Silent Mercy

TWENTY-FOUR

GUIDO Lentini cracked the door open. “Everything okay with you, Alexandra?”

“We’re good. What’s with Scully?” It was almost seven thirty.

“Everybody in the room is getting antsy. All I know is that the first dep called to say the mayor has info for Scully, for a change. He asked me to keep all you cats herded in the big office. You ready to join us?”

“Couple more calls, Guido,” Mike said. He had already convinced the pair of 9th Precinct cops to let Luther Audley go and void his arrest for third-degree assault.

“I want you to be in there when Scully shows, okay?”

The office of the DCPI was one of the most high-tech communications hubs in the department. Lentini’s phone bank could auto-dial any bigwig in the city, and the flat screens that hung on three of the walls could call up everything from local breaking news to on-the-ground action in Afghanistan or Israel, Abu Dhabi or Singapore.

“Give me a heads-up when he’s crossing the street, will you?” Mike asked, one hand on the television remote.

I stood up and walked into the restroom to splash water on my face. When I came out, Mike pressed the power button and five of the large screens lit up with Alex Trebek’s face.

“Get ready, Nan. I expect you to ante up,” Mike said.

“What makes this okay, Mike?” she asked. “That the body isn’t actually in the room with us? Or do you just like being the poster boy for bad taste?”

“You know a body wouldn’t stop him,” Mercer said. “Never has done.”

“That’s right,” Trebek said. “Tonight’s Final Jeopardy! category is CRIMINAL SONGBIRD. First time we’ve had this one. CRIMINAL SONGBIRD.”

All three studio contestants laughed and shook their heads.

“Fifty bucks, ladies and gent. We’re bound to know this,” Mike said. “All crime, all the time.”

“Twenty-five,” Nan said. “I’ve got those little mouths to feed at home.”

Trebek stepped back to reveal the answer. “ ‘ Singer convicted of pinching buttocks of a woman in the Central Park Zoo.’ ”

“I’m going inside. I have no idea.”

“Don’t throw in the towel, blondie. You know every Chester Molester in history.”

“Who is Frank Sinatra?”

“Are you crazy? If you were a player on the show, ninety-nine percent of the viewing public would be throwing rocks at the telly. Ol’ Blue Eyes never had to pinch.”

I was only a bit ahead of the accountant, who guessed Keith Richards. Nan and Mercer — like the other two contestants — threw up their hands without an answer.

“I’m in a cultural wasteland with you mooks. Who was Enrico Caruso?” Mike cheered for himself when Trebek confirmed the question. “In 1906. The great tenor was arrested by the NYPD for ass-grabbing a society dame in the monkey house.”

“You learned that at the Academy?” Mercer asked. “I must have been dozing.”

“Nah. My dad loved Caruso. But Aunt Eunice wouldn’t let him listen to the records ’cause of what he did. She thought he was a perv. Convicted too. He testified at his trial that the monkey did it. How’s that for a new low?”

Mike was gathering up his papers to shift to the conference room adjoining Scully’s office.

“Fits with your orangutan theory,” Mercer said. “Let’s move out, okay?”

Nan and I left first. We had long ago ceased to be surprised by the black humor of homicide work. These were detectives who faced down the darkest corners of the human condition every day and found relief — like small air pockets for someone gasping for breath — in the most unlikely manner.

The group waiting for Scully had grown considerably in number. Lieutenant Peterson led the Manhattan North contingent, chatting with his South counterpart while the men — and one woman homicide cop — stood in clusters around the long table. Somehow, Manny Chirico was still wide-eyed and alert. I recognized guys from Anti-Crime and the Harbor Unit, Highway Patrol and Housing. The only people not invited seemed to be the Counter-Terrorism teams.

Lentini stepped out to make a call, clutching his ever-present clipboard. He was back in a minute. “Take your seats, men. The commissioner’s in the elevator.”

You could almost smell the testosterone in the room as the city’s best murder investigators staked out places and readied their notepads.

Sadly for the victims, not all homicides are created equal. The choice of religious institutions as this killer’s backdrop and tortured young women as his prey ratcheted up the level of interest and outrage of this select team. Gang members, junkies, and the great unwashed dead of the metropolitan area would be shuffled to back burners until this perp was caught.

