Chapter Eighteen

LIKE THE TRIP out, the trip back from New Orleans had its high and low points. On a pleasant note, the plane boarded on time. We were more familiar with the Cleveland airport, so Hannah and I assumed our flight had been called in error. Once we realized there was no mistake, we gathered our carry-on bags, boarded, and found our seats. Based on the sudden constriction in my arm, that was also the time Hannah’s fear of flying set in for real.

“You know,” I said, “you could have gotten something to drink like every other red-blooded American who hates to fly.”

“That would be completely unprofessional,” Hannah replied. “Besides, do you have any idea how much they charge for alcohol in an airport? Not to mention that if I drank too much, you’d have to drive my car. There’s no way I’m letting you behind the wheel of my BMW. I’m not even sure the car would let you drive it.”

“Trust me, I have a lot of experience being rejected by cars.”

Fortunately for the circulation in my arm, a young boy came to my aid. Sitting directly behind Hannah, the boy started to kick the back of her seat the moment we began taxiing down the runway.

Hannah withstood this impact to the limit of her patience—about ten seconds by my count. At that point, she turned around and gave the boy a stare. I’d seen the look before, a gaze that said, “You’re dead; you just don’t know it yet.” Hannah continued to stare, and the kid stared back. Eventually, Hannah wore him down, and the kid sort of shrank back into his seat. He looked more than a little stunned.

She glanced at me and whispered, “I guess he’s not going to do that anymore.”

I looked back at the boy. He had the dazed stare of a child forced to watch an adult horror movie just before bedtime. “I don’t think he’s going to be doing much of anything anymore. He appears to be catatonic.”

“He’s fine. Don’t be such a worrywart.”

“I don’t know. I think you broke him.”

Luckily for me, this interaction took place during takeoff, the time when Hannah would have normally been wearing divots in my right arm. I figured I owed the kid. If he showed any signs of consciousness, I should probably give him a tip.

The rest of the flight was more uneventful, although I wasn’t nearly as lucky during landing. With my friend behind us now out of commission, Hannah had nothing to distract her from the threat of an imminent crash. I tried to hide my arm, but that didn’t deter her in the slightest.

“Remember,” she said, “your arm isn’t the only thing I could grab.”

Despite my lack of what she so sweetly called “guy parts,” I still felt a shiver. In fairness, Hannah did try to take it a little easier this time. At least I could still feel my fingers after we set down on the runway.

After we exited the plane and retrieved our weapons, I called Father Lawrence to see if we could schedule a meeting with him and Father Samuel, making sure to mention Detective Page would be there as well. Hannah’s presence prompted a request for more information which I was loath to give in the middle of a crowded airport. We finally compromised and decided Hannah and I would meet with him alone at three-thirty to summarize our findings. Once that was complete, we would call Father Samuel into the room to fill him in on the status of the investigation and ask our questions.

Our plane had arrived in Cleveland at exactly 12:00 p.m. That gave some happy travelers there the opportunity for an on-time departure, Cleveland’s version of winning the lottery. With so much time to spare until our afternoon meeting, Hannah and I decided we’d drop off our bags at our respective homes. She would then go to her station to fill in her captain and speak to Detective Roberts.

I also had a plan for my time alone. I had to speak to an old client, and that conversation needed to take place without Hannah in the room.

Tomas O’Malley was one of my first clients and the owner of one of the most unusual names in the city of Cleveland. Like many city residents, he was the product of the ethnic integration that had crossed all Cleveland boundaries over the last two generations.

Fifty years ago, Cleveland’s neighborhoods were as diverse as an early pilgrim church meeting. There were separate neighborhoods for the Polish, the Italians, the African-Americans, the Germans, the Irish, and almost every other ethnic and racial group you could think of. These communities had well-defined boundaries, most with their own schools and churches. The inhabitants of each locale knew they should never transgress the boundary of another.

The rigid lines defining these neighborhoods gradually broke down as residents discovered their fellow Clevelanders weren’t so different after all. According to family lore, Tomas’s parents met when his mother, Maria, wandered into his father’s church for the eleven o’clock mass. From the stories Tomas heard as a child, the beautiful, raven-haired Mexican immigrant and the tall, fair-skinned Kevin O’Malley sat in the same pew that day and immediately fell in love.

Tomas didn’t find out until he was an adult that his mother’s quest for citizenship played a role in his parents’ early relationship. Before agreeing to marry Kevin, Maria asked for only one thing—since any children would bear Kevin’s last name, she wanted to be the one to grant them their first. Kevin quickly agreed, and that’s how the name Tomas O’Malley was unleashed upon the unsuspecting world.

While practical considerations might have contributed to their early romance, no one who met Kevin and Maria today would doubt their deep and abiding love for each other. That devotion was evident the first time I met Tomas’s parents at their family’s home. After they explained their problem, I realized that love was also mixed with fear.

Tomas’s sister, seventeen-year-old Rosa O’Malley, had recently begun living with Leonard “Leo” McDougal, a smooth-talking street hustler who presented himself as a professional photographer. Rosa, beautiful like her mother, wanted to make a living as a model. As she was from a small Cleveland neighborhood, Leo looked like her best shot. The fact that Leo was a drug addict whose picture-taking expertise tended to pornography did not deter Rosa in the slightest.

My involvement in the case came after Tomas spotted his sister on the street outside Leo’s home, her beautiful face, now bruised. Rosa barely appeared to recognize her brother.

Alarmed, Tomas decided he needed outside help. He ended up picking my name from the online Yellow Pages with the hope that a lone private investigator would charge less than an agency.

From the moment I stepped into their home, I knew I wasn’t what the O’Malley’s had been expecting. Kevin’s first comment confirmed that impression.

