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  She went over to a weight bench, parked against one wall with dumbbells and barbells on the floor around it. “He keeps in shape.”

  “Girlie weights,” spat Garcia without turning around. “I saw that equipment when we walked in.”

  She eyed the bar positioned over the bench and added up the numbers stamped on the side of the round plates. “Counting the bar itself, I’ll bet he’s pressing close to two hundred pounds.”

  “I do that in my sleep.”

  She went over to the apartment’s only closet and pulled open the door. A row of footwear covered the floor. Each sneaker or dress shoe was with its mate, and all the pairs were lined up with toes pointing to the back of the closet. Over the shoes, a solid wall of clothes hung from a bar. The short-sleeved shirts were together, facing the same way. Then all the long-sleeved shirts. Then the slacks. Last came the blazers. “I wonder if he’d come over and do my closets.”

  Garcia crawled to his feet and stared at the rope art hanging on the wall behind the couch. “Did you catch this? The knot-tying that you were talking about. That Father Pete confirmed.”

  “I noticed,” she said, still eyeing the jammed but neat closet. Most of the stuff was black or gray. Even if Quaid was no longer a priest, he was dressing like one. A flowery panel of material hiding amid the dark ones caught her attention. Wrestling it out of the wedge of clothes, she held the oddball up by the hanger. She blinked three times before her eyes registered that it was one of those aprons beauty salons draped over customers to protect their clothing.

  “Find something?” asked Garcia. He went over to the kitchen and started opening and closing drawers and cabinets.

  “Apron from a beauty parlor.” She crammed the drape back into the closet, making sure she returned it to its spot between the blazers and the slacks.

  Garcia opened the refrigerator and held his nose while he looked inside. “Apron? Wonder what the hell that’s about.” He closed the refrigerator and opened the top freezer compartment.

  She glanced over at him. “Any body parts on ice? A hand or two?”

  “Frozen peas and fish sticks. Blue Bunny Rocky Road.”

  She took down a jacket hanging from a door hook and checked the pockets. Found only lint. “What’s the worst thing you ever found in a freezer?”

  He lifted up the bag of peas and pushed aside the box of fish sticks. “Does a walk-in freezer count?”

  “No. That’s really a room.” She hung the jacket back on the hook.

  “Chest okay?” He started to close Quaid’s freezer door and then reconsidered. He reached inside and retrieved the ice-cream bucket.

  “Works for me.” She crouched down and lifted the lid off a shoe box. Empty.

  “Found a guy and his parrot in a commercial chest freezer. Frozen solid. It was a Mafia thing.” He wrestled with the ice-cream bucket’s slippery top. “Your turn. Worst thing ever. Same rule. Chest freezer or fridge freezer. No walk-ins.”

  “Fridge freezer. A guy’s privates.”

  Garcia grimaced. “Ouch.”

  “At first I thought it was fake. You know.”

  He stopped struggling with the lid for a moment and looked at her with raised brows. “Fake?”

  “One of those hollow dildos people fill with water and stash in the freezer.” She quickly added: “I only know about those because I went to a bachelorette party. Instead of regular cubes in the punch, they had ice shaped like penises.”

  “Hilarious.”

  She frowned. “Where did I leave off with this? Oh yeah. The guy’s ex-girlfriend separated the guy from his privates after she killed him. Then the psycho took the penis home with her.” Bernadette pushed aside the shoes and felt around the back of the closet, behind the wall of clothes. She sat back on her heels and looked over at Garcia, who was working the lid again. “Found it in an ice-cream bucket, as a matter of fact. An empty pint of Ben and Jerry’s.”

  “I’ll be really impressed if you can remember the flavor.”

  “Chunky Monkey.”

  The top popped off, and Garcia looked inside. “No hands. No parrots. No penises. Not even a frozen dildo.” He snapped the lid back on the bucket and returned the container to the freezer.

  She got up off her knees and stood on her tiptoes to check the shelf over the clothes bar. Sweaters and sweatshirts, folded into neat rectangles and stacked like sandwiches. “I’m coming up with a whole lotta nothing so far.”

