Body Count Read online

  “Wait,” Pringle said, “let me get you some coffee.”

  It was a longstanding signal. Pringle wanted to talk.

  Pat couldn’t refuse. “That’s okay. You work on your breakfast. I’ll get myself some coffee.”

  When Pat returned to the table, Pringle lost no time in resuming the conversation. “It’s a funny thing,” she said, “I hadn’t thought about it until we started talking about Hal and the religion desk. But you know, if he were alive now, he probably would’ve gotten my assignment.”

  Pat looked at her quizzically over the cup rim.

  “That’s why I was late this morning: Bob gave me this assignment as soon as I hit the city room.”

  “What story?”

  “A missing priest.”

  “Somebody lost a priest?” Pat could not bring herself to take this seriously, at least not at first blush.

  “Yesterday,” Pringle explained. “Well, actually Friday, I guess.” She fished her notepad out of her purse and flipped it open. “A Father Keating—John Keating. Ever hear of him?”

  Pat shook her head.

  “He left his parish sometime Friday. Mentioned he was going into Detroit on business, and that’s it. That’s the last time anyone seems to have seen him.”

  “He didn’t get back for Sunday Masses?” Pat’s interest picked up slightly.

  “Apparently not. That’s significant?”

  “You bet.”

  “God,” Pringle sighed, “I wish Hal were here. For lots of reasons, not the least of which is that he’d be covering this story. Short of that, I wish Bob had given it to a Catholic.” Her eyes widened. “Say, you’re a Catholic, aren’t you?”

  “Used to be.” She half smiled, half grimaced. “Well, I guess I always will be … I just don’t work at it much.”

  “Well, this business of not being there for Mass on Sunday: Is that about the same as … oh, a minister not showing up for Sunday services?”

  “Worse, I’d say. Considerably worse. If it were a Protestant church, I think it would be a considerable inconvenience for the congregation if no one were there to conduct the services. But in the end, they could live with it. Probably somebody would be available to lead them in prayer, sing a hymn or two—wing it. Couldn’t do that in a Catholic church.”

  “Is that the way it is?”

  “Seems so to me.” Lennon decided she’d had enough coffee; she eased her cup away. “Did Bob tell you anything about the crowd—the congregation? Was there some other priest around to cover for—what’s his name?”

  “Keating.” Pringle looked once more at her notes. “I don’t think he mentioned.”

  “I’d find out about that if I were you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Seems to me a slightly more serious problem if there was no other priest to take the Masses. I can’t imagine a priest—especially a pastor—not providing for Sunday Mass if he could help it. If there wasn’t any other priest around, then odds are you got a very sick—or dead—absent priest.”

  “What if all the Masses were taken care of?”

  Pat shrugged. “Who knows? An unannounced vacation. Illness, maybe, but probably not as significant. What it comes down to, I think, is that those guys generally are pretty serious about an obligation like this. If a pastor was pretty sure things would be taken care of one way or another, then if it would be a serious inconvenience for him to show up, he might skip it.” She thought for a moment. “Wait a minute … did you say ‘missing’ priest?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who says?”

  “Who says what?”

  “That he’s missing.” Pat mentally computed the elapsed time. “You said it was Friday when he was last seen in his parish?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Friday to Saturday, twenty-four hours. Saturday to Sunday, forty-eight hours. It won’t be seventy-two hours until sometime today. If memory serves, the cops don’t begin looking for someone as ‘missing’ until seventy-two hours have gone by. If the cops aren’t looking for him, why should you be?”

  “But the cops are looking for him. Have been since yesterday afternoon.”

  “How come?”

  “Ever hear of Eric Dunstable?”

  Lennon whistled softly.

  “He’s the one,” Pringle explained, “who got the cops going on it.”

  “Eric Dunstable! Wait a sec: What parish are we talking about?”

  “St. Waldo of the Hills, Bloomfield Hills.”

  Pat’s chuckle was low and throaty. “St. Waldo of the Wheels. This thing is beginning to come together.”