“Thanks for your patience, men.” Keith Scully entered the room with his first dep and a second man carrying a laptop, and it was as though the spine of each of us around the table automatically stiffened as we mumbled some version of “good evening” to the commissioner. His professionalism was unmistakable, as was the ramrod straightness of his Marine bearing, physically and metaphorically.

I had known Scully for six or seven years, from the time when he had been chief of detectives, on the steady climb up the ladder to the top cop post, which was a mayoral appointment. He was tall and sinewy, with close-cut hair now gone silver, and as many creases etched into his face as there were constant crises thrown onto his lap.

“How many guys you got on this, Ray?” Lieutenant Peterson was the senior man in the room, so Scully started with him.

“A dozen, Keith.” The two privileges the old-timer was allowed were still addressing the commissioner by his first name and smoking his cigarettes inside headquarters. No one else dared do either.

“Double it. By tomorrow’s day shift. Same goes for all of you.”

“Manpower’s an issue,” Peterson said. “My men each got a full plate as it is, and then you sent that new directive about limiting overtime — which, I gotta say, pissed everybody off.”

“Tell them to eat their overtime. Shove it. You’ve got tonight to organize yourselves. Get a good meal and whatever rest you can in the next twelve hours. I don’t expect you to sleep again till you bring this guy down,” Scully said. “Your world turns upside down tomorrow when we let the media know we’ve got an ID on the victim.”

Manny Chirico pushed back from the table. The rest of us were riveted on Keith Scully.

“Her name is Ursula Hewitt.” Scully pointed to his tech aide, who flashed one of the crime-scene photos of her from his Power-Point file onto the wall screen.

If you hadn’t seen the body in the churchyard firsthand, there was nothing like a life-size color blowup to jump-start this crew for a full-on manhunt. I could hear the intake of breath and a few “holy shits” from around the table.

“Female Caucasian,” Scully went on, like he was calling cadence. “Thirty-nine years old. Born in Forest Hills. Flushing Boulevard. Attended church and parochial school there.”

Most of the men in the room were Catholic. That fact was probably intended to juice them a bit more.

“Our Lady Queen of Martyrs,” Mike whispered. He often said that New York and New Orleans were the only two cities in the country in which the devout identified themselves by their parish affiliations, rather than neighborhoods.

The next slide was a photograph of the young Hewitt from her high school yearbook, offering all the freshness and promise of youth. She was slimmer then, and the contrast between her slender neck and the slashed throat of the morning’s scene was horrifying.

“Ursula’s uncle called the mayor’s office at five twenty-three this evening. He lives in San Francisco, but he’s got a high school buddy who works at City Hall. She’d been staying with friends in Manhattan but never made it home last night. It was his birthday, and she was certain to call. Then he heard about the body at St. Pat’s on the radio, but he thought he didn’t have enough reason to call the police. Just that it was one of her favorite churches, which snagged his radar. We went over to compare photographs from the scene with the one from her last visit that her uncle scanned in to his friend at City Hall.”

The next picture went up on the third screen. It was a more recent image of Ursula Hewitt, dressed in flowing clerical vestments. The floor-length alb of white linen was perfectly draped over her, with a scarlet stole on her shoulders that ran down the length of the garment, and a large cross around her neck.

“This is Ursula Hewitt,” Scully said, his lips clamped tightly together as he paused. “Three years ago, when she was ordained as a Catholic priest.”

There was dead silence in the room as we all took in the photo, till a split second later when one of the guys from Manhattan South broke in with a nervous laugh. “Hey, chief. We don’t got lady priests. We got nuns.”

Keith Scully didn’t brook interruptions.

“Ursula Hewitt was a Catholic priest. She was ordained in a neighborhood church in Back Bay, Boston. She even celebrated Mass a few times at Old St. Pat’s.”

Most of the men looked perplexed, as surprised as I was to hear that fact.

“She was excommunicated by the Vatican a year later, because of that ordination. So we’ve got another outcast on our hands, gentlemen,” Scully said. “Another pariah.”