‘More coffee, honey?’ asked Trixie.
Detective Jenna Pullet shook her head emphatically from side to side. ‘No, thanks, Trixie. I don’t want to spend the rest of the morning shaking like a fricking epileptic.’
‘You didn’t touch your bacon,’ said Trixie, frowning at her plate. ‘You hardly touched your eggs, neither.’
‘That’s because the bacon is watery and the eggs are rubbery. And is this a buckwheat pancake or a mouse mat?’
‘I don’t never know why you come in here,’ said Trixie. ‘You order breakfast, you always hate it.’
‘I come in here to lose weight. It’s a whole lot nearer than my gym.’
For Jenna, her weight was a never-ending struggle. She was blonde, with big hair and a wide, generous face, and a wide, generous figure to go with it. In her closet at home she had seven suits of three different sizes – the suits she could comfortably get into, the suits she could get into if she wore her Bali firm-control briefs and held her breath from morning till night, and the suits she could only aspire to get into.
It was the irregular mealtimes that did it. The jelly donuts when they were out on early-morning stake-outs, the hurried Reuben sandwiches before they had to give evidence in court, and then the cheesesteak and beer orgies after they had made a successful arrest. She could never keep track of the calories, and she always imagined that her digestive tract was like the CSX marshaling yard, with food being shunted down her like coupled-up railroad cars.
‘So, you doing anything exciting today?’ Trixie asked her, taking away her plates.
‘Sitting in front of a computer screen, most likely. Things have been real flat for the past couple of weeks. Even the South Philly mob are sitting at home and doing all their racketeering online. These days, I think “Mousie” Massimino employs more hackers than hit men.’
Joe McVitie came out of the kitchen holding up Jenna’s plate. ‘What the hell’s the matter, Jenna, this is best farm bacon, fresh eggs!’
‘I know, Joe. It takes real talent to mess them up as bad as that.’
‘So why do you keep on coming in here if you think I cook so shit?’
‘That’s what Trixie asked me. I really don’t know, Joe. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing. Mortification of the palate – you know, like the nuns force themselves to eat gristle.’
‘Well my advice to you is to go eat breakfast someplace else.’
‘No, Joe. It’s not in my nature. I’m waiting for a miracle. I’m waiting for the morning when I walk in here and the bacon is crispy and the eggs are over easy and the pancakes are light and golden. An angelic choir will start singing and the whole diner will be filled with dazzling sunshine and I will know that my faith in you has at last paid off. And do you know when that will be?
Joe shook his head, partly because he really couldn’t guess and partly because he thought Jenna was nuts.
‘Sometime around the year twenty-thirty, if I’m lucky,’ Jenna told him.
She climbed down off her red leather stool and lifted her coat off the back. As she did so, her cellphone played ‘Blanket on the Ground’. She slid it open and demanded, ‘What?’
It was her partner, Dan Rubik. It sounded as if he were out on the street someplace, because she could hear traffic and sirens and people shouting in the background.
‘Jenna – I’m here at the intersection of Green Street and North Twenty-second. Just outside the Convent of Divine Love. We got ourselves a very weird DB here.’
‘Weird? What do you mean by weird?’
‘Looks like the guy got hit by a half a ton of rock, right out in front of the convent. Killed him instantly.’
‘What? Did it fall off the roof or something?’
‘Couldn’t have done. He’s nowhere near the roof.’
‘OK – I’ll get right down there. Do you have backup?’
‘There were half a dozen uniforms here by the time I got here, and the medical examiner’s on his way.’
‘OK. Give me ten minutes.’
Jenna took out her billfold to pay for her breakfast, but Joe McVitie said, ‘Forget it. It’s on the house. Go be a nun. Eat gristle.’
*
Officers Steinbeck and Cremer gave Jenna a ride to North Twenty-Second Street. Officer Cremer had a head cold and kept noisily blowing his nose, and the interior of the squad car reeked of menthol.
When they arrived, Jenna saw that the wide paved area in front of the Convent of Divine Love had already been cordoned off with POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape and that the side street was crowded with spectators. A black van from the medical examiner’s office was parked nose-to-tail with a van from the crime scene unit and another van from 6 ABC Action News.
Dan Rubik came across the paved area and lifted up the tape for her. He was a young, intense detective with a bright ginger buzz-cut and pale green eyes and freckles. He always wore green coats because he thought that they complemented his gingery complexion.
