A Necessary Evil

CHAPTER 57

Omaha, Nebraska

Tommy Pakula had had enough. He felt Morrelli's attention had followed O'Dell out the door after she'd left Father Gallagher's office. The two may have worked a case years ago, but it seemed obvious to Pakula that Morrelli still held some kind of a grudge. Pakula finally told both men that he'd be in touch, thanked them for their time and left.

He found O'Dell coming out of a classroom and raised his eyebrows at her, surprised that she would be so transparent in her snooping.

"Learn anything?" he asked.

"Maybe. Are you finished with Father Gallagher?"

"Yeah, I've had enough of those two clowns. I should have unleashed Carmichael on them." They started down the steps, and he let her lead the way. "I can tell you one thing, Morrelli sure isn't finished with you. Is he going to be a problem?"

"I get the feeling he thinks there's some unfinished personal business between us," she said with no emotion, perhaps a bit of amusement if anything.

"Is there?"

"If you're asking if it'll get in the way of working this case, I won't let it." Her tone was serious now.

"No, actually I wanted to make sure the asshole's not gonna be hassling you. If he gives you any problems you've got my cell-phone number. You give me a call. I'll take care of it"

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at him. "Are you trying to protect me, Detective Pakula?"

He stopped in his tracks, too, and wanted to cringe. Was she going to bust his chops about how just because she was a woman she didn't need his protection? Jesus!

"It's been a while since I've had someone want to play big brother with me," O'Dell told him, but she was smiling now. "That's kinda nice." And before he could respond she was on her way again, leaving him as she headed out the school's front door.

Back in the car, she filled him in about her conversation with Sister Kate Rosetti, the lesson in daggers and their popularity because of medieval crusader-type games on the Internet. She also shared her new theory, that maybe the killer could be a teenage boy who had been abused by a priest. He listened without interrupting, hearing her out.

"You're forgetting one thing," he finally said. "How does a fifteen-or even sixteen-or seventeen-year-old have the time or opportunity to get from Minneapolis to Omaha to Columbia, Missouri, on his own?"

"Each of the murders happened over holiday weekends.

"Look, I don't have this figured out. All I'm saying is that we need to consider it."

"That the killer could be a teenager?"

"Or two. Maybe they got the idea from playing one of these games."

"You think a kid _ even two kids __ could actually plan something like this and pull it off and in a public place? Not only that, but he could keep his cool enough to stab a Catholic priest and just walk away? You're asking me to consider all that?"

"Sounds too incredible, huh?"

"Yeah, it does."

"Okay. Try this, though. No one ever considered that two teenagers could build and plant two twenty-pound propane bombs and place them in a school cafeteria, rigged to explode and kill up to five hundred of their schoolmates. And no one considered that if and when those bombs failed to detonate, the teenagers would then arm themselves with two sawed-off shotguns, a 9 mm semiautomatic carbine rifle and a 9 mm Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol and then proceed to very calmly, very calculatingly shoot and kill twelve students and one teacher"

"I'd like to believe Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were extreme exceptions," Pakula said, not enjoying the fact that he could be so wrong. When she put it that way, it certainly did sound like a possibility. "But you told me that the murders looked like the work of an assassin."

"Which is what some of these Internet games allow for, right? I mean, in a way, don't they allow the players to become executioners or assassins?"

"I don't know enough about the games. Look, I suppose it's possible. Anything's possible. To tell you the truth I was beginning to think it might be more than one person, but a kid… I just can't wrap my brain around that one."

"One thing I've learned, Detective Pakula, in almost ten years of chasing killers is never to underestimate who is capable of murder."

"You mean like four years ago in Platte City?" It had taken Pakula a while to remember the details of the case, but when he did he also remembered the rumors, "Didn't you make a statement someplace that you thought the wrong men were being convicted? If I remember correctly, the FBI profiler in that case __ you __ believed a young Catholic priest was responsible."

"I still do believe that," she said, looking out her side window at the little shops and restaurants in Dundee along Underwood Avenue.

"Why didn't you pursue it?"

"I did." This time she shot him a look and he caught a glimpse of her anger before she could control it and go back to studying the cityscape outside her window. "Everyone in Platte City, including Sheriff Nick Morrelli seemed content to believe they had the killer, or rather, killers. Timmy Hamilton escaped and was rescued. I suppose everyone thought it was a nice wrap-up."

"But if the kid got away couldn't he identify the guy?"

"No, Timmy said the man always wore a Halloween mask, a Richard Nixon Halloween mask. I certainly could understand that people wanted to put the case behind them. They thought they had the killers in custody and why wouldn't they think that? The kidnappings and murders stopped."

"Makes sense," Pakula agreed.

"Yes, but what no one seemed to notice or care about was that Father Michael Keller had suddenly disappeared. He left the country. Not even the Omaha Archdiocese knew why or where he had gone. They claimed there was no reassignment. It wasn't like he had taken a leave of absence. He just disappeared."

She paused and Pakula glanced at her. She stared out the windshield now, but seemed to be somewhere else, her hands in her lap, her ringers nagging at a loose thread on her jacket. She continued as if she needed to explain, "I tracked him for a while as best I could even though I had absolutely no jurisdiction to do so. He wasn't implicated in the case in any way and he had left the country. All I had to go on were rumors. He fit the description of an American-speaking priest who suddenly showed up at a small parish in a poor village outside of Chiuchin, Chile. No sooner did I think I'd found him and he was gone again, on to some other little village."

"How could he do that without the Catholic Church keeping track of him? What did he do, just show up and pretend to be the new priest?"

"From what I could find out, yes, I think that's exactly what he was doing, probably what he's still doing. Many of these poor villages haven't had a priest for years. The people have to travel miles just to take part in a mass. Can you imagine a priest just coming into their village? They might not question it at all. They'd simply be glad to have him. They'd probably do anything and everything in order to keep him. Maybe even keep his presence secret."

"Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time the bad guy got away." Pakula flexed his shoulders. He'd wondered if he'd overdone it with the punching bag this morning.

"Maybe he hasn't gotten away, after all."

"Whadya mean?"

"That's who called me right before we went into the school," Maggie said.

"Holy crap! You've got to be kidding." Then he remembered. "You said something about the list. He's on it?"

"Yes," she said, only now she was smiling.

"What the hell did he want?"

"Protection. And medical attention. He thinks the killer poisoned him."

Pakula couldn't believe it. "Why the hell does he think we'd protect him?"

"For one thing, he can tell us who else is on the list."

"He has the list?"

"That's what he says."

"And you believe him?"

Maggie nodded. "He says Daniel Ellison is on it."

Pakula stared at her until he realized they were approaching a stop sign. Keeping his eyes on the road, he said, "You already made a deal with this guy, didn't you?" It wasn't really a question.

"We should probably talk to Chief Ramsey about this," she said calmly.

Pakula felt the sweat trickling down his back. He turned up the air-conditioning and flipped one of the vents to blast him in the face.

"We'll have to do that later" he told her. "We only have about a half hour before we meet with that snoopy reporter." And he needed to keep focused. Actually what he needed was a break. This case kept getting more and more bizarre. "How 'bout some lunch? Whadya think about splitting a pie at LaCasa's. Best pizza around."

"Italian sausage?"

"Only if we get to have Romano cheese."

"Deal," she said.

"Oh crap!" Pakula said, slapping his forehead. It hit him like a flash of lightning. "Hamilton? The kid. Morrelli's nephew is Timmy Hamilton. And you asked him how his sister, Christine, was?"

"That's right. What is it?"

"It just occurred to me and I don't suppose it's a coincidence __ the snoopy reporter from the Omaha World Herald is Christine Hamilton."