The Basilica of the Sacred Heart was a monument to something. Had to be. I spent ten minutes walking around inside the giant church like a tourist at some midwestern Vatican, but I couldn’t decide precisely what the pompous shrine was intended to honor. God? I came from a tradition of simple prairie churches with inadequate heat in the winter and nonexistent air-conditioning in the summer. I wasn’t raised to pray to a God who sat around in heaven with His saints counting His cathedrals and basilicas like Midas counting his gold; a God who cared whether the glass in His windows was stained or the bronze on His altars was gilded.
Certainly not a God who gave a hoot whether Notre Dame beat Michigan. My old man once told me that if God cares who wins a football game while people are starving in Africa, we can all just give up. That hell on earth is just around the corner. My old man was not a genius, far from it, but he got that right.
Carmen was an observant lady. Being observant, she didn’t waste any time before she asked why I seemed so interested in the massive pipe organ inside the basilica. I told her it was a thing I had, a fascination with organs and organ music. The truth was, I didn’t know a division from a manual or a pipe from a stop. But it didn’t make a whole lot of difference what I knew or didn’t know: Carmen liked disco. I figured arguing musical taste with the woman would be about as fruitful as trying to teach a dog to gargle.
All that mattered to me at that moment was that the precise location where Holly and Sterling had had their profane tryst was going to remain their secret, and mine, and maybe God’s-that is, if during their coupling He hadn’t been too occupied watching the Notre Dame-Michigan game or hadn’t been totally blinded by the quasi-Gothic glitz of His Indiana basilica.
Memory told me that one of God’s commandments to Moses had to do with coveting thy neighbor’s wife, so I was assuming that He maintained some interest in marital fidelity and duly noted the fact that Sterling and Holly had fornicated in front of His fancy pipe organ.
Carmen and I moved back outside and stood for a moment beneath the vaulting spire that dominated the front of the basilica. I said, “I hope God cares what happened to those four women, and I hope He cares what happens to Holly Malone and to Gibbs.”
She touched my hand. “Feeling philosophical, Sam?”
I couldn’t tell whether my hand was cold and she was all heat or vice versa. But the thermal contrast between her flesh and mine had all my attention. I said, “Kind of, I guess.”
Carmen had listened carefully to my edited version of Holly’s story-I transformed it from an X-rated melodrama to a suggestive PG-13 and totally omitted any reference to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart-on the way over to the Notre Dame campus. I was ready to hear her thoughts on how we were going to spend the rest of our day.
“Is she in danger?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“Maybe.”
I laughed. The campus, deserted for the holiday, chewed on my guffaw and spit it back at me in fractured echoes.
“Well,” I said, “that settles it.”
Carmen laughed, too.
Our hands were still touching. The top of my hand rested against the side of hers. It was either an accident, or it wasn’t. I figured that was just the way we had planned it. Total deniability. Know this: Cops are better at deniability than just about anybody but politicians and corporate executives.
Carmen grabbed two of my fingers and tugged me away from the church. When I chanced to return the pressure, she pulled away and stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat. I did the same.
Didn’t mean a thing.
She yanked us back to the work we were doing. “Let’s assume that the way Sterling met Holly is similar to the way he met the other women. Can we do that?”
“Not Louise, the stewardess.”
“Flight attendant.”
“Don’t get me started. I liked stewardesses. I liked waitresses. Turns out I’m not so fond of flight attendants and servers. Why is that? Sterling met Louise on a flight she was working, right? Isn’t that the story? And he met Holly on the Internet, right? But I don’t think it really matters. I don’t think the meeting-them part is as important as the sex-with-them part.”
“You’re probably right. He met them. By chance, socially, at work, on the Internet-whatever. He met them. He made a point of meeting them. And he had sex with them.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. “The sex with Holly wasn’t… pedestrian. She made it clear that that was important. Not only to her but to him, too. He wasn’t just into infidelity, he was into… sexual adventure. He was into women who might be as adventurous as he was.”
“This another interest of yours, Sam? Like pipe organs?”
With the tease, her voice tingled a little.
“Don’t make this more difficult than it already is for me.”
“Holly’s that adventurous?”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said. Not only did I not want to violate Holly’s confidence, I didn’t want to have to repeat her story out loud to another human being. Especially not another human being of Holly’s gender.