‘OK – we have at least five eyewitnesses already. They all say that the vic was crossing this forecourt, minding his own business, when crash! This massive block of stone dropped on top of him, right out of the blue. No warning. Just crash!’
Jenna elbowed her way into the knot of officers and CSIs and medical examiners who were gathered around the victim. When they saw who it was, they all stepped aside and let her through. Several of them gave her a wary nod of acknowledgement. One or two of them put on sour expressions and backed away.
The body was that of a man about forty-five years old, wearing a dark blue linen coat and light khaki pants. He was lying with his face pressed flat against the paving slab, still wearing his horn-rimmed Clark Kent spectacles, as if he had made no attempt at all to break his fall. The back of his head was crushed in – a glistening mixture of brains and skull fragments that looked as if somebody had broken a white china pudding basin filled with boysenberry jelly.
Lumps of shattered stone were scattered everywhere. Several of them were still resting on the victim’s back, but most of them had exploded in all directions, and now littered an area spanning the street. One chunk was over a foot wide, but few of them were bigger than tennis balls, and most of them were much smaller.
Jenna looked up. The convent’s facade was a gray Gothic chapel with a circular stained-glass window like the spokes of a huge cartwheel. Dan was right. The vic was lying at least sixty feet too far away to have been struck by a piece of stonework falling from the roof of the chapel – not that she could see any sign of missing crosses or spires or statues or gaps in the parapet.
Ed Freiburg, one of the crime scene specialists, came up to her. He was short and chunky, with pitted cheeks and steel wool for hair, and he looked more like a boxing coach than a forensic scientist. ‘We’re guessing there’s nearly a thousand pounds of stone here. We can’t know for sure until we collect it all up and weigh it, but that’s our estimate.’
‘So how the hell did nearly half a ton of stone drop out of a clear blue sky?’ Jenna asked him. ‘Did any of the witnesses hear a helicopter?’
Dan said, ‘None of them.’
‘All the same, run a check on all helicopter flights in the vicinity. See if some construction company was maybe trying to fly a block of rock across the city for some restoration job.’
She turned back to Ed Freiburg, ‘Do you know what kind of stone this is?’
‘Limestone,’ Ed Freiburg told her. ‘And it’s some of the best quality limestone I ever saw. Usually used for building and sculpture, that kind of thing. So if it was dropped from a helicopter, this is the kind of stone it would most likely be, if that makes sense.’
Jenna looked around. She hated cases like this. More often than not, they turned out to be negligent homicide, and cases of negligent homicide invariably involved weeks or even months of tedious paperwork and hours of Byzantine interviews with evasive executives and slippery corporate lawyers. Eventually, somebody would pay off somebody else and the whole process would be dropped for the lack of anybody willing to point a finger at whoever had added the lethal chemical to the cleaning fluid, or whoever had left off the safety switch, or whoever had allowed the pipes to rust through, or, in this case, whoever had failed to secure half a ton of limestone to whatever it was supposed to have been secured to.
‘I presume the vic was carrying some kind of ID,’ she said.
Dan passed her a black leather wallet. She opened it up and saw a photograph of two curly-headed girls about eight or nine years old, one with her two front teeth missing. The victim’s driving license showed a serious, slightly overweight man with the glassy-eyed look of a contact-lens wearer. His name was Steven Caponigro, and he lived at 4414 Buttonwood Avenue, Maple Shade Township, across the river in New Jersey.
‘No relation to Tony “Bananas” Caponigro, I suppose?’ asked Jenna, but then she answered her own question. ‘Highly unlikely, if he was living in Maple Shade Township.’
She took a business card out of his wallet. It told her that Steven Caponigro was senior manager of Maple Shade Realtors.
‘Can’t see anybody deliberately wanting to flatten this poor guy. Not unless he’d sold them some overpriced dump that turned out to be riddled with dry rot.’
‘You want to talk to any of the witnesses?’ Dan asked her. ‘I’ve asked them to wait, in case you did.’
Jenna shook her head. ‘You can let them go. It’s pretty obvious what happened here, even if it isn’t explicable.’
As she circled slowly around the body, she noticed the heavy side door of the convent open up. There was a pause, and then one of the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters stepped out, dressed in the distinctive rose-colored habit that had earned them the nickname of the Pink Sisters.
