Confessions
Confessions
Ryne Douglas Pearson
Schmuck Underwood (2010)
Rating: ★★★★☆
Tags: Suspense Thrillers
Suspense Thrillersttt
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*Knowing *screenwriter Ryne Douglas Pearson brings to life a novel of vengeance, revelation, and redemption.
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***Three shots. Two killers. One secret that must be kept.***
Five years after his sister, Katie, was murdered, Chicago Police Chaplain Father Michael Jerome has moved on with his life. But he has never forgotten that terrible time. Has never stopped wondering who killed her.
And why.
When a dying criminal's confession points Michael toward answers to these questions, he embarks on a journey of discovery that takes him from the halls of Congress to death row at an Indiana prison, and ultimately leads him to Christine Wheeler. A friend from his sister's past, she expresses doubts about the circumstances of Katie's murder. Doubts that force Michael down a path where revelations shatter a lifetime of illusions held about those closest to him, and uncover a web of deceit crafted to keep a dark truth from ever being known.
But every secret he uncovers, every lie he unravels, leads him to realize that someone is desperate for the past to stay buried.
### Review
"The turns this story takes make it **a page-turner from start to finish**" *Aliverse *for 'Confessions'
"...**told with a beauty and lyricism of language** that had me breathless at times" *Parlez-Moi* for 'Confessions'
### About the Author
Ryne Douglas Pearson is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of several novels, including *Cloudburst*, *October's Ghost*, *Capitol Punishment*, *Simple Simon*, *Top Ten*, *The Donzerly Light*, *All For One*, and *Confessions*. He is also the author of the short story collection, *Dark and Darker*. His novel *Simple Simon* was made into the film *Mercury Rising*. As a screenwriter he has worked on numerous movies. The film *Knowing*, based on his original script, was released in 2009 and opened #1 at the box office. Receiving Four Stars from Roger Ebert, who branded it 'among the best science-fiction films I've seen', it went on to earn more than $180 million worldwide. He has also done uncredited work on films such as the remakes of *The Day The Earth Stood Still* and *The Eye*.
Despite the often 'dark' nature of his novels and films, Pearson has been noted to have a 'sweet, disarming quality' by Entertainment Weekly-an accusation he has been unable to shake. When not writing he is usually thinking about writing, or touting the wonders of bacon in online conversations. He is addicted to diet soda and the sound of his children laughing. A west coast native, he lives in California with his wife, children, a Doberman Shepherd and a Beagle Vizsla.
Confessions
A Novel
Ryne Douglas Pearson
Schmuck & Underwood
© 2010 Ryne Douglas Pearson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief passages used for review purposes.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Visit the author’s website:
http://www.rynedouglaspearson.com
Follow the author on Twitter:
Please see an excerpt from the bestselling novel,
Four Years From Home,
at the end of this book
The sacramental seal is inviolable. Accordingly, it is absolutely wrong for a confessor in any way to betray the penitent, for any reason whatsoever, whether by word or in any other fashion.
Canon Law on the Seal of Confession
Table Of Contents
Chapter One
Calling
I am dreaming when the phone rings.
We are children. My sister and I. Romping along the shore of the lake. Wind waves lapping at our feet. Our parents watching from the porch. Savoring the slice of summer that is no more singular than the next, but no less either.
Ring….
My sister is five. She is chasing me. Kicking tiny splashes at me as she runs. I steal a glance back at her. She is giggling madly. The late day sun painting a glow upon her.
Ring….
I sprint a bit to pull away. To heighten the chase. And I look back to sample that perfect face. To see it once again.
Ring….
But it is not there.
Ring….
She is not there. Just an endless shore stretching out empty from where I have—
Ring…
My head jerks up from the pillow, the fractured remembrance of a time long gone still echoing vividly as I cross the boundary from slumber and wake quickly in the darkness. For a moment I do not reach to the bedside table to stifle the phone, and though awake I close my eyes and draw a breath, wanting to hold the remnants of the dream in my thoughts. But the images of my sister from our shared age of innocence begin to flee, as they do each time I stumble up from sleep, watching helplessly as the days at the lake, or the candy trading after Halloween, or silly faces made at the dinner table recede from my waking world. They are gone to me.
As is she.
My eyes snap open and my feet swing over the bed’s edge. I sit in the filtered glow of moonlight slanting through the curtains and reach to the phone, silencing it mid ring as I bring it to my ear.
“Hello.”
“Father Mike?” All memories scatter to nothingness when I hear the voice. A voice I know. I am instantly awake. I am instantly worried.
“Yes.”
“We have an officer shot,” Captain Dennis Kerrigan says, and another thing happens instantly—I am on my feet, juggling the phone as I turn on a lamp and begin to dress.
“Where and how bad?”