Carmen could tell. She Cliff-Noted the thing for us. “He met them, he gauged their interest, and he joined them on some sexual adventure. So why are four of them dead?”
“We know some things about Louise and Holly, right? We know they both survived their first sexual encounters with Sterling. Can we assume that the other women did, too? That there was an initial encounter-mutually satisfying-and that he went back a second time, or a third or fourth, and that’s when he killed them?”
We covered a good chunk of dormant Notre Dame turf before Carmen answered. “Yes, for now we can assume that. We almost have to.”
“That means that Holly’s now in danger. Pure and simple.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe?”
“Sam, nobody was looking for Sterling when he killed these other women. He had the cover of anonymity. Now? He has to assume that we’re after him.”
“Is this devil’s advocate time?”
“The risk factor has changed. He has to think that some cop-somebody like you and me-doesn’t believe he drowned. If I’m him, I’m lying low.”
“Why? The Georgia cops think he’s dead. My guess is that your superiors have already suggested you go home, too. Or even ordered you back to work.” Her eyes confirmed my supposition. “I bet you’re using vacation days right now, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
She could have lied to me. Would’ve been easy. I said, “Sterling might think he’s home free, Carmen. That this is like a free play in football, you know? After an offsides call?”
“We still don’t know his motive, Sam. And we don’t know where Brian Miles fits.”
She was right about that. We certainly didn’t know where Brian Miles fit. But the possibilities concerned me. I said, “Half the collars I get I never understand what the idiots were thinking, Carmen. Criminals are goofy.”
“Goofy? Is that a Colorado word?”
“Nope. Minnesota.” Intentionally, I said Minnesota the natural northern way, accentuating the “so” syllable so that it became “soooo.”
“That’s what that accent is? Minnesota? That’s where you’re from?”
“The Iron Range. That’s up north.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“Not really.”
I wasn’t sure she was going to let it rest there.
She did. I was impressed.
Ten more steps. I asked, “Do you think they call this the Quad?”
“Don’t know,” she said.
On the way back over to Holly Malone’s neighborhood, Carmen said, “Since I left San Jose, this is the most time I’ve spent with another cop without being asked why I left town without my pension.”
“Some things are personal.” I was thinking about Sherry and me, but I was also thinking about Alan and that bug in his office, and about Sterling and Holly and their time down near the pedals of the pipe organ. Secrets? They don’t mean shit. “You want to tell me what happened before you changed jobs, that’s cool. You don’t, I understand completely. I’m sure you had your reasons.”
Traffic was light on the streets of South Bend. Everybody was either watching football or cooking a turkey or taking a nap or playing with nieces or nephews or grandkids that they hadn’t seen in way too long. In a perfect world I wouldn’t be spending my holiday driving through the streets of some strange midwestern town with a California cop who liked disco.
In a perfect world Simon and I would be cuddled up in front of the TV making fun of the Detroit Lions.
But in the imperfect world where I spent most of my time, being with Carmen wasn’t the worst of alternatives.
Carmen seemed to read my thoughts, sort of. “This your first holiday by yourself?”
“My wife took our kid to see her parents.”
“Yeah, right, that’s the reason you’re alone. And I left San Jose because I like the beach.”
It was a good comeback. The traffic light changed to red over the intersection in front of me. I thought of running it-mine was the only car in sight-but I braked instead. I tried to think of something smart to say back to Carmen, but nothing came to mind.
“It’s mine,” Carmen confessed after we’d been sitting at the light for a while. “My first holiday without my daughter. And it’s not going to be the last, either.”
I admitted something to her that I hadn’t even admitted to myself. “Probably won’t be my last, either.”
She touched my knee. A quick little fingertip thing. There, and then gone.
“It’s easier to be working,” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed.
I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station so we could both use the john. As we walked inside, I was thinking that Carmen and I had covered a lot of important emotional ground in that one block of West Angela Boulevard Road in South Bend, Indiana, and we’d done it without using too many words.
If damn Alan had been in the backseat, he would have made us jaw on and on until we reached the Canadian border and probably wanted to kill each other.
Until we definitely wanted to kill him.
I wondered how he was doing with his problems. The office thing. How Lauren was feeling. Whether that thing he’d made for his big dog was still keeping her tongue off her paw.
I’d call him later on, after I called Simon, probably just about the time they were sitting down to their turkey dinner.