  Garcia headed for Quaid’s bathroom. “I’ll see if the john’s got any goodies.”

  “Grab some hair while you’re in there,” she said after him. “Got a bag for it?”

  “Yes, Mom.” He walked through.

  She closed the closet. “Anything jump out at you?”

  “A woman’s dressing table,” he said from the other side of the bathroom door. The sound of dresser drawers being opened and closed.

  “Weird.” She crossed the room to investigate a collection of electronic equipment he had parked in a corner. A cheap television set sat on a wobbly stand. Next to that was a cheap stereo system. On the floor next to the stereo was a CD wallet. She picked it up and paged through it. Classical religious music. Bach. Handel. Mozart. Beethoven. A smattering of country gospel by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Some religious sets by Elvis. The score from The Passion of the Christ. None of it was to her taste. She closed the wallet and set it down.

  Bernadette turned around and looked at the computer monitor again, gritting her teeth, as Quaid’s self-righteous screen saver scrolled across repeatedly. “Maybe I could check out the history of his Web searches. That shouldn’t mess up anything too badly. I hope.”

  “What’d you say?” Garcia called from the bathroom.

  “Nothing.” She walked over to the desk and sat down on the edge of the office chair. She reached for the mouse and stopped, contemplating the gloves on her hands. No. She didn’t want to take them off; she wasn’t ready to use her curse of sight. Not now, not here. She needed her energy to concentrate on regular investigative work. She pulled the leather tighter over her fingers.

  “We gotta move this operation along,” Garcia said, poking his head through the bathroom doorway. “Our guy could show up any minute.”

  “Something tells me we have some time,” she said over her shoulder.

  He watched her cup her hand over the mouse. “Change of heart?”

  “Yeah.”

  Garcia popped his head back inside the bathroom. “It’s your show, Cat.”

  “Maybe this time it really is,” she said in a low voice. She rolled the mouse and noticed what was under it. The pad showed a man dressed in a dark suit and tie topped by a dark hat and sunglasses—like one of the Blues Brothers guys. The words printed across the pad read: On a Mission from God.

  “Delusional maniac.”

  She jiggled the mouse again, and Quaid’s desktop appeared, as spare as his apartment. Only a handful of icons on the screen, and all neatly stacked to one side, on the left. At the bottom of the totem pole was his e-mail. She wondered if she could check it without messing up anything. She braced herself, set the cursor over the icon, and opened his mail.

  “Zip,” she said. Nothing in his out basket. Nothing in his in basket. Even his wastebasket of deleted mail was empty. Either he never corresponded with anyone, or he’d been meticulous about cleaning out his files. The bureau’s computer geeks would have to dig deeper. She hit the “X” on the top right of the screen and returned to the desktop.

  She clicked on the Internet Explorer icon and it opened to Google. She moved the cursor to the top of the screen and clicked on the arrow curled in a counterclockwise direction. The history icon.

  The screen split, with Google still open on her right and Quaid’s Internet history on the left. She stared at the hunk of screen on her left. “Son-of-a-gun,” she said, louder than she intended.

  Garcia came out of the bathroom, stuffing a plastic bag in his pocket. “What?”

  “His history—what he�
��s looked at while on the Net—is cleared except for today.”

  Garcia stood behind her, with a hand on the back of her chair. “Do most folks know how to do that? Why would they do that? Who would do it?”

  “A guy surfing for some porn would do it, so his wife or his girlfriend or his officemates wouldn’t see what he’s been into.”

  Garcia: “Why would a guy living alone erase his history?”

  “Maybe he’s just naturally neat and meticulous and anal and secretive,” she offered.

  “Or maybe he’s worried about getting caught one day,” he said.

  “Today could be that day.” As she moved the cursor to Quaid’s Internet file folders, she sensed her boss leaning over her shoulder, breathing down her back. “Tony.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you keep sniffing around this joint while I poke around here? When I’m done, I’ll give you the executive summary. It won’t take long, since I’ve only got today’s history.” She checked her watch. “Soon to become yesterday’s history.”

