"But this isn't…"
"Yeah. I know."
The priest dropped the sheets and staggered to his feet.
"Oh, my God!"
He turned and leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the Brooklyn rooftops in silence. Renny knew he'd just been socked in the gut so he let him have his time. Finally he turned around.
"I really screwed up, didn't I?"
There was an impulse in Renny to say, Yeah, you did. But he knew it was just his own anger looking for a convenient target. As a cop he'd had his share of times as target for that kind of anger from citizens and he wasn't going to fall into the trap himself. Besides, what was the point of kicking a decent man when he was down?
"You got taken. You followed the routine and she slipped through. And didn't you tell me you even went so far as to call the woman's old pastor?"
A mute nod from the priest.
"Okay. So how were you to know that the two of you were talking about different people?"
But Father Bill didn't seem to be listening. He started talking to the air.
"My God, it's all my fault. If I'd done my job right, Danny wouldn't be all cut up like that. He'd still be in one piece back in St. F.'s."
"Aw, don't start with that bullshit. It's her fault. Whoever took the real Sara's place is to blame. She's the one who took the knife to Danny."
"But why? Why all the subterfuge, the elaborate plotting, and most likely the murder of the real Sara?"
"We don't know that."
True. They didn't know that. But Renny felt it in his gut: The real Sara was dead.
"Why, dammit? Just to mutilate a small boy? It doesn't make sense."
"I stopped expecting sense a long time ago."
"And what about Herb?"
"At this point I can go either way on Herb," Renny said with a shrug, trying not to remember what the man had looked like the last time he'd seen him. "But my gut instinct is that Herb was a victim too."
The priest's eyes were bleak as he looked at Renny.
"So then it's Sara—the bogus Sara—we're after."
"Right. And we'll find her."
"I'm not so sure about that," Father Bill said softly.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Before the priest could answer, a doctor walked into the lounge, one of the nameless, faceless white coats that had been trooping in and out of Danny's room for days.
"Excuse me. Father Ryan? I want to discuss some procedures we'd like to do on the Gordon boy."
Renny saw the priest's body tense, like an animal ready to spring.
"Tests? More tests? What about his pain? All you do is tests but that child is still in agony in there! Don't come to me with more requests for tests until you've healed his wounds and stopped his pain!"
"We've tried everything we know," the doctor said, "but nothing works. We need to test—"
Father Bill took two quick steps toward the doctor and grabbed the lapels of his white coat.
"Screw your tests!" His voice was edging toward a scream. "Stop his pain!"
Renny leapt from his seat and pulled the priest off the doctor. He shooed the doctor out of the lounge and got Father Bill into a chair.
"Cool it, Father. Just cool it, okay?"
A nasty thought slithered through Renny's mind. In a crime with no witnesses, the first suspects should be the people closest to the victim. He remembered how everyone he'd interviewed at St. F.'s had commented on how attached Father Bill had been to little Danny. What if he'd been too attached? What if the thought of giving the kid up for adoption had been too much for him? What if—?
Jesus! Knock it off Augustino! This is one of the good guys here. Save it for the street slime.
"Why don't you go home," he told the priest. "You're cracking up from spending too much time in that hospital room."
The priest looked away. "I can't leave him. And besides, it's the only place I know without a phone."
Oh, yeah. Another sign that Father Bill might be cracking under the weight of all this craziness. He kept talking about these phone calls he was getting from Danny where the kid was screaming for help, begging him to come get him. A sure sign that—
The priest jumped as the lounge phone began to ring.
"That's him!" Father Bill said hoarsely, staring at the phone as if it were going to bite him.
"Yeah? How can you tell?"
"That's the way it rings when it's Danny."
The phone did sound weird. One long, uninterrupted ring that kept going. But weird ring or not, Renny knew it wasn't Danny Gordon on the phone. He snatched it up.
"Hello!"
A child's voice, terrified, screaming.
"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me. Don't let him kill me. I don't want to dieT
Renny felt his heart begin to thud in response to the anguish in that little voice. It made him want to run out the door and find him, help him, wherever he was.
But he knew where he was. Danny was down the hall, in bed, hooked up to half a dozen tubes and monitors.
"Is that you, lady?" he shouted into the phone. "This is Detective Sergeant Augustino, NYPD, and you just made the biggest mistake of your life!"
The line was dead. He depressed the plunger and dialed the operator. After identifying himself he asked if she had just put the call through to extension 2579. She said no and checked with the other operators. No one could remember putting a call through to that extension all morning. He slammed the phone down.
"She's somewhere in the hospital!" he said.
"What?" The priest was back on his feet, his eyes wide.
"If the call didn't come through the switchboard, it had to originate in-house. She's probably sitting in some corner playing her tape into the phone."
"You mean it sounded like a tape to you?"
"Come to think of it… no."
Father Bill was suddenly running down the hall.
"Danny! She's here to finish him off!"
Renny followed him. He hated the thought of entering Danny's room, of hearing Danny's sound, his voiceless scream, like air escaping a punctured tire. Endlessly. It never stopped. The whole time you were in there it went on and on and on. He didn't know how Father Bill stood it. But he followed the priest into the room. He'd go anywhere, to hell itself to catch the bitch who'd done this to that kid…
But Danny was just as they'd left him, twisting and writhing in openmouthed agony. Renny could bear only a moment or two in that room, then he had to flee it, leaving Father Bill alone at the bedside.
Bill seated himself at the side of the bed, pulled a Rosary from his pocket, and began fingering the beads. But he didn't say the usual Our Fathers and Hail Marys. He couldn't find the words. His mind was saturated with Danny's ungodly torment.
Ungodly. A fitting adjective. Where was God when Bill needed Him? When Danny needed Him? Where had He been Christmas Eve? On vacation?
Or is He out there at all?
Such a question would have been unthinkable a few days ago. But Bill had run out of excuses.
And he knew them all. All the gentle explanations of why bad things happen to good people, and why even the most devout, most sincere, most selfless prayers often go unanswered. He knew how events often seemed to conspire to work against the best people, against the best things they tried to achieve. But that didn't mean there was a Divine Hand at work, moving people around, shaping events, checking off names of those who could go on living and those whose time was up.
As Bill saw it, death, disease, rape, murder, accidents, famine, plague—they all had earthly causes, and therefore had earthly solutions. As God's creatures we were expected to find those solutions. That was why He equipped us with hands, hearts, and minds.