Everyone Pays (15 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

MICHAEL

At Washington Square, people with days free lay out on the grass. Drug dealers dealt their drugs. Others consumed them.

So much happened here in the name of sin, all under the shadow of Saints Peter and Paul Church. I walked right up to the stairs from the lawn and looked at the grand entrance under the inscription
“Per L’Universo.”
The message: for everyone. Universal, for all.

The church welcomed all. Sinners. Just enter the house of the Lord to be saved. A daily offer, yet so few came inside.

So be it.

As soon as I passed through the door, I felt the silence. The silence of the space—its vaulted ceiling, arches, the wood of the pews. All this absorbed sound, changed the nature of the space. A peace descended on me, one I had not felt since I left St. Boniface on Wednesday. This was the peace that I needed to restore.

At this time of day, the pews were mostly empty—a few tourists and a believer or two. Midday mass ended, now the church simply waited. Welcoming.

I sat in one of the middle pews, removed my jacket, and laid it gently beside me. I knelt and began my prayers, begged His forgiveness for bringing this trouble to my church, outsiders into it, and asked His protection for Emily while she was in their hands. For myself, I listened.

I whispered, “Please, Lord. I am Your servant. Restore Your guidance to me.”

Even as He failed to respond, I felt peace. Eyes closed, I knew the presence of all that was holy in His name, the eyes of His son looking down on me from the altar.

I prayed.

After a time, I sat back in the pew and pondered the beauty of His church. I had never been there before, but I still felt welcome. I was and would always be safe in the house of the Lord.

Safe under Him.

Then I noticed a man in odd dress, too formal, someone with the aura of a policeman trying to appear undercover. He walked along the far side of the pews, tried to avoid drawing attention. But in His house, he stood out like a man-size fire.

Believers, tourists, and
him
. Three different sets. I bowed my head, hoping he didn’t see me.

But he was heading closer.

Slowly, carefully, trying to act as if he wasn’t, he started toward me, walking across a pew. This, all wrong, something no believer would do.

I stood, pulled myself together, and moved away, headed for the far corner. And as I moved, I felt His peace, knew He watched over and protected me from harm.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Sliding out of my pew, I reached the far side of the church and turned toward the altar, heading toward the sacristy.

The officer was no more than ten steps behind me, but it may as well have been miles given what I knew about His ways and His protection.

A friar left the sacristy, and I slipped in behind him unseen. The door closed with a dignified, resonant click.

“Yes? Can I help you?” I heard from the door’s other side.

Inside I was alone. A chasuble and stole lay out on the sacristy credens, waiting to be put away. I moved quickly, stopping only for a moment at the piscina to make the sign of the cross. I heard the officer outside raise his voice, then I passed into a hallway and down a set of stairs. There, I found a solid exit door to the outside. To my left was another hall that would take me farther into the church’s inner sanctums. I pushed through the wide release of the door and stepped out into the cold. I found myself in a narrow walkway alongside the church.

The door fell shut behind me as I made my way beyond the remainder of the church’s length and then around a corner to a wide alleyway between a row of houses and the church’s lot. This led me west then north to Greenwich Street.

I came out on the sidewalk. To my right I saw a wide driveway across the street. Back down the alley behind me, no one was there.

I jogged across the street and up the driveway toward a house set back from the street. Its beige backside stood against a white staircase that led up to apartments. A low gate lay opened for me, unlatched, and took me behind another house, then through a yard and to a back alley to the next street north of Greenwich, Lombard, where I was certain no one could have followed my route.

I slipped into a shop for a few moments to browse the day’s newspapers, making sure my features didn’t grace the covers. They didn’t. Likely it was just the police who had my picture and instructions to watch for me around any church. Fair enough.

I crossed myself quickly, thanking Him for leading me from harm.

No one in the shop noticed me. High shelves protected us all.

From there, I made my way west in the direction of James Weber’s apartment, where I would follow my desires.

Without Him, I still knew what to do, who my next victim would be. I knew where to find him and exactly what I would do when I did.

CHAPTER FIFTY

DONNER

We worked the phones and computers from our desks for the rest of the morning. After the meeting with Bowen, my hangover was long gone. Call it adrenaline or the honest clearheadedness that the job required, I didn’t care. I took it light on the coffee and drank water to rehydrate my brain.

Then that afternoon we got a call from a beat officer in North Beach named Duncan Comrie who said he’d seen Father Michael, followed him, and then lost him in SS. Peter and Paul Church.

Peter and Paul was one of the most well-known churches in the city, a tourist staple for its location at Washington Square and appearing in the original
Dirty Harry
. In the movie, the killer, Scorpio, had his shooting there stopped by a police helicopter scouring the city for him.