  He took his hand off the chair. “I’m making you nervous.”

  “Hell, yes.”

  He resumed his sweep of the apartment.

  Fifteen minutes later, she summoned him back. “Tony.”

  “Be right there.” He dropped a cushion back on the couch and went over to her. He took his former position, with one hand clamped over the back of her chair. He glanced at the monitor. The screen saver was back on; she’d already finished. He took his hand off the chair and took a step back, shoving his hands in his jacket. “What’d you come up with?”

  She spun around in the office chair and faced him. “Quaid did some checking on Stannard. Most of it seemed superficial. He just plugged in the guy’s name. Looked up some professional stuff. An article Stannard wrote for a medical journal. A piece on cancer treatments.”

  “What else?”

  “He also looked up OxyContin.”

  “Powerful medicine.”

  “If we assume Quaid is continuing his pattern of punishing bad guys, then maybe this means the pharmacist was dealing the drug.”

  Garcia folded his arms in front of him. “Doesn’t seem serious enough for Quaid’s biblical-justice bit.”

  “Maybe a kid died after taking the drug. Could be Stannard wasn’t even dealing. He filled a prescription wrong, and then someone croaked.”

  Garcia shook his head. “Doesn’t feel right.”

  “Quaid was checking out the wife, too. ‘Chris’ was the name you heard on the machine, correct?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Quaid plugged in Chris Stannard’s name and then a Smith Avenue address and then the name of this building in St. Paul, which is located at aforementioned address. West Side Artists’ Block.”

  “I think our next stop should be the West Side Artists’ Block,” said Garcia.

  “I agree.” She pushed the chair back from the desk and stood up. That’s when she noticed the fat envelope sitting on the desktop, tucked next to the base of the monitor. “What have we got here?” She picked it up and pulled out the flap.

  “What is it?” asked Garcia.

  She reached inside and carefully extracted the green stack, holding it up for Garcia to see. “Think he’s been dipping into the collection plate?”

  “What size bills?”

  She set the envelope on the desk so she could flip through the layers. “Hundreds. Lots of hundreds. Few thousand bucks total, at least.”

  “Could be our holy man’s got some folks funding his overall scheme. Bunch of pissed-off rich guys who wanted that death penalty passed.”

  She picked up the envelope and examined the front and back, but found no writing or markings. She sniffed the white paper and wrinkled her nose. “What should I do with it?”

  Garcia: “Leave it. We’ve got to come back to the Vatican with the proper paperwork.”

  She slipped the stack back into the envelope, tucked in the flap, and returned the envelope to its spot on the desk. “A perfumed envelope with money. I don’t know why, but I don’t think we’re talking group financing here.”

  Thirty-seven

  Passing the Smith Avenue building, they scanned the storefronts on their right. “Doesn’t look promising,” grumbled Garcia, taking in the row of dark windows as he drove.

  Bernadette snapped her head around and looked over her shoulder while they continued south on Smith. “There’s a light coming from the second story, on the end.”

  He looked in the rearview mirror. “Could be there’s apartments above the artsy-fartsy shops. Let’s check it out.” He slowed the Grand Am and hung a right and another right, parking the Pontiac on the street in the residential neighborhood one block over.

  The pair approached the shops from the back, jogging onto a tar strip behind the stores. The lot ran the length of the complex, but was only wide enough for two rows of cars. The back row had a set of cars and pickups lined up one after another. The two agents slipped between a sedan and a truck parked on the end.

  Bernadette counted the vehicles. “If you figure one parking spot for each unit, there must be six apartments upstairs,” she said in a low voice.

  They heard a crack and ducked down. More cracks. The noise stopped for several seconds and then resumed. “What is that?” Garcia rose from his squatting position and squinted into the darkness. A floodlight was mounted against the building near the roofline, but it was dim and dirty.

  Bernadette straightened up and ran her eyes around the parking lot. The racket stopped and then picked up again—with a gust of wind. She pointed to the rear of the building. “Now I see it. Back door. Wind’s banging it. Someone left it open.”

