Resolved

7

Felix came out of the fog in a splash of cold water, with a crushing pain in the back of his head and the discovery that he could not move. He blinked the water from his eyes and saw Rashid's face, floating there with a peculiar expression on it, avid and self-satisfied, like a nasty schoolteacher about to mete out punishment to an errant boy. Felix also observed that the reason he couldn't move was that he was secured to an armchair with duct tape. His right arm was affixed to his side, his torso was tied to the chair back, his ankles were similarly restrained, and his left arm was stretched out and taped to the kitchen table. The hand itself was heavily wrapped in silvery strips, except for the little finger, which hung free over the table's edge. Without seeming to, Felix tested his bonds, and found no give; he was an expert in this field and recognized the work of someone who knew the art. He noticed that the big shaven-headed guy, Carlos, was standing behind Rashid, holding something in his hand. Off to one side, just within Felix's field of view stood the other one, the beard, Felнpe.

Felix cleared his throat and said, "What the fuck is this, Rashid?"

"What is this? You want to know? Listen to me. Firstly, we Arabs invented numbers, did you know that?"

"Numbers?" Felix was trying to arrange his thoughts, come up with something, but it was impossible, with the pain in his head and the mounting fear in his belly. His eyes were fixed on his little finger hanging helpless over the table's edge.

"Yes, numbers. One, two, three, four. And also zero. Zero is an Arab invention. Many years ago, of course."

"Yeah, that's great," said Felix. "And look, Rashid, I don't know what this is all about, but you got to admit this is a little extreme, whacking me on the head. I mean there's no reason for… I'm doing good for you guys, right? I mean the bombs, and the girl is coming along real good, just the-"

"Shut up! So, since we invented numbers, of course we can count. I have counted my prepared devices and instead of twelve there are ten. That is two missing. Did you think I would not notice two missing bombs? Today I hear that this old man has been blown up in Queens, and I think, Can there be a connection? I tell you, Felix, my mind boggles. Is he really so stupid that he believes that I am so stupid that I don't notice this event? But it is so. You are a stupid man, Felix. I tell you, I warn you in every way, and yet you do this." He made a little clucking sound. "So, you must be trained like a donkey now, with the stick, so you will see we are serious men." He gave a quick command in guttural Arabic. Carlos moved swiftly into position with a pruning shears and snipped off the first two joints of Felix's little finger.

Over Felix's howl, Rashid asked, "Now, where is the other bomb?"

"What happened to your hand?" asked Lucy when Felix showed up at the Holy Redeemer kitchen that evening.

Felix lifted the hand, which was swathed in bandages, and presented a rueful smile. "I caught it in a crusher at the recycle plant up in Morrisania. Took half my pinkie off. My second day. I could get workmen's comp, but meanwhile I'm on the bricks again. Some shit, huh?"

"That's terrible, Larry! What are you going to do?"

"Well, the violin playing is out." He uttered a brave little laugh; she smiled at him.

"You seem to be taking it well," she said.

"Hey, what else can I do? If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all. At least, as long as there's people like you in the world, I won't go hungry."

He gave her a glittering smile. She turned away and dumped some carrots she had cut up into a huge pot.

"Thank you. How's your little girl?"

"Oh, Sharon's great. Hey, that's some good news. I got custody of her. You know, I got this job, so my parole officer fixed it for me. She's at my place now."

"By herself?"

"No, no, there's a nice old lady down the hall, glad to watch her." He paused and offered another smile. "So… want to meet her? I told her all about you."

"Sure, I'd love to. Bring her around for supper. We have chocolate cake tonight."

"No, what I thought was, she's kind of shy and maybe the first time, you could come by our place. We could get takeout, you know, like a family evening."

His eagerness was palpable. "Well, it'd have to be next week," she said. His face fell, and for an instant she saw something boiling behind his eyes.

"Oh, that's too bad," he said. "Sharon'll be real disappointed."

Lucy said, "I wish I could, but I've got something of a family crisis myself." Someone called to her from the depths of the kitchen, and smiling an excuse, she went off.

