Broussard steadied himself against the railing as sweat poured like warm rain from his hairline.
“Had to blow the lock on the bulkhead and come up through the basement,” he said. “Sorry it took so long.”
I nodded.
“Clear in there?” He took a deep breath, watched me steadily with dark eyes.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Corwin Earle is dead.”
“Samuel Pietro,” he said.
I nodded. “I think it’s Samuel Pietro.” I looked down at my gun, saw that it jumped from the tremors in my arm, the shakes wracking my body like a series of small strokes. I looked back at Broussard, felt the warm streams spring from my eyes again. “It’s hard to tell,” I said, and my voice cracked.
Broussard nodded. I noticed that he was weeping, too.
“In the basement,” he said.
“What?”
“Skeletons,” he said. “Two of them. Kids.”
My voice didn’t sound like my own as I said, “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“I don’t either,” he said.
He looked down at Roberta Trett’s corpse. He lowered the shotgun and placed it against the back of her head, and his finger curled around the trigger.
I waited for him to blow her dead brains all over the staircase.
After a while, he removed the gun and sighed. He took his foot and brought it down gently on the top of her head, and then he pushed her down.
That’s what the Quincy police met as they reached the stairs: Roberta Trett’s large corpse sliding down the dark staircase toward them and two men standing up top, weeping like children because they’d somehow never known the world could get this bad.
26
It took twenty hours to confirm that the body in the bathtub had, in fact, been that of Samuel Pietro. The work the Tretts and Corwin Earle had done on his face with a knife had made dental records the only sure means of identification. Gabrielle Pietro had gone into shock after a reporter from the News, acting on a tip, called before the police contacted her to ask for a statement regarding her son’s death.
Samuel Pietro had been dead forty-five minutes by the time I found him. The medical examiner ascertained that in the two weeks since his disappearance he’d been sodomized repeatedly, flogged along his back, buttocks, and legs, and handcuffed so tightly that the flesh around his right wrist was worn down to the bone. He’d been fed nothing but potato chips, Fritos, and beer since he’d left his mother’s house.
Less than an hour before we’d entered the Trett house, either Corwin Earle, one or both of the Tretts, or maybe all three of them—who the hell knew and ultimately what difference did it make?—had stabbed the boy in the heart and then drawn the knife blade across his throat and severed his carotid artery.
I’d spent the morning and most of the afternoon up in our cramped office, tucked in the belfry of St. Bartholomew’s Church, feeling the weight of the great building around me, the spires reaching for heaven. I stared out the window. I tried not to think. I drank cold coffee and sat, felt a soft ticking in my chest, in my head.
Angie’s ankle had been set and plastered last night at the New England Med emergency room, and she’d left the apartment this morning as I was waking up, taken a taxi to her doctor’s office so he could check the ER resident’s work and tell her what to expect from time spent in a cast.
I left the belfry office, once I got the details regarding Samuel Pietro from Broussard, and descended the stairs into the chapel. I sat in the front pew in the still half-dark, smelled the remains of incense and the bloom of chrysanthemums, met the gem-shaped gaze of several stained-glass saints, and watched the lights of small votive candles flicker off the mahogany altar rail, wondered why an eight-year-old child had been allowed to live on this earth just long enough to experience everything horrific in it.
I looked up at the stained-glass Jesus, his arms held open above the gold tabernacle.
“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Explain that.”
I can’t.
Can’t or won’t?
No answer. God can calm up with the best of them.
You put a child on this earth, give him eight years of life. You allow him to be kidnapped, tortured, starved, and raped for fourteen days—over three hundred and thirty hours, nineteen thousand eight hundred long minutes—and then as a final image You provide him with the faces of monsters who shove steel into his heart, cleave the flesh from his face, and open his throat on a bathroom floor.
What’s your point?
“What’s Yours?” I said loudly, heard my voice echo off stone.
Silence.
“Why?” I whispered.
More silence.
“There’s no goddamned answer. Is there?”
Don’t blaspheme. You’re in church.
Now I knew the voice in my head wasn’t God’s. My mother’s probably, maybe a dead nun’s, but I doubted God would get hung up on technicalities during such a time of dire need.
Then again, what did I know? Maybe God, if He did exist, was as petty and trivial as the rest of us.
If so, He wasn’t a God I could follow.
Yet I stayed in the pew, unable to move.
I believe in God because of…what?
Talent—the kind Van Gogh or Michael Jordan, Stephen Hawking or Dylan Thomas were born with—always seemed proof of God to me. So did love.
So, okay, I believe in You. But I’m not sure I like You.
That’s your problem.
“What good comes from a child’s rape and murder?”
Don’t ask questions your brain is too small to answer.
I watched the candles flicker for a while, sucked the quiet into my lungs, closed my eyes to it, and waited for transcendence or a state of grace or peace or whatever the hell it was the nuns had taught me you were supposed to wait for when the world is too much with you.
After about a minute, I opened my eyes. Probably the reason I’d never been a successful Catholic—I lacked patience.
The rear door of the building opened and I heard the clack of Angie’s crutches against the door bar, heard her say, “Shit,” and then the door closed and she appeared at the landing between the chapel and the stairs leading up to the belfry. She noticed me just before she turned toward the stairs. She swiveled around awkwardly, looked at me, and smiled.
She worked her way down the two carpeted steps to the chapel floor, swung her body past the confessionals and baptismal font. She paused by the altar rail in front of my pew, hoisted herself up onto it, and leaned her crutches against the rail.