Silent Mercy ac-13 Read online

  “Well — I—uh, I couldn’t describe features or recognize him from a photograph, Detective,” she said, becoming more flustered as he pressed her. “But it was his shape, his silhouette that was identical.”

  I nodded my understanding and now Faith looked to me. “Yes,” I said.

  “You understand what I mean, Alex? There was something distinctive about his movement. It was almost — well, almost fluid.”

  I was thinking of the man who had entered the courtroom to watch some of Bishop Deegan’s testimony. When I enlisted Pat McKinney to look at him, he had disappeared, as if by magic. And when I saw him again — as I was certain that I had — he had glided down the aisle and out the door of St. John the Divine, as gracefully as Faith described.

  “Did you see his face?” I asked, hoping that angry red blisters might have been visible under the streetlights, if he was the man I thought.

  “Barely. I think he was white-skinned. And no eyebrows. There was something weird about his look. Almost — well, phantasmagorical.”

  Mike rolled his eyes. He probably thought Faith was being a bit too dramatic.

  “Hair?” I asked, hoping for the long ponytail that I had noticed.

  “Dark. Just dark. Which is why it was so weird that I couldn’t see eyebrows.”

  “Long or short?”

  “I only saw him from the front. I don’t know.”

  “Anything else about his skin?”

  “No. I was just drawn to his eyes, because it was such a bizarre contrast with the dark hair.”

  The man in the courtroom two days ago had been wearing sunglasses. I had no idea whether he had eyebrows or not.

  “Do you know how he was dressed?”

  “A winter coat, I guess.”

  “I don’t want you to guess, Faith,” I said. “Just give us what you remember.”

  “Outerwear of some sort. A long jacket or coat.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was put words in her mouth. I knew Mike would kill me for suggesting it but I couldn’t help myself. “By any chance, was he wearing a clerical collar?”

  Mike threw his hands up in the air in mock despair of my methodology. I was grateful to have such an honest witness who was not willing to be led.

  “I’m not sure I would have noticed that, Alex. Riverside Church is my back door. Between that and the seminary, I see collars on everyone most of the day. Stay long enough and I’ll think both of you have them too.”

  “Of course,” I said, disappointed in her answer. Maybe I was trying to push pieces of the puzzle into shapes they didn’t fit. How could someone so brutal and ferocious be at the same time so graceful and fluid?

  “I was about to punch 911 into my cell phone, sort of panicked that the man was headed straight at me. I don’t know whether he was put off because he caught me fidgeting with the cell or that he saw one of my neighbors coming out of the building, but he just brushed past me and kept going, as swiftly and quietly as he had come up from behind. By the time it occurred to me that I should have snapped a photo of him, he was gone.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m crazy or anything, but he was right in front of me this time. It was so faint that I couldn’t be sure he was saying ‘Ursula’ again, because that’s what I had already heard earlier. Or maybe the noise he made was — was, um — just a hissing sound.”

  Faith knew she sounded confused, so she took a few moments to clear her throat, and her mind. “Of course, after I got inside and Mr. Hewitt called, everything began to sound like Ursula.”

  Faith Grant dropped her head and clasped her hands, as though she was praying.

  “And that’s all you heard?” I was silently repeating Ursula’s name, comparing the sound to a hiss.

  “He picked his head up right as he passed me, for just a second. The only other word he said was ‘sorry.’ ”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “WHAT would be involved in having you move in to a room here in the dormitory, in this quad?” I asked Faith.

  “That’s the last thing I’d want to do, Alex. I don’t need the front office to know about this.”

  “What if I gave you a choice of having Mike Chapman handcuffed to you for the weekend, or bunking in the dorms?” I said, reaching out to put my hand over hers.

  “I’m partial to ministers with dimples,” Mike said. “I might let you out of the cuffs, but I’d hang pretty close to you.”

  “There must be some guest rooms, Faith.”

  “Yes, we use them for visiting scholars. I really don’t want to do this.”

  “Give us the weekend,” Mike said. “There’s nothing I like better than a brave broad who wants to tough things out. But we need you to be safe till we sort through this.”

  “Do you think the man I saw last night was the killer?”

  Mike hesitated. I guessed that to be because he wasn’t even sure that Faith knew who or what she remembered correctly. She seemed flightier to him than she did to me.

  I spoke to assuage her fears. “We’re not sure what we’re dealing with yet, Faith. There have been two vicious slayings in the city — maybe more somewhere else. And both victims here, just twenty-four hours apart, were strong women, outspoken about religious issues. We’d rather know you had some kind of security system in place.”

  “Just tell them the heat in your place isn’t working right.”

  “That’s not a stretch,” she said, flashing an impish grin at Mike. “You sure I can’t choose the handcuffed option?”

  “I’m expensive to feed,” he said.

  “And to water. You’ll be replacing the red wine with Absolut or Ketel One. Not to mention how he’ll try to rewrite your sermons,” I said. “I’ll tell you what would help a lot, Faith, is to understand this place, to see how you fit and what you do. If you think you’re a target for this guy, we’d like to know who else might be in danger.”