Felix had to hand it to himself. Introspection was as foreign to him as Hungarian, but he realized in a vague way that he had a short fuse and that this had meant trouble for him in the past, and so he was proud of not having picked up a knife or something heavy and killing the little bitch right there in the kitchen. Losing a piece of his body had concentrated his mind more than it was used to, besides which he was clean and sober for the first time in a while, the Arabs having found and lifted his pills. But he had to get the girl alone, he had to get her to talk about this fucking gook the Arabs were so interested in. They were going to clip another joint off if he didn't tell them about the other bomb, so he did, but it was already planted, they couldn't move it, so it would eventually go off. Rashid had asked a lot of questions about the target and Felix had answered truthfully. In the end, Rashid had shrugged and acquiesced. And why not? What the fuck did they care where the bombs went off. Then Felix had made what seemed now to be an error. He had to disarm them, make them see he was still on the team, so he'd spun a story about the girl, the girl was ready to pop, she loved him, she'd do anything for him, he was that close to getting the story on the gook. It had worked, too. Rashid's eyes lit up.

That was the insurance. They could get another mule maybe to do the bombs, some skinhead, some wacko, but this they couldn't replace, the relationship. So he had to deliver, and soon. That would get him in good again, buy him a little time to figure out how to kill the three of them.

"How did it go?" asked Karp.

From the doorway of Karp's office, Collins said, "About as well as could be expected. Obviously they moved to dismiss after our case in chief, and Higbee blew them off. Then I chewed Burns up pretty good, the lying scumbag."

"Good. Good for you."

"And we started on Selwyn the ballistics fraudster."

"And?"

"Okay, I guess. But you know how it goes with this technical shit. One expert says one thing, the other expert says another. Who knows what a jury will do with it? I didn't stipulate to his expertise and I got the bit about him being fired from Jersey onto the record. Higbee sustained me. That's all we did, cross and redirect. Klopper was rare. I guess he figures if it's confusing once it'll be more confusing six times, and that'll add up to reasonable doubt. Judge let most of the repetition stand. So who knows?" He hesitated, then asked, "Did you come up with that thing?"

"Not yet," Karp admitted. "It's probably an idle fantasy, old neurons firing at random. And it's a little late for it now anyway. I'm sorry."

Collins shrugged, made a what-can-you-do gesture, waved a good-bye, and walked off. As he left the courthouse he loosened his collar and headed toward the subway for the ride uptown. Crossing White Street, he heard his name called. He turned and saw it was Hank Klopper.

Klopper pointed a blunt finger and said, grinning, "You momser, you did good in there. I was sweating."

"That's nice of you to say so, Mr. Klopper," said Collins, continuing to walk. Klopper fell into step beside him.

"It's Hank," said Klopper. "Not that it's gonna do you much good, given how things are in the city nowadays. Cop shoots Muslim? Half the people in the city would be lining up to buy the bullets, give 'em the chance."

"And half wouldn't."

Klopper laughed. "Point taken, but that still doesn't help you, because you need a hundred percent to convict. Sad but true. I could walk Jack the fucking Ripper right now if he was sporting a badge."

"We'll see," said Collins, moving away from the corner. "Nice talking to you, Hank."

"Can I give you a lift? West End Avenue, right?"

"How do you know where I live?"

"Hey, if you don't know where I live, you didn't do your job. Didn't Karp teach you to do a full bio on the comp?"

Collins stopped walking. He had not done such research, and was a little guilty about it, and was conscious that he was being flattered. He realized that for the first time he had reached the professional level where top-end defense lawyers thought it worth their while to treat him collegially. And avoiding a long subway ride at 110 degrees F. had its attractions. If Klopper wanted an opportunity to feel him out privately, two could play at that. He nodded agreement and they both turned east on White.

"So, you gonna be a lifer with the DA or are you planning to emerge into the broad uplands someday?"

"I like the work I'm doing."

"Sure, what's not to like? Except the salary. You got kids?"

"Clearly you know the answer to that," said Collins.

"Yeah, just making conversation. We're down here."

They entered a subterranean parking garage on White near Franklin. The temperature dropped ten degrees.

"This must cost you," said Collins.

"More than my rent on my first apartment. But leave my car out in the sun and the lunatics all day? Forget it! Also it's new. My second childhood, my wife says, a Porsche Carrera convertible, yellow. I had it three months."

They descended a flight of dark, gray stairs to a parking deck.

"Anyway, I understand idealistic," Klopper went on, "shit, it's hard to believe, but I was idealistic, too, way back when. I worked poverty law for a couple of years in Nassau County, then did a hitch with the DA out there. Meanwhile, it's gonna cost you probably a quarter million to educate each of your… holy fucking shit!"

