On the plane ride home, Kay sat in the middle seat, her laptop open, trying to make sense of what we’d stolen. There was no sequence to the documents. Some had been copied from dog-eared or coffee-stained originals, some wrinkled or mussed beyond legibility. It was less like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle than sifting through pieces from many puzzles. I leaned against Kay’s shoulder and directed her sorting—by penmanship, format, or date, but always looking for the name Dana Essex.
In the window seat, Blatchford snored. Before going through the security gate, he’d ingested whatever was left of his pharmacy. Then shortly after takeoff, he’d slugged back two airplane bottles of Tullamore Dew. He’d be comatose till touchdown.
As Kay scrolled through the files, a familiar blue script filled the screen. I pointed. “Looks like her handwriting.”
“I guess you’d know,” Kay said. “When I dropped by your place that morning, she was in there?”
“Yeah.”
“You slept with her.”
“How does that help us now?” I said.
“Sorry, it’s just weird. You don’t think it’s weird?”
“I crossed a line,” I said after a moment. “She knew I’d cross it, maybe helped push me, but it doesn’t change that this is my fault.” I added, “I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of this.”
“Don’t be,” Kay said. “I’m having a really good time.”
We looked at the paper. The middle page of a report, explaining how Essex had spent the hour working with her client on paragraph structure:
. . . while he doesn’t understand the logical development of supporting ideas, Mr. Henshaw is nonetheless a gifted raconteur. It’s a matter of focusing him, reminding him of the rules. He defaults to upper case letters when excited. I’ve suggested as a stopgap that he continue to write in caps while observing proper margins and punctuation. This method may . . .
—and done, and none of the surrounding documents seemed to pick up the thread.
“Henshaw,” I said. “We’ve got a suspect.”
“Only another thousand pages to go.”
“There’s no rush.” I remembered something. “Back at the church, you rolled your eyes. What was the password?”
Kay shook her head disapprovingly, like Father Darian should have known better. “Would you believe, ‘Jesus1’?”