaved a breath. “She did. Asked me to keep my patrol away from a storage building. Tell my team anything they saw around one of the hangars was authorized. For one day. That should have been the tip-off it was something big. People smuggle in booze or dope or other contraband, they’ve got drops. Regular customers. A supply chain. One-off, that’s got to be something big.”

“You didn’t know what was going on?”

“I didn’t want to know.” He bent over, resting his elbows on his knees. “Jesus help me. She could have been smuggling those WMDs out of the country. I didn’t want to know.”

“So then what happened?”

“Nothing. The finance building got finished, and she went back to Anaconda for good. We e-mailed and IM’d back and forth as much as we could.” He gave her a challenging look. “It wasn’t just sex. She was really easy to talk to. I felt like—like she got me, you know? Even though she was from this pissant little town in upstate New York and I’m from Chicago. Like those differences didn’t matter at all.”

“I know.” Did she ever. “When did you start to think there was something more than just a romance going on?”

“When she shipped home. All of a sudden, she’s not answering my e-mails, she’s not taking my calls. I knew she was separating, and I thought maybe the readjustment to civilian life was hitting her hard. I had leave after I cycled back stateside, so I decided to come out here and talk to her in person.”

“Which is where you and I met.”

“Yeah.” He paused for a long moment. “After that’s when I started looking into what actually happened. It took a while, because I wasn’t officially investigating and I wanted to keep things on the down low.”

“To avoid incriminating yourself?”

“Hell, yeah. She already made an idiot out of me. I didn’t want to lose my career, too.”

“So you found out she had gotten away with a million dollars.”

“The building I was supposed to keep my patrols away from was a transshipping facility, right next to the airfield. Usually, any cash coming in would have been secured, but this stuff was transiting, off one Herky Bird and onto another within a few hours.”

“Do you know how she moved it?”

He shook his head. “There were quite a few finance people at the base. She might have gotten help there. Or who knows, maybe she had a string of guys she was playing along. One with a forklift, another with a truck.”

Clare rubbed her arms. “That doesn’t sound like Tally.”

“Yeah. Well. She had friends. It was her second tour. She knew people.”

“I take it you don’t know where the money is right now?”

He gave her a look. “Would I be here asking for help if I did?”

Clare spread her hands. “What sort of help are you looking for, Chief? What do you want? The money? Revenge? You want to find out who killed her?”

He frowned. “I thought she killed herself.”

Clare made a noise. “Officially, yes.”

“You think—oh, God. Yeah. If somebody was trying to get her out of the way.” He closed his eyes. Opened them. “Will I sound like a sick bastard if I say that would be a relief? I called her just a couple days before she died to tell her the investigation had been taken away from me. I thought maybe the news—”

“Wait. She knew about the investigation?”

“That’s why I’m here. I was putting together the pieces, slow, like I told you. I had a pretty good idea of what she’d done. I figured she doctored the manifests, so the paperwork that came from stateside matched the paperwork from inside the theater and the numbers all lined up. Nobody checks against the originals if they think they have authentic copies in hand, right?”

“I guess.”

“I needed to see the original invoices. The ones that were generated stateside. U.S. Army Finance Command has a small group of MPs and CIDs attached—specialists in fraud and financial crimes and all that. I made the request through them. A week goes by, and then two weeks. Then I get a surprise visit in person from Colonel Arlene Seelye.”

Clare blinked. “She’s the one who’s here, investigating the missing funds.”

“She asks me to turn over everything I have on the case, which was weird, because I hadn’t put any other info on my request form. Then she says she’s taking over the investigation. I’m thinking I’m screwed, that somehow she’s been able to figure out I was the guy who looked the other way and let it happen. So I handed over my stuff and sat down to wait for the arrest. The next day—two weeks ago—I was reassigned to Fort Gillem. Courtesy of Colonel Arlene Seelye.”

Clare frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what I thought. I went back and forth, trying to figure out the right thing to do. About telling Tally or not.” He propped his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. “Up to that point, I guess I was still hoping there was going to be some way I could have my cake and eat it, too. Get the money back without Tally taking the fall. At the end, I called her. Told her I’d been working on an investigation. Told her what I found.” He glanced up at Clare. “I warned her that there was a CID finance investigator on her trail. The next thing I heard…”

“She was dead.”

“Yeah.”

They both sat with that in silence for a while. Finally, Clare said, “I still don’t understand Colonel Seelye’s actions. If she knew you were involved, why not place you in custody? And if she didn’t know, why didn’t she ask you to back her up, since you knew about the investigation? The only other guy she’s got here is a buck-green private.”

“Huh.” He sat up again. “I figured at first she wanted the cred for the discovery all to herself. Policing in the army isn’t all that different than policing on the outside when it comes to being judged on the number of collars you make or the cases you clear. Then I got to thinking. Nobody else in my chain of command knew what I was doing, and if she’s the one who fielded my request for information, nobody else in her unit knows about the missing money, either.”