This last phrase was shouted. Collins saw the Porsche in its stall, gleaming like a lone lemon at the bottom of a crate, and he saw bearing down onto it an immense Ford Expedition that was cutting to back out of the stall opposite, a little faster than was wise. It was clear even from a distance of twenty yards that the driver of the SUV was using only the rearview mirror and couldn't see the low sports car, and that the huge rear bumper of the Ford was not going to clear the Porsche's yellow snout. Klopper shrieked in anguish and ran forward a few steps. Collins hunched his shoulders and screwed up his face in helpless anticipation. He heard an expensive crunch, the tinkle of falling glass. Or perhaps he just imagined it, because the next thing he remembered was waking up on a bed in St. Vincent's Hospital.

Karp actually heard the explosion as he walked north on Centre Street, but did not register it as anything that should have claimed his attention. A lifetime in New York had inured him to loud noises, and even the current age of terror had not changed that. It was a dull thump, felt more through the feet than heard. He was thinking about his wife, about the passion and terror of the previous night, and about whether she would stay or not. He did not like feeling helpless, but this seemed to be a consequence of marriage to Marlene Ciampi. He was used to it, as he was to loud noises.

Marlene watches Peter Balducci laid to rest in St. John's Cemetery, Queens, less than a mile from where he was killed and where he had lived nearly all his adult life. That was the good thing about getting killed in Queens, she thinks, a short commute. She suppresses the thought, as she does with the other irreverent thoughts she has at funerals. Isn't there a tribe that has clowns at funerals? That would be something she would have liked to do, had she been such a tribeswoman. A Catholic funeral, of course, very old-fashioned like Pete was, no cremation for Pete, but a proper burial next to the wife, and the Knights of Columbus turned out, elderly guys with strong peasant faces, dressed in sable cloaks and white-plumed bicorne hats. A rotten day for a funeral, she thinks, hot, sunny, no shade, everyone in black and sweating bullets, not a breeze moving the yew trees. It should rain on funerals, the black umbrellas out like shiny toadstools.

The daughters are there, crying, supported by their husbands. She didn't know them. Pete was a professional friend, would call for a drink every so often; he took a quasi-paternal interest in her. They would meet in a bar downtown somewhere, Pete, Raney, and Marlene, and catch up. An amusing guy, Pete, a good storyteller, a gambler in retirement, Atlantic City, Foxwoods, the track, also the stock market. He was always pushing penny stocks at her and Raney.

One thing they didn't ever talk about was the connection between them, which was that Raney had saved her life the time that a devil cult had kidnapped her, and she had saved Balducci's by shooting the first man she had ever killed, one shot through the head, from a bad angle in poor light. Only the first of many. No, Marlene, keep away from that line. Let's listen to the words of the priest. Let's think about eternal life, that life has a purpose, that God exists, and loves us. Marlene still believes God exists, although she is no longer sure that the Church as now constituted is His official spokesperson. She acknowledges the flames of hell, and hopes that there is a purgatory. She figures she will spend about 187,000 years there, unless her daughter's prayers get her out. She was not kidding when she told her husband about thinking suicidal thoughts. Now she balances in her mind different degrees of catastrophe. Do they still plant suicides in unhallowed ground? She would like a nice funeral like this one. She imagines Karp and the kids at the graveside, then imagines another graveside, with her standing there in black and Karp or one of the kids, or maybe all three or them, in boxes, and it's her fault. Which picture is your favorite?

Switch that off, we don't need that right now. Standing on one side is Raney, stiff-faced, not a weeper. On his other flank is Nora, Mrs. Raney, a pale Irish beauty, actually from the Republic, an immigrant nurse, and on her other flank in her stroller is plump little Meghan, aged two. Marlene steals a look at Nora. She's the weeper, dabbing at her eyes, her cute little Irish nose getting red at the edges. Marlene has only just met Nora, has never been invited out to the bridal bower in Woodmere. It's still hard for her to think of wild Jim Raney all settled down and domestic. No more flirting with Marlene at any rate, which they'd done a good deal of, and some occasional light necking, back when. Maybe that's why she hasn't been out to Woodmere. Her dirty secret, pathetic nonaffairs with a string of guys, mainly boyish Irishmen, irresponsible, hard drinkers, antithetical to her hubby. Not much energy left for that nowadays, maybe she should do it, that might be a way out, to convince herself she was In Love with an irresponsible lunk who'd beat her as she so richly deserved, unlike Karp, who just took it and took it. Hideous, really to be loved like that when one was such a destructive piece of shit.