“We thought you would be…bigger. I’m sorry, but the man we’re concerned with is at least six foot two.”

I understood their reaction, but I promised if they stuck with me, I would bring Rosa back that evening. The O’Malley’s agreed, though still with some reluctance. Tomas told me Leo’s house was located on a side street off Euclid Avenue just outside Cleveland’s downtown.

Euclid Avenue, once home to mansions built by men such as John D. Rockefeller and Samuel Mather, was known to old-time Clevelanders as Millionaire’s Row. Unfortunately, that era was more than a hundred years past. Little more than an alley, Leo’s Euclid side street now looked like an abandoned neighborhood from some post-apocalyptic horror movie. I drove there at about 1:00 a.m. and parked a few houses away until I was reasonably sure Leo and Rosa were asleep.

For most visitors, parking in that neighborhood would be an open invitation to car thieves, the majority of whom wouldn’t care if the owner was still in the car. For me, they weren’t a concern. No self-respecting thief would consider my car worthy of even a joy ride.

To get into Leo’s house, I’d brought along the set of lockpicks John had given me to celebrate my detective’s license. Amazingly, he’d ordered them through Amazon. After some practice, I’d become pretty good at picking locks, a skill that has served me well in the years since.

I was helped by the fact that Leo had only one lock on his back door, a significant oversight for that neighborhood. That lock took about twenty seconds to pick, and I needed just two more minutes to find Leo and Rosa asleep in Leo’s bedroom. Not surprisingly for a pornographer, the room also included most, if not all, of Leo’s photography and projection equipment. Closer to the bed, I found a case of homemade DVDs.

I woke them both up. While Rosa screamed, Leo, ever the hustler, sized up the short, skinny guy standing by his bed and decided a fight was his best option. He stood up and started to move forward. It was the second time in the space of a few hours that someone had questioned my abilities. I was beginning to get annoyed.

To deal with my irritation, I fired two bullets into the large camera by the bed before shifting my aim to Leo’s head. Reassessing the situation, he decided his bed was a perfectly comfortable place to stay. Before Leo could change his mind, I decided to press my advantage.

“Leo, you are one ugly shithead. I should shoot you for that alone, but here’s how things will go. I’m taking Rosa back to her parents. If you try to stop me, I will shoot you; if you so much as talk to Rosa ever again, I will shoot you; if I see a picture of Rosa on the internet, I will shoot you; if you bother anyone in her family, you guessed it—I will shoot you.

“I have to be honest, though, Leo. Even if you don’t do any of those things, I might shoot you anyway just because you’re such a fucking stupid piece of shit.”

Having no wish to argue further with the crazy person in his bedroom, Leo remained mute and seated.

I told Rosa to put on her clothes. While she dressed, I collected Leo’s homemade DVD collection, putting all of them in an empty shopping bag I’d found in Leo’s kitchen. Once dressed, Rosa came with me willingly. I drove her back to her parents’ house, earning the eternal gratitude of Tomas and the entire O’Malley family.

I don’t think Kevin and Maria ever understood some of my life choices, but they were fiercely loyal. From that day on, they treated me like a stepson. I kept the existence of the DVDs to myself, destroying them after I went back home. For his part, Leo McDougal never attempted to contact Rosa. In a wonderful example of addition by subtraction, he was killed six months later in a drug deal gone bad.

All of this came back to me as I thought about Tomas and his particular expertise. With a name like Tomas O’Malley, you might expect an exotic occupation like a movie star or a llama farmer. Instead, Tomas spent his days working as an accountant with a large Cleveland accounting firm.

For this case, I was more interested in Tomas’s nighttime occupation. I was one of a small circle of friends who knew Tomas for what he really was, one of the Midwest’s most accomplished computer hackers. I called him as soon as I got back to my apartment, and he picked up almost immediately.

“Hola, Terry. How’s my favorite private investigator these days?”

“I would be more impressed, Tomas, if that wasn’t the only word of Spanish you knew. By the way, how’s your sister doing?”

“Rosa’s doing well. It’s hard to believe she’s in her second year of college. She also started dating an engineering major. It’s nice to see her with someone who doesn’t have a criminal record, and don’t think I didn’t check. While we’re talking about family, Mom mentioned she hasn’t seen you in a while. She wanted me to invite you over for dinner, and she said you could bring a friend if you wanted.”

Like my own mother, Maria lived in fear that I would die a bachelor. “I wish I could, but I’m in the middle of a case right now. I really called to ask you for a favor. It involves hacking into the records of a Jesuit priest.”

“Sounds good. Why don’t you send me straight to hell while you’re at it? Also, how many times have I told you not to use that word over the telephone?”

I’ve heard that most hackers hate the term, and Tomas was no exception. His preferred title was computer consultant. Compared to “hacker,” I thought that was boring as hell. Like all people in his profession, Tomas was also paranoid when it came to discussing his craft.

Fortunately for me, he was also innately curious. I asked him to look for any and all information he could find on Father Samuel Dennert, starting with school records and progressing through his Jesuit career. I then asked him to cross-check anything he found against the academic and professional records for Dr. Michael Grieve. If there was a connection, I intended to find it. I probably wasn’t being fair, given our meeting had yet to take place, but I didn’t trust Father Samuel to tell me the full truth on the subject. Tomas agreed to what I asked, and I told him to call my cell immediately if he found anything worth reporting.

After we ended our call, I once again considered and rejected the idea of telling Hannah. I’d be putting her at risk, and I knew she’d tell me to stop. I didn’t want to hazard either outcome, convincing myself I could apologize later if she ever found out.

I still had a couple of hours left before the meeting at Saint Edmund’s, so I took a quick nap after calling John and my mother to let them know I was home. After the past week, it felt odd to sleep alone. Whether that was good or bad, I really wasn’t sure.