process the things you couldn’t stomach as well as the things you could. Your body got rid of waste one way and your mind had to get rid of it in another.
Unfortunately the rest of his mind wasn’t so reasonable. It was as irritated with him as he was with the building, which made for the beginning of a very bad day.
On his desk was the file marked “McVann, Margaret Mary.” It was a crime he hadn’t been called to the scene of, and not one he’d expected to be involved in, but a passing memory of the details had made him leave a message with his secretary to have the file brought up. Now he sat down and flipped through it, to the picture of Margaret Mary with the Eucharistic symbol on her forehead, to the notation in grease pencil in the photograph’s corner: “temp in apt at disc 4°F.” The rest of the photographs detailed bruising—on the neck, on the back of the hands.
The Eucharistic symbol made Margaret Mary McVann and Theresa Cavello connected.
How?
The bruises on Margaret Mary and the lack of them on Theresa made the two cases different.
Why?
Did he have a nut here or something more banal, a mugger with a sense of humor, an individual with a grudge?
It was the kind of thing he would never be absolutely sure of until the cases were closed.
Chapter Five
1
I F PAT MALLORY HADN’T known the people at Damien House, he would never have become involved in the Theresa Cavello case. It wasn’t the kind of thing he was supposed to get involved in. Chief of Homicide was essentially an administrative position. His job was to “stay on top” of duty rosters and case assignments and ongoing investigations. What this meant was that he was supposed to have answers to the idiotic questions Dan Murphy or the mayor decided to ask at irregular intervals: why had this been done here, why hadn’t that been done there, why couldn’t his people come up with a single viable suspect in this other place. Since the answers were always the same, but nobody wanted to hear them, he spent a lot of his time inventing euphemisms. It was amazing what the single word crack could be turned into, when he put his mind to it.
Every once in a while, for things like the Billy Hare case, he was dragged out for show. Years ago, he’d had a reputation as a first-class detective. He was the man who’d solved the Jug Killer case and managed to get the Church Street Slasher safely into jail. His name appeared in the Register and his picture appeared on the local television news. That was how he’d ended up in this office, even though he didn’t play politics—even though he didn’t know how. Crack had brought with it a crime wave that made all previous crime waves seem unreal. Compared to a machine-gun drug battle in broad daylight on a street four blocks from the New Haven Green, the Church Street Slasher was Saturday afternoon at the movies. In the wake of the bad publicity, the mayor had thought it would be a good idea to promote him. He was known to the public, and he wasn’t a party favorite of the other side.
Now he sat down on his desk and looked at the mess on it—the mess of a Tuesday morning when he’d been late getting in to work. In the upper-left-hand corner were two stacks of pink message slips. The taller stack would be messages he didn’t have to answer: civilians with bees in their bonnets; social workers with Good Liberal speeches to deliver about Bad Reactionary police officers; magazine writers with questions about his childhood that sounded like they’d been cribbed from a textbook for Abnormal Psych III. The shorter stack would be messages he did have to answer. Some of them would be just as irrelevant as the messages in the taller stack, like the ones from Dan Murphy demanding to know what he was doing up here. Others would be serious news. He had fifty-four detectives under his authority. All of them were working.
He reached for the shorter message stack and then stopped. He was not a man who resented
Unfortunately the rest of his mind wasn’t so reasonable. It was as irritated with him as he was with the building, which made for the beginning of a very bad day.
On his desk was the file marked “McVann, Margaret Mary.” It was a crime he hadn’t been called to the scene of, and not one he’d expected to be involved in, but a passing memory of the details had made him leave a message with his secretary to have the file brought up. Now he sat down and flipped through it, to the picture of Margaret Mary with the Eucharistic symbol on her forehead, to the notation in grease pencil in the photograph’s corner: “temp in apt at disc 4°F.” The rest of the photographs detailed bruising—on the neck, on the back of the hands.
The Eucharistic symbol made Margaret Mary McVann and Theresa Cavello connected.
How?
The bruises on Margaret Mary and the lack of them on Theresa made the two cases different.
Why?
Did he have a nut here or something more banal, a mugger with a sense of humor, an individual with a grudge?
It was the kind of thing he would never be absolutely sure of until the cases were closed.
Chapter Five
1
I F PAT MALLORY HADN’T known the people at Damien House, he would never have become involved in the Theresa Cavello case. It wasn’t the kind of thing he was supposed to get involved in. Chief of Homicide was essentially an administrative position. His job was to “stay on top” of duty rosters and case assignments and ongoing investigations. What this meant was that he was supposed to have answers to the idiotic questions Dan Murphy or the mayor decided to ask at irregular intervals: why had this been done here, why hadn’t that been done there, why couldn’t his people come up with a single viable suspect in this other place. Since the answers were always the same, but nobody wanted to hear them, he spent a lot of his time inventing euphemisms. It was amazing what the single word crack could be turned into, when he put his mind to it.
Every once in a while, for things like the Billy Hare case, he was dragged out for show. Years ago, he’d had a reputation as a first-class detective. He was the man who’d solved the Jug Killer case and managed to get the Church Street Slasher safely into jail. His name appeared in the Register and his picture appeared on the local television news. That was how he’d ended up in this office, even though he didn’t play politics—even though he didn’t know how. Crack had brought with it a crime wave that made all previous crime waves seem unreal. Compared to a machine-gun drug battle in broad daylight on a street four blocks from the New Haven Green, the Church Street Slasher was Saturday afternoon at the movies. In the wake of the bad publicity, the mayor had thought it would be a good idea to promote him. He was known to the public, and he wasn’t a party favorite of the other side.
Now he sat down on his desk and looked at the mess on it—the mess of a Tuesday morning when he’d been late getting in to work. In the upper-left-hand corner were two stacks of pink message slips. The taller stack would be messages he didn’t have to answer: civilians with bees in their bonnets; social workers with Good Liberal speeches to deliver about Bad Reactionary police officers; magazine writers with questions about his childhood that sounded like they’d been cribbed from a textbook for Abnormal Psych III. The shorter stack would be messages he did have to answer. Some of them would be just as irrelevant as the messages in the taller stack, like the ones from Dan Murphy demanding to know what he was doing up here. Others would be serious news. He had fifty-four detectives under his authority. All of them were working.
He reached for the shorter message stack and then stopped. He was not a man who resented
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