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  I turned to Samuelson and said, “Forgiveness to the avenger, I guess.” I followed the nun into the hall.

  She paused by her door and turned with a sly smile. “Did your friend Taser the man?”

  I shook my head. “He left the Taser in his trunk, packed a bag, and divorced his wife quietly.”

  Her smile dropped at the corners of her mouth. “Sad,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “Absolutely.” She turned again to her door.

  “I’ve got another question,” I said.

  Again the green eyes and the sly smile, as if she’d come to work hoping only to see me.

  “Out of all the fights you could take on,” I said, “why sex? Aren’t there worse things?”

  Her smile widened. “I have nothing against sex,” she said. She put her hand on my arm. “But these girls don’t know how to do it right. If a man isn’t willing to lose his job as a policeman, if he isn’t willing to humiliate himself for a woman he’s having sex with, then why should she bother with him? If a woman isn’t willing to die for her lover, she should stay home and take a hot bath. These girls don’t understand that.”

  I blinked. “That’s an unusual attitude for a nun.”

  She squeezed my wrist. “Is it?” she said, and she disappeared into her office.

  FOUR

  I DROVE EAST TOWARD Lake Michigan. If I turned south into the Loop, I could go to my office and write a refund check to Greg Samuelson. If I turned north, I could stop by the storefront where my ex-wife Corrine ran an urban landscaping business. We needed to talk. In the last couple months, we’d been picking up the pieces, seeing what we looked like together again. Then I’d screwed up and spent a night with my friend Lucinda and, though Corrine didn’t know about it, I was pretty sure we were going to fall apart again.

  Maybe Corrine needed to Taser Lucinda. Maybe she needed to Taser me.

  I kept driving east. A strong wind was blowing into the city from the lake. That meant whitecaps would be battering the limestone slabs that the parks department had dumped to keep storms from undermining the lakefront luxury high-rises. On days like this, I sometimes drove to the lake to watch someone else take a hit. My car was a 1989 Skylark, with 165,000 miles and too little tread on the tires. It felt like home the way only an old car can. The heater hardly worked, but the afternoon sun on the vinyl felt fine. No place better to watch the lake pound on the city. No place better to dream of escape.

  As I merged onto Lake Shore Drive, my phone rang. When I ran away to the Florida shrimping village, I would drop it in the ocean.

  I answered and my ex-client Greg Samuelson said, “Can you come back?” His voice was quiet, worried.

  “Huh? I told you, I’m done with you.”

  “You’ve—I’m in trouble—”

  “Yeah, you’re in trouble. You torched a Mercedes.”

  “You’ve—”

  “Plenty of people to help you at the church. The priests. The Virginity Nun. The monks—Do you have monks? You can confess your arson if you want.”

  “Oh fuck!” he said.

  The line went dead.

  Yeah, I thought, oh fuck. He’d gotten that much right.

  I kept driving. I could ignore the call. I’d already quit. I owed Greg Samuelson nothing.

  But he’d sounded scared. Desperate.

  Not my problem, I thought.

  But I exited Lake Shore Drive.

  Twenty-five minutes later, I knocked on Samuelson’s office door at Holy Trinity.

  Silence.

  I knocked again and opened the door. His desk was clean, his computer off. He was gone—to a bar, home, out for a walk, wherever scared, desperate arsonists go when they leave work. That meant I could leave, too. I’d done my duty, more than it.

  But I went to Sister Terrano’s door and knocked on it.

  More silence. So I walked in.

  The sun shined through a window well covered by a sheer white curtain. A floor lamp and a desk lamp were on. Faded red carpet covered the floor. A large wooden desk stood in the middle of the room with a leather chair behind it. Papers, anti-abortion bumper stickers, posters, and T-shirts that said VIRGINS ARE COOL were piled on top of the desk.

  On one of the stacks of posters there was a head.

  Greg Samuelson’s.

  Lying on its side the way you might rest your head to take a nap.