“That sounds consistent with not wanting to give anyone else credit for the arrest.”

“Yeah—but I think she’s after more than a nice write-up from her superiors. I think she’s after the money.”

“You mean … for herself. To keep.” Clare sat back in her pew. She stared at the reredos behind the high altar, at the dozens of saints and angels carved into the fine-grained mahogany. “Tally died last Wednesday.”

“Yeah?”

“Stephen Obrowski, the innkeeper at the Stuyvesant Inn, said Colonel Seelye checked in Wednesday evening. He said she was upset there hadn’t been any other accommodations available.” If she had thought about it before, she would have passed it off as the normal annoyance of someone who was going to have to explain blowing her travel budget to the quartermaster. She would have missed the other implication. “Her trip was so spur-of-the-moment, she didn’t take time to make any reservations.” She turned to Nichols. “What if she came here to confront Tally? To see if she could force the location of the money out of her? Maybe she went too far. Or maybe she scared Tally into telling her and then decided to get rid of her.” She stood up. “You stay here.”

Nichols got up from his pew, frowning. “Where are you going?”

“To tell the chief of police that he can’t rule Tally’s death a suicide just yet.”

*   *   *

Entering the Kreemy Kakes diner, Russ spotted Clare in what he thought of as her usual spot, the red vinyl banquette against the wall, the wide window behind her showing the granite-and-marble facade of Allbanc and an unusual number of pedestrians on Main Street. Tourists, enjoying the last week of prime fall foliage.

She was in her clericals, of course, rosy-cheeked in the heat from the crowd. She was finally putting on some weight again, and it looked good on her. Real good. Down, boy. Russ dropped his jacket over the back of a chair and sat.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He reached across the red-tiled table. “I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.” She took his hand. “Friends?”

He grinned. “Among other things.”

Erla Davis appeared at his side, menus in one hand and a pot of coffee in the other. “Well, howdy, strangers!” She beamed at Clare, then at Russ. “It does my heart good to see you two back in the old spot. Reverend, you still partial to a cup?”

Clare turned her mug over. “Erla, I’ll be partial to your coffee three days after I’m dead.”

The waitress eyed Russ as she filled Clare’s cup. “I heard you two are getting married the end of this month. Never saw that one coming.”

Russ laughed.

Erla served up his coffee and then tapped the large plastic sheets against the table. “You need to look at the menu?”

“I’ll have the chili, please,” Clare said.

“Reuben with fries.”

“That’s what I like,” Erla said. “Folks that know what they want without shilly-shallying.” She winked like a burlesque performer and whisked away, menus in hand.

Clare leaned forward, but instead of making a joke, she said, “Quentan Nichols is here. In town.”

The clatter and conversation in the Kreemy Kakes diner created a kind of homey white noise, loud enough to keep a private discussion private, soft enough to hear the person across the table. “Huh,” he said. “Okay. It looks like I really do owe you an apology.” He rubbed his lips. “I’d better tell Seelye.” Then the meaning of her statement caught up with his brain. “Wait. How do you know he’s in Millers Kill?”

“He’s at St. Alban’s, right now.”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Clare—” Erla appeared again with their order. “’Scuse my French,” he said as she unloaded the thick china dishes. He waved away the waitress’s offer to bring them anything else. “Nichols may not have killed Tally, but he sure as hell has his hands dirty.” He shoved against the table and stood up. “I’m going to take him into custody for questioning.”

“Sit down.”

The steel in Clare’s command voice dropped his ass back into his chair before he could think about it. “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

“Oh, cut it out. I just want you to hear me out before you run off half-cocked.”

“Right. Wouldn’t want to do anything without assessing all the information and thinking it through carefully.”

She gave him a look. “Listen. Nichols admits he enabled the theft by steering his patrols away from the transit warehouse where the money was stored.” She dug her spoon into her chili. “He says he didn’t know what she was doing and he didn’t want to know. He thought it was all love’s sweet bliss until she got back stateside and dropped him like a hot rock.”

“More like a hot million,” he said around a bite of his sandwich.

“After he came here to try to see her—that was the night I got home, you remember?”

He smiled slowly. She pinked up. “Yes, well. Anyway, after that, he decided to figure out what it was, exactly, that he had done for her back at Balad Air Base. He spent a month or two digging around and figured out she must have altered the invoices coming from the States to hide the theft. So he sent a request in to USAFINCOM’s attached investigators, asking them for copies of the original invoices. Guess who shows up in person?”

“Colonel Arlene Seelye?”

She frowned. “Yes, Arlene Seelye. She confiscates all the stuff he’s amassed in the course of his investigation, tells him she’s taking over, and then—get this!—has him transferred to Fort Gillem.”

He had a good idea where this was going, but he let her spin it out.

She’s after the money. For herself.” Clare emphasized her point with her spoon, dropping a blob of chili on her paper place mat.

He finished chewing a bite of Reuben. Wiped his mouth. “Did he happen to say why he showed up at your church?”

