Eminence Read online

Meanwhile, Tully had been assigned to restricted duty for the duration of the investigation. The official term for this assignment was “minimal duty.” In effect, it was a sort of benign suspension or a brief vacation. At the conclusion of the investigation, the findings would be announced by the board of review.

  Then the official decree of justifiable homicide in the course of duty would be rendered. That verdict was, Tully felt, inevitable.

  Moellmann was mumbling again. As was his custom, he wrote nothing during the examination, merely making cryptic notations on the body chart. Afterward-immediately afterward-back in his office he would write a complete report.

  “. . . uh-huh,” Moellmann murmured, “twenty-one and one-half inches below the top of the head, one-half inch to the right of the midline, and five inches above the navel is located the entrance bullet wound. The wound measures one-quarter inch in diameter surrounded by the narrow rim of abrasion. There is no evidence of close-range fire on skin surrounding the injury.”

  Following the trail of dried blood, the M.E. began to trace the path of the bullet as it had passed from one internal organ to another. “The wound track passes from front to back, from right to left and slightly upward” There was a pause as Moellmann removed the affected organs. “. . . ah, here it is!” This intonation as if he had just successfully panned for gold.

  Tully assumed the bullet had been located and that he was being invited to view the discovery. Both assumptions were correct. He moved closer to the body and studied the small area defined by Moellmann. There it was, lodged in one of Powell’s ribs. Now somewhat misshapen, nonetheless the slug would carry the distinctive markings made by whichever gun barrel it had exited. In this case, unquestionably, Tully’s gun.

  Moellmann carefully excised the segment of bone containing the bullet. Then with strong fingers, he bent and flexed the specimen until the slug fell free. He was careful not to handle it with forceps or a hemostat for fear of destroying the bullet’s distinguishing markings.

  So, there it was. Powell’s remains would be examined further. Moellmann would know more about David Powell in death than anyone had known in life.

  Ordinarily, at this point in the autopsy, Tully would leave. Ordinarily he couldn’t get out quickly enough. The autopsy in which he was involved was, for his purposes, concluded. But for some reason that he could not identify, he lingered.

  An autopsy was just beginning at an adjoining table. Automatically, from force of habit, Tully began mentally ticking off the evident clues this body presented.

  Hispanic woman, maybe in her late thirties, wearing an ordinary housedress, which was being carefully removed. From the condition of the clothing, Tully was fairly certain what had happened. The dress was stained with grease and tire marks. Fragments of glass tinkled onto the metal table and were carefully collected. There’d probably be paint stains on the dress too, though from this distance Tully couldn’t distinguish them. She’d been hit by a car. How seriously she had been hit by that car was about to be revealed.

  Briefly, she was placed face-down, nude. There were bumper injuries on the back of her legs. Hit from behind. But the bumper marks were at different levels on each leg. An indication that she had been walking, or, judging from the discrepancy of the marks—much higher on the left than on the right leg—more probably she had been running. The scenario was getting clearer.

  Why would she run from a car? In the case of an accident, if the victim isn’t aware of the approach of a vehicle, he or she is usually hit from the side. Or, if there is some apprehension, the victim may turn toward the oncoming vehicle and be hit from the front.

  But if someone is running away from the car when struck, the probability is that the driver is chasing the victim. And if that is the case, the charge is battery with a motor vehicle. Or, in this case, homicide—probably murder one.

  The deceased was turned over onto her back. Suspicion confirmed. There was a deep gouge in the groin. Tully was certain this one was a homicide. Not only had she been struck from behind, but the car was being driven at high speed.

  There were lacerations all over her head. Easily to be expected, since a pedestrian hit at high speed tends to be thrown high in the air, perhaps landing briefly on the car’s roof or trunk, and then falling into the street. Frequently, the victim then may be struck by one or more of the following cars.

  To top it off, there were multiple parallel tears over the victim’s trunk and upper legs. These were injuries caused by overstretching of the skin under the great weight of a car.