As if.

Bowen had given us room, but no way were we securing a chopper. More movie magic in the name of police work.

Officer Comrie had lost the priest when he slipped into the sacristy, then somehow out a back door of the church, then down an alley and out onto the streets. It was a sighting though and, being a church, sensitive enough for Hendricks and me to follow up personally.

“What’s he doing up there? What’s in that neighborhood?”

Hendricks shrugged. It didn’t matter, really. The priest was on the run, could be after another john in any part of the city. North Beach had Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club and plenty of others. It wasn’t a hub for the S&M sex trade, like the ’Loin, but it had a lot to see, even more to buy.

“So now we wait?” I asked. “Not this girl.” I pushed in my keyboard, stood up, then followed it with my chair. “Let’s go take a walk around the neighborhood, partner. See if we can dig up any clues.”

Washington Square was full of stoners, hippies, and college kids, some resident trustafarians with facial tattoos and dreads, living on the street, exploring homelessness to drive some one-percenter parent insane.

Even in the relative cold of a San Francisco January afternoon, they were all out doing their thing.

“Not a bad place, this city?” I asked Hendricks as we strolled across the grass.

“Yeah. In the daytime.” He threw something he’d been playing with onto the ground. A blossom of some sort. “What’s not to like?”

We’d both seen our share of the city’s horrors, enough to change the way we saw the world, and neither of us started out with a short list of reasons to give up hope.

We walked into the church through a wide entranceway under a grand stone arch. Above the door,
“Per L’Universo
” was carved in stone, meaning universal—for everyone. Welcome to all, a nice sentiment if it was true.

We split up and peeked around, looking for who knows what, and when we didn’t find anything strange, we showed our badges to a priest, one Father Benedict. Even this had the potential of getting back to Bowen and raising a stir, so we played it light, making sure to stay on the priest’s good side as we asked about anyone who had passed through earlier.

I was tempted to call the priest Ben but didn’t. Hendricks would’ve walked me out and carried on the investigation himself. This man definitely didn’t look like a Ben.

He and his peers were not left happy by Officer Comrie’s visit. He made that much immediately clear, put us right on thin ice politically. Apparently Comrie had lacked the requisite niceties, following a potential suspect and all, so we listened extra closely to Father Benedict’s earful and did our best to bring him around to the greater civic cause.

Once the priest finished up on Comrie’s lack of sensitivity, we asked him about the possibility of a suspect coming through the church. I almost mentioned that he was a priest himself, this suspect, but Hendricks wisely put his hand on my arm before I did. He had a good sense about him, from time to time.

In any case, I asked about the chance of a suspect coming through the church, going out a back way, and whether they thought there might be any truth to the officer’s notion that he might still be somewhere behind the walls.

Father Benedict wasn’t a man to lie, being a priest and all. When he said anyone passing through must’ve gone out a side door instead of going farther down into the rectory and the interior, we nodded and agreed. I felt sure there were rooms down there, residences and who knew what else a church contained—I didn’t think it was any pagan craziness, but I honestly had no idea—that we weren’t going to see. We’d gone way deep and through St. Boniface, and I supposed that would be all I would get of a church’s inner sanctums.

This was the stuff you got into political trouble for, I was learning.

The priest took us into a room he called the sacristy. It was off to the side of the main altar at the front end of the church.

“Here is where your Officer Comrie thinks this suspect went,” he said.

The main article in the room was a big book open on a table. Around that were closed cabinets and a series of racks holding robes.

“
If
he was here, your suspect proceeded into this foyer.” The father led us into a stairway, onto a landing between two flights. He pointed down to a fire exit door and beyond that a hallway.

“Any outsider went through that door,” he said. “If someone was here, he’s now gone. Of course, Officer Comrie wanted to see through the rest of the hallways and cloisters, inside the rectory even. But that’s not possible.” He smiled like a sly civil servant, one not entirely unwise to the ways of the outside world. “At least without a warrant.”

It was more than lucky that Father Kevin at St. Boniface hadn’t been as stubborn or sly, though a judge denying us a warrant to enter a church would’ve kept some downtown brass happy—while totally sabotaging our case.

“Right you are,” I said to the father. “I’m sure we don’t need to see any farther. As long as you say you’re not harboring a known fugitive.” I put extra emphasis on this last line, almost wanted to add a wink in there too, but I didn’t. If the church was really screwed up enough to protect a murderer from the police—even one of their brothers—then the world was in even worse shape than I had imagined, child-molestation cases notwithstanding.

In truth, there was something I appreciated about this “no”-first way of handling our presence in the church. I’d be happier to know where I couldn’t go than to blindly just go there, tip over an apple cart of political bull like I had at St. Boniface, and get beat up for it later.

