Want To Play? (Monkeewrench)

2

It wasn’t the first homicide in KingsfordCounty since Sheriff Michael Halloran had pinned on his star five years ago. Scatter a few thousand people over the northern Wisconsin countryside, arm a good half of them with hunting rifles and skinning knives, throw a hundred bars into the mix, and eventually some of them are going to end up killing each other. That’s just the way it was.

It didn’t happen very often, and for the most part they were the kind of killings people up here could get their heads around: bar fights, domestics, and the occasional suspicious hunting accident, like when Harry Patrowski said he shot his mother through the kitchen window because he thought she was a deer.

But an old couple gunned down in a church? Now that was something else, something senseless and evil that wasn’t supposed to happen in a little town where kids played outside after dark, nobody locked their doors, and corn wagons still lumbered down Main Street on their way to the feed mill. Hell, half the people in the county thought smoking a joint meant lighting your elbow on fire, and you still had to drive ninety miles south and east to Green Bay just to see an ‘R’ movie.

This murder was going to change everything.

Four of the five squad cars on third watch were already in St Luke’s parking lot by the time Halloran arrived at six A.M.

Great, he thought. I’ve got one car left on the road patrolling over eight hundred square miles of county. He saw Doc Hanson’s ugly blue station wagon sandwiched between two of the squads, and off in a corner, an ancient Ford Falcon in an ominous rectangle of yellow crime-scene tape.

Deputy Bonar Carlson walked out of the church and waited on the top step, tugging at a belt that had no hope of ever again making it up to his belly button.

‘Bonar, that holster hangs much lower you’re going to have to kneel if you ever need to get at your weapon.’

‘And I’d still beat you at the draw,’ Bonar grinned, which was true. ‘Man, you’re ugly this early. Good thing you don’t work the third. You’d scare the other boys.’

‘Just tell me you’ve solved this already so I can go back home to bed.’

‘Way I figure, Father Newberry did it. Forty years of listening to confessions and sniffing incense and then one day, poor bastard just snaps and shoots two of his parishioners in the back of the head.’

‘I’m going to tell him you said that.’

Bonar stuffed his fat hands into his jacket pockets and snorted a frosty exhale, serious now. ‘He didn’t hear anything, didn’t see anything. Fell asleep in front of the TV after dinner, didn’t even know Kleinfeldts were here until he looked out the window at five A.M. and saw their car. Went over to see if he could help, found the bodies, dialed 911, end of story.’

‘Neighbors?’

‘We’re working on it.’

‘So what’s your take on it?’

It wasn’t an idle question. Bonar might look and talk and act like another good old Wisconsin boy, but there were some scary processing chips in that head of his. He could take one look at a crime scene and tell you things the state forensics boys would never find with all their fancy equipment.

He and Bonar had both done a year-long stint in Milwaukee right out of the academy before hustling back home and jumping into county uniforms. They’d seen a lot in that city they were still trying to forget, but they’d learned a lot, too.

Bonar sucked at the inside of his cheek for a minute, thick eyebrows working like a pair of caterpillars. ‘Actually, it looks like a hit, which makes about as much sense as the padre doing it. I don’t know. My gut tells me psycho, but it seems too clean for that.’ He pushed open the heavy wooden doors.

A lifetime of conditioning made Halloran’s hand twitch as he passed the font of holy water, but it was only a twitch, the last contraction of a dying thing.

Father Newberry was sitting in a back pew, motionless, tiny, old. Halloran touched his shoulder as he walked up the aisle, felt the answering brush of dry fingertips on his.

Two deputies were stringing yellow crime-scene tape from pew to pew in a terrible parody of the white satin ribbon draped for a wedding. Two others were on their hands and knees with flashlights, searching the floor.

Doc Hanson was crouched sideways in the narrow space between the Kleinfeldts and the pew in front of them, eyes and hands busy with the dead, oblivious to the living. Nobody talked. The church was absolutely silent.

Halloran circled the scene slowly, letting it imprint on his mind. There was something wrong with it; something a little off-kilter about the bodies, dancing at the edge of his consciousness, just out of reach.

‘Just from the rigor, four hours, give or take,’ Doc Hanson said without being asked, without looking up. ‘I’ll check the temps when I’m ready to move them. Harris, give me one of your bags. I got a hair here.’

Long gone, Halloran thought, moving out of the way, back down the aisle toward Father Newberry. Whoever did this could be in New York by now, or California, or next door.

‘So everybody hated them.’

‘I didn’t say that, Mikey.’

‘Father, meaning no offense, but could you not call me Mikey when I’m on the job?’

