Vandals, McGuire thought as he entered Father David Sellinger’s sixth-grade classroom at St. Matthew’s Catholic School for Boys. Vandals with red paint.
No, he told himself. Not red paint. Not vandals.
The wall facing the entrance displayed childish images of spring, brightly coloured posters of flowers, kites, boats and children painted with the freshness and primitive forms of ten-year-old artists. Now their innocent pictures were splashed with blood.
Bernie Lipson called his name from the corner, and McGuire looked up to see his partner standing with two uniformed officers and Mel Doitch. In the opposite corner a small, wiry man was crouched loading film into his camera.
“Who’s the victim?” McGuire asked, walking over to Lipson and Doitch.
“Name’s David Sellinger,” Lipson answered. “Jesuit priest. This is his classroom.” Lipson nodded to the blackboard that ran along the wall opposite the posters. “The message, it’s over there.”
McGuire walked up to the wall and squinted at the words hastily scribbled in chalk on the black slate:
The Priest desires.
“What the hell does that mean?” McGuire wondered aloud as he edged his way between the rows of school desks to inspect the writing.
“Who knows?” Lipson followed at a respectful distance. “This guy, we figure he wrote it on the way out. All the blackboards had been cleaned off earlier.” Lipson stopped next to McGuire. “We’ve got more to go on here, Joe,” he said. “The writing, if the killer did it. I’m betting he did. Plus we’ve got somebody who was here when it happened. Name’s Jaycock. School custodian. He’s downstairs in the teacher’s lounge. Says he tried to play hero, but I don’t think he’s telling us everything.” Lipson angled his head back towards the mutilated body on the floor beneath the children’s images of spring. “And this guy didn’t go down without a fight. Looks like he charged the killer. Took the first shot in the neck. Then the gunman reloaded and finished him off in the chest. Hell of a mess.”
McGuire nodded again and walked to examine the priest’s body more closely. “You got the perimeter secure?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Three teams, one in the school, two on the grounds,” Lipson answered. “Norm Cooper’s on his way for prints. Mel Doitch will bet everything matches. Buckshot pellets, sawed-off pattern, the works.”
The police photographer moved cautiously behind McGuire, who was crouched studying Sellinger’s wounds. The left half of the priest’s face had been cruelly mutilated by the fringe of the buckshot pattern. His chest was an open vessel of coagulated blood. “Can you get a clean shot of the writing on that blackboard?” the detective asked sharply without looking around.
The photographer had been prepared to focus on the body. Now he twisted to peer over his shoulder at the message scrawled in chalk. “Sure,” he said. “How many you need?”
“One,” McGuire replied, still studying the priest’s body. “About a half-dozen prints of one perfect shot before some idiot decides to houseclean and erases it.”
“Sellinger, the father there, he didn’t lock the door I guess.” Harvey Jaycock sat on a straight-backed wooden chair, looking awkward and uncomfortable. He avoided the eyes of the two detectives standing in front of them, their hands thrust deeply into their pockets. “The guy, he must have come in through the rear door. Same door the father used.” Looking up, Jaycock managed a small smile for Bernie Lipson. “The TV guys here yet? Eyewitness News?”
“Didn’t see them,” Lipson answered.
“Where were you when it happened?” McGuire demanded. Jaycock looked away and shifted in his seat. A mild stench filled the air. McGuire winced and glanced over at Lipson, who nodded silently.
“Downstairs,” the janitor replied, avoiding McGuire’s eyes. “Near the furnace room. I’d just finished my work and was set to go home. I heard somebody come in. Thought it was another teacher, see? Sometimes two of them’ll come in for a meeting or something. Then I heard the gunshot and the scream and another gunshot, and I knew it was the priest killer. Right here in St. Matthew’s. In Braintree. Jeez.” He shook his head in wonder at it all.
“What did you do then?” McGuire asked as Bernie Lipson scribbled in his note pad.
“Well, you know, I wanted to catch the bastard. So I went upstairs to find him.”
“With what?”
The janitor looked quickly at McGuire, then away again. “What do you mean, with what?”
“You go upstairs to meet some guy who’s just killed a priest with a shotgun, and you don’t take anything? A gun or something?”
“Hey, I don’t carry no gun,” Jaycock protested. “This is a school. I’m not licensed.”
“So you went upstairs all set to take on a shotgun killer with your bare hands?” McGuire demanded.
Jaycock shrugged. “Well, you know, you don’t think about yourself at times like that. I just went up there, you know. I was pissed off, somebody coming in a good Catholic school, shooting a priest, a fine man like Father Sellinger, so I just went up the stairs after him.”
“Is that when you shit your pants?” McGuire asked. Jaycock winced.
“Hey, I had an accident. Bowel problem, it runs in my family. . . .”
McGuire’s hand shot out and grasped Jaycock by the neck, squeezing the soft flabby flesh and forcing the man’s head against the wall. “Listen to me, you slimy son of a bitch,” McGuire hissed through clenched teeth. “Cut the fucking around and tell us what happened, or the only way you’re getting on TV is when we wheel you out on a stretcher with the corpse.”