The nun hesitated for a moment, and then half-lifted her right hand, as if she were trying to attract Jenna’s attention without appearing too obvious.
Jenna said, ‘OK, Dan, want to follow up that helicopter thing? Try talking to Stuart What’s-his-face at Columbia Heavy Lift Helicopters.’
‘Stuart What’s-his-face?’
‘Just ask to speak to the skinny guy who laughs like Pee-Wee Herman. They’ll know who you mean.’
She maneuvered her way through the assembled police officers and CSIs and walked across the paved area until she reached the convent door. The nun waited for her. As she approached, she lowered her hand and said, ‘Are you a detective?’
Jenna tugged out her badge. ‘Detective Jenna Pullet, Sister. Did you have something you wanted to tell me?’
The Pink Sister nodded. She was in her late thirties, maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a face so pale that it was almost ivory. She wore rimless spectacles and her eyebrows were dark and unplucked – yet in a strange, asexual way, she was beautiful, like a medieval painting of a saint, either male or female.
‘I felt something,’ she said, with the slightest of lisps.
‘You felt something? What do you mean? You felt it when that rock hit the sidewalk? I’m not surprised. It weighed close to a thousand pounds.’
‘No. I felt something before it fell.’
‘Before it fell?’
‘It was during our Eucharistic celebration. We have one every morning at seven. While we were praying in the chapel I felt something pass overhead.’
‘I get it. Like a helicopter, or an airplane, something like that?’
The nun shook her head. ‘It made no sound. It passed overhead like a shadow passing over the sun, that’s the only way that I can describe it.’
‘Did you actually see it?’
‘No. It was a feeling, that’s all. Dark, and cold, and very evil-hearted.’
‘What’s your name, Sister?’ Jenna asked her.
‘Sister Mary Emmanuelle.’
‘How long have you been a Pink Sister, Mary?’
‘Seventeen years this September tenth.’
‘So for seventeen long years you’ve been shut up in this convent, praying? I mean, like, this is a very closed community, so far as I understand it? You don’t get out much.’
‘We do live a cloistered life, yes. We devote our days and our nights to listening to the Word of God and to keeping a prayerful vigil on behalf of the entire world. But I hope you’re not trying to suggest that my years of seclusion have made me susceptible to delusions.’
‘No, no. I’m not suggesting that for a second. Or, I don’t know. Maybe I am. It’s pretty hard for me to understand how you can spend all day every day praying. I’m a Catholic, too, Sister, but I have to confess that there’s a limit to how much praying I can do before I start to feel seriously prayed out. My knees won’t take it, either, not these days.’
She paused, and then she asked, ‘Did any of your fellow sisters experience this same feeling? This cloud passing over the sun?’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle shook her head again. ‘If they did, none of them spoke of it.’
‘OK … so what do you think it was? Do you have any kind of explanation for it? Maybe it was intuition? Or maybe a cloud really did pass over the sun and the chapel physically went colder and darker and for some reason it gave you the heebie-jeebies?’
‘I have no explanation for it,’ Sister Mary Emmanuelle admitted. ‘I felt it, and I felt that it was cold and ugly and ill-intentioned. But only seconds later it fell out of the sky and killed that poor man, and that’s why I thought it important for me to tell you what I felt.’
‘Excuse me?’ said Jenna. ‘You said “cold and ugly and ill-intentioned”. It was a half-ton lump of rock, that’s all. How could a half-ton lump of rock be ill-intentioned?’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle frowned over Jenna’s shoulder toward the fragments of limestone scattered across the pavement.
‘It was a living thing, Detective. A creature.’
‘A creature? What kind of a creature, exactly?’
‘I’m sorry. Please – forget it. I shouldn’t have bothered you.’
‘No, Mary. I don’t think that at all. Tell me what kind of a creature. Please.’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle’s eyes darted from side to side behind her rimless spectacles as if they were trapped. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I should never have mentioned it. To believe in evil is to give it life.’
‘Mary – evil is alive and well whether we believe in it or not. I come across evil every day of my life and some of it is totally unbelievable. But it still exists, and all I can do is try to stamp it out.’
Sister Mary Emmanuelle covered her face with both hands. When she spoke, she spoke so quietly that Jenna had to tilt her head toward her to hear what she was saying.