  But a hole hung through the side of his face where he should have had a cheek. His bottom jaw was gone, God knows where. The rest of his body slumped forward onto the desk from the desk chair. His right hand was lying on a pile of T-shirts. So was a large pistol.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I started toward him but couldn’t get myself to go near. I went to the window, pulled away the sheer curtain, and looked through the window well at the blue sky. The window had been painted shut. My eyes teared. Samuelson was dead. I thought about Eric Stone threatening to kill him. I’d figured the threat was heat-of-the-moment. Why kill someone over a car? I took a couple of deep breaths and turned.

  What I saw made me turn away again.

  I took more deep breaths. Twenty, thirty, I don’t know how many. I stood at the window a long time, but it wasn’t enough—no amount of time ever would be. Then, because I knew I had to, I turned back to the room and looked.

  A crucifix hung on the opposite wall, a wooden cross with a carved Jesus in agony. Nails were hammered through his hands and feet. A crown of thorns stabbed into his forehead. Painted blood ran down his face like tears. He’d cocked his head to the side, his eyes looking to heaven, his mouth open in a huge O. A blue cloth covered his middle, exposing a bony left hip.

  I lowered my eyes from the crucifix.

  Judy Terrano was lying on the carpet. The Virginity Nun. She looked nothing like Jesus. Her dress was shoved up to her neck. Her underwear was beside her. She wore one black shoe. I didn’t see the other. Her pubic hair was gray and bushy. She had no blood on her at all.

  I forced myself to go to her.

  She had great legs, legs that on a living woman would have drawn me close, and now, on a dead woman, terrified me. Her face was a bruised mask. Her green eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling like she was looking for heaven but could see only hell. The whites of her eyes were marbled with the lines of broken blood vessels. I figured I knew what her neck would look like if I cleared her clothing from it. It would show the bruises of strangulation. Eyes don’t bleed from reading in bad light.

  Her chest was thrust up toward the ceiling and her breasts looked like heaven and desire. But on her belly, she had a big, fine-lined tattoo of a cat, its back arched, its tail raised like a furry S, its legs taut. The ink had faded, but the lines were sharp and clear. It looked like a cat in heat. Under the tattoo someone had scrawled two words in black marker: BAD KITTY.

  I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Then I sat on the floor by the dead nun and my eyes filled again with tears.

  When I could stand up, I used my cell phone to call 911. The operator answered, and I rasped something about two bodies, a woman and a man.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure they’re dead. I’m very sure.”

  I stumbled back toward the desk where Greg Samuelson’s head rested on a stack of bloody posters.

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll stay calm. Yes, I’ll stay on the line.” Then Samuelson’s hand moved, the one on the pile of T-shirts, the one by the gun.

  I yelled and threw the cell phone at it, that hand which was attached to a man I was sure was dead. How could he be alive with the bottom half of his face missing?

  Less than five minutes later paramedics and cops ran in. After the first of them arrived, a priest peeked around the door frame. His face paled. Sweat broke on his forehead. He disappeared from the doorway. But in the hallway, beyond the noise of the police and paramedics, he sobbed for the dead nun. Maybe for the rest of us, too.

  FIVE

  DETECTIVE STAN FLEMING LED the investigation. He came
ten minutes after the first cops arrived. I knew him well. He’d dated Corrine before we’d gotten married and he’d started calling her again as soon as we’d divorced. We were friends so it was okay, right? he’d said when he’d told me he was still interested in her. No hard feelings, right? I couldn’t blame him for his taste, and Corrine and I had split up so what business of mine were his calls? But still I’d wanted to punch him in the teeth. “Yeah,” I’d said, “no hard feelings.”

  Stan had on a gray windbreaker over a blue shirt that he’d buttoned tight over his chest. He had a strong chin and cheekbones that I’d heard women say made him look like Hugh Jackman. Not only was he good-looking, he was smart. The department sent only their best for big-press events like this.