“District Twenty Four, Rogers Park,” Kerrigan explains. A half dozen voices chatter urgently behind his. “I don’t have anything on his condition. He was arresting some meth freak when the guy pulled a gun. His backup scooped him up and rushed him to Lakeview Memorial.”
I awkwardly button my pants after contorting into them and twist my feet into a pair of sneakers, the phone wedged between my shoulder and cheek as I open my closet in search of a sweater. “What’s his name?”
“Luke Benz,” Kerrigan answers, and for a moment my quickened dressing slows, and the questions I have directed at him stop. It is enough a reaction that he confirms what I suddenly fear without query from me. “Your dad worked with his.”
I remember. Dave Benz. One of my father’s first partners until the man traded his patrolman’s uniform for a detective’s shield and began a steady climb through the ranks, finally retiring as a captain a short time after my father.
One of the last cases he oversaw was the murder of my sister.
I am still stuck in place when a memory of Dave Benz rises. A brief snippet of a fleeting interaction between him and my father. Seven or eight years ago. Talk of his first grandchild. Friendly prodding as to when Katie was going to get busy and give my father and mother one.
“Does he have any kids?” I get moving again, slipping the sweater over my head.
“Two,” Kerrigan says, and now it is he who quiets. For an instant that shatters the veneer of toughness all police officers wear—until the talk of children comes. “Boys, four and seven.”
“I’m on my way.” I hang up and reach into the closet one more time, retrieving a windbreaker from its hanger. It is blue and thin. A coat for brisk summer nights, at best. But I have not chosen it for warmth, and it stays bunched in one hand as I leave my room and move quickly down the hallway. The stairs hardly have time to groan as I bound down, and at the bottom in the foyer the wall clock draws my eye. It is the first I have noticed the time since waking—2:21 a.m.
I am one step from the door when I hesitate. I look behind to the small table close by, bowl still atop it, a collection of sweets skimming the bottom, remnants from the night’s rush of costumed kiddies padding up the walkway in search of candy. I reach quickly and take a small mix of treats in hand, pocketing them as I open the door and step out into the chill.
My car is in the rectory’s driveway. I jog slowly toward it, my breath jetting as I cross the browning lawn, one arm slipping into my windbreaker, then the other. There are letters of gold stamped across its back, identifying my role this terrible, terrible morning—CPD Chaplain.
* * *
I reach the hospital eighteen minutes after leaving the rectory. I know the address. The street. There are signs directing me to it from the boulevard. But I would need none of these things if they were mysteriously gone. The swirling lights of two dozen patrol cars would lead me there. Red and blue spokes sweeping the darkness, painting the parking lot and the neighborhood beyond with oddly festive hues.
I pull into the lot and nose into a spot between two cruisers. Stepping from my car I am hit by the chill. I had not noticed it when leaving the rectory, but here it seems a dozen degrees colder. An icy blow creeping in off the lake, no doubt. November making its arrival known. I jog quickly through the brisk air toward the emergency room entrance. Two officers there see me coming. One lifts his hand as if to stop me. He is new. A clean and rigid face. Not long out of the academy. Rules are what still guide the performance of his duties. His manner has not yet been infected by instinct or knowing. He sees no badge on me and therefore I am to be excluded.
But as I near him the older officer next to him lifts his own hand and puts it on his younger colleague’s and eases it down, clearing the way for me. Blessing me, in effect.
“Straight down the hall, Father,” the older officer says. I pass him and his younger colleague, my eyes forward. Fixed on the glass doors just ahead. They open automatically, a wash of frigid night following me in, ending as they close behind. Beyond is a sea of uniforms and suits. Brother and sister officers come at this hour not because their presence will turn any medical tide, but because
not
being here, in proximity to one of their own in need, is unthinkable.
“Father Mike.” It is the same voice that summoned me here. In person now. Kerrigan moves through the crush of officers toward me. A bright white spot among the landscape of blue. His uniform jacket shed for some reason, the crisp white shirt beneath all between him and the hospital’s inner chill.
“Captain.” I reach my hand out and he takes it in both of his, pumping it in his double grip. Part greeting, part prayer. “Where is he?”
“Trauma room,” Kerrigan says.
No further direction is needed. I know the space. The way there. Just as any priest would after serving any decent amount of time where I have. It is familiarity by osmosis. Those of my calling minister where the need arises. In grand sanctuaries with gilt trappings and angelic choirs. In gardens of stone when committing a body to its final resting place. In homes to bless the space with waters made holy so that those who live there might be free from harm and worry. And in places like this where, often, those in their final hours on earth seek the last measure of consolation from men in black suits and stiff white collars who can anoint with oils and offer absolution for sins committed on this mortal coil. It will be left to God to judge the sincerity and depth of any remorse, but it is my eyes which the dying see just before passing from this life. My words they hear. I am the hope they take with them from this life that all will be forgiven as they cross over.