The funeral moves into its final act: the family and friends are tossing bits of soil into the grave, crouching on the obscenely green artificial grass rugs that cover the raw earth, wielding a chromed trowel. Marlene doesn't toss. Instead she stands by the baby and watches Jim and Nora do so. The baby is sleeping, a pink doll. Could Raney even imagine placing this one in danger for the sake of some imagined general good? No.

There is a wake at the house in Rego Park afterward, a lot of retired cops getting drunk. Marlene has a glass of wine and makes her excuses. She gets out on Woodhaven Boulevard going north and here comes a life decision, rarely so clear-cut as now, with the freeway ramps and signs looming just ahead. East on the Long Island Expressway, back to the dog farm, or west on the same thoroughfare, taking it to the 278 turnoff and down to the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, and… what? A little more torment? A slide back into the life they had before, some time in the city, and then having the boys at the farm for the summer, with Karp coming out for weekends? She rolls under the railway bridge and she's in the wrong lane for the eastbound. She's about to change lanes, when a truck appears on her right, she slows, horns honk, she sighs, and lets the traffic ease her into the ramp that leads back to the city. She wishes all her decisions might be like that, from now on, settled by mere fate, like a scrap of litter driven by the hot breeze of the roadway. She tells herself it's just a day or so, a week. It can't hurt. Besides, she's dying to stroll down Mulberry Street again and shop Italian.

Lucy's appointment was uptown and on the other side of the isle of Manhattan, and it was hot and it was the rush hour and she was oddly exhausted, so she took a cab rather than the subway and a crosstown bus. She glanced at the driver's ID, waited for a stop at a light, and then said, "How are you today, Mr. Saadi?" in perfect Palestinian Arabic. It was one of the small pleasures of taking a cab, but one she did not allow herself too often. The driver's head whipped around. They almost always did this, even when rolling, which was why she had waited for a stop. She had more than once narrowly avoided accidents; New York's cabdrivers are not used to being addressed in their native tongues by American girls. Then the usual: She was not a Palestinian? Surely she was, or could not speak the language so well. Sometimes Lucy omitted the linguistic-freak explanation and let the cabbies imagine a life for her, a family. She got invitations to dinner this way, in Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, Gujarati, and Spanish, and quite often proposals of marriage, on behalf of a son, a cousin, the cabbie himself.

She had to break Mr. Saadi's heart, but tipped him lavishly to make up for it and left the cab. She was at Fifty-Seventh and First Avenue, where the archdiocese of New York has its seat. She was not going to the archdiocese proper, the huge and imposing structure at 1011 First Avenue, but a few buildings north of it, an undistinguished office brick faced with the kind of shiny white material used in tunnels and public lavatories. She ascended to the tenth floor and walked through a glass door that was inscribed in gold lettering. The Lucia Foundation.

Lucy breezed by the receptionist with a smile and a wave. Although officially a limb of the cardinal archbishop's domain, the Lucia was very much a family affair. Her mother had founded it upon ill-gotten stock market gains and named it after her great-grandmother, a woman of strong feelings, courage, and deranged mind. Pazza Lucia, as she was known by Ciampi family historians, was a scion of the di Messina, a noble house of Palermo. She'd run off with a gardener laddie around 1890, the dad had sent men to clip the gardener laddie and bring the daughter home, and Pazza Lucia had, according to the Ciampi family historians, stood in a doorway with her lover's blood all over her nightgown and blown the assassins to hell with a shotgun. Then an exciting escape to New York, with the cops and assorted Sicilian cutthroats at her heels, and a marriage to Paolo Ciampi, also of Palermo, but from a lot lower down in the social order. From this liaison the Ciampi clan, numbering now in the hundreds, had sprung. Here and there in this line- which produced mainly respectable artisans and their wives, and latterly a sprinkling in the more stable professions- appeared a flash of zany fire, when the old ladies in black would mutter marrone! and tell the old story again. Thus the ladies in black explained Marlene's exploits.

There was a portrait of Lucia di Messina hanging just outside the director's office. It was not a good portrait, being cooked up from a faded sepia photo, but it looked enough like Lucy's mother, especially around the eyes, to give Lucy a little chill.