  “The Wheels? Does somebody call it Waldo of the Wheels?”

  “I’ve heard it called that now and again. Couldn’t tell you exactly why. I suppose it’s because the people who live out there are some of the better-known wheelers and dealers in this territory—like Eric Dunstable. Or maybe because they’re auto execs who put the world on wheels—like Eric Dunstable. That makes sense … I can easily imagine Dunstable getting the Bloomfield cops to bend the rules.”

  “Not just the Bloomfield Hills police.”

  “Huh?”

  “The Detroit cops too.”

  “Detroit? Just because he said he was going to Detroit?”

  “That’s not all,” Pringle added. “Not just Detroit Missing Persons; Homicide is investigating too.”

  “Homicide! My God! That’s overkill.” Lennon giggled. “Please forgive; I didn’t intend the pun.”

  “That’s the part that’s got me worried.” And indeed, Pringle’s face was clouded.

  “What’s got you worried?” Pat asked supportively.

  “Homicide. The fact that Detroit Homicide is in on this. It scares me. I haven’t worked on a story that involved homicide since …” She did not need to elaborate.

  Pat slid her chair closer and touched Pringle’s arm. “Don’t give it a thought. There aren’t that many people with enough clout to get two major police departments involved in a missing persons search—a good twenty-four hours early at that. But if anybody could pull it off, Eric Dunstable certainly qualifies. I can just see him calling in some of his markers from Mayor Cobb. Don’t worry: Homicide’s there just for show. Just to flaunt Dunstable’s belief that he’s got pull and the balls to use it.”

  Pringle smiled. “You think so?”

  “Sure. You’re gonna have a ball with this story—oops, another involuntary pun.” She shook her headand grimaced. “I’ve got to cut this out before I start work today.

  “But you’ll see: You’ll be fine. Go find the missing priest.” She grinned. “By the time you get done, you’ll probably be able to give me a refresher course in Catholicism.”

  6

  It was late Monday afternoon and Lieutenant Alonzo Tully had not gotten his wish.

  Periodically during the day he had imagined the elusive Father Keating simply showing up at St. Waldo’s. Those occupying the parish buildings—housekeeper, secretary, janitor, religious education coordinator, teachers and the like—had been forcefully instructed to call either the Bloomfield Hills or Detroit police should anyone spot the priest.

  At no point in this so-far brief search had Tully given a damn where Keating had been or what he’d done. As long as the priest stepped forth or somebody located him, all would be well that ended.

  Those members of Tully’s squad whom he’d called in yesterday afternoon had greeted their new assignment with a variety of reactions. As for Tully’s two closest collaborators, Sergeants Angie Moore and Phil Mangiapane, they were poles apart.

  Moore greeted the task in much the same spirit as her leader. To both her and Tully, this was a necessary evil brought on by arich bastard who would settle for nothing less than what he demanded—and by the mayor, a political animal who would exchange his consent for future favors.

  Mangiapane, a very practicing Catholic, never could get enough of his religion and its mysteries. And one of those great mysteries, stemming from the sergeant�
��s youth, involved priests—priests and nuns. As a boy, young Philip had wondered: Are they human? Do nuns have legs? Hair? Do any of them ever go to the bathroom?

  Fortunately, these sorts of questions seldom concerned him any longer. Still, mysteries did abound. The power that priests had to absolve, to consecrate, to bury, to marry, all these had to be taken on faith—another mystery. Mangiapane did not at all mind taking time from Homicide—even though it was his first love—to search for a lost priest and, along the way, to learn more about these still-mysterious creatures.

  Partly to free himself to supervise the investigation as well as to follow his own instincts and leads, pardy because they were closest to him on the squad, and pardy because they differed in their attitude toward this case, Tully had appointed Moore and Mangiapane coordinators. They now had brought him the results of all efforts to date. To simplify, they had consolidated and summarized the various reports.

  “Both our guys and the Bloomfield people have been checking with all the relatives and friends we can find,” Moore reported.

