A Fountain Filled With Blood

She looked up at him as she pocketed the keys. There was just enough twilight to see the prim expression on her face. “The church,” she said, “does not belong to me.”

“I’ll walk you back to your place before I go.”

“The rectory is the first house on this street. It’s all of fifty yards down the sidewalk.”

“Yeah, well, I also parked my cruiser in your driveway.”

“Ah. Okay, then.”

They walked in silence to the rectory. He opened his cruiser door, and she stopped on her lawn, halfway to the front porch. “Good night, then,” he said. “Thanks for letting me use your office. And you did right, letting Lyle know right away about McKinley.”

She shrugged. “I just hope you don’t find he’s loaned his truck to his aged mother and has been spending his nights working at the food pantry.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.” He leaned on the door frame a moment, instead of sliding directly into the car.

She looked down at her sneakers. “So.” She looked up at him, her face faintly etched by the light from the corner lamppost. “Am I forgiven?”

“What, for speaking your mind?”

He saw the flash of her grin. “No, I can’t honestly say I’ve ever repented speaking my mind. I meant for how I did it. Hurting your feelings.”

He was going to say his feelings didn’t matter one way or another, that you take a hit and you keep on going, but he realized he would sound like an outtake from a Knute Rockne biopic. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you are.”

A flash again in the darkness as she smiled. She turned toward the porch. “Hey, Clare,” he said. She turned back toward him. “You know that Holy Spirit thing?”

“Yeah?”

“I think you’ve got a little shine, too.”

Chapter Seventeen

Russ was parked behind number 2 Causeway Street when Elliott McKinley finally made it home. Russ’s squad car was strategically wedged between the sagging two-car garage moldering at the rear of the lot and the rooming house Dumpster behind it. No one had emptied the Dumpster in a long time. He tried rolling his windows up to keep the smell to a bearable level, but as the sun rose and the morning heated up, he began to feel like a hunk of grizzled beef in a slow cooker. He wound up opening his door and praying for an upwind breeze.

He had been there since their shift change at 6:00 A.M. The neighborhood had been emptying out when he arrived, since even those who had had Monday as a holiday were back to work today. He had listened as the Chevy Camaros and the ten-year-old Skylarks and the occasional tiny import fired up and headed off for the first shift at the G.E. plant in Hudson Falls, or the software-packaging plant in Fort Henry, or to construction sites and auto-repair shops. Causeway Street was a neighborhood that worked in shifts, round the clock. At 4:00 P.M., all the bartenders and waitresses and bouncers would be off to the honky-tonks or the fake rodeos that lined the roads up to Lake George, or to hushed white-linen restaurants that had been serving the summering rich since Teddy Roosevelt’s administration. Finally, at 10:00 or 11:00 P.M., the cleaning women and the night clerks would leave, returning too sleepy-eyed in the morning to give much thought to a few cop cars passing them in the streets.

Russ, Noble Entwhistle, and Eric McCrea had taken over from Lyle and Mark. Eric and Noble were in an unmarked car parked a few doors down from the rooming house. Eric made a radio check religiously every fifteen minutes, reporting that nothing had happened in the last quarter of an hour. That, the bluebottle buzz of flies feasting at the Dumpster, and the occasional shriek of children in danger of toppling rickety swing sets were the only company Russ had.

At 9:45, his radio buzzed. He reached for the mike, wondering why no one had invented a noiseless air conditioner that you could run while still hearing what was going on outside the car. “Yeah, Eric, I’m here.”

“So’s our boy.”

Russ sat up straight. “What’s happening?”

“A burgundy Ford Taurus wagon just dropped him off. A guy and a girl are in the front seat.”

“Call in the plates and tell Harlene I want a unit on them.”

“Already did.”

“You guys get any better at this, I’m going to have to retire. What’s he doing?”

“He’s just entered the front door. He didn’t check his mailbox.”

“Has the postman been by?”

“Nope. Either he doesn’t care what he gets or he was home yesterday in time to get the mail.”

“Somebody must have reached him in the afternoon to let him know that the BWI construction site’s closed today.”

“Okay, I think he’s had enough time to get to his room. Noble and I are gonna go in.”

“Be careful.” This was the thing Russ liked least about his job: sitting and waiting while his men stood on the wrong side of a door, behind which lay—what? A resigned perp who went without comment, or a nutcase with an arsenal? He held himself motionless, listening, waiting.