"They picked up the guy in the house," Kolarcik said, thrusting the handset toward Renny. "Everything there's pretty much like Father Ryan described it."
We don't know for sure he's a priest yet, Renny wanted to say but skipped it.
"You mean the guy was just sitting there waiting to be picked up?"
"They say he looks like he's in some sort of trance or something. They're gonna take him down to the precinct house and—"
"Bring him here," Renny said. 'Tell those guys to bring him here and nowhere else as soon as he's booked. I want to get a full medical on this guy while he's fresh…just to make sure he's not suffering from any unapparent injuries."
Kolarcik smiled. "Right."
Renny was glad to see that this particular uniform was on his wavelength. No way that fucker in Queens was going to take a walk on a psycho plea,- not if Renny had anything to say about it.
He opened the door to the lounge and took a look at the guy who said he was a priest. Big, clean-cut, square jaw, thick brown hair graying at the temples, good build. Good-looking guy, but at the moment he looked crushed by fatigue and pretty well frayed on all his edges. He sat hunched forward on the sagging sofa, a cup of Downstate's bitter, overheated coffee clasped in his hands.
His fingers trembled as he rubbed his palms against the cup, as if trying to draw warmth from the steaming liquid on the other side of the Styrofoam. Fat chance.
"You connected with St. Francis?" Renny said.
The guy jumped, like his thoughts had been a thousand miles away. He glanced at Renny, then away.
"For the tenth time, yes."
Renny took a chair opposite him and lit up a cigarette.
"What order you from?"
"The Society of Jesus."
"I thought the Jesuits ran St. Francis."
"Same thing."
Renny smiled. "I knew that."
The guy didn't smile back. "Any word on Danny?"
"Still in surgery. Ever hear of Father Ed? Used to be at St. Francis."
"Ed Dougherty? I met him once. Back in seventy-five at St. F.'s Centennial. He's gone now."
The guy had said the magic words: St. F.'s. Only someone who'd lived there called it St. F.'s.
Okay. So he probably really was Father William Ryan, S.J., but that didn't absolutely mean that he had nothing to do with what had happened to that kid. Even priests got bent. Wouldn't be the first time.
"Look, Detective Angostino," Father Ryan said. "Can we make small talk later?"
"It's Awgustino, and there's no small talk and no later in something like this."
"I've told you, it was Herb. The husband. Herbert Lorn. He's the one. You should be out—"
"We've got him," Renny said. "We're bringing him down here for a checkup."
"Here?" Ryan said. The fatigue seemed to drop away from him in an instant. His eyes came to blazing life. "Here? Give me a few minutes alone with him in this little room. Just five minutes. Two." The Styrofoam cup suddenly collapsed in his hand, spilling hot coffee all over him. He barely seemed to notice. "Just one lousy minute!"
Okay. So the priest most likely had nothing to do with hurting the kid.
"I want you to tell me the whole story," Renny said.
"I've done that twice already." The fatigue was back in Ryan's voice. "Three times."
"Yeah, but to other people, not to me. Not directly. I want to hear it myself, from you to me. Right from the moment these people stepped into St. F.'s until you arrived here in the ambulance. The whole thing. Don't leave anything out."
So Father Ryan began to talk and Renny listened, just listened, interrupting only for clarifications.
None of it made much sense.
"You mean to tell me," he said when the priest had finished, "that they had this kid in their home for weekends, whole weeks at a time, and never laid a finger on him?"
"Treated him like a king, according to Danny."
"And then as soon as the adoption is official the guy slices the kid up. What's the story there? What's it mean?"
"It means I screwed up, that's what it means."
Renny saw the tortured look in Father Ryan's eyes and felt for him. This guy was hurting.
"You did all the routine checks?"
The priest jumped up from the sofa and began pacing the length of the small room, rubbing his hands together as he moved back and forth.
"That and more. Sara and Herb Lorn came up as white as that snow falling outside. But it wasn't enough, was it?"
"Speaking of Sara—any idea where she is?"
"Probably dead, her body hidden somewhere back at that house. Damn! How could I let this happen?"
Renny noticed that he wasn't passing the buck, wasn't blaming anyone but himself. Here was one of the good guys. Weren't too many of those around.
"No system is perfect," Renny said in what he knew was a pretty lame attempt to console the poor guy.
The priest looked at him, sat back down on the sofa, and buried his face in his hands. But he didn't cry. They sat that way in silence for a while until a doctor in surgical scrubs barged in. He was graying, in his fifties, probably robust-looking when he hit the golf course, but he was pasty-faced and sweaty now. Looked like he'd been on a week-long bender.
"I'm looking for the man who brought Daniel Gordon in. Which one of you—?"
Father Ryan suddenly was on his feet again, in the doctor's face. "That's me! Is he all right? Did he pull through?"
The doctor sat down and ran a hand over his face. Renny noticed that it was shaking.
"I've never seen anything like that boy," he said.
"Neither has anyone!" the priest shouted. "But is he going to live?"
"I—I don't know," the doctor said. "I don't mean his injuries. I've seen people mangled in car wrecks worse than that. What I mean is, he should be dead. He should have been dead when he was wheeled in here."
"Yes, but he wasn't," Father Ryan said, "so what's the point of—?"
"The point is that he lost too much blood to have survived. You found him. Was there much blood there?"
"All over. I remember thinking that I never knew the human body could hold so much blood."
"That was a good thought. Was he bleeding when you found him?"
"Uh, no. I didn't think about it then, but now that I look back… no. He wasn't bleeding. I guess he'd just run out of blood."
"Bingo!" said the doctor. "Exactly what happened. He ran out of blood. Do you hear what I'm saying: There was no blood in that boy's body when he got here! He was dead!"
Renny felt the skin at the back of his neck tighten. This doc was sounding crazy. Maybe he'd been on that bender after all.
"But he was conscious!" Father Ryan said. "Screaming!"
The doctor nodded. "I know. And he remained conscious through the entire operation."
"Jesus!" Renny said, feeling like someone had just driven a fist into his gut.
Father Ryan dropped back onto the sofa.
"We couldn't find any veins," the doctor said, talking to the air. "They were all flat and empty. You see that in hypovolemic shock, but the child wasn't in shock. He was awake, screaming in pain. So I did a cut-down, found a vein, and canulated it. Tried to draw a blood sample for typing but it was dry. So we started running dextrose and saline in as fast as it would go and took him upstairs to start suturing him up. That was when the real craziness started."
The doc paused and Renny saw a look on his face that he'd occasionally seen on older cops, thirty-year men who thought they'd seen everything, thought they were beyond being shocked, and then learned the hard way that this city never revealed the full breadth of its underside; it always held something in reserve for the wiseguy who thought he'd seen it all. This doc probably had thought he'd seen it all. Now he knew he hadn't.