Getting to the box hidden there was made a whole lot easier for me when I remembered that, while we were having dinner with his mother on Saturday, Will mentioned that he was taking Monday off this week. I call him from my car on the way to the hardware store.
“Will? Hi, sorry to bother you. What are you doing?”
“I just got back from the gym and I’m going to take a shower. Want to come take it with me?”
Give the man credit; he never gives up trying to get me naked.
“Nope, I already showered. But I need your help. Are you going to be busy?”
“Why? What’s going on? I can tell this isn’t a social call.”
“I need a ladder, a really long metal one. Your cousin, the one who does roofing lent you one a few months ago. Do you still have it?”
“Boy, you get right to the point, don’t you? Yeah, I still have it. Why do you need a ladder?”
“If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy and you won’t bring it here.”
“I already think you’re crazy and where’s here?”
“Marie McElroy’s house in Queens. The cold case file.”
“Queens? You want me to come to Queens? Now? This is my day off! I had plans.”
“Please? It’s really important. I may have found something big concerning the case.”
He says absolutely nothing for a couple of minutes, then, “Can I take a shower first? Believe me you’ll appreciate it if I do.”
“A quick one then, okay? I’ll send the address to your cell phone and you can key it into your GPS. Thank you Will. Seriously I owe you.”
“You sure do.” And he hangs up.
At the hardware store I get a sharp hand pick tool and a bottle of lubricant guaranteed to dissolve rust. I’m betting that if there is a metal box, it would be rusted shut after ten years of sitting in a moist wood opening.
On the way back to the McElroy house I call Marie and tell her I need her permission to do something at her house that might damage some of the wood on the outside just a bit. I don’t tell her exactly what I’ll be doing and don’t mention the eaves or what I suspect. No good getting her hopes up. I just promise her that I’ll be careful not to do much damage.
“Oh, Cate, don’t worry about damage. If there’s a possibility of a clue about Josh I don’t care if you wreck the house! I’ll come home. I can be there in a half hour.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I say and tell her I’ll call her if I find something. I use all my charm to convince her to stay at work. Truthfully I want to check out anything I find alone. I don’t want anyone else touching evidence.
It takes Will about an hour to get to Queens and he arrives not in the best of moods. While he’s untying the ladder from the roof of his truck. I quickly fill him in on why I need it, the problem of David, and my need for privacy with what I’m doing. I introduce him to Mr. O’Leary who has been not so discreetly watching me walk around the house, go back inside, and look out second floor windows.
“Mr. O’Leary, this is Will Benigni; Will, Mr. Albert O’Leary.”
They shake hands and talk for a few minutes. I’m sure that Mr. O’Leary thinks that Will works for me and I have to smile at that thought.
With Mr. O’Leary supervising and Will holding the ladder steady for me, I climb to the top and am easily able to reach the eaves. At first it looks as if there isn’t anything there but weather-scarred broken wood; maybe the sun was only glinting off a chip of paint that looked shiny in the glare. Looking closer, though, I can see there is definitely something that does look like a piece of metal. I carefully chip away the larger rotted pieces with the pick. My hands are sweating and the rotting wood flakes stick to my fingers. Larger pieces fall to the windowsill.
Suddenly the plinking sound of metal hitting metal makes me aware that I have hit something that might be the jackpot and I am right. I hurriedly break the old wood with my hands making an opening large enough to insert my fingers. Looking into the opening, I see it. Hidden deep within the wooden eaves is a narrow metal box. It had been wedged into an opening that looked to be about a foot deep and six inches wide. Using the pick and my fingers, I wrestle it slowly out of the wooden opening. Splinters jab into my palm.
Once the box is free, I hold it against my chest with one hand and fish Joshua’s key out of my back pocket with the other. The key certainly looks as if it will fit but, as I suspected, the lock is rusted shut.
“Does the key…?” Mr. O’Leary begins to yell up the ladder. Will turns and says something to him and Mr. O’Leary is quiet. I see David and a few neighbors standing a short distance away from them watching me. Will calls my name and nods at me as a signal to come down.
“Well?” says Mr. O’Leary in a stage whisper when I’m on solid ground and cradling the box inside my sweatshirt. I don’t answer him.
“Did you find something important?” David asks quietly, coming to stand in front of me. I’m about to tell him what I told him before about privacy when Will takes over, pulling out his wallet ID and his badge.
