7.

It was about noon on another Monday, exactly two weeks after the murder of Thomas Kanowski, that the body of the second priest on the list was found. He’d been dead for some days, maybe as long as a week, when his body was discovered in the middle of nowhere in central Minnesota. His name was Stanley Immel.

Kirsten learned of it when her uncle called at ten o’clock that night with the news. He was obviously shaken. He’d known Father Immel well. The two had talked often over the last few years about their cases, and about how both of them thought they’d gotten their lives back together until the recent national uproar about priests and sex abuse. They’d both been removed from their positions and told that if they wanted to keep their insurance coverage and get a small monthly stipend they had to live at Villa St. George.

“But Stanley refused to sit here and vegetate with the rest of us,” Michael said. “He left to start a new life, on his own. Stanley Immel had more courage than I.”

Right, Kirsten thought. And Stanley Immel is dead.

*   *   *

The next morning, Tuesday, broke dreary and cold. Rain started pouring down about ten o’clock and gave every indication it would last forever. Michael had said on the phone that he needed a few hours away from Villa St. George, and he’d decided to take the train downtown today and visit one of the museums. She said she’d meet him at the station at noon. He hadn’t asked her to do that, but she could tell he was glad to hear it.

She’d been hoping his fear was as unfounded as she’d told him it was, hoping there wouldn’t be a second priest killed, that there wasn’t some crazy out there planning to go down the Sun-Times list and cross out one name after the other. Because if there was, even though Michael would never ask her, how could she not try to help? When she’d been in trouble and reached out to him, he hadn’t hesitated for a minute. Yes, that was some fifteen years ago, and no, it wasn’t a debt easily repaid.

First, though, she had a report to write. For a week she’d been working fourteen-hour days, doing surveillance for a lawyer wanting proof that the man his client ran over with a truck wasn’t really disabled. Her report wouldn’t be complicated. The subject hadn’t been out of his house except to go to physical therapy.

*   *   *

She met Michael at the station and they took a cab to Michigan Avenue. The gloomy weather was no help at all. They went to the Art Institute, had a cafeteria lunch in the Court Café, then wandered the galleries. For two hours they struggled to focus on the works they were viewing, from the French Impressionists to the African Collection, to some amazing mobiles by a Belgian artist she’d never heard of … although Michael had. But finally, as though by unspoken agreement, they ended up back at the cafeteria for coffee and the conversation turned to what was actually on both their minds: the murder of Stanley Immel.

Once he got started, the words poured out of Michael’s mouth. What he knew about Immel’s sex abuse case he had learned from the man himself. At fifty-one, Immel had been the pastor of a parish when he was found to have engaged in incidents of improper sexual touches with two sisters, aged ten and eight. At the time, they had been foster children under the care of Father Immel’s sister, Louise, and her husband. The couple had no children of their own, and this was their first experience with foster care.

Unknown to Louise and her husband, Michael said, the girls had been in four other foster homes in three years and had been removed from every one of them when they complained of sexual abuse by their caregivers. The ten-year-old, Maggie, a small, pretty girl with a wide smile and large dark eyes, was quite precocious and talkative. Her little sister, on the other hand, hardly ever said a word, other than to agree with whatever Maggie said. The frequency of their claims of abuse was not deemed by the social workers to affect their credibility.

The incidents with Father Immel were said to have occurred on two nights during a week when he was visiting his sister’s family at a summer cottage they owned near Brainerd, Minnesota. He’d offered to babysit, to give Louise and her husband some well-earned respite from the two girls.

On the second occasion, the couple had gone out to a movie, and Father Immel sat on the sofa with the girls and read to them, which they seemed to like. But when he told them it was bedtime all hell broke loose. Maggie went out of control and threatened to run away. He was scared and finally locked the girls in their room. The moment Louise and her husband got back, Maggie started screaming uncontrollably. She accused the priest of molesting her and her sister on both nights. “According to Stan,” Michael said, “Maggie kept saying, ‘He picked us up and made us sit on his penis and wiggle around.’ He said she used those exact words and never varied from them. Like she had memorized them.”

Torn between her faith in her brother and her belief that little children could never lie about such things, Louise took the girls home to Chicago the following morning. She reported the matter to the social worker, who reported it to the archdiocese. Father Immel was called in and interviewed by a priest from the cardinal’s sex abuse task force, and a lawyer.

“Did he bring his own lawyer with him?” Kirsten asked.

“Of course not,” Michael said. “To him it was just a conversation, to explain what really happened.”

What Father Immel explained was that Maggie had become enraged and threatened to “get him good” when he insisted the kids had to go to bed. In addition, however, while he denied any sexual contact or sexual interest in the girls, he did admit under questioning that there were some “embraces and caresses” that occurred as he cuddled the two girls and read to them, and that these were “probably imprudent.” He agreed that he “should have known better” and “should have avoided that.”

When criminal charges were filed Father Immel did get a lawyer. Later, the state’s attorney dropped the charges and the priest entered the archdiocesan sex abuse program. He was removed from his parish and went through the required course of evaluation and treatment. He was eventually certified as “not a danger” to children. Still, when he was returned to priestly work, it was at the Catholic Center at the University of Illinois, the Chicago Circle Campus, where he wouldn’t come into contact with young children.

“Stan worked as chaplain there for almost four years without incident,” Michael said. “Then, suddenly these new policies were put in place and, like me, he was removed at once from his position.”

“And later, like you, his name got into the paper,” Kirsten said.

“Right.”

“It sounds like he suggested to you,” she said, “that what got him in trouble was his not being more careful answering questions, and that they interpreted his answers in a way to make him look guilty, when he wasn’t.”

“Exactly,” Michael said. “Those girls lied. They’d done it before and—”

“But you know, don’t you, that he might have been the one lying? That maybe he did abuse those girls?”

“I … well … I don’t think so. Not at all. The psychologists said he was okay, and there was never any other incident.”

“No other incident that you know of.” His eyes widened and he was about to object, but she raised her palm to stop him. “Look, I’m not saying he did it. I’m only saying…” She let it go. “Anyway, he wasn’t appealing to Rome about his removal from the priesthood, like you are?”

“No. Stanley was angry that they would send him back to square one after he’d already done everything they asked him to do. Basically, he told the cardinal the hell with it, and walked away. I heard he bought a rundown summer cottage near his sister’s place in Minnesota for next to nothing and was trying to fix it so he could live there year-round.”

*   *   *

The rundown cottage was on tiny Two Skunk Lake, and that was where Stanley Immel’s body was discovered. Kirsten had already read a very sketchy report from a Brainerd newspaper’s Web site. The report didn’t identify the victim as a priest or an ex-priest but did say that according to the coroner, he’d been dead about a week when he was found by a woman who delivered propane gas in the area. “I wondered where he was, because he always comes out when I drive up, and the dog’s usually barking and all,” she was quoted as saying. “So I peeked in the kitchen window. Gosh, it was a mess in there. Blood all over everything.”

The paper said the Crow Wing County Sheriff’s office had classified the incident as a homicide. There were no suspects.