  “I’d be casting a wide net, Alex. We’re such a liberal arm of the church — the most progressive, viewed as the most left-wing.”

  “Has that always been true of Union?”

  “For a pretty long time. Think of this country’s earliest institutions of higher education — Harvard, Yale, Princeton,” Faith said. “They were all founded as divinity schools. The only reason for a man to be educated at that time was to become a minister.”

  “So this seminary was part of a bigger school?”

  “We started as a mission school in the early 1800s. Part of Princeton University, which was the most powerful of the group for religious training. But the radical leaders grew to believe that you couldn’t do God’s work on a cloistered campus. The whole point of the ministry was to be in the cities, working with orphans and paupers, immigrants and prostitutes. Princeton was too isolated. So we split from the university, on the theory that cities are the best classrooms for knowing God, knowing Jesus.”

  “And Union Seminary was that breakaway institution?”

  “Yes, as a Protestant seminary, in the Reformed tradition. At first in Greenwich Village, moving up here in 1908, as the city spread north,” Faith said. “We needed to be where the heathens are, Alex, as they were called in those days. Still, it’s a primal impulse in our ministry to deal with social injustice in our work — to go to the margins.”

  “Exactly what some of the Roman Catholics have been silenced for doing,” Mike said.

  “Let’s say we’re more welcoming. We’ve got three hundred undergraduate students here, half of whom are women.”

  “Is that a new thing?” I asked, trying to gauge the exposure of Faith and her colleagues.

  “Not at all. It’s been that way for a couple of decades. A quarter of the group is African American, a fifth is Latino. And we’ve got a large LGBT community.”

  “I hadn’t thought of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender presence as a big part of the professional church community.”

  “Many institutions aren’t quite as e
mbracing as we are. So we train a lot of these students, even though many don’t get placed in jobs.”

  “What do they do then?”

  “Some of our best graduates are running secular organizations, nonprofits, mostly. Just another way of working on the side of the angels.”

  “And women in the Protestant Church?” I asked. “How have they been received?”

  “Pretty well, in America. They’ve even had an ordained woman bishop heading the Episcopal Church here. At one point I thought they were going to completely divide over the role of women. Then that moment passed, and all the turmoil has been about the acceptance of gays in the hierarchy. One thing you can count on is that any church that is anti-gay is also anti-feminist. Basic rule of thumb.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” I said.

  “One of my good friends is a Lutheran pastor from South Dakota. Openly gay. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — the ELCA — is the largest Protestant church in the country to let noncelibate gay ministers serve in the clergy, something that has caused wrenching dissension in many denominations. In her home church, her fellow Lutherans treated her sexuality as a demon that had to be exorcised. So we’ll take our victories as they come.”

  “And you, Faith? Would you tell us about your beliefs?” I asked.

  “I’m a Calvinist.”

  “How’d you come by that?” Mike asked.

  “Three generations of dirt-poor Kansans. Some were Lutherans, Dutch originally, from Pennsylvania. There’s a little bit of Cherokee in me that came on the Trail of Tears. The rest is a healthy mix of sharecroppers and horse thieves. The Grants were a rough bunch, but they were always religious. And how they hated the elitism of some of the Protestant sects.”

  “It’s hard for me to imagine the way religion took hold on the frontier.”

  “It was the only thing that held poor folk together, Mike. It was the idea that God loved them. You could accept the love of God and become a new person — a Christian. You weren’t just a product of your history and your culture — or should I say your lack of culture.”

  “There were great divisions in the Protestant Church, too, weren’t there?” I asked.

  “Certainly so. Around the turn of the last century, the Protestants divided,” Faith said, animated now, talking with her hands. “That split was between the head and the heart. The mainline church — the Eastern elite — that was all about the head. If you wanted to adore God, in their view, you built universities and you educated people.

  “But it was the evangelicals that ran off with their hearts,” she said, tapping her chest with her hand. “Calvin and Wesley, Edward and Whitefield. They created churches instead of schools. These were men devastated by witnessing slavery, and by walking among the impoverished and the ill. Heart and hope — people with little else to cling to could have that. And the great irony? Union broke free from Princeton because our founders were all about the heart. But we managed to keep the head too. We do both very well.”

  “So who are your enemies, Faith?” Mike asked.

  “I never thought I had any, really. This hasn’t been a hard road for me, Detective. Many people don’t understand my choices, but I’ve never been as ‘out there,’ say, as Ursula was.”

  “The other woman who was killed, Naomi Gersh,” I said, “did you ever meet her?”

  “No. Where do you think I would have?”

  “She took a class at Jewish Theological.”

  “Good neighbors, they are. But I didn’t know her.”

  “The play that Ursula directed—Double-Crossed—did you go to see that?”

  “I didn’t. It was performed over the Christmas holidays. I’d gone home to see family for ten days,” Faith said. “Chat went with some of my friends to see one of the performances and told me about it.”

  “Chat knew Ursula too?” I asked.

  “Not well, but they met a few times. Why?”