She knocked, heard a hail, and walked through the door. The executive director of the Lucia Foundation was Father Michael J. Dugan, a Jesuit in bad odor with the Society of Jesus, which was nearly enough by itself to recommend him to Marlene when she decided to give umpteen millions to the Church. Putting Dugan in charge had been a condition of the gift, and so he was elevated from second seat in a collapsing parish to his current post, where he was tasked with dispensing money at levels sufficient to immensely improve his standing with the hierarchy. He was also the closest thing Lucy Karp had to a spiritual advisor.

Dugan came around from behind his desk- a board on filing cabinets- and embraced her, kissing her loudly on the cheek.

"Are you still allowed to do that?" she asked.

Dugan laughed. He was a stocky man of around sixty, with a thick head of black hair and a knobby, pleasant face. His eyes were blue, intelligent, and marked with pain, although she noticed when she pulled back to look at him that there was less of that than heretofore.

"I don't know," he said, "but why should you be the only Catholic in the country to remain unfondled by a priest?"

She sat in a canvas director's chair. All the furniture in the place was cheap, classic, and functional. He took a couple of canned drinks from a small refrigerator and gave an Orangina to her.

"You're looking sprightlier," she said. "Not so borne down. Surprising, given what's going on. I heard some of you guys are afraid to wear clericals on the streets."

"So I hear. It's funny, I was a flannel shirt guy for years, but since these sex stories started to break, I'm practically always in a collar. A natural contrarian: you say tomato, I say to mah to. That or showing the flag as the ship goes down."

"Is it?"

"I wish I knew. It's certainly the biggest thing to hit the Church in my lifetime, maybe not even excepting Vatican Two. It's 1517 again and the same kind of idiots are still in charge, and they may make the same kind of mistake. Their problem is that in this country there's no Church at all without the women, and the women are more steamed about this than they were about the Pill. If they bolt…" He waggled a hand. "But you didn't come here to talk about the future of the one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic."

"No, I came by unannounced to see how you're spending the foundation's money. I am a trustee, you know."

"You want to see the books?"

"No, I trust you. Isn't that why they call them trustees?"

The priest laughed. He had a nice one, and Lucy recalled that when he was working in the hardscrabble parish, he hadn't laughed all that much. He really does like being in charge of something big, she thought. Yet again she wondered what had gotten him into so much trouble. Definitely not diddling altar boys. He said, "I saw a nice white stretch limo in the latest issue of Corrupt Charities Today. I might just pick one up."

"As long as you take the poor for a ride, Father."

A somewhat less enthusiastic laugh here. "Merciless! How's your mom. Speaking of contrarians."

Lucy hesitated, sucked it in, and resigned herself. "Speaking of merciless contrarians. She's back home. For a funeral, she says. Strictly temporary. She thinks she's toxic, cursed of God, a danger to her family."

"And what do you think?"

"She's suffering. Which is good, actually. If she was just breezing along with what she's got on her conscience, I could hardly bear to look at her. On the other hand, she won't change. She won't really repent, won't really just accept she's a lawyer of a certain age with two boys to raise, and get a job and act normal, and, I don't know, have a life. Everything has to be an opera with her. Guns, knives, danger, corpses strewn around the stage. She'd rather be in dramatic self-exile than say, 'Hey, I had a past like everyone else, and screwed up big time, and I learned my lesson.' I pray for her, but…"

"Yes, but," said the priest. "The great 'but' of God." They both thought about this in silence for a moment, making one of the infinity of little surrenders that religious people make in the course of daily life, and then Dugan asked brightly, "And you? How have you been keeping? You're looking pretty good, which suggests you're still in love."

"She blushes to admit it," said Lucy.

"How's the boyfriend?"

"The boyfriend is in Boston, far enough away so that I don't get into trouble. We exchange steamy e-mails. Thus my miserable body remains intact while my heart is all loaded up with foul lusts. I wonder if it's worth it, sometimes. Every time I see him I say to myself, Oh, hell, why not? Let's just dive into bed and cohabit along with the rest of the adult and preadult population of the country."

"Why don't you?"

"Oh, thank you! Is that official advice from the magisterium now? You're supposed to say, 'Sex is a sacrament of marriage, my child.' "

"Sex is a sacrament of marriage, my child." In a pontifical tone.