  Where this case broke through the mold was in the pattern of the tire tracks across the victim’s body. To Tully’s experienced eye, the tracks appeared startlingly similar. He bet it wouldn’t take the technicians long to establish that all these injuries had been caused by one and the same vehicle. As frequently happens in such cases, when this woman had been run over repeatedly, the edges of the tire’s grooves between the tread were imprinted on her body. Something similar to a rubber-stamp effect.

  If the police ever found the right guy with the right car, they’d be able to match the actual tires with these treadmarks, which were at this moment being carefully recorded by the morgue’s technicians. In this case, the tire treads would prove almost as helpful as fingerprints.

  And, thought Tully, the cops very possibly would catch up with the guy who did this. Whoever the perp was, he had certainly been motivated.

  Killing somebody was so easy. Or was it because Tully had become so inured to violent death that the act seemed so simple? In any case, one could kill quickly with little or no expense or trouble—as with that bum who’d had his throat slit. Or one could kill from a distance with little effort with a gun, as he himself had done with the late David Powell.

  But to take the trouble to chase down a defenseless woman with a car, deliberately hit her at high speed, then run over her again and again—that required a good bit of intensity and dedication. There was little doubt, thought Tully, if they get this guy it would be murder in the first degree. For some reason he did not think of the driver of the death car as a woman.

  And because there seemed to be such intense motivation in this killing, it seemed likely the good guys would win this one. But, experience stepped in to wag a finger, you never could tell.

  With a deep sigh, Tully turned away from the autopsy tables. Idle speculation about homicide was a waste of time. And so was everything else he could think of doing just now.

  Investigations into murder had substantially become his life. His dedication to the Homicide Division had cost him his first and, to date, only marriage. His wife long ago had decided that she had no chance in competition with his job. So, after a reluctant but finally amicable no-fault divorce, she had moved to Chicago with their five children. He visited the kids four or five times a year. He would have done so more often but he couldn’t tear himself away from all these cases that begged for his attention. She had remarried. He had not.

  For a little more than a year after the divorce he had lived alone in their now-too-large home in northwest Detroit.

  Then he met Alice Balcom, a Wayne County social worker assigned to juvenile court. They were attracted to each other immediately and began dating. Soon they had mutually decided that the drive between the far reaches of the east and west sides of Detroit was silly. She moved in with him. It was Tully’s first miscegenational union and, until recently, it had worked more smoothly than he could have hoped.

  Al, as Tully called his “significant other,” knew from the outset that he could not compromise his total dedication to his job. She had seemed content to finish a close second.

  However, for the past several months, Al had not been well. And no one seemed able to diagnose her ailment. Her doctor, a renowned internist, had attended her carefully, but had not been able to stem the tide of symptoms that kept popping up like the buttons on a blender.

  Most men would be grateful, even if they would not admit it, to have some time off
to spend at home. Tully was not one of them.

  Al was ill and there was nothing he could do about it. That was frustrating. Everyone would expect him to stay home with her. He expected it of himself. But he was confused. He was uncomfortable with a situation wherein he was surrounded by a problem, a problem that he could not solve.

  For that was the whole kick of homicide. Tully thrived on real-life whodunits. The puzzle, the challenge of solving it, that was the entire enchilada.

  Now the only challenge was how to deal with and what to do for Al. And he had no clue as to an answer.

  Otherwise, he was on the shelf. And he didn’t like it one little bit. But there was nothing he could do about it. And that, as he pulled his shapeless rain hat on, was that. But he didn’t like it.

  SUNDAY

  JULY 23

  CHAPTER

  2

  Following an afternoon of dodging raindrops on the golf course, four priests met for dinner at the Wine Barrel, one of Father Robert Koesler’s favorite downtown restaurants. After being served drinks, they ordered, then got down to the serious business of clerical gab.

  Father Patrick McNiff stirred his Manhattan on the rocks. He used his right index finger. He always had. But then, almost everything he did he always had done. “I heard that Al McNeeley is getting St. Al’s. Anybody else hear that?”

