43.

Michael told her that on the previous afternoon two FBI agents had shown up at Villa St. George. “They were checking our security arrangements,” he said, “but before they left they took Tony and me aside. They said it might be just a coincidence, but that the first letters of the victims’ last names so far were—”

“I know. Spelling out the name ‘Kirsten.’”

“Right! But why your name?”

“It’s ‘Kirsten,’” she said. “It’s not necessarily me. But go on. Did the FBI say to do anything?”

“They just told the two of us to be extra careful, and then they left. Oh, they made us swear not to tell anyone else—including the other priests, so they wouldn’t get careless. They don’t want it to get into the media, either, and—”

“Let’s get back to Anthony Ernest,” she said.

“Oh … well … it’s like that was the last straw for Tony. He was really scared. He’d have been better off not know—”

“Michael, what did he do?”

“He’s gone. That’s what I just said. Last night was Monday, my AA meeting night, and I told him I’d skip it and we’d stay together. But he said why make it easy for the killer to catch an E and the only N together in one place? He said if he hid somewhere, like John Ettinger—the only other E—he’d be safer. We’d both be safer, he said.”

“But where would he hide?”

“He … he said not to tell anyone, but I have to tell you. He has this friend—or not a friend exactly. It’s a man he helped a year or two ago when he was still assigned to St. Jeremiah’s in Rogers Park. The man was in the country illegally and worked as a janitor at a big apartment building across from the church, and lived in the basement. Tony says he’s still there and would take him in. I told him that was nonsense and he’s safer here, and I was sure I’d talked him out of it. But now … now he’s not anywhere around.”

“Did you call the police? Have you told them about the man … the janitor?”

“The security people called, but the police haven’t gotten here yet, so no one’s asked me anything. The thing is, Tony said the man’s supporting his girlfriend and their baby, who are both citizens here. But he’s a Moslem—from Syria, I think—and if they find him they’ll deport him, or maybe even send him to prison. That part really worries me. If Tony did go there, I sure wouldn’t want to get the man deported … just for helping him, and—” He stopped, then said, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Michael, I’m a day’s drive away. I’ll call you after I get back. Meanwhile, if anyone questions you—especially the FBI—you have to tell the truth. If you don’t, you could have a big problem.”

“I’m not in the habit of lying,” he said. “But then, what else is there but problems?”

*   *   *

It was just past noon, and it was a good seven hours to Chicago. It made no sense for Kirsten to race back to help look for Father Anthony Ernest, not until she finished what she’d come to Michigan to do. Although convinced that she’d found Debra Morelli’s hideaway, she had to try to make sure. There was no mailbox, of course, and nothing to indicate who, if anyone, lived here.

She walked up the drive toward the house, her hand on the Colt .380 in her coat pocket. The whole time she’d been here not one car had passed by in either direction. If someone did come, they couldn’t get very close without being seen. As she walked up to the house, she became more convinced that someone lived here. There were no broken windows; no trash was lying around.

It was a two-story frame house, white with faded green trim, and missing the covered front porch that Kirsten thought made so many farmhouses look so cozy. The basement windows were painted over on the inside. Unpleated curtains, possibly made of tan bedsheets, hung straight down at all the other windows. Four concrete steps with wrought-iron railings led up to a wide stoop and a windowless front door.

She went up the steps and saw a circle on the doorjamb where there’d once been a bell, and marks indicating hinge sites for a screen door, also gone. Still clenching the gun in her pocket with her right hand, she pounded on the door with her left. No answer. She tried the knob and it turned, but the door was locked with a keyed, turnbolt lock. She went down the steps and around to the back. That door was locked, too. As was the set of sloping cellar doors. All the locks looked sturdy and new.

The huge double doors on the front of the sagging barn were closed, but an entry door on the side was standing open. She went to the doorway and looked inside. Thin lines of sunlight streaming in through cracks in the walls, and a larger column through the hole in the roof, served more to accent the shadows than to dispel the darkness. The few windows along the side walls were coated with years of grime and illuminated nothing. She stepped farther in and ran face-first into a sticky spiderweb, and had to pick it, strand by strand, away from her skin and out of her hair. The barn was filthy and smelled strongly of rotting vegetables and the droppings of small animals. She stood and listened, but heard only the occasional flapping of the wings of birds—or bats, maybe—flitting around up near the roof.

Suddenly she heard a car approaching on the gravel road. She ran back outside and saw an old red pickup roar by at about sixty miles an hour, tossing up a wake of stones and dust. It didn’t slow down as it passed the house and the parked Impala, and it quickly dipped out of view down by the river. She could still hear it, though, and could tell when it got beyond the river and came to the end of the road, slowed, and turned onto the crossroad. It accelerated again, and then the sound faded away into the distance.

