Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [611]
Pakula left the photos on the table, but set aside the file folder. Now he was ready for Minneapolis. He scanned the police report. It was just like Weston had said—an outdoor festival during Memorial Weekend. The victim was stabbed in the chest in the middle of the crowd. No one saw it happen. No one claimed to see anything other than ex-padre Daniel Ellison fall to his knees, grabbing his chest. Maybe this one was random.
Pakula tossed several of the downloaded images onto the table alongside the Omaha ones. Not much here, either. He sat back, leaned his head against the soft leather of the sofa and absently watched Fox News top-of-the-hour news report, not really listening, his mind focused instead on the scant evidence.
He was tired and frustrated and mostly he dreaded telling Chief Ramsey that he had diddly-squat. He wondered if Archbishop Armstrong’s only concern was to continue to keep secret the monsignor’s drinking habit. Maybe they didn’t even know what was in the missing leather portfolio. Or could it simply be something embarrassing but not incriminating?
Pakula remembered Armstrong several months ago expelling two students from one of the parochial high schools for accessing porn sites on a school computer, sites the kids claimed their theology instructor—a priest whose name Pakula no longer remembered—had shown them just the day before.
At the time, Pakula thought it was Armstrong’s knee-jerk reaction, an attempt to ward off the slightest suggestion of impropriety in the wake of the sexual-abuse scandals rocking other archdioceses across the country. Armstrong had managed to keep a squeaky-clean record—no criminal reports filed or any civil lawsuits pending.
Just then Pakula noticed the photo of a priest being shown on the Fox News update—his black shirt and white collar grabbing Pakula’s attention even before he could read the caption below. He grabbed the remote and punched up the volume in time to hear only “…was mysteriously stabbed during a fireworks display. No other information is known at the moment. Father Gerald Kincaid was the pastor at All Saints Catholic Church in Columbia, Missouri. He was fifty-two years old.”
Pakula could feel the prickle at the back of his neck and the twist in the bottom of his gut. He grabbed his cell phone and without hesitation dialed the home phone number for Chief Ramsey. No matter how much he hated to admit it, he was beginning to think Bob Weston might be right.
Somebody was killing priests.
CHAPTER 29
Meriden, Connecticut
Maggie O’Dell watched Harvey take turns racing and chasing the much smaller Jack Russell terrier. She had never seen the big dog play so hard. She could swear Harvey looked like he was smiling and laughing as hard as Luc Racine was. Luc had already told Maggie three times that he didn’t know Scrapple liked to play with other dogs, and it wasn’t because he was forgetting that he had already told her but because he seemed truly amazed. Amazed and pleased. Which she knew had to make his daughter, Julia, a bit more relieved. This behavior, here and now at Hubbard Park, felt better especially after the alarming greeting they had gotten earlier at Luc’s front door.
Racine had called her father, talking to him several times in the hour it took them to get from West Haven to Wallingford. He sounded excited about having guests, even suggested that if Bonzado was picking up lunch and meeting them, he should stop at Vinny’s Deli. He seemed perfectly fine and yet minutes later when he answered the door he didn’t recognize his daughter or Maggie. He had no idea who the two women on his front porch were or what they could possibly want.
Maggie still remembered the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach when Luc’s eyes met hers and she saw that empty, confused look, a look that told her not all his pistons were firing no matter how hard he tried. It had been Harvey