Every Wickedness (21 page)

Maybe this time, he could come closer to perfection.

He had big plans for Beth Wells. She would be the best yet. He knew it from the moment he’d met her. She was stunning, her shoulder-length hair the colour of rich sable, her eyes an intriguing blue-green, able to swallow him like the depths of the sea. Her perfume, a heady mixture of jasmine and musk, the full sensuous lips, all there to ensnare him. For him, time slowed to a crawl as he found himself lost in her. The force of their first touch jolted him. There had been no turning back.

He had always been a planner and loved to imagine scene and sequel much as a writer would. The two priests had served as adequate opening acts, though both their deaths had not come about exactly as designed. Still, Francis did croak eventually, and so did Anthony.

He hadn’t had the privilege of seeing Francis die, but Anthony had done him the courtesy of showing him exactly what it sounded like when a human head came into contact with pavement. That had been an unexpected bonus. Pretty much everything since had gone his way.

Soon it would be time for his next project, and to keep the game from getting dull, he had given himself a little mental challenge. He recorded the series of medical symptoms of anticoagulant overdose as they occurred, then he would predict the time each victim would die. He had nailed down the jogger’s death to within five minutes.

The women’s scripts were getting to be a drag, though. They were always saying the same things, begging him not to hurt them, offering him anything. Most annoying was when they told him why they wanted to live. They wanted to travel, get into movies, start their own business. He could yawn.

They made feeble attempts to say what they thought he wanted to hear. They called him master, king, stud, god. When he heard all he could take, he cut them.

Maybe this one would be different. He knew why she was here, of course, and her intrusion into the environment where he’d grown up evoked in him an irony that made him smile. He wondered what she knew, then realized it didn’t matter. He could have her any time.

Following her had been easy. Since he had first seen her, he’d gotten to know her routine pretty well. Today though, she was less predictable. Today was an adventure. Tailing her to the airport, grabbing a last-minute flight to LAX, his taxi pursuing her rental car at a discreet distance, just added to the thrill of the quest. His wig, unshaven face and baggy clothing rendered him nearly unrecognizable. As an added precaution, he’d popped in tinted contact lenses and applied a different aftershave. In retrospect, he needn’t have bothered. On the plane, she was absorbed in some book or other and hadn’t even looked up as he sidled by.

An image formed in his mind. The Peace Pagoda in Japantown. No, he thought, ashamed of himself.
Too complicated. Even if he could successfully get his cargo to the top, he would be too far away to hear the force of the impact. Then there would be his escape from the top of the tower, an impossibility if curious onlookers began gathering below.

The Golden Gate Bridge was a cliché; too many others had fallen from it. He thought a moment about Pier 39 and imagined a dozen fat, blubbery sea lions around her dead body. A possibility.

The image that stayed with him, grew and festered until he actually saw it in colour, was the sight of her perfect body tumbling down Lombard Street, the crookedest street in the world. Would she ricochet off each concrete barrier when she rolled? Not likely. Regardless of the steep slope, the shape of the human body prevented it from gaining the necessary velocity. Still, the notion amused him.

Bethany Wells. Human pinball.

“N
o action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.” Beneath the black silhouette that replaced his grad photo in the yearbook, the boy had quoted Somerset Maugham.

Father Daniel hadn’t thought about him in years. Now, the boy was on his mind constantly. And in his prayers.

Monday’s visit from Lieutenant Kearns had stirred up memories, recollections that, over time and with steely discipline, Daniel had managed to bury. Still, he believed there was a reason for everything. Eventually, perhaps with a small mental nudge, he would learn why his stomach roiled relentlessly and why he hadn’t kept food down since Kearns had called.

Beth Wells, too, with her particular brand of desperation, confusion, and nagging doubts, would contribute to Daniel’s sleepless nights, sweat-drenched hours of tossing and turning, flailing legs shackled by soaked sheets. With as much motivation and determination as he could muster, Daniel finished preparing the next day’s history lesson. He hoped the class wouldn’t rehash today’s discussion of the Spanish Inquisition. Young people were fascinated by the ghoulish nowadays, it seemed. Or had they always been?

