Silent Mercy - By Linda Fairstein Page 0,65

the spine of each of us around the table automatically stiffened as we mumbled some version of “good evening” to the commissioner. His professionalism was unmistakable, as was the ramrod straightness of his Marine bearing, physically and metaphorically.

I had known Scully for six or seven years, from the time when he had been chief of detectives, on the steady climb up the ladder to the top cop post, which was a mayoral appointment. He was tall and sinewy, with close-cut hair now gone silver, and as many creases etched into his face as there were constant crises thrown onto his lap.

“How many guys you got on this, Ray?” Lieutenant Peterson was the senior man in the room, so Scully started with him.

“A dozen, Keith.” The two privileges the old-timer was allowed were still addressing the commissioner by his first name and smoking his cigarettes inside headquarters. No one else dared do either.

“Double it. By tomorrow’s day shift. Same goes for all of you.”

“Manpower’s an issue,” Peterson said. “My men each got a full plate as it is, and then you sent that new directive about limiting overtime—which, I gotta say, pissed everybody off.”

“Tell them to eat their overtime. Shove it. You’ve got tonight to organize yourselves. Get a good meal and whatever rest you can in the next twelve hours. I don’t expect you to sleep again till you bring this guy down,” Scully said. “Your world turns upside down tomorrow when we let the media know we’ve got an ID on the victim.”

Manny Chirico pushed back from the table. The rest of us were riveted on Keith Scully.

“Her name is Ursula Hewitt.” Scully pointed to his tech aide, who flashed one of the crime-scene photos of her from his Power-Point file onto the wall screen.

If you hadn’t seen the body in the churchyard firsthand, there was nothing like a life-size color blowup to jump-start this crew for a full-on manhunt. I could hear the intake of breath and a few “holy shits” from around the table.

“Female Caucasian,” Scully went on, like he was calling cadence. “Thirty-nine years old. Born in Forest Hills. Flushing Boulevard. Attended church and parochial school there.”

Most of the men in the room were Catholic. That fact was probably intended to juice them a bit more.

“Our Lady Queen of Martyrs,” Mike whispered. He often said that New York and New Orleans were the only two cities in the country in which the devout identified themselves by their parish affiliations, rather than neighborhoods.

The next slide was a photograph of the young Hewitt from her high school yearbook, offering all the freshness and promise of youth. She was slimmer then, and the contrast between her slender neck and the slashed throat of the morning’s scene was horrifying.

“Ursula’s uncle called the mayor’s office at five twenty-three this evening. He lives in San Francisco, but he’s got a high school buddy who works at City Hall. She’d been staying with friends in Manhattan but never made it home last night. It was his birthday, and she was certain to call. Then he heard about the body at St. Pat’s on the radio, but he thought he didn’t have enough reason to call the police. Just that it was one of her favorite churches, which snagged his radar. We went over to compare photographs from the scene with the one from her last visit that her uncle scanned in to his friend at City Hall.”

The next picture went up on the third screen. It was a more recent image of Ursula Hewitt, dressed in flowing clerical vestments. The floor-length alb of white linen was perfectly draped over her, with a scarlet stole on her shoulders that ran down the length of the garment, and a large cross around her neck.

“This is Ursula Hewitt,” Scully said, his lips clamped tightly together as he paused. “Three years ago, when she was ordained as a Catholic priest.”

There was dead silence in the room as we all took in the photo, till a split second later when one of the guys from Manhattan South broke in with a nervous laugh. “Hey, chief. We don’t got lady priests. We got nuns.”

Keith Scully didn’t brook interruptions.

“Ursula Hewitt was a Catholic priest. She was ordained in a neighborhood church in Back Bay, Boston. She even celebrated Mass a few times at Old St. Pat’s.”

Most of the men looked perplexed, as surprised as I was to hear that fact.

“She was excommunicated by the Vatican a year later, because of

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