  “When you told us that Ursula had to move out of your apartment because Chat moved in, I made the wrong assumption. I didn’t figure they overlapped. My own mistake. In fact, I would have urged Chat to stay so we could have asked her about Ursula.”

  “She obviously didn’t want to be here — I think you saw that. She didn’t know Ursula nearly as well as I did. I’ll tell her you want to talk.”

  “Thanks. It’s just better if you don’t discuss it with her,” Mike said. “Better if we handle that.”

  “I understand.”

  “So Chat didn’t travel with you for the holidays?”

  “It’s hard for her to go home. It’s — well, that’s neither here nor there. Even she told me the play was over-the-top.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Very graphic. Like we talked about earlier.”

  “What people — what groups — do you think would be most outraged about someone like Ursula Hewitt?” Mike asked.

  “She got it from all sides,” Faith said, shaking her head from side to side and biting her lip again. “The actions that made her beloved to so many feminists were offensive to scores of her coreligionists.”

  “How about someone with no religious attachment at all?” Mike said. “Maybe it’s my own head, but as someone who goes to church — maybe not as often as I should — it’s impossible to imagine a believer capable of this kind of violence.”

  Faith Grant looked away from Mike. “The second largest group of people in the world, if you want to look at it that way, are the religious unaffiliated. Say they’re lapsed, or uncontained if you will, or even searching for an institutional form to hold them.”

  “Okay. I get it.”

  “I don’t view them as dangerous at all. They’re in twelve-step programs or yoga camps or ashrams. They don’t worry me in the slightest,” she said with a laugh.

  “So who does worry you?”

  Faith hesitated, as though she didn’t want to speak ill of anyone else. “The fastest-growing religious group in the world today is Pentecostal.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Many, mind you, have been accepted by Rome and by Protestant sects as part of the flock. It’s a serious movement, and encompasses a wide variety of believers. The poor and the disenfranchised really gravitate to it.”

  “I imagine so, if it’s that fast-growing.”

  “But there’s a whole sect of Pentecostal churches that are completely outside the constraints of the dominant culture,” Faith said. “They’ve overtaken the evangelicals.”

  “Aren’t both about expressing the passions of the heart?” Mike asked.

  “Well, yes. But evangelicals believe in regulating those passions. Not a lot of talking in tongues where I come from.”

  “Can you point us to any specific organizations?” Mike was hoping to get direction from Faith Grant.

  “I’d be looking at some of the extreme ministries that have sprung up.”

  “Extreme?”

  “Yes. You know that a lot of nondenominational churches — evangelicals in particular — have used popular culture to reach new followers. Rock music, skateboarding — including pop things like that has been going on for years.”

  “So what do the extreme groups do?”

  Faith paused before answering. “There are a lot of ministers who think that the church has become too feminized. I don’t mean just because of women in the clergy. They think, in this new movement, that we’ve gotten too far away from Christ, emphasizing compassion and kindness rather than strength and responsibility.”

  “So what’s their solution?” I asked.

  “Fighting. Using mixed martial arts as part of the church service.”

  “You got to be pulling my leg,” Mike said.

  “I wish I were. They believe that using violence — or sport, I guess they’d call it — explains how Christ fought for what he believed in.”

  “You know where these extreme ministries are? You’ll give us names?”

  “I can w
ork on that today. They’re pretty much springing up everywhere.”

  “Have you had any personal experience with anyone in particular that you think marks you in one of these fringe groups?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. Not that at all. But when I look for — I don’t know — someone capable of this kind of violent behavior, I’m not thinking he comes out of any church that I know.”

  Mike lowered his voice. “Then you haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Faith: every one of the deadly sins committed by the righteous and the religious, sometimes before the preacher even gets to say the last amen.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  MIKE and I walked Faith back to her apartment and waited while she packed a small suitcase with clothes, toiletries, and books to get through the weekend in the dormitory. She had arranged through the secretary of the soon-to-be-retired president to stay in one of the guest suites for the weekend. No one questioned the problems with the aged heating system that she complained of in her apartment.

  “Are you sure we aren’t putting you into the reach of someone here who could be dangerous?” I asked as we entered the lobby and passed into the center courtyard.

  “I’ll be very safe,” Faith said.

  The small quad looked like most other campuses at eleven a.m. A few students were throwing Frisbees around while others tossed a football. The music that came from classroom windows was the sound of a gospel choir at practice, and the kids who greeted Faith on the path were a mix of earnest and upbeat.

  “How about your nemesis?” I asked. “The guy you didn’t look too happy to see when the statue nearly got you. Won’t you tell me his name?”

  She looked up at me and smiled. “Would you mind if I turn the other proverbial cheek, Alex? He spends weekends in Connecticut, and the only serious backstabbing he does is with a very sharp tongue.”

  We exchanged phone numbers and e-mails so that we could stay in communication. “You’ll call us if anything happens?” I asked. “No matter how insignificant it seems to you.”

  “Of course I will. I’ll have Chat here with me too. That’s why I told them I needed a suite. As soon as she comes back today, I’ll have her join me. Might be a bit more church than she’s used to on an average weekend, but she’s fiercely loyal to me.”