  A bunch of other cops were in the room along with the paramedics. Two of them had Greg Samuelson on the floor and were working on his vitals. Another was injecting something into his leg. A cop standing close to Samuelson kept brushing his hand against his service pistol. Samuelson moaned softly and rasped into the plastic respirator cup that the paramedics had fixed over what remained of his face.

  Stan Fleming glanced around the room, made sure the other cops were keeping Judy Terrano’s body secure, and ambled over. He held out his hand and gave me a grim smile. “Hey, Joe.”

  “Hey.”

  He asked what had happened and how I was involved, and I gave him the short version and admitted that I’d called in the killings.

  He moved close. “I know you, Joe, and I know you like to freelance. But you’ve got to tell me everything you know, what you did, and what you saw.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Every detail.”

  He smiled warmer. For the next twenty minutes, I described everything I could remember of the hour or so between when Greg Samuelson lit Eric Stone’s Mercedes on fire and when I threw a cell phone at him after calling 911. Stan nodded when I told him that Eric Stone threatened to kill Samuelson. Maybe this would be one of the easy ones.

  But I said, “I don’t see why Stone would kill the nun.”

  Stan grimaced and thought. “Fine. Then Stone didn’t do it. Greg Samuelson killed the nun and attempted suicide.”

  The forensics team arrived. They wore no bulletproof vests and their skin had a look that said they spent more time inside smelling rotting corpses than out on the streets. A clean-faced man in olive pants, an olive button-down shirt, and a big watch led the team. He looked like a forest ranger.

  He stepped into the middle of the room and looked at Sister Terrano. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is a fucking mess,” he said. Another forensics cop took photographs of Terrano’s body, the desk where Samuelson had been sitting, and almost everything else in the room.

  A third cop shouldered between the paramedics and used a glue-lift kit on Samuelson’s hands and fingertips. The paramedics watched him, astounded. “What?” the cop said. “You swab this boy down, there’s no more residue, no fibers, no nothing but shit.”

  “Get the hell out of the way,” said one of the paramedics.

  The cop took his time.

  There were procedures for moments like this, step-by-step protocols that everyone should follow. But in the excitement and fear of a high-profile murder, even the best cops were getting sloppy.

  The man in olive went to work on Sister Terrano. He tracked up and down her body with a penlight like he was counting her moles. Seven or eight times he stopped and called the photographer over to take photos.

  I went to watch him.

  He peeled the nun’s dress down from her neck. A deep bruise ringed her throat. He measured the width of the bruise, brushed the skin for fiber residue, and let her dress rest around her neck again. He shined a light into her nostrils, her mouth, her throat, and each of her ears, and he made notes in a notepad. He spent some time with the black cat tattoo and the scrawled words on her belly, but if they offered him anything he didn’t show it. Then he parted her legs.

  “Makes you want to cry,” I said.

  He looked up. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Joe Kozmarski,” I said. “I found her and Samuelson.”

  “So?”

  “So I didn’t ask to find them.”

  “Get out,” he said.

  I gestured toward Judy Terrano’s chest, thrust up slightly toward the ceiling. “When you roll her over, you’ll find her missing shoe.”

  He gave the idea about a moment’s thought, then pointed at the door. “Out.”

  I could take a hint.

  I was ducking under the crime-scene tape when Stan Fleming put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Where are you going?”

  I pointed my thumb at the man in olive. “Smokey the Bear told me to get out.”

  “Stay awhile in case I need you.”

  “I feel very conflicted,” I said.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, all right?” He turned away.

  “I need some air,” I told him.

  “Fine,” he said over his shoulder. “Go out in the hall with the dogs. But don’t go far.”

  I ducked under the tape and stepped out of the room.

  Cops and clergy crowded the hall, but the sobbing priest was gone. The air felt good away from Judy Terrano’s office. I leaned against a wall as far from the others as I could get and ran through my memory, trying to remember anything I’d missed when I’d told Stan my story. I’d gotten to the point of approaching the nun’s body when a loud commotion started inside the room. Two men were shouting. Heavy furniture tipped. I made my way to the door. Inside, a cop was arguing with the paramedics about removing Samuelson. He was holding a set of handcuffs, trying to reach around a paramedic. The paramedic kept blocking him. The desk chair was lying on its side. The posters and T-shirts were scattered across the floor. Who needed protocols?