When he was young his family had vacationed one summer in Niagara Falls. They crossed the border into Canada, Daniel’s only visit to another country, and had scoured every souvenir shop and T-shirt place on Clifton Hill. A visit to Madame Tussaud’s wax museum was a required tourist attraction, but the chamber of horrors, with its instruments of torture, gave Daniel nightmares for weeks. He usually revelled in a good horror story, his collection of H.P. Lovecraft his most prized possession. But Lovecraft wrote fiction. The Inquisition and all the atrocities committed upon humans in the wars, before and since, were fact.

So was the Spiderman.

Daniel steadfastly ignored any news printed about the killer, his only information gleaned from the hallway chatter of his students. By avoiding immersing himself in suffering, he felt he could deliver a more positive gospel message. Now he wondered if all the years of guitar playing, basketball games, and zealous camaraderie meant not that he was a good priest, but instead one who skated across life because it was easier. He knew how to be a pal, but could he be a friend?

Daniel was as guilty of abusing the boy as the priests who beat him and his mother who ignored him. He’d done nothing to show the boy right from wrong, his inaction sending yet another unclear signal about life and how it should be lived. Instead, he swept the boy’s illness into a corner and played
one-on-one with the kid to work off all that energy.

He closed his binder, rose from his desk, and walked over to the classroom window. The church’s white
campanario
was floodlit, its contrast to the surrounding black a symbol to Daniel that goodness, purity, the awesome power of God, could triumph over the dark forces. He had never questioned his vocation, knowing deep in his soul he was meant to teach and to serve. He loved clamour in his classroom, cheers in the gymnasium, a full congregation of voices raised in song. This evening, he would forsake his acoustic guitar for the electric one. A little noise, for the love of God. Tonight, Daniel found the infernal quiet that enshrouded the place after lights-out to be disturbing.

It had begun with the dog, a Heinz variety of no fixed address that regularly wandered onto the grounds in search of food scraps and companionship. The dog had become a kind of mascot for the boys, who took turns feeding and grooming it. When its body had been discovered hanging in Father Francis’s confessional, a puerile vigilante squad was formed. Father Anthony quickly quashed the idea of vengeance. So long ago, yet sometimes Daniel still felt the stiffness of the pathetic creature’s carcass, rigid in his arms as he’d cut it down. He led a burial ceremony in the garden behind the school.

A week or so after the dog had been killed, a fire broke out in the office adjacent to Father Francis’s study. Someone had set all the priests’ vestments
ablaze. Father Francis, as was his habit, had consumed his evening sherry and was snoozing in a leather chair. He had awakened, groggy and disoriented, to find the office and adjoining study thick with smoke. The priest groped his way to the door leading to the corridor, only to find the heavy oak portal jammed shut. The casement window on the opposite side of the study wouldn’t budge either, and the elderly priest’s feeble shouts received no response. Everyone else was in the gymnasium, watching an exhibition basketball game. Francis’s last desperate act before succumbing to smoke inhalation was to hurl an armchair through the casement window and propel himself after it.

The combination of the priest’s age, his angina, and his panic brought on the heart attack that kept Father Francis hospitalized for well over a month. Father Daniel, though only a recent addition to the Good Shepherd staff, had gone to visit Francis, hoping to offer some comfort. Francis, however, could not be comforted. The police had said his sherry had been spiked with Seconal, the study door pennied shut, the casement window nailed down to prevent the priest’s escape. Attempted murder. A sick practical joke gone horribly wrong.

In a matter of days, Father Francis appeared to decay before Daniel’s eyes. The old priest’s gnarled hands lay clasped together on top of a lightly woven hospital blanket. His wrinkled cheeks were concave, as though the element that had once given them
shape had been vacuumed away. His complexion was sallow, his eyes sunken in their sockets, eyeballs covered with film, their usual darting motion halted by the realization that he would never leave the hospital.

“Watch him, Daniel,” he’d gasped on a rush of exhaled air. “You must watch the boy.”

Daniel had tried to pacify him, urged him to get rest and allow the police to gather the necessary proof.

“Proof!” Francis hissed. “They’ll never prove he did it. You
know
. The boy is beyond clever. He’s evil. He must be stopped.”

