Page 16 of Go Home (Kate Valentine #1)

“No dice. That guy is three sheets to the wind. And when we searched the motel room, we found the remains of an eight-ball and an empty blister of Percocet.”

Kate found herself thinking wistfully about the Percocet; the pain in her shoulder was mounting.

It was close to midnight now; they’d brought Sullivan and the girl back to Douglas Cove for interviews, but Chief Daniels had suddenly decided to do everything by the book.

They were in his office, arguing the toss.

The air was stale, the heating too hot, everyone on a short fuse.

“They’re not going anywhere. You can speak to them in the morning, once I’ve had a nurse look them over and declare them fit.”

At that moment, the girl’s voice came through loud and clear from the cells at the back of the building.

“I am not a hooker, I’m a massoos ! Board-certified, asshole.”

“And if you’ve got your man, Agent Valentine, what difference do a couple of hours make?”

“Because if he isn’t our man, he could still have vital, time-critical information about who is .”

Marcus entered the room with water and a couple of painkillers he’d rustled up from somewhere. She took them gratefully.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Marcus asked. “We don’t charge him. We don’t record it. We have an informal chat with Sullivan before he goes night-night. Then we interview him by the rule-book after breakfast. Win-win.”

Daniels didn’t look happy. But he hadn’t said no. Yet.

“Chief?”

After a long pause, Daniels nodded.

“You think the girl’s involved?” he asked.

“We’ll try to establish that immediately,” Kate said. “If she isn’t, we’re happy to hand her over to your custody.”

“I don’t want her in my custody, frankly, screeching all night. But she did assault a Federal Agent.”

“I guess she’s only trying to make a living,” said Marcus.

Daniels didn’t find that funny. As he went off to fetch Sullivan, Kate tried flexing her shoulder. She winced.

“You okay?”

She smiled at him. “I’ll live.”

“It was a good bust.”

“Thanks.”

Daniels returned with Sullivan, who had a few cuts from the tussle in the alleyway. He looked rough, though: sweaty and red-eyed with inflamed nostrils.

“You can use my office,” Daniels said. “You want him cuffed?”

“Your call,” Marcus said to Kate.

Kate looked at their prisoner. “Are you going to give me trouble, Mr. Sullivan?”

He shook his head.

They waited until Daniels had left, then arranged themselves around the chief’s desk. Kate sitting opposite Sullivan, Marcus next to him, uncomfortably close. The office smelled like a gentlemen’s club, or what she imagined a gentlemen’s club would smell like: leather furniture, cologne, cigars.

“Who’s the girl?” Kate asked.

“Her name is Effy and she’s a masseuse,” Sullivan said. “I never met her before tonight. I just saw a leaflet in the motel reception. Honestly,” he added, “we met in the bar because she likes to meet her clients somewhere public. You can’t be too careful.”

“Ain’t that true,” Marcus observed. “You can wind up with murderers and all sorts.” He nipped out of the room to talk to Daniels.

“Why did you run?” Kate asked.

“I just panicked. It was stupid.”

“It was more than stupid,” Kate said. “It was a felony.”

“I know. Look – I was kinda… wired.”

“Cocaine will do that to you,” Kate said.

“My wife’s brother wants to give me a pounding. There’s a coupla guys I owe money to. I was already on high alert. I just saw a threat and ran from it.”

“Suppose you’re telling the truth. What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, as Marcus returned to the room.

“You’re in rehab. It sounds like you’re putting your life back together.

Suddenly, you snap. You end up back in Douglas Cove, where everyone knows you, where you have a high chance of bumping into one of the many people who are angry with you.

And that’s where you decide to go on the bender to end all benders? Why here?”

“I wanted to see my sponsor. Stasiu. In AA, you’re assigned a-”

Kate interrupted. “I understand about sponsorship. But why then? Why the dramatic flight from the hospital on Monday?”

“I had a fright. My heart doing all these crazy things. I really thought my time was up. I thought that would be typical of my rotten shitty luck. I get clean, properly clean, and then my heart gives out. I wanted to see Stas. He’s the only person who really gets me.”

Kate tried to mask a sigh. As much as she sympathized with anyone’s mental struggles, there was a part of her that found addicts hard to hear. They dramatized and romanticized their problems like teenagers did. No one understands me… She reached for her notebook. “Stas…?”

“Stasiu Pavlek. Technically he’s not my sponsor anymore, but we keep in touch. He let me stay a couple nights because his wife was away.”

“You realize we’re going to check that with Mr.…” She glanced back at her notes. “Mr. Pavlek.”

“He’ll tell you I was a clean and sober houseguest.”

She looked him in the eye. “You’re not clean now. Or sober.”

Sullivan put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. More drama . Meanwhile, Marcus left the room again.

“I was fine until I saw the news this morning. Honestly. That was what set me off.”

“You mean the news regarding the death of your former teammate, Father Thomas? You’re telling me you didn’t hear about that, or discuss it with your friend Stasiu, or see a newspaper headline before this morning?”

“We were talking about other things. We were talking about why I’d left The Sanctuary. Why that keeps happening. I get sober, I get clean, I get better. Then I sabotage it. It wasn’t until I was on my own this morning that I found out what had happened.”

“So you quit the program, but you stayed on the wagon until this morning.”

The man didn’t respond. Kate realized there was a small tear in the corner of his left eye.