  Stan stepped in and got the paramedics to agree to let an officer ride in the ambulance with them and Samuelson. No handcuffs. Then a couple of cops moved the desk out of the way, and the paramedics carried Samuelson out of the room and down the hall. His face was pale and bloody and looked like it already had started the final decay.

  Stan appeared beside me. “How the hell did you know about the shoe?” Smokey the Bear had reported our conversation.

  “No woman sticks her chest out like that unless she’s excited, and one thing Sister Terrano isn’t is excited. I’m guessing she fell on the shoe or got strangled on top of it.”

  “And the significance of that is?”

  “I don’t see any. You?”

  He breathed out long and shook his head. “None that I see.”

  “How about the tattoo and the Magic Marker on her belly?”

  Stan screwed up his lips. “I’ve seen stranger things but not many. Looks to me like the killer went hunting for the tattoo and then put a caption on it.”

  “Like a sick joke.”

  “The tattoo’s old. It says the Virginity Nun had a history. Our forensics guy figures she got it thirty or forty years ago. He says it’s first-class work. Fine detailing. Great application. She would’ve paid top dollar. He says only a handful of artists in the city could do it now, probably less back then. The penned letters were made with a Sharpie Permanent Fine Point, and they’re new, no more than an hour old.”

  “He can tell a lot with his magnifying glass.”

  “He’s into tattoos,” Stan said. “And we found the marker on the floor.”

  “How about the rest?” I asked. “Was she raped?”

  He shrugged. “Forensics says there’s no evidence of it.” He glanced around to make sure no one else was listening. “But he also says the Virginity Nun was no virgin. Not for a long time.”

  “She’ll have some confused followers. What about Samuelson?”

  “What about him? Like I said, attempted suicide. Either he found the nun or more likely he did her himself and then put the gun in his mouth.”

  I shook my head. “If he had a gun, why go through the trouble of strangling her? Why
not shoot her, then himself?”

  “Could be he didn’t plan to kill her. He got mad. It happened.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “No?”

  “He’s a calm guy even when others would get stressed.”

  “A calm guy who shoots himself?”

  “After he torched Eric Stone’s car, he made a telephone call and then walked away, no rush, no worry.”

  “So, what happened? Stone strangled the nun, scribbled on her stomach, shot Samuelson, and left the gun on the desk?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said.

  Stan told me again to stick around, then disappeared back into Judy Terrano’s office.

  But I’d had enough. I shouldered past a priest who was standing in the hall exit and found my way to a side door.

  Outside, a dozen news vans lined the street. Their remote-broadcast masts extended high into the air, cables snaking to the top. Orange and white police barricades with yellow tape strung between them blocked the church entrances. Streetlights were on, fighting against the sinking sunlight. A late afternoon wind whipped cold. Clusters of neighborhood residents stood together, talking excitedly or watching the cops at the barricades like they were waiting for a parade. Reporters huddled near the vans, bouncing on their toes, their hands shoved deep in their pockets. Others sat inside the vans drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. A couple of the younger ones schmoozed with the cops, looking for tips that the cops either didn’t have or weren’t going to share, though the rumors about what had happened inside were hot enough to keep everyone anxious.

  Attention turned to me when I came out the door, and three reporters scurried over to talk as I ducked under the tape. They all spoke at once, asking if the man they’d seen carried out on a stretcher worked for Sister Terrano, if Sister Terrano had shot the man, if the man had shot Sister Terrano.

  “I can’t even save myself,” I said. “I don’t know why you think I can help you.” They exchanged quick, nervous looks and backed away as quickly as they’d come.

  I climbed into my car and turned on the engine. News vans had boxed me in on three sides. I hit the horn and waited. No one moved toward the vans. I hit the horn again. Again nothing.