Unholy City Read online

  She pressed her palms over her ears as if she could block out her own voice whispering terrible taunts in her mind: Your whole life is a lie. You deserve what you’re about to get.

  Meditate, Mother Anna would say. Acknowledge the thoughts and push them away. Don’t hold onto them. As if letting go was the easiest thing in the world to do. Susan had tried a few times, closing her eyes and attempting to focus her mind exclusively on her breathing, but she had not found relief from her guilty conscience.

  She walked into the kitchen she and Daniel had remodeled last summer. In less than six hours, she was supposed to be sitting across from the Grubers—Marilyn and Jack—in her consultation room. How could she possibly do that now?

  She opened the Sub-Zero and stared at the too-familiar items on their biweekly grocery list. Organic Greek yogurt. Kalamata olives. Coconut milk. She’d eaten nothing since the PowerBar she’d consumed on her way to the vestry meeting. But nothing on the racks whetted her appetite now.

  She sat on a stool at the island and stared out the window facing east. She looked at her phone, wishing for just a two- or three-word text message that would mean she was saved. But even if by some miracle her lies could be contained, there was her conscience to consider. How could she continue to live with herself?

  She stood and poured a glass of water from the tap. Her future could unfold in three ways. She could face exposure within the next few hours. She could live days or weeks in constant fear of eventual exposure. Or she could end the burden of waiting right now. None of the options were pleasant, but one would get things over more quickly.

  She set the glass on the granite counter and walked to the south end of the apartment, to the room that served as a study or guest suite. She stepped into the guest bathroom and turned on the faucet in the large whirlpool tub. Guests who stayed in this suite always marveled at the amenities, as if space and luxury were only available to suburbanites. She positioned her fingers in the flow of water and adjusted the temperature the way she liked her baths—warm, but not too hot.

  She removed her skirt and blouse and folded them neatly on the seat of the toilet. She slipped off her panties and was removing her bra when she remembered that what she needed for this bath wasn’t here. It was sitting on a shelf in the medicine cabinet of the master bathroom.

  She didn’t bother to wrap a towel around her body before she stepped out of the suite, walked past the closed doors of her sons, who were away at college, and entered the master bedroom. She stared at the empty bed where she and Daniel had slept together for the past twelve years. Daniel had been a warm and sensitive father to the boys she’d adopted between her first and second marriages, and she loved him deeply, but she hadn’t been honest with him, and now she would pay for that.

  She made her way to the bathroom, found what she needed there, and was back in the guest bathroom before the water had reached the halfway mark in the tub. When it reached the three-quarter level—she liked to immerse her shoulders when she bathed—she locked the door and stepped in.

  In the soothing warm water, Susan felt weightless. She closed her eyes. Certainly no one who knew about her childhood would have predicted that she would become a renowned physician, sought out by families all over the country. No one would have imagined that she would live in an apartment so exquisitely designed that it had been featured on an Architectural Digest cover. And then there were her sons. She’d traveled to Russia twice to bring them home. One was now a nationally ranked tennis player who had been recruited by Stanford, and the other was a talented pianist who studied at the Boston Conservatory. To the outside observer, her life was perfect. But this whole perfect life was built on a landfill of lies.

  Susan took a deep breath and pressed her husband’s straight razor against the translucent skin of her right wrist. This method of suicide ranked high on the agony scale and low on effectiveness, but she knew the secret of success. You had to slice half an inch deep, cutting through skin and tendons to reach the radial artery. You had to carve a deep, long trench from your inside wrist to the elbow joint. And if you wanted to be absolutely certain that you succeeded, you had to cut the other arm as well. You would not experience the dreamy death of a narcotics overdose. This death would hurt. But at least in death, you could show the courage you had lacked in life. This death would be a form of self-punishment and an apology to others.

  CHAPTER 24

  Roger Sturgis felt as acutely alert as he had driving across the Saudi desert at night. He rang the bell and pressed his ear to the apartment door. If someone was in there, he would hear them approach, and he would duck into the fire stairs before they saw him. But no footsteps sounded. No one was behind the door.

  He slid a well-worn key into the top lock and turned it. Bingo. He slipped the same key into the lower lock, and that one turned too. He was gripping the brass doorknob before it occurred to him that he was leaving a full set of his fingerprints for one of those crime scene guys to lift, and like all current and former military personnel, his prints were in the national database. He let go, reached in his pocket for his handkerchief, and carefully wiped the knob clean before he continued inside and closed the door behind him.

  He stood in the darkness and checked the time on his iPhone. He had to do this fast. He flicked on his iPhone flashlight. Only hours ago, this little beam had illuminated the face of Philip in the St. Paul’s garden. Now it would light his way to whatever evidence the man had stored here.

  Roger stepped lightly over creaking floorboards as he followed the light through a narrow entry passage. Inches before he collided with a wall, he turned left and the passage opened into a room. Two sets of windows on the opposite wall looked out on the northwest corner of Amsterdam Avenue. Light filtered into the room from the street below, and the full moon rising over the rooftop of Columbia Teacher’s College made him feel as if this mission were sanctioned by some higher power. Not God, he thought quickly, but fate. Whatever that was. Fate was on his side. Things were going to work out.

  The windows were shut, and a heavy odor of curry hung in the stagnant air. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, the living room came into focus. What it lacked in square footage, it made up for in prewar ceiling height. A couch was pressed against the wall to his right. The far cushion, next to a side table and lamp, had been flattened by overuse. Apparently Philip sat his pompous ass in that spot, and it never occurred to him to rotate or flip the cushions.