  Father Jim Tracy tilted his head to look through his bifocals. “St. Al’s? St. Aloysius down here?”

  “The same,” McNiff affirmed.

  St. Aloysius was a famous tri-level church in the heart of what had once been the hub of downtown Detroit. Its building housed a myriad of archdiocesan bureaucracies, including the Tribunal, the Chancery, and the offices of the Cardinal Archbishop of Detroit, Mark Boyle.

  Tracy shook his head. “By me.”

  “So what?” Father Darin O’Day said. “What’s so hot about St. Al’s? Anymore, I mean.”

  He had a point. Once, the J.L. Hudson department store had anchored the commercial downtown. And St. Aloysius Church, only a few blocks removed from Hudson’s, had profited in every imaginable way from its nearness. Even though its congregation was heavily transient, the people who flowed through its doors all day, every day, had been among the genuine celebrities of the city, the country, even the world.

  Now, the core of Detroit’s downtown, such as it was, had shifted several long blocks to the riverfront. And what a difference those blocks made in terms of commerce, population, traffic, interest, special events and, by no means last, safety!

  “St. Al’s is St. Al’s, and I think McNeeley’s lucky to get it,” McNiff stated with a touch of infallibility.

  “Pat’s got a point,” Koesler said. “The history of that church and parish is special, even unique. It still serves a goodly group of interesting people. And it’s still the hub of the archdiocese if not the city.”

  “Sounds good to me, Bob, especially if you don’t mind staying inside your fortress for protection every night.” O’Day seldom gave any thought to downtown Detroit anymore so involved was he with his Novi parish.

  Koesler smiled. “I know how you feel, Darin. We’re all part of the suburbs now. But Detroit’s not an alien planet. We all grew up in this city. This is our town.”

  “Then why are we all out in the ‘burbs?” O’Day commented.

  Koesler winced inwardly. “Because that’s where we were sent. Because that’s where a good bit of what used to go on in Detroit has moved.”

  “Along with a good percentage of the Catholic population,” said Tracy.

  It was all true, thought Koesler. But that didn’t make him feel any less uneasy. Actually, he had attempted more than once to return to a city parish. But the assignment board that ruled on such matters was forced to juggle a Catholic population that was constantly shifting further out of the city against an ever-diminishing number of available priests. In a word, Koesler had been unsuccessful in his attempts to return to the city. But the fact that he’d tried did not make him feel any less guilty.

  “I don’t care what you say,” O’Day said, “it’s different than it was. It’s not safe down here. I don’t care if the mayor does have most of his cops downtown; I won’t feel comfortable until I—and my car—get out of here in one piece tonight.”

  “Come on, Darin,” said Tracy, “are you trying to make us believe there’s no crime in Novi?”

  “Not like Detroit. Not anything like Detroit. God! The last time it was safe in this city was when the Pope was here.”

  “Who could forget that?” McNiff said with a fervor bordering on veneration.

  “I guess I can’t,” said Koesler. “I dreamed about it the other night.”

  “Dreamed about it?” McNiff pursued.

  “Uh-huh. It was weird. I dreamed that the Pope was appearing in Hart Plaza on the riverfront, just like he did when he was actually here a couple of years ago.

  “And just like it was then, everybody was worrying about security and afraid that some nut would seize this opportunity to settle an imaginary score or make a name for himself by assaulting the Pope.

  “In my dream, the police, the fbi, the Secret Service, everybody had the downtown area pretty well secure. The Coast Guard was even able to control the river and all the boats that would be there to get a good look at the Pope. Just like when he was here in real life, everything in the immediate vicinity of Hart Plaza was taken care of. The only chink in the armor was Windsor, across the river. They weren’t able to secure that, but, on the other hand, they weren’t too concerned about it either. Downtown Windsor is a fair distance from downtown Detroit across the river.”