“I was the only one of the therapy group he could track down. He needs help if he’s going to find the money before she does.”

Russ held up his hands. “I want you to repeat that last sentence to yourself. Tell me what it sounds like.”

“He’s not going to keep it!”

He looked at her steadily. She bit the corner of her lip. “He’s going to keep it?” Sighed. “He’s going to keep it.” Then she frowned. “Wait, what about Colonel Seelye transferring him? That’s way too easy to be checked. He couldn’t have made that up, could he?”

“If I were running this investigation, and I suspected an MP of involvement in the crime, but didn’t have enough evidence to charge him, the first thing I’d do would be to contain him. So he can’t muck up any evidence or help out his co-conspirators.” He shoved the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth. Clare stared into her coffee, still frowning. Probably trying to figure out a way to redeem Nichols. He felt himself smiling like an idiot around the bread and pastrami.

Clare raised her eyebrows at him. “What?”

He swallowed. “Just you.” He stood up and pulled out his wallet. “C’mon. I want to talk to this guy.”

“Russ. He came to me for help. I told him to wait in the parish hall. I can’t lead the local police in to clap him in irons.”

“I think we’ve been over the fact that the church as sanctuary doesn’t fly in the twenty-first century.” They had had this same lunch so many times he didn’t have to see the bill to know the total and tip. He tossed the money onto the table and stood aside to let Clare out. “Besides. If Nichols is still there, I will wear a kilt to the wedding.”

Nichols wasn’t in the sanctuary. Nor in the sacristy, the parish hall, or the undercroft. He had picked up a great deal about church architecture for a nonreligious man, Russ realized.

“Sorry, Clare.” They surprised her secretary eating freeze-dried tuna out of a pouch. “He must have left before I got back from lunch.” She waved her plastic fork. “Obviously not lunch-lunch. I was running errands. I found a great dress for your wedding, and I’m getting it altered. It was a size six. A little bit too big.” She beamed. “Hi, Russ.”

“Hi, Lois.”

“A little bit too big, Lois? Really?”

The secretary smiled smugly.

In her office, Clare tossed her coat onto her battered love seat and flung herself into her desk chair. “Dang it!” She tilted back with a creak and a snap. “What are you going to do now?”

He leaned against the tall bookcases lining one wall. “I’m going to call his command and find out if he’s unauthorized absence. If he is, they’ll have people after him. Then I’ll tell Seelye. Based on what he told you, he’s definitely an accessory. If she wants, we’ll put a BOLO on him.”

“What about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nichols may be after the money for himself. I’m willing to accept that.”

“Gee, thanks.”

She frowned at him. “There’s still the matter of Colonel Seelye. She found out about the theft, got Nichols out of the way, and hightailed it here, conveniently just after Tally was found dead.”

“What are you saying? Are you trying to implicate Seelye in McNabb’s death?”

“The timing works. She doesn’t have any airtight alibi. She could have—”

“Okay, first”—Russ held up one finger—“Tally McNabb committed suicide. All the physical evidence points to that conclusion. There is no evidence supporting any other conclusion. Second”—he held up another finger—“Colonel Seelye’s a CID investigator chasing down the theft of one million dollars. Of course she hightailed it over here. What do you think she’d do? Sit on her ass until Tally McNabb finished laundering the money?”

“Exactly!” Clare sprang her chair forward, jumping to her feet. “One million dollars! Which is up for grabs now that Tally McNabb is out of the way.”

“Oh, for chrissakes. Will you give it a rest already?”

She strode toward him, her cheeks flushed, her hazel eyes glinting brown. He wanted to shake her shoulders until she dropped this fact-free victim fantasy she’d dreamed up for Tally McNabb. He wanted to strip her naked and fling her on the lumpy love seat and not let her up until he had wrung them both dry. How could one woman make him so batshit crazy?

She stopped maybe two inches away, close enough for him to feel the heat she was throwing off. “You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re wrong, and I’m going to prove it.”

“Do not go chasing after Nichols on your own, Clare. You don’t know what he’s after or what he’s capable of.”

“I can take care of myself. As I’ve told you.”

“Is that the deal? Either I knuckle under and drive an investigation in the direction you want, or you put yourself in danger? Is that how you’re going to get your way when we’re married? Forget about talking things out and making compromises, just go straight for the nuclear option?”

Her face went pale. She turned. Opened her office door. Pointed toward the hall.

“Clare. For God’s sake. I don’t want to fight like this.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Please, love. I don’t understand why this is so important to you.”

Her face wavered. He pulled her toward him. She resisted for a second, then collapsed against him. He wrapped his arms tight around her. “Why can’t you trust me on this? Why can’t you let it go?”

“It’s all wrong.” Her voice was muffled against his chest, but he realized she was crying. “It’s all gone wrong, and I have to make it right.”

He had a sick feeling that she wasn’t talking about Tally McNabb. Not talking about Tally McNabb at all.