She didn’t go back into the barn, but checked the nearby sheds and found them equally dirty and deserted and empty. Except for one. That one had been cleaned out and had a fenced-in pen inside it, and in the pen were two pigs. Or hogs maybe, she thought, if there was a difference. They were huge, anyway, and ugly, and they didn’t bother to get up on their feet when she came in. They lifted their heads and made low snorting noises, and stared at her with mean eyes that made her shudder at what they were thinking about. Apparently no one had been in to clean up for a while, because the pigs and their shed smelled even worse than the barn.

Finally she walked out to the three-sided building near the corner where the two rows of evergreens met. With its wide-open front it was easy to see that it was empty. It was an undivided space, a little wider and deeper than a two-car garage; the roof was about twelve feet high at the front and sloped down to maybe eight feet at the back. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and the tracks leading in and out showed that the shed was used for vehicles or some type of farm machinery. An unopened case of twenty-four quarts of motor oil sat up against one side wall.

With nothing more to look at, she turned and walked back to the house, and then down the drive toward the Impala. The sun was still out, so it startled her to hear distant thunder. She looked up to see storm clouds rolling in from the west.

There were no toys or swing sets in sight, or anything else indicating children lived here. And it wasn’t some group of skinheads or militia types, because those would be men, and this place seemed neat and clean, as though a woman were in charge. She’d have loved to look around inside the house, but even if she’d had her tools with her it wouldn’t have been easy to pick any of those locks. And she sure wasn’t about to break in and leave notice to Debra—and that’s who lived here, she was sure—that someone had an interest in the house and its occupants.

She could contact the Detroit detective, Frontera, and tell him she found Angela Morelli’s old place and was pretty certain Debra Morelli was living there now. But as she played that conversation out in her mind she knew it wasn’t a call she would make. First, she had no real proof that Debra lived here. Second, Debra wasn’t a high priority on anyone’s list for her part in the crimes that had sent Carlo to jail.

Nor was there any point in calling Danny Wardell in Rockford. He took her way more seriously than those two FBI idiots, but she had nothing solid to tie Debra to the priest killings. She had told Wardell about the postcards and the target on her door and her punctured tire, but from his point of view she had only a belief that the murderer and her unseen stalker, assuming there was one, were the same person … and a woman. Beyond that, he would discount Kirsten’s belief that Debra Morelli matched her “profile” of who that woman must be, and say it was only a guess.

Thus, about all she would accomplish by calling any cops at this point was to line herself up in the FBI’s crosshairs. No thank you. She got into the Impala and drove away. With the time difference, and a little luck, she could be back in Chicago by seven o’clock that evening.

*   *   *

A combination of factors made it almost midnight when Kirsten got home. Rain had started falling shortly after she left, and it got worse the farther west she went. The traffic was terrible, too, with a multicar accident on the interstate somewhere around Gary, and then construction making one lane out of the Skyway—the towering bridge that spanned the entire southeast side of Chicago from the Indiana-Illinois border to the Dan Ryan Expressway.

What delayed her more than all of that, though, was her decision to stop at every home she could find within a two or three mile radius of “Anna Bergstrom”’s place and ask whether anyone knew who lived there now. No one did. In fact, no one had ever heard of Anna Bergstrom or Angela Morelli. Basically, no one knew one damn thing they wanted to share with some strange woman from Chicago who drove around in the rain asking weird questions. She decided it wasn’t a myth after all that such interviews go better on bright cheerful mornings.

When she got home it was too late to call Michael. She listened to her phone messages. One was from Dugan, who said he was exhausted and not to wake him up. The other was from Harvey Wilson, the man in charge of security at the seminary. He left his cell phone number. “Call me,” he said, “no matter how late it is.”

So she did, and he answered right away and sounded like a man with a lot to worry about.

“These priests,” he said, “I mean, the cardinal told them they don’t have to stay here. So I can’t keep them here if they wanna leave. The problem is, I’m not set up to keep track of them unless they cooperate.”

“I know.” She was asleep on her feet and wondered what the hell Wilson thought she could do about anything.

“But I’m responsible here,” he went on, “so if one of them disappears, how do I know he’s not kidnapped, or … you know … dead or something?”

“I understand. So how do you know whether Anthony Ernest just decided to live somewhere else, or was—”

“Exactly,” he said. “But the reason I called is your uncle. Father Nolan. The FBI wanted to talk to him about Father Ernest. But now Father Nolan’s gone, too.”