But now she had a chance to correct that ignorance and she’d be damned if she was going to let it go to waste.
“Well,” Mackenzie said, “we do have a very specific profile. I was hoping that if I could speak to you or maybe someone that has been here for a long time, I could maybe find a potential suspect. And even if not a suspect, maybe someone that knows something about the killings.”
“Well,” Costello said, “I’ve been here for thirty-five years. I was a guidance counselor first and then became the principal, a position I’ve held for nearly twenty years.”
She stood up and walked to the left side of her office where a row of ancient-looking filing cabinets lined the wall. “You know,” Costello said, “you aren’t the first detective to come sniffing around when a crime is committed that seems to have religious influence. Not by a long shot.”
Costello pulled four folders from the cabinet and brought them back to the desk. She plopped them down on the desk with enough force to show that she was clearly irritated. Mackenzie reached out to scoop them up but Costello’s hand was already pointing to them. Without looking at Mackenzie, Costello started talking again, tapping at each folder with her plump index finger.
“This one,” she said, pointing to the first folder, “is Michael Abner. When he was here in the early seventies, he assaulted a girl on the playground and was caught masturbating in the girl’s restroom in fifth grade. However, he died in 1984. A terrible car accident, I believe. So he’s clearly not a suspect.”
With that, Costello removed Michael Abner’s folder from the desk. She then promptly eliminated two other folders, as one of them had died five years ago from lung cancer and another had spent his life in a wheelchair – obviously not the sort of person that could cart around wooden poles to murder scenes.
“This last one,” Costello said, “belongs to Barry Henderson. While attending Holy Cross, he got into several fights, one of which sent two boys to the emergency room. When he returned from his expulsion, he began sending the teachers dirty letters, an activity which culminated in his attempted rape of the school art teacher while singing his mother’s favorite hymn. This happened in 1990. I regret to inform you, though, that he cannot be your suspect either. He has been a resident of the Westhall Home for the Criminally Insane for the last twelve years.”
Mackenzie made a mental note to verify that, then watched as Costello placed the folders back into her cabinet. When she closed it, she gave it a little slam that filled the office like a bomb.
“And those are the only students you’ve had in the last thirty-five years that would be capable of crimes like the Scarecrow Killer is committing?”
“We have no possible way of knowing that,” Costello said. “With all due respect, we do not keep tabs on every student that has the potential for a life of crime. That would involve detailed reports on every child that breaks even the slightest rule. The four I just showed you were the most extreme cases, and I have had those on hand for the last several years because it saves a great deal of time when we are approached by the police, especially when they have come up with what they believe are fitting profiles. They always want to blame religion for crimes they cannot solve on their own.”
“There’s no blame here,” Mackenzie said.
“Of course there is,” Costello said. “Tell me, Detective. Have you come here to simply find the name of a suspect or what sort of religious doctrine warped them so badly that they are now committing these horrible acts?”
“I don’t care how the information comes,” Mackenzie snapped. “I just need to find out who is killing these women. The why is secondary at this point.”
Mackenzie started to feel idiotic for coming to Holy Cross. What had she been expecting, anyway? A nice and tidy solution? An old student that matched Ellington’s profile to a tee?
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Costello,” she said softly. She got up and headed for the door. As her hand fell on the knob, she was stopped by Principal Costello.
“Why do you think that is, Detective White?”
“What?”
“Why does law enforcement come looking for answers from religion when they can’t solve what they believe are faith-based crimes?”
“It just matches the profiles in most cases,” Mackenzie said.
“Does it?” Costello asked. “Or is it because humans can’t accept evil for what it really is? And because we can’t accept it, we have to find something just as intangible to blame it on?”
A question rose to her lips, one that she was unable to bite back before it came out.
“What is evil, Ms. Costello? What does evil look like?”
Principal Costello grinned thinly. It was a haunting grin, an expression that hinted at some sort of dark understanding.
“Evil looks like you. It looks like me. We live in a fallen world, Detective. Evil is everywhere.”
The doorknob under Mackenzie’s hand suddenly felt very cold. She nodded and took her leave, not bothering to look back at Principal Costello for a goodbye.
As she made her way down the labyrinthine halls of Holy Cross, her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She retrieved it and saw Nelson’s name and number on the display. Her heart fell.
The killer, she thought. He showed up while I was away and Nelson is going to have my ass for it.
She answered the call with a knot of fear in her stomach. “Hey, Chief.”
“White,” he said. “Where are you?”
“Holy Cross Catholic School,” she said. “I’m following up on Ellington’s profile.”
Nelson was quiet for a moment as he considered this. “We can go over why the hell you’d defy my order and waste time going there later,” he said. “For now, I need you to swing by the station on your way back through.”
“But what about Route 411?” she asked. “I’d like to get back out before rush hour.”
“Another reason you had no business wasting time following up on Ellington’s lead. Just come here now.”
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
But Nelson had already ended the call, leaving Mackenzie to listen to nothing more than a dead line.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Her sense of unease grew even larger when Mackenzie walked into the station and saw Nancy sitting at the front desk. When Mackenzie came in, Nancy gave her only a brief smile and then looked back down to her desk. This was extremely uncharacteristic for Nancy, a woman who usually seemed to stretch her face to accommodate a smile for anyone that came in the station’s front doors.
Mackenzie nearly asked Nancy if she knew what was going on but decided not to. The last thing she wanted was to seem weak and out of the loop as she tried to spearhead the closing to this case. So she bypassed the front desk and headed to the back, marching dutifully toward Nelson’s office.
She opened the door and stepped in, trying to appear confident and as if she were fully in control. But even now, as she closed the door behind her, she knew that taking two and a half hours out of her afternoon to visit Holy Cross had been a mistake. She’d been jumping at shadows in an attempt to be as perfect as possible, making sure she exhausted every opportunity, especially ones offered by impressive FBI agents, to get to the bottom of this case.
Nelson looked up to her and for the briefest of moments, an anxious expression crossed his face.
“Have a seat, White,” Nelson said, nodding to the chairs on the opposite side of his cluttered desk.
“What’s going on?” she asked. The nerves were evident in her voice but that was the last thing on her mind as Nelson seemed to size her up.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “And you are not going to like the solution. Our scum-sucking friend Ellis Pope has lodged a formal complaint against you. For now, he’s keeping it quiet – just between us and his lawyer. But he says if immediate action isn’t taken, he’ll take it to the papers. Usually I wouldn’t even care about such a threat, but the papers and even some of the television media have painted you as the head of this investigation. If Pope goes to the media with his complaint, things are going to get very bad.”