‘Sorry. It slipped out.’ Father Newberry smiled at the one man on this earth he could truly and freely admit he loved like a son in a very human way. Michael Vincent Halloran was broad and tall and very imposing indeed with a gun on his hip and a badge on his chest, but the priest still saw Mikey the altar boy, dark and intense in this land of bland and blond, tailing him through those years before puberty when the priesthood had still been a magnet.

‘Okay, then who were their friends?’

The priest sighed. ‘They had no friends.’

‘You’re not helping, Father.’

‘No, I suppose I’m not.’ Father Newberry frowned at the yellow crime-scene tape around the pews ahead, framing the centerpiece of John and Mary Kleinfeldt. Doc Hanson was rummaging in his bag now, bumping John Kleinfeldt’s body, grabbing it by the shoulder when it started to tip over. Father Newberry closed his eyes.

Halloran tried again. ‘You said they tried to get several parishioners removed from the congregation because they believed they were homosexual. I’ll need a list of those people.’

‘But none of them took it seriously. I can’t think of one who was really upset, the accusations were so preposterous.’

‘So none of them are really gay?’

Father Newberry hesitated again. ‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘I’ll need the list anyway, Father. You have a file on the Kleinfeldts? Next of kin, that sort of thing?’

‘In the church office, but they had no family.’

‘No kids?’

Father Newberry looked down at his hands, at the shiny spots on the knees of his pants that marked him as a professional supplicant, thinking that this was the gray area; that dreaded place where the obligations to the secular and spiritual worlds clashed in a terrible way. He sorted through his memory for what he could say, setting aside what he could not. ‘I believe they had a child, but they refused to speak of him. Or her. I don’t even know if the child was son or daughter.’

‘Still alive?’

‘I don’t know that either. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. Anything else you can tell me about them?’

The priest frowned, mentally ticking off the pathetically few scraps of information he possessed about the Kleinfeldts. ‘They were retired, of course, at their age. Both in their seventies, as I recall. Very devout, in their own way more than God’s, I’m sorry to say. And very solitary. I don’t think they trusted a living soul, including me, and I always thought that was very sad. I suppose that isn’t an uncommon trait among the wealthy.’

Halloran looked doubtfully at the shabbily dressed corpses. ‘Land poor?’

Father Newberry shook his head. ‘They tithed a precise ten percent. December thirty-first every year they’d send a check and a financial statement from their accountant to prove it was exactly ten percent, as if I would question it.’

Halloran grunted. ‘Weird.’

‘They were . . . unusual people.’

‘So what were they worth?’

The priest looked up, found his memory on the ceiling. ‘Over seven million, I believe, but that was last year. It would be considerably more now.’

Behind them the church door opened and closed and a wave of cold moved up the aisle, Bonar in its wake. He stopped next to Halloran. ‘We got nothing from the neighbors. State forensics is just pulling in.’ His eyes narrowed on Halloran’s face. ‘What? You got something?’

‘Motive, maybe. Father tells me they were worth millions.’

Bonar glanced up the aisle at the bodies. ‘No way.’

‘It isn’t exactly a motive, Mike,’ the priest interjected. ‘Unless you consider me a suspect. They left everything to the church.’

Bonar elbowed Halloran. ‘I told you the padre did it.’

Father Newberry almost smiled; stopped it just in time. ‘Lutherans,’ he muttered instead.

Up in the front of the church Doc Hanson stood abruptly. ‘Oh shit.’ He shot a quick, guilty glance back at Father Newberry. ‘Sorry, Father. Mike, you want to come and take a look at this?’

Beneath the black coat that Doc Hanson had started to unbutton, Mary Kleinfeldt’s once-white blouse was saturated with the red-brown of coagulating blood. The smell of it filled the pew.

‘She was shot in the chest, too?’ Halloran asked.

Doc Hanson shook his head. ‘Not unless they brought along a cannon. Head hole looks like a .22, and this is way too much blood for anything that small.’ He unbuttoned the soggy blouse and opened it. The two deputies watching both took a quick step backward.

‘Jesus,’ one of them whispered. ‘Looks like someone started a do-it-yourself autopsy.’

Mary Kleinfeldt’s slip and bra had been sliced in half and peeled to each side, exposing blue-veined skin that had never seen the sun. A vertical gash ran down the center of her chest, exposing the sternum. Another gash ran horizontally, so deep that the lower half of her breasts hung inside out.

Halloran stared at the old woman’s chest and felt a new kind of fear he couldn’t put a name to yet. ‘That’s not an autopsy incision,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a cross.’