Three dagger spikes blipped across the heart monitor’s screen. Daniel remembered patting the priest’s hand, wishing he would exhaust himself and fall asleep.

The film across the old priest’s eyes seemed to disappear, his gaze widening in agitation. His scrawny hands groped for Daniel’s black shirt. “In the name of all that is holy, the boy hung that dog in my confessional. I was meant to find it, to have this heart attack then. He knew about my angina.”

Gently, Father Daniel tried to remove the priest’s fingers from his shirt, uncurling them individually until Francis’s hands rested underneath his own. “With all due respect, Father Francis,” he’d said, “everyone knows about your angina. You’re never without your pills, and all the boys have seen you pop a nitroglycerin under your tongue. It could have been any one of them.”

“Why do you close your eyes to what he is?”

“I know how you feel about the boy —”

“He’s evil,” Francis repeated, his voice growing faint from fatigue, “and don’t tell me you haven’t seen it. You know him better than anyone.”

“I know he’s had some problems, that his mother —”

“Spare me the armchair psychology, Daniel.” The old priest’s bony fingers moved under his, making weak fists. “I know you’re young. Seminarian idealism. Evil exists, Daniel, and it lives in that boy.”

“Then it’s my — our — job to save him.”

“It’s our job to
control
him. It’s too late for salvation. He spits in the eye of God.” The notion that the boy blasphemed appeared to upset Father Francis more than the attempt on his life. For a moment, he looked about to say more, but both men’s thoughts were interrupted by a hacking, ragged cough. The old priest covered his mouth, but a moment too late. A spray of spittle dotted the blanket and the front of Daniel’s shirt. Father Francis jackknifed upright, his cough robbing the rhythm from his breathing. His face reddened, then went purple. Daniel reached for the nurse’s buzzer, but Father Francis waved his hand in protest.

When his cough subsided, he spoke again, his voice a mere rasp. “Stop him, Daniel. Please.”

Daniel bit his lip and nodded, but Francis had already closed his eyes. His flushed face returned to its previous pallor.

Daniel remained at the ailing priest’s bedside for another forty minutes, wanting to reassure himself that the old priest was resting peacefully. The corridor was quiet, the evening hush broken only by Father Francis Xavier’s frail lungs whistling as they laboured for air.

Finally, the obnoxious caw of a crow on the ledge outside the hospital window roused Daniel from his chair. The sound filled him with dread. Dreams of birds, in traditional folk wisdom, signified death.

Like that night years ago, a gentle drizzle was now falling, and it pattered against Daniel’s classroom window, coaxing him into the present and blurring his vision of the
campanario
. He moved away from the window, grabbed his windbreaker from the back of his chair, shut off the lights, and rushed outside. The rain was cool, and he turned his face upward.

In the distance, Daniel heard the roll of thunder, like a giant’s growling stomach. He turned up his jacket collar and headed for the church. Minutes later, he stood before the huge double doors, the pair of ringed handles like two vacant eyes staring at him. If he concentrated, he could almost hear the strains of the opening hymn as it had been sung that night.

Seven o’clock mass had begun, and he remembered slipping quietly into the church, sidling into a pew directly behind the boy. Father Anthony was bellowing the liturgy, as though volume was some kind
of measuring stick for devotion. Daniel had been unable to concentrate on the scripture, his gaze so focused on the boy.

He couldn’t believe how much the boy had changed in the few months he’d known him. His shoulders had broadened, his unblemished face now in profile, so hard and chiselled like a man’s. When he turned to face Daniel for the sign of peace, there was a trace of a grin at the corner of his mouth. Their handshake was robust and friendly.

Evil. You must stop him
.

After communion, Father Anthony appeared visibly shaken. Even from where he sat, Daniel noticed the priest’s hesitant steps, the teetering as he moved from altar to tabernacle to chair. Drunk? Daniel dismissed the thought. Priests drank, of course. Lots of them. It was a lonely life, but Daniel had never seen Anthony have more than the occasional glass of wine. There was a bad flu going around. The church was three-quarters empty; many of the boys were sick, so Anthony had likely picked up a bug. He didn’t even sing the recessional hymn as he came down the aisle, and by the time Daniel chatted with a few of the regular parishioners and exited the church, Father Anthony was nowhere in sight.