“I’m Detective Will Benigni, NYPD.” I see Mr. O’Leary’s mouth drop open with that statement. “This is a cold-case private investigation by Cate Harlow. It can only be discussed with the person who hired Ms. Harlow. I’d appreciate it if everyone would just go back to whatever they were doing and not ask any questions. There’s nothing to see anyway. Everything’s over.”
Turning to me he suggests we walk back to my car. I glance at Mr. O’Leary who nods and gives me a brief smile. He knows that Will had to talk the way he did to get rid of David. David walks quickly around towards the front of the house pulling his phone out as he goes. Probably calling Marie but I can handle that later.
I turn towards Mr. O’Leary and call out that I’ll be back for the coffee kick soon.
“Make it real soon. ‘Bye lady detective.”
****
I am sitting in my office with only the desk light illuminating the papers I found in the metal box. Will followed me back to my office where we used the rust dissolvent to clear the lock. Myrtle insisted on putting paper towels on my blotter so I wouldn’t have a mess from the rust and solvent on my desk. I didn’t care; I just wanted the box opened. After cleaning away the rust from the lock I took the key and after a few tries, it turned in the lock and the box opened. It was after five.
“Cate, this is your case. Check out what’s inside. I’m here and if you want to share what’s in there, that’s fine.” Will sits in Myrtle’s chair and puts his feet up on her desk. Myrtle doesn’t seem to mind and she busies herself by the copier.
Inside the box is a brown canvas bag that contains rolled up papers. They are dated and in order. Sifting through them quickly, I am stunned by what I read and say quietly, “Will? You have to look at this.” Then I add, “You too Myrtle.”
There are newspaper and magazine clippings about the sex scandals that have been rocking the Catholic Church for years. They are a veritable timeline of sexual abuse and the extraordinary efforts the church took to keep these horrendous crimes hidden.
While most of the clippings and copies from books are dated no later than fifty years ago, there are some going back to the fourteen hundreds. I see copies of historical documentation of atrocities committed with the official approval of the Church. One of these was the authorization of procuring young boys for the castrati choir. There are explicit legal testimonies from some of the castrati detailing the sexual abuse they endured at the hands of the priests all during their boyhood.
I find handwritten papers, obviously copied from old files and books, on what happened to Dutch boys in the 1950’s who were abused by diocesan priests.
“Dutch boys who accused priests of sexual abuse, including sodomy, were surgically castrated to rid them of, (what the Church declared was), their homosexuality, but also as a means of punishing those who dared accused clergy of this abuse”, wrote one Dutch investigative journalist named Joep Dohmen. He discovered that the castrations were done by Catholic doctors recruited by the Roman Catholic Church while the young boys were students or altar boys living on church grounds. Performed in psychiatric wards, without any type of anesthesia, the surgical castrations were authorized by the Church hierarchy, official seal and all.
Will gives a low whistle and mutters “Christ.” Myrtle closes her eyes and shakes her head.
We read about one of the victims, a young man named Henrik Heithuis, who was castrated at the age of twenty in 1956 after accusing several clergymen of years of rape, which began when he was ten years old.
After the castration, Heithuis spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital A psychiatrist who examined him stated officially that, “This man has been totally maimed; physically, emotionally, and mentally.”
There is a clipping about Church authorized payouts to sexually abusive priests after they left their dioceses and of these pedophiles being provided with room and board courtesy of the Church. I find a newspaper copy of a letter written by SNAP to a Catholic archdiocese asking, “In what other occupation, especially one working with families and operating schools and youth programs, is an employee given a cash bonus for raping and sexually assaulting children?”
There are hand-drawn pictures of the hideous yellow-eyed hyena and the innocent animal victims. The pictures have the same themes that were found in Joshua’s backpack
And there’s something else; something that explains the sadness in Joshua’s eyes in those pictures at the McElroy house. Written in a boyish hand is a detailed account of Joshua’s sexual abuse at the hands of a parish priest. A journal of papers, folded and tied together with string, begins with the account of his first abuse at the age of nine to his rape at the age of ten and continuing until a few months before Joshua McElroy went missing. The priest called the rapes penance for the boy’s sins. Joshua had decided he had only one desperate course to take .I have to run away because no matter how much pain it causes my family, no matter how I hurt Marie, I have to do this to survive. They are all so unaware of what has been happening. I can never tell them just as I can’t let him ever, EVER, hurt me again. He has destroyed my spirit. And Joey, the one everyone called a sweet kid, a good boy; Joey is now dead.”
Who is Joey? Was he abused also and did it cause him to take his life?