‘It had a face like a demon, ugly beyond all description, with bulging eyes and horns. It had a hunched back and leathery wings. Instead of feet it had claws.’
She hesitated for a moment, and then she lowered her hands.
Jenna said, ‘You told me you didn’t see it.’
‘I didn’t see it. That was what I felt.’
‘You felt bulging eyes and horns? You felt claws instead of feet? I don’t understand what you’re saying. How do you feel claws instead of feet?’
‘You think I’m hysterical. You think I’ve been shut up in this convent for too long. You think I’ve been looking at too many illustrations of hell.’
Jenna didn’t know how to answer that. She patted Sister Mary Emmanuelle on the shoulder and said, ‘OK, Mary … thanks for talking to me. I know where to find you if I need to ask you any more questions, don’t I?’
‘You don’t believe me,’ said Sister Mary Emmanuelle.
‘Of course I believe you. Jesus, you’re a nun.’
‘I felt it pass overhead. I felt its coldness. I felt its malevolence. I saw it clearly in my mind’s eye. I promise you in the name of Our Lord that I am telling you the truth.’
‘And like I said, Mary, I believe you.’
*
Jenna left Sister Mary Emmanuelle at the convent door and walked back to the victim. The crime scene investigators were taking photographs now, and with each flash of their cameras his body seemed to twitch, as if he wasn’t quite dead yet.
‘Anything?’ asked Ed Freiburg, nodding his head toward Sister Mary Emmanuelle.
‘Are you kidding me? I think too much adoration has gone to her head.’
‘Well, we’ll catalog all of the pieces and that should give us some idea of how high this rock was dropped from. Maybe that should give us some idea of what it was dropped from, and how.’
‘OK. I’m going to drive over to Maple Shade and talk to this unlucky bastard’s nearest and dearest. After that I’ll be back at the district.’
One of the CSIs called out, ‘Ed! Take a look at this!’ She was holding up a piece of limestone and turning it this way and that.
Ed went over to see what she wanted, and Jenna followed him. Although one side of the stone was broken and rough, the other side was evenly rippled and smooth, as if it had been fashioned to look like a fold of material.
Jenna took it and examined it. ‘This has definitely been carved,’ she said. ‘Look, you can see that it’s been chiseled, and then filed.’
‘So our vic could have been flattened by a statue?’
‘I don’t know. Let’s see if we can find some more sculpted bits.’
Ed called out, ‘Can you all take a closer look at these rocks, people, and check if any of them have evidence of carving on them – like this one I’m showing you here!’
Within a few seconds, one of the police officers held up a triangular fragment of stone and said, ‘Here! This piece has some kind of a wing tip carved on it, by the looks of it.’
‘And there’s a kneecap here! Or maybe it’s an elbow.’
‘I found a couple of fingers!’
Over the next ten minutes, the officers brought over more and more pieces of stone that bore unmistakable signs of having been carved. Most of the fragments had been smashed so small that at first sight it was impossible to identify what part of a statue they could be, but Jenna knew that once Ed and his team got them back to their laboratory, they would be able to reassemble them and find out what the figure originally looked like. Two years ago they had reconstructed an antique glass vase that had been shattered into more than three thousand pieces.
‘Right,’ said Jenna, checking her watch. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Let me know as soon as you’ve got this baby stuck together again.’
‘Oh, for sure. So long as you give us about three months, minimum.’
She was returning to the squad car when one of the CSIs shouted out, ‘Detective! Detective Pullet!’
She turned around. The investigator was standing in the raised flower-bed at the side of the convent, more than forty feet away from the point of impact. He was holding up a large gray piece of limestone that looked like a mask that had been broken in half, diagonally. Jenna walked back so that she could look at it more closely.
‘Scary-looking sucker, don’t you think?’ said the CSI.
The piece of limestone must have weighed at least fifteen pounds. It was half of a head, with tangled hair and a single curved horn. Its face had one protuberant eye and a snarling mouth. It had a face like a demon, ugly beyond all description.
Jenna looked across to the convent’s side door, but Sister Mary Emmanuelle had disappeared now, and the door was closed.
‘Shit,’ she said. The very last thing she had wanted to find out was that Sister Mary Emmanuelle might have been telling her the truth.