Jaycock’s eyes bulged and rolled back and forth from McGuire’s angry face to Lipson’s calm expression. His hands reached up to McGuire’s grip on his neck. “I didn’t do nothing,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Were you down here when Sellinger was killed?” McGuire asked, tightening his grip.
“Yes, I told you.”
“And did you go upstairs after Sellinger was shot?”
“Yes, yes. That’s true.”
“Why?” McGuire paused while Jaycock’s eyes rolled over to Lipson, who stood silent and impassive. “Why?” McGuire shouted.
“To get the hell out of here!”
McGuire relaxed his grip and straightened up. “Now quit trying to play hero and tell us what happened. All of it.”
Jaycock rubbed his neck in silence, staring at the floor. “I seen him,” he said finally.
“Where?”
“In the stairwell. With the shotgun. I thought I was next, so I hid in the broom closet. He knew I was in there but . . .” Jaycock paused and shook his head. “He walked right by me. Right out the same door he come in. I couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t fucking believe it.” He looked up at the detectives. “I waited in there maybe five minutes. Then I come out, and I go downstairs and phone the cops. I didn’t go upstairs. I didn’t want to see it, what he done to the father.” He shook his head in wonder again. “He looked right at me. He knew I saw him. He had a clear shot at me down the hall when I was heading for the closet. Then he just walks out, calm as could be.”
“What did he look like?” Lipson asked.
The janitor scratched his nose absently, his eyes wide and staring off in the distance. “Young. Maybe twenty, twenty-two at the most. Slim build, blond hair.” He looked up at the two detectives. “He looked like a nice kid,” Jaycock said. “A real nice kid. And calm. Real calm, he was.”
Returning upstairs, McGuire and Lipson found some late arrivals performing their chores. Norm Cooper was dusting the blackboard for prints, Eddie Vance was scribbling furiously in a wire-bound notebook, Mel Doitch was speaking to two waiting ambulance attendants, and Kevin Deeley was praying softly over the body of Father David Sellinger.
McGuire jerked his thumb at the writing on the blackboard. “You get a shot of this?” he demanded from the police photographer. The photographer assured him he had several pictures, and that the prints would be on McGuire’s desk within hours. The detective grunted in approval, then turned to study the body again. He snapped his fingers.
“Vance!” he shouted across the room. “You got an M.B.T.A. map on you?”
Fat Eddie glanced up from his notebook. “What?”
“A subway map. You got one?”
“Might be one in my car.”
“Get it. Then go downstairs and take a statement from the custodian.” He looked over at Kevin Deeley, who made a sign of the cross over the dead priest’s body before turning to McGuire. “You know him, Father?” McGuire asked, lowering his voice.
Deeley nodded, his eyes still cast downward. “Not very well,” Deeley answered softly. “But yes, I knew him. He was a strong man. He wouldn’t have gone down without a fight.” The priest looked over at McGuire abruptly, his face flushed with anger. “When is it all going to stop? When is all this killing going to end?”
“When we catch the crazy son of a bitch,” McGuire replied calmly. “That’s the only time it ever ends.” He looked quickly around the classroom, then down the hall. “Anybody see a pay phone here? I’ve got to make a call.”
“He’s using the subway.”
McGuire stood in front of the colourful map impaled now by a third pin. It was 2 a.m. The rest of the special force assigned to the murders of the three priests—Lipson, Vance, Cooper, two men from ID, Ralph Innes and the other homicide sergeants, and Janet Parsons—were sprawled across chairs in front of him. Some sipped coffee from plastic cups. All of them made notes and tried to remain awake. At the back of the room Kevin Deeley sat apart from the others.
“The subway,” McGuire repeated. “I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you think so?” Bernie Lipson asked.
“The locations.” McGuire slapped the map behind him without looking at it. “St. Gene’s. Four blocks from the Forest Hills station. Forest Hills is the end of the Orange Line.” He hit the map again. “Xavier. Practically across the street from Boston College. End of the Green Line.” Instead of slapping the map a third time, he spread his hands in front of him. “Tonight, Braintree. End of the Red Line.”
“You figure he rides one of the lines to the end, then gets off and goes looking for a priest to kill?” It was Ralph Innes, gesturing at the map with his pencil.
“That’s how I see it. There’s nothing else connecting any of the priests. And all three killings happened when the subway was running with a reduced passenger load.”
“The gun, Joe.” Bernie Lipson spoke softly from his front row seat.
“What about it?”
“How’s he get it on a subway? Even sawed-off, he can’t carry the damn thing in his pocket.”
McGuire continued staring at Lipson, then closed his eyes. “I know. I know.” Shooting a look at Eddie Vance. “You were the last guy to talk to Jaycock,” he said. “Did he remember seeing the kid carrying anything else besides the gun?”
Vance replied that he hadn’t.
“Well, ask him again. When’s he looking at mug shots?”