“One bit of bad news, Ray, and you decide to throw in the towel.”

“I don’t expect you to understand. And anyway. You don’t decide to do anything. Not when you’re an addict. It’s like being chained to a lunatic.”

“I don’t buy that,” Kate said. “Maybe you make bad choices. But there’s a reason. A trigger. What triggered you back in the hospital? Why did you run away instead of going back to The Sanctuary?”

“I just got so tired of it. So tired of it. Working the program. Discussing your thoughts and feelings. Raking over the wreckage, being so, so careful that everything you do and think and say is in line with what they say in the big blue book… It’s exhausting, you know?

And sometimes you think, you know what? Screw it.

He doesn’t have to live every moment in recovery.

That girl over there, she doesn’t have to do a lifelong penance.

She just has a drink when she wants one.

I can’t expect you to understand, Agent Valentine.

But sometimes you just think, screw it.”

Kate understood far more than the man thought, but she said nothing. Meanwhile, Marcus returned to the room.

“Mr. Pavlek manages the local branch of First Union and serves as a volunteer firefighter,” he said. “Confirms that you spent Monday and Tuesday nights on his sofa. Says you arrived at his home at tea-time on Monday, and sat up talking until the small hours.”

He and Kate exchanged a look. Whatever offenses Sullivan had committed, he could not have been directly responsible for the priest’s murder.

Sullivan straightened up in his seat. “So you know that I wasn’t involved in Tom’s death,” he said, quietly.

“We can surmise that you weren’t directly involved. That wouldn’t preclude someone acting on your behalf, or with your collusion.”

“Tom was my friend .”

“Well, Mr. Sullivan, I’ve read the emails between you two,” Kate said. “And they don’t sound too friendly.”

“We had a falling out, but -” A look of horror crossed the man’s face. “Wait up, you can’t seriously think that I…”

“Drop dead,” Kate said. “That was one of your comments, wasn’t it?”

“Aw, hell, it’s an expression! I was angry with Tom, we were angry with each other, but… God in heaven, how can you think that I…”

“Spare us the outrage,” Marcus said. “Did you get someone to kill him?”

“No!”

Over the next, tear-stained thirty minutes, Sullivan told them a tale of simple, grubby, human frailty.

Told them of how, clinging on to his faith, he’d asked the priest to absolve him of his sins.

And Father Thomas had refused, on the grounds that in order to be absolved of sin, the penitent had to be sincere about not doing it again.

While all the evidence thus far suggested that Ray Sullivan would do everything, again and again and again.

He hadn’t been totally unbending, though.

Father Thomas had given Ray an ultimatum.

Get clean. Stay clean for a year. And he’d receive absolution.

Ray had quit the confessional in a rage.

The way he saw it, without the spiritual boost of absolution, he had no chance of getting clean.

And Father Thomas was going way beyond the powers and prerogatives of a priest, imposing his own conditions upon something that was solely the province of God.

Despite that, Ray Sullivan had gone on to gain some mastery over his addictions.

He started attending a support group, a few towns away, where no one knew him.

A woman at this group began to talk about a difficult relationship.

A man she’d sought help from, but developed feelings for.

Over the weeks, it became clear that she was trapped in a loveless marriage, and that the man supporting her was a priest.

It also became clear to Ray that this priest was Father Tom.

Ray felt an overwhelming rage which, as on many occasions before, sent him spinning into relapse.

Matters came to an ugly head at the County Fair last June, where there was initially a minor dispute between Ray and Father Tom over the scoring in a pétanque match.

Words became insults, insults became shoves, shoves became punches.

The pétanque team were banned from competing for a year, and a whirlwind of rumors and counter-rumors began to whip around the town.

Ray checked into rehab – the first of two visits to The Sanctuary in one year - but continued his quarrel with Tom online, eventually threatening to tell the Bishop about the priest’s infidelities.

In response, Tom urged Ray to go ahead and report him.

He might have been calling Ray’s bluff. He might have been surprised when, instead of moving him yet again, the Bishop merely told him to remember he was a priest, not one of the boys, and ordered him to concentrate on his sacred duties instead of playing pétanque.

Tom might even have had enough of this endless cycle of growing dangerously close to women he could not have, which was an addiction less harmful than any of Ray’s, but an addiction, nonetheless.

But no one would ever know, because somebody murdered Father Tom in the ugliest possible way.

Like an old pool toy, Ray had seemed to deflate as every minute of his story went by. By the time he reached the end, he looked tiny, a hunched figure, bowed by the weight of his own confession. Not that he had a great deal to confess.

“What happens now?” he asked, quietly.

“You’ll be formally interviewed in the morning,” Kate said. “However –”

Her phone trilled into life, making everyone jump. It was Winters.

“I have to take this, sorry.”

She nipped out of the office and stood in the corridor.

“Brantley College,” said Winters, abrupt as ever. “Just outside Marburg.”

“I know it.”

“Another fire, another body. Seems to be a Professor Alan Whitman. Do you know the name?”

“The atheist theologian?”

“Similar MO, diesel as the accelerant. Nasty. Brief me.”

She clicked off. Kate leaned up against the wall for a moment. Despite her tiredness and the nagging pain in her shoulder, she felt the urge to get moving, to stay on the trail of this killer. She felt a kind of dread, too. The last murder came with a direct message to her.

And she felt sure that the killer had more to say.