44.

Rogers Park is the last neighborhood on the north edge of the city, along the border with Evanston. Kirsten took Lake Shore Drive north to Sheridan Road, then Devon to Western Avenue. The sari shops and restaurants and other storefront businesses this far west on Devon seemed primarily Indian, but she knew there were immigrants from over a dozen different countries and three or four continents living within a half-mile radius of where she was. It was eight o’clock in the morning.

A bit farther west and two blocks south she found St. Jeremiah’s. It was in a congested neighborhood, but directly across the street from the church the property lay flat and vacant. Whatever used to be there had succumbed to the wrecker’s ball, and a sign on the security fence announced townhomes on the way, offering “the latest in urban luxury and convenience.”

She pulled to the curb as two black-haired women in bright saris came along the sidewalk with their babies. The strollers they pushed looked about half the size of Kirsten’s Impala, and she wondered how hard it would be to maneuver one of those things up and down her stairway at home. She got out of the car and approached the women. The sun was out, but there was a chill in the air, and nothing of the babies was visible beyond what must have been their noses, deep down in the folds of their blankets.

She leaned over the strollers and cooed at the noses and told the women how beautiful their children were. That must have been true, too, because both mothers were radiantly beautiful themselves. Both were just girls, really, ten to fifteen years younger than Kirsten. They smiled and thanked her, in halting English, and she was surprised to feel suddenly envious. Of their youth, to be sure. But more than that, in an ache of resentment growing deep in her abdomen, she envied them their strollers. Signs they had babies to push.

“Oh, wait!” she called, because they’d gone on by before she remembered to ask them. “Excuse me!” When they stopped and turned back, she asked, “Last year, wasn’t there a big apartment building across the street here?”

They looked at each other, and she was afraid they didn’t understand. But then one of them said, “Oh no, miss. That was houses there. Old houses. Not apartment building.”

“A big apartment building,” the other one said, pointing, “is past the church. On the other street.”

“Thank you,” Kirsten said, and the two of them turned away and pushed their babies on down the sidewalk.

She looked toward where the woman had pointed, but her view was blocked, so she walked that way until she could see past the church to the apartment building. It was a massive three-story structure on the corner, made of ugly yellow brick, with entrances on both streets. Probably thirty or forty apartments in there.

She wondered how Anthony Ernest thought he was going to live across the street from the side of the church, and across from the front of the rectory, without being seen coming and going by someone who knew him from when he worked here as a priest. If that happened—and regardless of what his actual crimes were, or how long ago they’d occurred—there would be a huge outcry that the child abuser was back, skulking around the church and school again, a predator seeking more victims.

Or maybe he planned not to come or go at all, but to stay holed up for God knows how long in some small, dingy, sunless room in the basement, probably next to the boiler. Sharing it with a man who himself lived in daily fear of exposure to the authorities.

It was a foolish plan, and dangerous. Both for himself, and for the janitor if he let him stay. But she sure hoped Anthony Ernest was here. Because otherwise he might right now be sitting somewhere else, dead. Or worse yet, still alive, with sections of his skin being peeled off in strips. Besides, whether he was here or not, this had to be where Michael had come.

If Michael had stuck around Villa St. George long enough for the police or the FBI to get there, he would have had to choose between lying to them or exposing the janitor to arrest and deportation, possibly never to see his baby or its mother again. Michael wouldn’t have liked either alternative. Nor did Kirsten, which was why she hadn’t told Harvey Wilson where she thought Michael might have gone to look for the missing priest.

Michael knew that Anthony Ernest’s hiding out here was a dangerous idea. And since he clearly felt a responsibility to his fellow “exiles,” he would have come here to try to talk him out of it. That was assuming, of course, that Michael’s disappearance from Villa St. George was voluntary. Which is what she did assume. First, because Harvey Wilson said Michael’s old white Ford Fairlane was missing from the parking lot there; and second, because any other assumption was simply unacceptable. She tried each of the five street-level entrances, but found no mailbox or doorbell marked MAINTENANCE, or MANAGER, or anything like it. She went around to the alley and to the rear of the building. The space within the L formed by the two wings was paved, and there were several cars parked there. Two were taxis; none was Michael’s Fairlane.

A set of concrete steps led down to a basement entrance, right at the angle where the two wings met. The door was wooden and covered with what looked like fifty coats of black paint. It was locked, so she pressed the button and heard a loud buzz from inside. No one answered. She tried again and still got no response, so she just pressed her finger to the button and let the buzzer go on and on. Finally a door opened on a wooden porch a little to her right, and about five feet above ground level. She took her finger off the buzzer.

The door was the back door of a first-floor apartment. A dark man in an undershirt and gray pants came out, yelling in an angry voice. The language must have been Arabic, but the message was clear: that damn basement buzzer was driving him crazy.

“Where’s the janitor?” she yelled back.

“What?” He stared in her direction, blinking as though she’d woken him up. Then he ducked out of sight and returned almost at once, wearing thick, black-rimmed glasses. “What you want?” he asked, leaning forward with his hands on the porch railing.

“The janitor,” she said. “He’s not answering.”

“So then … go away.”

“Do you think he’s down there?” she asked. “Because—”

“I don’t know nothing. Go away.” The man went back inside and slammed the door.

She turned to go and almost tripped over a boy, maybe six years old. “He went to the Elks Club,” the boy said. He looked Middle Eastern, too, but his English was perfect. He had wide, serious eyes that gazed up at her under lots of curly black hair, and his backpack said he was on his way to school. “He took the American man to the Elks Club,” he said, then added, “What is an Elks Club?”

“Who took who?” she asked. “What man?”

“The janitor, Habi.” The name sounded like hobby. “He took the sick American man in the sick man’s car. That was not so long ago.” He frowned. “I’m American, too. Did you know that?”

“No,” she said. “But how do you know the man was sick?”

“I heard him. He said he felt terrible and gave Habi his car keys. Habi said the Elks Club is on … I think … Foster Street?”

“Foster Avenue?” she suggested.

“Oh yes, Foster Avenue. I’m American because I was born here, and anyone who is born in America is—”

“Just one American man? What kind of car? How did—” She stopped, not wanting to scare the boy off.

“Just one. And Habi, the janitor. It was an old white car and they—” A late-model SUV pulled into the alley, and the boy swung around. “Oh, I must not be late,” he cried, and ran to the SUV and was gone.