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

They made room for him, but of course he refused coffee. He had had the single cup that must make do until lunchtime. Joyce brought him a glass of mineral water, which he regarded ruefully, not interrupting Emtee Dempsey’s colorful account of Kim’s being followed, her confronting the man, their attempt to get information from Richard. And then this morning. By the time she got to the actual explosion, it might have been wondered how she could keep the dramatic line of her narrative rising, so exciting the preliminary events were made to sound. Kim found herself wishing she had actually behaved with the forthrightness Emtee Dempsey attributed to her when she confronted her supposed police escort in the Northwestern library. Emtee Dempsey had the folded morning paper safely under one pudgy hand, clearly her prop for the ultimate revelation. But there was so much to be said before she got to it.

“Regina Fastnekker! Do I remember that one,” Katherine said. “My pretrial interviews?” She looked around the table. “I was nominated for a Pulitzer, for heaven’s sake.”

“Do you still have them?”

Katherine smiled sweetly. “My scrapbooks are up to date, thank you.”

Benjamin Rush wanted to know where Regina was now. Katherine, to her shame, had not followed further the Fastnekker saga once the girl had been safely put away. Emtee Dempsey told them of the woman’s supposed prison conversion.

“ ‘Supposed’ in the sense of ‘alleged.’ I do not mean to express scepticism. Some of the greatest saints got their start in prison.”

“I won’t ask you how many lawyers have been canonized,” Mr. Rush said and sipped his mineral water.

Katherine said, “Conversion isn’t a strong enough word for the turnaround that girl would have needed. I have seldom talked with anyone I considered so, well, diabolic. She seemed to have embraced evil.”

“ ‘Evil be thou my good,’ ” murmured Emtee Dempsey.

“Who said that?”

“Milton’s Satan, of course, don’t tease. I must read every word you wrote about her, Katherine. I suppose the police will know where she now is.”

“I suspect they may be talking with her right now.”

“The bombing is in her style,” Rush said. “Ominously so. It is why I came directly here. Katherine will know better than I that the Fastnekker crowd had a quite unique modus operandi. There was always a series of bombings, the first a kind of announcement, defiant, and then came the big bang. What I am saying is that, far from being out of danger, you may be in far more danger now than before the unfortunate destruction of your means of transportation. If, that is, we are truly dealing with Regina Fastnekker and company.”

“Company? How many were there?”

“It’s all in my stories,” Katherine said. “I wonder why I didn’t read of her big conversion.”

“If it is genuine, she might not have wanted it to be a media event.”

“Well, you have certainly had some morning. But, as Benjamin says, the excitement may be just beginning. I suggest that you go at once to the lake place in Indiana.”

“No, no, no,” Rush intervened. He thought that for them to be in such a remote place, where the police were, well, local, far from taking the nuns out of danger, might well expose them fatally.

“We have to assume that you are being watched at this very moment.”

“Isn’t it far more likely that the next attempt will be on Richard’s family?”

Katherine said, “I wonder who that phony policeman was?”

That was Emtee Dempsey’s cue. “I was coming to that,” she said, unfolding the paper. “This is the man.”

“But that’s Michael Layton,” Mr. Rush said in shocked tones.

“Ah, you know him.”

“Sister, that boy, that young man, disappeared several years ago. Vanished into thin air.”

“That’s in the story, Benjamin.”

“But I know the Laytons. I knew Michael. I can’t tell you what a traumatic experience it was for them.”

Emtee Dempsey turned to Katherine. “Was this young man part of Regina Fastnekker’s company?”

“That’s not possible,” said Mr. Rush.

“Why on earth would he impersonate a policeman?”

“Sister Kimberly, please call your brother and tell him that Michael Layton was the one following you around of late.”

It was Katherine who summed it all up, despite the evident pain it caused Benjamin Rush. Alerted by what the young man following Sister Kimberly had said, Emtee Dempsey had coaxed from Richard his belief that Regina Fastnekker was more likely than anyone else to seek to do him harm after she was released from jail. She had masked her intention by undergoing a religious conversion while in prison, and some time had elapsed since she had regained her freedom. Richard himself had been lulled into the belief that Miss Butterfingers had gotten over her desire for revenge. She chose to strike where it would be least expected, at Richard’s sister. Accordingly, one of the gang followed Kim around and, when confronted, disarmingly claimed to be part of a police effort to protect Richard’s family. This morning, their automobile was blown up, a typical first move in the Fastnekker modus operandi.