She laughed. "Yeah, right. The way it's supposed to work is first you get sexually mature, then you fall in love, then you get married and have kids. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Only now it's sixteen, seventeen, and thirty-two, and no one is going to stay chaste that long except saints or the not interested, and I'm neither."

"So you came all the way up here to bitch and moan about your steaming loins? Re-read Augustine." He mimed, shouting out to a crowded shop: "Next!"

"Actually, I consider it an act of charity. Priests used to spend half their time listening to the sexual agonies of the young, and since the young no longer have sexual agonies to relate, you all must have a big titillation deficit. I think it's an issue for the Curia."

Dugan raised his eyes to heaven. "See! This is what it's come to. Mocked in my own office by a snip of a girl. How long, oh Lord?"

They both chuckled, the chuckles died down, Dugan's face grew sober, and they made eye contact at a deeper level than they had before. A subtle change occurred in the atmosphere of the room, as if the two of them had suddenly entered a sacred space.

"And…?" he said quietly.

"I think I've met a demon," she said.

"Uh-huh. Who's the afflicted?"

"A guy down at Holy Redeemer. He calls himself Larry Larsen, but I doubt that's his real name. He just breathes lies. And he seems to want to get close to me, I mean personally. He's always asking me questions about my life, about my folks, friends… the other day he was pumping me about Tran."

"That's interesting."

"Why?"

"Because there are probably people who'd like to know where Tran is, and it's probably common knowledge in some circles that you were as close to him as anyone."

"He's not a cop," she declared. "I guess he could be a bounty hunter, but he doesn't even seem organized enough for that. Asking about Tran is just making conversation. He's curious about the family, too. I figure him for a low-level grifter who got possessed pretty early. There's not much left of him now. The problem is he has a little girl. I'm concerned."

"You could contact the authorities."

"Yeah, and what do I tell them? Beelzebub is squatting in one of their parolees? The guy is perfectly presentable- good looking, sexy, well-spoken. But he has absolutely no idea of how he appears to a person with any spiritual discernment. Of course, that probably hasn't been a problem in his life, given the modern world. The nuns go out of their way to avoid him without being able to come right out and say what it is. They're not supposed to think stuff like that. They've been taught to use psychological language like everyone else."

"How sure are you?"

"Oh, it's the real deal all right. The thing is pretty brazen. It's almost like we're having a conversation while the poor schmuck is running his little scam on me, all oblivious. What do you think I should do?"

The priest sat back in his canvas chair, making it creak. He tented his hands in front of his face and considered his reply. This was not the first time that the fifteenth century had intruded into his life through the medium of the Karp women. The mother definitely belonged in a viperous ducal court in the Italy of that era and the daughter should have been having visions in a convent and making miracles for the peasantry. He knew that Lucy had been having visitations from Saint Teresa of Avila since age seven, so it was only a matter of time before other sorts of spirits came calling. Few men are as inoculated against superstition as old-style Jesuits (more so, oddly enough, than actual materialists), but Dugan did not dare to dismiss Lucy's report.

"I take it your guy would not take kindly to an attempt at exorcism?"

Lucy snorted. "No, he thinks the demon is him now. It's way too late for that."

"Is he apt to be violent?"

"Not that I've actually witnessed. But when you cross him, or don't do what he wants, you can practically see the flames shoot from his eyes. I'd say he'd be violent if he thought he could get away with it."

"Then you ought to bail out. Don't mess with him."

She grinned and said, "Oh, you don't think I'm up to handling one little demon?"

The priest didn't smile now. "No. I think you very well might be able to 'handle' him. And how proud you'll be of it."

"Uh-oh."

"Right. You're already so stuffed with pride that you think the rules don't apply to you, and the ones you do keep you keep with such heroic virtue that it's nearly as toxic as sin. Do you honestly think that a self-respecting demon wouldn't prefer you to some loser? Don't you understand that professional exorcists go through elaborate training to prevent just that from happening?"

Lucy dropped her eyes and bobbed her head impatiently. "Okay, right, you made your point. What about the child?" She tried to keep her voice even, but it quivered a little.

He pushed a pad across the desk. "Write her name down and anything you know about her. I'll check her out through my cookie-baker contacts. Meanwhile, keep out of this guy's way."

"He's not going to be like that. I think he's fixated on me. And I'm damned if I'm going to let him chase me away from Holy Redeemer's."

"Yes, you would say that," sighed Father Dugan. "I suppose I'll just have to rally whatever pathetic forces God has left and see what can be done."