“In the morning. Nine o’clock,” answered Janet Parsons.
McGuire nodded his approval as a knock sounded at the door.
“Lieutenant?” A uniformed police sergeant leaned into the room.
“What is it?” McGuire barked.
“There’s a guy named Hudson to see you?” The cop phrased it as a question. He regretted having to disturb McGuire.
“Send him in.”
Stewart Hudson was small and slim, with thick glasses that refused to rest atop a narrow, pinched nose. He entered the squad room tentatively, like a man unsure of his welcome. He nodded to the men in the room, smiled shyly at Janet Parsons and looked twice in the direction of Kevin Deeley dressed in his black priest vestments. Hudson carried a large black-and-white photograph and a pad of yellow notepaper.
“Hudson’s on retainer by us,” McGuire explained as the man worked his way between the squad room desks. “He’s a graphologist.” He turned to a frowning Ralph Innes. “Handwriting expert.”
Hudson stood beside the map, smiling nervously at the others in the room. His Adam’s apple moved up and down behind a perfectly knotted knit tie.
“I called him from the school tonight,” McGuire said. “The words on the blackboard mean something. We don’t know what. But the writing itself may tell us what the guy’s like.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “In about six hours I have to have a report ready for Jack Kavander, and I want everything in it I can get. You got some ideas from the stuff on the blackboard?” McGuire asked Hudson, who seemed fascinated by the presence of Kevin Deeley.
Hudson turned quickly towards McGuire. “Yes, yes, I have.” His voice was high-pitched and nasal. Pushing his glasses higher on his nose, he pinned the photograph to the face of the map. The three words stood out starkly in black and white: The Priest desires. Hudson looked down at his notes, then back to the detectives and Deeley.
“You must understand,” he said, “that three words constitute a very limited source upon which to base a graphologically correct personality profile. A signature would, of course, have been ideal. Aspects of personality are revealed much more precisely in a signature. But I can make a few tentative observations.”
Hudson turned back to the photograph of the writing on the blackboard. “Notice the slope to the right. A very marked slope, as a matter of fact. I’d say whoever wrote this is very affectionate, and he—”
“Very what?” Ralph Innes growled.
Hudson adjusted his glasses again. “Affectionate. He is someone who thinks with his heart instead of his head.”
“He thinks with a fucking twelve-gauge Remington,” Innes said to the detective beside him.
“Let’s get on with it and get out of here,” McGuire said, and nodded at Hudson.
“If you look at the ‘d’ and the capital ‘P,’” Hudson said, “you’ll see how large and elongated they are. They usually indicate that the writer is very idealistic in nature. He has high morals. Strong ideas about what’s right and wrong. And he’s very creative. Certainly artistic.”
Hudson looked up at his audience, who sat with sceptical expressions on their faces. Two in the morning, and some doorknob is saying a shotgun killer has a sense of right and wrong, they were asking themselves. Where’d McGuire find this clown?
But Kevin Deeley sat forward, his chin on his hand, absorbing every word.
The graphologist cleared his throat and turned back to the photograph. “Now, this is very unusual. From what I can see, the writer used very heavy pressure on the chalk. I’ve never seen this combination before, of an affectionate and moralistic nature plus such strong pressure in every letter.”
“Which means what?” asked McGuire.
“Which means we have a very complicated personality here,” Hudson explained. He was growing bolder, enjoying the opportunity to exhibit his expertise. “You see, pressure like this is normally associated with a self-reliant, revengeful individual. Which isn’t normally combined with affection and high moral sense.” He glanced back at the writing sample. “I’d say he might be a trifle immature too.”
“Does this mean he’s a schizoid, this guy?” Bernie Lipson asked.
Hudson shrugged and smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said, adjusting his glasses. “I’m not a psychologist.”
“What else can you figure out?” McGuire asked. He sat wearily on a table next to the map and rubbed his eyes as Hudson replied.
“A few tentative clues,” said Hudson who, along with Kevin Deeley, was the most wide-awake person in the room now. “The varying size of the letters suggests someone immature. The dots over the two ‘i’s are light and firm. I’d say this person has moral courage, somebody who dares to do what he thinks is right.”
Hudson looked around the room again at bored, unbelieving expressions.
“Anything else?” McGuire asked.
“Some of these forms, in the ‘d’s and ‘e’s, are found in the writing of shy people. And all these varying sizes of the small letters are common in the writing of people undergoing serious inner turmoil. You see that a lot in teenagers.” He looked up and smiled. “As you might expect.” Janet Parsons smiled back. Hudson adjusted his tie and pushed up his glasses.
“Is that it?” McGuire demanded.
“One more thing,” Hudson said. “Uh, is this, does this have anything to do with the series of priest murders?”
“It might,” McGuire replied gruffly. “Why?”
Hudson glanced at Deeley, who was watching him intently. “Because,” the graphologist continued, “there’s one aspect of the writing I just couldn’t ignore.”
“What’s that?”
“Whoever wrote these words is very religious. A terribly religious person.”