Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Richard squinted at her. “All right, what’s going on? How come you ask me about her yesterday and today your car’s blown up?”

“Richard, you introduced her into the conversation. I may have asked a thing or two then, but if I ever heard of the young woman before, I had forgotten it. Are you suggesting that she...”

“Aw, come on.”

“Sergeant Grimaldi, has the lieutenant been told of the concern about him and his family?”

Grimaldi looked uncomprehending.

“Perhaps you weren’t aware of it.” She turned to Kim. “I think you will agree, Sister, that I am no longer bound by my promise.”

“Of course not.”

“Richard, your colleagues have been assigned to look after you and your family. Even Sister Kimberly has had an escort these past days.”

Richard glared at Grimaldi, who lifted his shoulders. Richard then got on the phone. Emtee Dempsey’s initial attitude was a little smug; clearly she enjoyed knowing something about the police that Richard did not know. But her manner changed as the meaning of Richard’s end of the conversation became clear.

“There’s been no protective detail assigned to my family. Where in hell did you get such a notion?”

Emtee Dempsey nodded to Kim.

“A man has been following me for several days. Two days ago I had enough and asked him what he was doing. He said he was a policeman.”

“A Chicago policeman?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask? Didn’t you ask for his ID?”

“No, Richard. And I didn’t call you up and ask what was going on either. At the time, I was relieved to learn why he was following me.”

“Relieved that I was supposedly threatened?”

“Well, I was relieved to think that Mary and the kids...”

“I don’t suppose he’ll be following you around today,” Richard broke in, “but I guarantee you a cop we know about will be.”

“You want Sister to keep to her regular routine?”

“Sister Mary Teresa, I want all of you to follow your regular routines. And if anything relevant to this happens, I want to know about it pronto.”

“An interesting use of the word, Richard. In Italian it means ready. It’s how they answer the phone. Pronto,” she said, trilling the r. “You, on the other hand, take it in its Spanish meaning.”

There was more, much more, until Richard fled the study. At their much delayed breakfast, the conversation was of the car. Joyce thought their insurance covered bombing. “Unless it’s considered an act of God.”

“Sister, a bombing is always an act of man. Or woman.”

The newspaper lay on the table unattended throughout the meal. After all, the news of the day had happened in their street.

“I’ll want to speak to Katherine about this. We don’t want her to learn of it from someone at the paper. What is in the paper, by the way?”

Joyce had taken the sports page and Kim, standing, was paging through the front section when she stopped and cried out.

“That’s him!”

“He,” Emtee Dempsey corrected automatically, coming to stand beside her.

The picture was of a young man, smiling, confident, embarking on life. Perhaps a graduation photograph.

His name was Michael Layton. He had been found dead after an explosion in a southside house. He had been missing for five years. He was the man who identified himself as a policeman in the Northwestern library.

3

Katherine Senski caught a cab from her office at the newspaper and was in the house within half an hour of Emtee Dempsey’s call, but of course there was far more to discuss now than the mere blowing up of their automobile. The street had been cordoned off, to the enormous aggravation and rage of who knows how many drivers, while special units collected debris and the all but intact rear end of the car, which seemed to have gone straight into the air, done a flipflop, and landed in their customary parking place.

“Dear God,” Katherine said. “They might be out there collecting pieces of you three.”

“Nonsense,” Emtee Dempsey said.

A first discovery was that the device had not been one that would have been triggered by starting the car. This conclusion was reached by noting the intact condition of the rear of the car.

“But aren’t such devices hooked up to starters, to motors?”

“The motor was in the rear end,” Joyce explained.

“Oh,” Katherine said, but the three nuns were suddenly struck by that past tense. Their Volkswagen bug was no more.

They had just settled down at the dining room table with a fresh pot of coffee when Benjamin Rush arrived. The elegant lawyer stood in the doorway, taking in the scene, and then resumed his usual savoir faire.

“It is a relief to see you, as the saying goes, in one piece, Sister. Sisters.”