But maybe that was just me.

“Maybe we should take that door, see where it leads,” Hendricks said. I took it as a good sign: both for us to leave the church without breaking any more eggshells and as a viable next direction to follow our case.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

That was how we found ourselves in the alley behind the church, looking out onto Greenwich Street and a neighborhood of houses.

“Maybe he’s holed up, found a hiding place around here,” I said. “Want to call in and check for any crime reports today from this area?”

Hendricks followed my advice for once, making the call into Central Station, which covered all of Chinatown and points north to the Bay, including North Beach. “Anything strange on the books today?” Hendricks asked the dispatch.

I didn’t want to hear that someone had found a body, but something else to go on would’ve been helpful.

Then Hendricks was nodding, and I felt a spark. He took out his pad and pen. Crunching his phone between shoulder and ear, he wrote down an address. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Sounds useful. Thanks.”

He scribbled as best he could. This was a problem with the newer, sleeker cell phones: you couldn’t squeeze them beside your ear like old wall phones or our desk models down at the station—yes, we still have those.

When he hung up, he looked puzzled, tapped the address on his notebook with the pen. “It’s not much to go on, but this is what we got.”

He showed me an address on Montgomery Street at the corner of Alta, right by Coit Tower. We couldn’t see the tower from where we were, but I knew it wasn’t far.

“Looks like a break-in. The owner reported it but says nothing was taken. Just a broken doorframe and a wedding photo taken from one of his shelves.”

“A photo?” I said. “That sounds like our man.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Like I said, it isn’t much.”

“More than enough for me,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

MICHAEL

Weber’s apartment was on the northern end of Montgomery, just below Pioneer Park and Coit Tower. I saw the Transamerica Pyramid from his corner, and on the backside of his building, I saw the same set of fire escapes that so many old buildings in San Francisco had. Why no one realized these created a major danger from intruders was laughable. Another of God’s favors.

The back of the building had no windows, like a spare concrete block with metal doors at each landing.

I jumped up from street level to the lowest rung of the fire escape, confident that no one watched me, and pulled myself up to the first ladder from there. I climbed it to the metal landing for the first floor, then the next ladder and the next to get closest to Weber’s apartment on the third floor.

Knocking lightly at the third-floor door brought back the ring of hollow metal, a door not heavy but well locked. I pulled on the knob a few times, turned it, tried my best to see if it would break, and it wouldn’t.

So I climbed the final ladder to the roof. No one saw me come over the wall onto the rough gravel. Then there, in the middle of the building, was exactly what I had hoped: a wide skylight over the main stairs. Familiar wire-mesh safety glass. I tried to lift it, knowing already I’d find it open.

In God’s name.

The cover came right up on its hinges, and I slid underneath, to the ladder down to the hall. Someone had been more interested in getting up to the roof than wary of making sure the skylight stayed locked. So be it. In this manner, I got inside.

In the third-floor hallway, I saw one apartment at either end. The north one was his: apartment six. I walked calmly to that end and knocked. Then again. Too easy, almost, I forced the door with my shoulder and broke the lock. A skill learned in a former life, one that seemed necessary at one time. Now a trick I used rarely.

I entered slowly, certain I’d hear beeps, the warning of an alarm, but did not. My first view was bright wood floors and light.

I noticed none of the familiar features of the other apartments I’d visited on my path: no dirty corners, dingy walls, no straps or clamps or dusty bed. No, this was something from a magazine. Beautiful, detailed, decorated. This apartment had a good woman’s touch.

I walked around noticing rugs, framed artwork, even paintings. On the living room mantle, I saw their pictures: a man and a woman, very much married, posing in a series of pictures. At the center of the row was their wedding: she wore the traditional white dress, beautiful. He had a tuxedo. Black tie.

But it wasn’t only the two of them in the photos I saw. There were a young boy and a girl. Two sets of baby pictures stood on the mantle with the rest. Pictures of the children with them.

I turned around, checked the floors again, noticed the toys—not a lot of them, but definitely the playthings of a child. Books for school. Homework.

This john who had touched Emily, who was a partner in the events that left her beaten on the streets, was a parent. The father of a boy and a girl.

God’s word came then, rushed back to me, said my work here was done. This man was not the one responsible for Emily’s sins.

Just like that and of a sudden, I heard Him again.

Then I felt the apartment closing in on me, its air constricting my neck. I checked the room for signs of my presence, anything other than the broken door, and nothing showed that I had entered their home, nothing but the still echoes of my feet.

I went to the mantle and took one picture. To leave James Weber a single sign. I wouldn’t keep it, didn’t want it, but someone would put together the pieces, tell James Weber that I had been there.

My message would get through.