  Garcia drew his weapon while he eyed the door, situated less than fifty feet from where they were standing. Whenever the door blew open, a faint light became visible from the other side. “Someone was in a hurry.”

  “A hurry to get inside, or a hurry to leave?” She unsnapped her holster and drew her Glock.

  He darted out from their hiding spot, and she followed. They ran up the short stoop and went inside, leaving the door flapping behind them. Garcia flattened himself against one side of the stairwell, and she hunkered against the opposite wall. Their eyes went to the top of the steps. They saw only a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling by a frayed cord. The bulb danced and blinked as the door banged and a breeze rolled up the stairs. Beyond the bulb was an open door. Garcia whispered: “The hallway for the apartments.”

  He took the stairs slowly, hugging the wall as he ascended. She did the same on her side. When they were halfway up the long, steep stairwell, the slamming stopped. In unison, the agents turned their heads and looked to the bottom of the steps. Bernadette trained her Glock at the closed door and waited. The door stayed closed.

  They resumed their climb, the bare wood creaking with each step they took. They got to the top of the landing and went through the doorway. They were in the middle of a dingy corridor painted the same aquamarine as the hallway of Quaid’s apartment building. Instead of a musty perfume odor, however, they detected another stink. An old ladies’ beauty shop. Garcia looked to the left, and Bernadette to the right. Each counted three doors. Garcia leaned into her ear. “Your pick.”

  Her eyes were pulled to the right, to the apartment at the end of the hall. It had a white door, whereas all the others were stained brown. “The white one. That’s the unit that we saw lit up from the street.”

  He followed her down the corridor. When they got to the end, they stood with their backs against the wall, one on each side of the white door. That’s when Bernadette saw the smudge on her side of the doorknob. A dot of red spotting the white. Pivoting around, she cranked her foot up and brought it down on the bottom quarter of the door.

  Garcia jumped next to her. “Again. On three. One, two, three.” They kicked in unison, and the door slammed open.

  Thirty-eight

  Her eyes were wide open, and so was her mouth. Red stai
ned her lips and chin and throat and the front of her bathrobe. The blood had dripped down her neck and formed an oval puddle on the rug beneath her.

  Garcia maneuvered around the body and checked behind the kitchen screen while Bernadette took the bathroom. They met back at the body, one standing on each side. Garcia took out his cell and called for an ambulance and assistance. He snapped the phone closed and dropped it back in his jacket pocket. Keeping his gun in his hand, he glanced through the open doorway into the hall. “I’m going to do a sweep of the rest of the—”

  She cut him off. “Do what you want, but he’s gone. We were too slow.” She paused. “I was too slow.”

  His jaw stiffened. “We got here as soon as we could.”

  Bernadette holstered her gun and nodded toward the woman on the floor. “Not soon enough to help Mrs. Stannard.”

  “We don’t even know if that’s who we’ve got here.”

  “Let’s solve the mystery,” she said, tipping her head toward the purse on the nightstand. She reached into the bag, fished out a wallet, and flipped it open to the driver’s license. Holding the open wallet in front of his face, she said: “Chris Stannard.” She snapped it closed and dropped it back into the purse. “Mystery solved.”

  “Watch the attitude, Cat.” He disappeared into the hallway.

  She inspected the apartment from where she was standing. The coppery smell of blood was mixed with another stink that frequently permeated murder scenes: booze. On the nightstand, next to the purse, she spotted a drinking glass with a quarter inch of amber liquid and ice in it. The dregs of a cocktail. On the area rug, between the nightstand and the body, was a tumbler on its side. Halfway across the room was a broken glass on the wood floor. Something had happened in the middle of the room. A drunken fight between Stannard and Quaid? Another smell was sandwiched between the booze and the blood: stale perfume. The vanilla scent from the envelope in Quaid’s apartment. Chris Stannard had given him the money. Why? Was Quaid blackmailing her, or was she bribing him? Was Quaid little more than a paid assassin? She hoped not; it would make the case much less intriguing.