The Lost Years

20

Busy with their own thoughts, Detectives Simon Benet and Rita Rodriguez were silent for the first fifteen minutes after they got in their car and started to drive back to New Jersey.

When they reached the West Side Highway, Rita looked pensively out at the boats on the Hudson, remembering how only a few weeks before 9/11, she had met her husband, Carlos, at five o’clock at a café on the waterfront for cocktails and dinner. Some of the tall ships had been back and she and Carlos had gloried in the warmth of the late afternoon, the beauty of the nearby ships, and the feeling that New York was special, so terribly special.

He had worked in the World Trade Center, and the ultimate tragedy had occurred. It was the same sort of late-summer day as this that we were here, she thought. And once again she asked herself who could have predicted that disaster could ever have happened.

I never imagined I would lose him, she thought. Never.

But then, a week ago at this time, who could have predicted that Professor Jonathan Lyons would be a murder victim? He was killed on Monday, she mused. I wonder what he was doing last Saturday. He had a full-time caregiver for his wife. Did he slip over to New York to visit his girlfriend, Lillian Stewart?

It would be interesting to trace Professor Lyons’s movements over last weekend. And what about the Vatican parchment, the letter to Joseph of Arimathea that may have been written by Christ? Did Jonathan Lyons really find it? Its value would be incalculable. Would someone kill for it?

Of course we’ll follow up on it, but I don’t believe it has anything to do with this homicide, Rita thought. That gun was fired by a jealous and demented wife, and her name is Kathleen Lyons.

“Rita, my guess is that our professor went to confession, or should I say the reconciliation room, with Father Aiden.” Simon Benet’s matter-of-fact voice broke into her reverie. “I know I hit home when I asked the good father that question.”

“Do you think Lyons might have been planning to give up his girlfriend?” Rita’s voice was incredulous.

“Maybe, maybe not. You’ve seen how his wife acts. Maybe he was just saying, ‘Father, I can’t deal with it anymore. Right or wrong, I have to get out.’ He wouldn’t have been the first to say that.”

“What about the parchment? Who do you think has it?”

“We’ll check on the people whose names Father Aiden gave us. The professors and the other guy who hung out with them, Greg Pearson. And I want to talk to Lillian Stewart, too. If there is a valuable parchment and she has it, who knows how honest she’ll be about it? She may have gone to Professor Lyons’s grave, but just two minutes later she was in the car with Richard Callahan.”

Simon Benet steered around a slow-moving driver. “Right now my money is still on Kathleen Lyons, and our next step is to get a search warrant. I want to go through every inch of that house. I have a hunch we’ll find something more tying Kathleen Lyons to the murder.

“But whether we find anything else or not, I’m recommending to the prosecutor that we make the arrest.”