  Koesler studied his companions. “Did any of you see that movie about an assassination attempt on General de Gaulle—Day of the Jackal!”

  All three nodded and smiled at the recollection of a memorable movie.

  “Okay,” Koesler continued, “I must have been influenced by that movie. Because in my dream, an assassin was taking advantage of the lack of complete security in Windsor. He rented a room in a hotel directly across the river from Hart Plaza. He was an expert marksman. He even looked like Edward Fox . . . the actor who played the assassin in Day of the Jackal.

  “Anyway, he set up his tripod and attached his high-powered rifle to it—so there would be a minimum of movement when he pulled the trigger. And—oh, yes—he had a telescopic sight attached to the rifle.

  “He was taking no chances. Even so, that’s a hell of a long distance. And there are variables like the wind factor. I don’t know if someone could actually do it in real life, but it was, all in all, even in my dream, a chancy shot.”

  The waiter brought their entrees. It was a testament to the captivating quality of Koesler’s recital that none of them reached for a fork. They simply sat and gazed at him.

  “Come on,” Koesler invited, “eat up.”

  They proceeded to dig in, McNiff, however, exhorting, “Go on with the dream, damn it!”

  “Oh, well, where was I? Oh, yes. The assassin was ready. He had the stand, the rifle, the telescopic sight. Still, it would have to be a fantastic shot to hit his target.”

  “We know that,” said McNiff. “What happened then? And if you say you woke up, there are three of us priests here . . . just enough to give you a solemn high funeral.”

  “No, I didn’t wake up . . . not just then, anyway. What happened next was that the procession of priests and bishops and Cardinals filed onto the raised stage in Hart Plaza. Just about every ecclesiastical dignitary in the country was there. Then, the Pope, in his white cassock and red cape, stepped up to the microphone and began reading his speech.

  “Meanwhile, in Windsor, the assassin was ready. He took very careful aim. He inhaled deeply. Then, as he partially exhaled, he very carefully squeezed, rather than pulled, the trigger.”

  Koesler paused. His companions once again put their dinners on hold, McNiff with a forkful of vegetables poised between plate and mouth.

  “And there on the stag
e of Hart Plaza,” resumed Koesler, “shock registered on the face of the Bishop of Flint as he tumbled from his chair onto the stage. There was a neat bullet hole in his forehead. He was dead.”

  McNiff frowned. “Bishop of Flint? Flint’s not a diocese. There isn’t any Bishop of Flint!”

  “It was a dream, for Pete’s sake,” Koesler said.

  “You mean to tell us the son-of-a-bitch missed the Pope?” O’Day asked. “What the hell kind of dream was that, anyway?”

  “That’s when I woke up.”

  “Woke up?” McNiff almost shouted. “Woke up! You mean that’s it?”

  “Well, not exactly. I was so interested in how this dream would work out, I tried to get back to sleep and take up where I left off. Occasionally it works out that way.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “When I got back to sleep—in, for me, record-quick time—the same dream continued.

  “The police started with the theory that the assassin had missed. Obviously, the intended target had to have been the Pope. He was the one all the law enforcement agencies were protecting. The one area of total protection they could not guarantee—at least in my dream—was Windsor. And that’s where the lethal shot came from.

  “But then, a smart detective came up with a different premise. Suppose—was the way his premise started—just suppose the assassin hadn’t missed. Suppose the assassin’s real target was not the Pope but the Bishop of Flint.”

  “Makes sense,” said Tracy. “Doesn’t make much difference which one you’re talking about. To lots of people, one bishop is as good or bad as another.”

  “Right,” Koesler said. “That’s what this detective figured. The target could have been the Pope. In which case the motive probably would have been some insane desire for notoriety. But since the shot came from across the river, presumably it was a professional assassin. Why hire a professional assassin? Any idiot who hungers for notoriety gets close to the target and does the dirty work himself. One hires an assassin when one wants the job done neatly and professionally and with anonymity for the employer.”