There’s a bottle of Kentucky bourbon in my desk drawer. A client had given it to me as a present after I had helped her discover that her husband, who had filed for divorce, had a girlfriend and a significant amount of money hidden away in a Cayman Island account.
I pour two stiff drinks into plastic cups for Will and for me. Even Myrtle takes a shot but adds water to it.
Now I know why Joshua drew predators and innocent victims and why he had a fascination with reading about people who were able to escape their captors. There’s a possibility that he may have run away with that boy named Joey. I ask Will to do a check on missing children named Joey from that area. He keys the specifics into his phone and sends it to The Center for Missing Children and local authorities.
“My God, Cate. We’re looking at details of a crime that was ongoing for over seven years. You need to find out if that priest he mentioned is still around. This is convictable evidence here. You might want to take it to our sex crimes unit to see what they have to say.” Will pours himself another drink and hands me the bottle to do the same.
“I will do that, but first I have to decide how to tell Marie or even if I should tell her anything until I can locate this priest. I’m assuming he’s from St. Matthew’s.”
“Yeah, you’d better do that first. Once sex crimes get hold of it, it’s out of your hands. They won’t want a private investigator involved in what they’re doing.”
Myrtle is sitting there looking out of the window. It’s well past the time she usually leaves and she’s already called Harry to say that she’d be late. Without taking her eyes away from where she is looking she says, “Do you think that Marie had any idea of what was happening to her brother?”
I look at Will and he shakes his head.
“No, Myrtle," I say firmly, “Even if she suspected that something wasn’t quite right, I truly believe she didn’t know what was going on. Most family members and close friends never know or even suspect what’s happening. And we have to remember that Marie’s family was very deep into their religion. You have to see the house, religious objects and pictures are everywhere. It would be hard for Joshua to tell them what was happening and just as hard for them to believe it. Even though they loved him, they would find it incomprehensible that it was happening. Plus, he was led to believe that this was his penance for whatever sins the priest told him he had committed.
“You know, Melissa said to me a few days ago, that religion is a subtle form of brainwashing. Subtle because it begins in childhood when you’re so young and your mind is malleable. Subtle or not, it’s still brainwashing and the effects of it are powerful.”
“Give me the child until the age of seven and I will show you the man,” quotes Will. “That’s attributed to Ignatius Loyola, a man who had a strict military background until he decided to form the Jesuit order. The members of the order are also known as God’s Marines and that alone says a great deal. Get a child in his formative years, tell him what he should believe, and he will grow to manhood believing all you have told him is true. Goes for girls too.” I nod in agreement.
“And because of the brainwashing the child never tells anyone about the sexual abuse. He or she feels ashamed, almost as if they were to blame. Look at the recent comment made by a priest-psychiatrist who counsels pedophile priests! He said that youngsters were often to blame when priests sexually abused them because the child was the seducer.” I stand and stretch.
“A vulnerable kid can be led by the abuser to believe that bullshit. Brainwashed to believe the victim is the bad one.”
“Maybe all religions are brainwashing,” says Myrtle who goes to her synagogue only on high holy days. “I don't feel especially brainwashed, but then I'm pragmatic.”
“What about you Will? Do you feel brainwashed?”
“No, but then Francesca had no problem changing religions when she was dissatisfied with the one in which she was raised. That led me to believe that no religion is infallible. You?”
“Me? I didn’t grow up in a particularly religious family. My parents were loving and kind but I was exposed to different beliefs and ideas. I know as much about Buddhism as I do Christianity. I’m more spiritual than religious. Add to that that I have a hard time with those who I think abuse authority.”
We grow silent then and just sit and sip our bourbon. I know alcohol is supposed to blur your senses but sometimes I think it clears them. So much about Joshua and his disappearance made sense now. Even the utter neatness of his room. Now I no longer thought that Marie had put it in perfect order after her brother went missing. It was more than likely left like that by Joshua. Sexually abused children need to be in control of the simple things in their lives and having everything in its place is a symptom of being able to control their environment.
I am going to wait a few days to tell Marie what I found. She needs to be prepared first. She has called my cell phone and the office leaving messages on both for me to call her back. I will, but not yet. There’s more to this story than just Joshua running away. I just have to find out what it is and that will take a few days.
With bourbon glasses in hand, the three of us go back to the papers to see if there is a clue that may have been missed. Myrtle makes copies of everything in the box, Will and I read through the articles and Joshua’s notes. It’s going to be a long night.
_________
“I remember the first time you served Mass as my altar boy. Do you remember that?”
“I remember everything, Father.”