  “And?” Tully prompted.

  “For one thing, there aren’t many relatives. Parents, dead. No brothers or sisters. Some distant cousins, and that’s about it. And with a couple of them, we had to explain who John Keating was, and then they remembered he was a relative. Those were mostly out-of-towners. The few living in this area at least knew they had a priest relative, but we couldn’t find any who saw him on anywhere near a regular basis. We haven’t uncovered a relative who would be a reasonable lead. Deadendsville.”

  “Zoo” —nearly everyone used the nickname from the abbreviated Alonzo—“the thing of it is that priests don’t usually end up having many relatives,” Mangiapane said. “Especially if they don’t have brothers or sisters. They don’t get married, so they got no in-laws. So it’s not strange that we come up dry.”

  “Okay, Manj.” Tully may not have known much about any of the organized religions, but he was aware that priests had no in-laws unless they had married brothers or sisters, and so they’d have fewer relatives than most. But experience taught that it did not pay to come down too hard on Mangiapane. Criticism tended to inhibit him. And that was not productive.

  “There are lots of friends, though, or at least acquaintances,” Mangiapane continued. “Funny thing, they’re mostly among the elite—the silk stocking crowd.”

  “Why would that be funny, Manj? That’s the neighborhood he operates in, isn’t it—Bloomfield Hills? Not too many panhandlers out there.”

  “Yeah,” Mangiapane responded, “but Keating wasn’t always out there.”

  “Oh?”

  “We went over his assignments with the secretary. He’s been all over the place in a little more than twenty years. Downtown, the core city—before it was ‘the core city’—all around the town, some of the suburbs. But he’s been in Bloomfield Hills for the past almost ten years.

  “The thing is, we can’t come up with anyone who could be described as a friend, especially a close friend, anywhere but in Bloomfield Hills.” ?

  “That’s right, Zoo,” Moore added. “We went over the stuff in his office and suite. A few phone and address books but hardly any listing for anyone outside of Bloomfield Hills. Oh, a few in Birmingham, you know, the same neighborhood. But hardly anyone with an address down-to-earth people might live at. Not even the Pointes,” she added, and then, with a touch of amusement, “The difference between old and new money.”

  Moore and Mangiapane glanced at each other. Mangiapane nodded, offering Moore the floor. Moore riffled through several pages of notes. “The single item about which no one seems to have any doubt is that there could be no reason for what’s happened. Some—most of his friends were surprised to see us. They didn’t know he was missing.”

  Tully seemed slightly surprised. “These people from the parish?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Their pastor misses a whole weekend of services and his parishioners don’t know he’s not there?”

  Mangiapane spoke as one in the know. “All the people who go to Mass on Sunday know is there’s a priest there to say the Mass. See, at St. Waldo’s, there’s an assistant priest and two other priests who come in just to help on weekends. There’s a rotation in most places—and that’s the way it works at St. Waldo’s too.”

  “Rotation?”

  “Yeah, Zoo. Like one week a priest will have a Saturday evening Mass, then next week he’ll take early Sunday, then the middle Sunday Mass, then the late Sunday Mass, and then back to a Saturday Mass. But not that many parishioners pay much attention to who’s takin’ what. All they want’s a priest to give the Mass. They just want to take care of their obligation to hear Mass.”

  “That’s it, Zoo,” Moore attested. “Even the ones who are aware of what’s going on wouldn’t think it was alarming if the priest they expected didn’t have their particular service. He could be ill. Or for some reason, the priests could have traded schedules.”

  “What it comes down to, Zoo,” Mangiapane said, “is that that’s why none of his friends—who are also mainly parishioners—knew anything out of the ordinary might have happened. So they were surprised when we came calling with questions. The only ones who thought something might be wrong were—whatchamajigger—the inner circle: the housekeeper, the secretary—and the assistant priest and the other weekend help of course, because they had to cover for Father Keating.”

  “So then,” Tully concluded, “they were the ones who brought Dunstable in on it.”

