wide it hung by a thread, the next decapitated, and this time a severed tongue.”
Keith Scully was convinced he’d made his point. “Wouldn’t you say they’ve been silenced?”
TWENTY-SIX
“DOES Scully think you’re taking yourself off the case?” Mike asked. We decided to use my apartment as a command center for our team’s strategy session. It offered space, privacy, and a well-stocked bar.
“He didn’t wait around for an answer. He’s so damn used to getting his way.”
It was ten o’clock, and we had spread out the police reports and our notes on my dining-room table. Nan was on the phone ordering pizzas, Mike was fixing drinks, and I was opening a bottle of wine. Peterson had banded the four of us with another foursome assembled from different squads and, after a brief discussion with them about how to communicate in the morning, we left to regroup at my home.
“You see what he’s done, Coop. He’s silenced you, too,” Mike said. “First Battaglia clips your wings. Then Scully gives you the boot. Sitting behind the cash register in a restaurant in the south of France keeping count of every escargot the chef sells is looking more and more like your future. The glory days may be behind you.”
“Jack her up, Mr. Chapman,” Nan said. “Just what she needs.”
“I don’t want to be a lightning rod for anything that will affect the case.”
“Running scared.”
“Hardly. How about if I just fade into the background for the time being, let Nan take the lead, and we carry on as usual?”
I poured a glass of white wine for Nan and one for myself. “And I thought you were my pal,” she said. “I get to deal with Battaglia, the archdiocese, and the unhappy mobs. And you?”
“Whatever you need. I can do witness interviews—”
“Find me a frigging witness first, will you?” Mike said, clinking his glass full of vodka against my wine. “I smell what you’re up to. You’ll do everything except having to interface with the bosses. You get the fun part. And then I’ll get pounded when Scully finds out.”
“By Monday we’ll have a better sense of where this is going. I’ll poke my head out and test the waters.”
“Kind of like a groundhog, looking for his shadow,” Mike said. “But you’ll have to see Battaglia tomorrow morning. That won’t be pretty.”
“It’s Friday, and he’s got meetings in Washington all day. Probably took the last shuttle tonight,” I said. “To which I add a ‘hallelujah’ and let’s get to work.”
Nan had opened her laptop and begun her research on Ursula Hewitt. “What do you want to know?”
“I’m the wrong one to pass judgment on the idea of ordaining women. It seems smart to me.”
“Amen,” Mercer said. “Overdue by a millennium or two.”
“But then it’s not my church, so what I think doesn’t count for much.” I looked to Mike and then Nan, who were both practicing Catholics.
“Here’s the latest New York Times poll,” Nan said, Googling faster than we were talking. “For more than twenty years, a large majority of American Catholics favor allowing women to be ordained as priests, even though the church hierarchy is opposed. More than sixty-four percent think it’s a good idea. Another eighty-one percent support women as deacons.”
“Let me speak for my aunt Eunice,” Mike said, raising his glass in the air. “And my aunt Bridget and my sainted mother and the good ladies of St. Anselm’s of Bay Ridge. Not happening. Hellfire and damnation before they’d approve ordaining women. You want a poll? Poll my relatives.”
“Women are so often more judgmental about each other’s conduct than men,” I said.
“You can’t let Nan take the heat on this,” Mike said. “Don’t we have a kick-ass atheist on board who won’t care when crowds start picketing the courthouse?”
“I can deal,” Nan said.
“It’s like an ancient fraternity,” Mercer said. “Somebody needs to bring these guys in Rome into the modern world.”
“Men in dresses. That’s who’s in charge,” Mike said. “Men in dresses with more gold rings than even Coop’s got. Ought to be a signal right there. You want to make my mother crazy? Some days I tell her I think I was the only altar boy in town who wasn’t abused. I must have been homely as sin. Just ask her about that.”
“This is interesting,” Nan said. “There’s actually a formal organization with its own website. Roman Catholic Womenpriests. They claim that more than one hundred women have been given ordination ceremonies as priests or bishops or deacons.”