  “Yeah, Zoo. He’s the parish council president,” Mangiapane added. “The council president, Zoo, is the one who—“

  “I know what he does. The inspector filled me in on that yesterday,” Tully said. “So, okay, none of the friends or parishioners were on to what was going on. What was their reaction?”

  Moore looked up from her notes. “Unanimous, as far as I can see, Zoo. No one could think of any reason why Keating should be among the missing—although some thought he might be taking a vacation. But that had to be a stab in the dark: When you ask them, they immediately admit that’s never happened before. Not that he doesn’t take a regular vacation. But it’s always announced well in advance. And here there’s been no such announcement.”

  “Any grudges, hard feelings?” Tully asked.

  Mangiapane smiled. “Not once they found out he was missing.”

  “That’s understandable,” Moore said. “If a cop comes to your door, tells you somebody you know is missing, you’re not likely to volunteer that you hate the bastard and hope he’s dead. But this was different: The general reaction was surprise, surprise that he was missing and surprise that the police were looking for him. If anybody had any hard feelings, they weren’t intense enough to pop out spontaneously.”

  “How about the people he worked with?”

  “Guarded,” Moore said. “It got to be like pulling teeth. Monosyllabic answers. Little or no information volunteered. We concentrated on the housekeeper, the secretary, and the other priest—the assistant. But we didn’t get anywhere.”

  “The funny thing is,” Mangiapane noted, “nobody seems to work for him very long.”

  “Hmmm?” Tully found that of interest.

  “I didn’t pay much attention when I found out the assistant priest had been in the parish only six months. That happens. Priests get moved around. Some more than others. But then the secretary said she’d been hired a little less than a year ago. That made me wonder. Then the housekeeper said she’d worked for him just a little more than a year—just before the secretary was hired.”

  “So the housekeeper overlapped the secretary. She give any reason why the former secretary was let go?”

  “I asked her about that,” Mangiapane said, “and she said she didn’t really know. The housekeeper got along good with the secretary. They’d eat lunch together in the rectory kitchen. Then, all of a sudden—as far as she knew—out of the blue the secretary is given notice and she’s gone and a
new secretary is hired. And then I asked about her predecessor. She said she didn’t get to know her more than just saying good-bye. The two of them passed like ships in the night. But she did find out from a parishioner that the former housekeeper had been there a little more than a year.”

  Tully scratched the stubble on his chin. “A pattern? Might be worth looking into. Manj, get some of the guys on the former employees. Maybe one or another of them has got some mean words for the boss. How about the priest—the assistant? He’s been there the shortest time. Anything there? Do the priests go through that revolving door too?”

  “I gotta check that out, Zoo.”

  “Okay. Did we bump into any pattern—any routines? Keating have any habits that can lead us anywhere?”

  Moore shrugged. “I suppose there’s mornings.” She looked at Mangiapane. “Don’t they have services—Mass—every morning? I guess that would tie him up first off.”

  “It’s not like the old days …” Mangiapane shook his head. “That’s the way it used to be when I was growing up. Waldo’s got two priests—which, in the old days, meant there’d be at least two Masses every day. But I wouldn’t have bet on that now, so I checked their schedule. They only got one Mass a day. Turns out Father Keating says Mass Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The other priest has Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

  “And Saturday?” Tully asked.

  “That’s the start of the weekend schedule,” Mangiapane said. “There’s Mass later in the day on Saturdays, so they don’t have one in the morning.”

  Tully wondered what evil fate dragged him into these cases involving organized religions. He knew little about them and cared even less.

  “Well, that clears things up for me, anyway,” Moore said. “The housekeeper there told me Keating was away from the rectory a lot, but on a pretty regular basis.”

  “Regular?” Tully was alert once more.

  “Yeah,” Moore said. “After Mass on Sunday, Keating would take care of the collection. By that time he’d be pretty beat. He usually left late afternoon and didn’t return till Tuesday morning’s Mass. Until Manj said Keating didn’t take the Monday services, I wondered how he could manage staying away till Tuesday.”