  On a low coffee table in front of the couch was a Styrofoam takeout container. Roger moved closer. One uneaten shrimp lay in a puddle of curry sauce. A used fork rested beside a mound of basmati rice. Grains of that rice and shrimp were in Philip’s stomach right now, Roger thought.

  He looked from the container to the stack of books on the table next to the couch. These were the predictable titles of a twentieth-century Cold War scholar: The Cambridge History of the Cold War, The Rise and Fall of Communism, The Crisis Years. Even during vestry meetings, Philip had peppered his remarks with lessons learned from two superpowers overanalyzing each other. He liked to quote Reinhold Niebuhr’s warning to governments to not try to play God to history, but Graves had never faced an incoming Scud missile. He was a boorish blowhard who liked to show how intelligent he was. And although he warned against playing God to history, hadn’t he tried to play God to the church’s future?

  Roger scanned the rest of the room. What exactly was he looking for, and would he know when he saw it?

  The window in Philip’s bedroom faced an air shaft. How could this be the home of a tenured Columbia professor who’d written five or six books and spoke all over college campuses in the United States and abroad? Roger remembered Philip once bitterly describing the spacious apartment he and his wife had purchased together three years before their divorce. “I got screwed. That place has probably tripled in value since she bought me out,” he’d said with obvious resentment.

  Roger closed the curtain and twisted the dimmer switch on a halogen l
amp in the corner to a low light he judged would go unnoticed beyond the curtains. As he stepped away from the lamp, he realized that he’d just left another set of fingerprints and quickly took out his handkerchief again to wipe the switch.

  The modern black lacquer desk by the window did not suit the space at all. Stacks of loose papers and books covered the left and right sides. The inside of a Columbia University mug was stained by coffee. A pair of vintage Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro bobbleheads grimaced up at him with bright-red puckered lips. The words “Kissin Kuzzins” appeared on the base of each bobblehead. Roger stared at the messy desktop. The proof had to be here.

  He examined the papers in the left stack—student essays, photocopied and stapled readings, magazines, and journals. He pulled a folder from the bottom of the stack and began to read the opening chapter of a novel Philip was apparently writing. After two paragraphs, he flung it onto the seat of the desk chair. You pretentious dilettante, he thought. Using his handkerchief to avoid leaving prints, he opened each desk drawer and looked inside. He was contemplating where else to look when his iPhone screen lit up with the image of Kendra, and the vibrating phone slipped out of his hand and crashed onto Philip’s laptop keyboard, causing it to come to life. Roger lifted the phone. Shit. He’d meant to call Kendra. Had she already spoken to someone else at the church?

  He took a deep breath before he accepted the call. “Yeah, babe.”

  “I’ve been calling and calling you, Roger.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. My phone was on silent.”

  “Where are you? It’s almost three.”

  “You didn’t call Vivian?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t pick up either.”

  He took a deep breath of relief. And she hadn’t gone to the church either, he told himself. She wouldn’t have done that, not with Charlotte sleeping. Kendra was taking her new role as a mother very seriously. “I’m still at the church. Something bad has happened. Philip and Emily are dead.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  He gave her the basic facts. “I’ll be able to tell you more in the morning—before I go to the airport. Now get some sleep. I’ll be home very soon. Don’t worry about me.”

  He hung up and stared at the illuminated password screen of Philip Graves’s laptop.

  CHAPTER 25

  The restroom stall was cramped, the hot and cold faucet levers squeaked, and the clear plastic soap dispenser was filled with pink liquid that Codella recognized as generic-brand hand soap. She cupped cold water in her palms and splashed it onto her cheeks. Then she dried her face and hands on a paper towel and stared into the mirror. For someone who’d been up for twenty-one hours, she didn’t look too terrible, she decided.

  She pushed some hair out of her eyes and turned away from the mirror. As she made her way through the corridor, out the door, and down the steps to the garden, she thought about the three vestry members she’d spoken with. Roger Sturgis had tried to rattle her with overt sexual provocations. Susan Bentley’s cautious, controlled answers had made her thoughts and emotions difficult to read. Peter Linton had been an open book of anger and resentment. Hardly anyone had mentioned Emily Flounders, and no one expressed the slightest sorrow for Philip Graves. Codella could only conclude that they hadn’t liked the senior vestry warden, but had one of them killed him?

  She ducked under the crime scene tape cordoning off Emily Flounders’s minivan. In the years she’d known Rudolph Gambarin, she had seen him maneuver through thick brambles in Central Park, slide down slippery rocks to the edge of the Hudson River, and crawl into dumpsters of rotting garbage to lay claim to corpses. Now the small-boned medical examiner had turned contortionist, fitting his body inside the front seat of the minivan without disturbing the body. Codella was watching him run a bright flashlight over the dead woman’s hair, face, and neck when Muñoz appeared at her side. As he filled her in on the two death notifications he’d delivered, Sergeant Zamora approached.

  “Hey, Detective, can I speak to you?”

  Codella turned, and Zamora stepped closer. “We just found a guy wandering around on the second floor of the church.” Zamora pointed over his left shoulder.

  Codella looked past him toward a tall man standing next to another officer on the sidewalk twenty feet away. A small child was in his arms. “Who the hell is he?”

  “He says he’s the rector’s husband. What do you want me to do with him?”

  Codella walked over to the man. In the glare from the crime scene lights, she could see that his hair was light brown and his skin was pale, but his eyes were dark. He looked part Asian. “Something bad has happened, hasn’t it?” he asked.

  Codella ignored the question. “What’s your name?”

  “Todd Brookes,” he said. “I’m married to the rector.”

  “Who let you into the church, Mr. Brookes?”

  “No one,” he said.

  “Are you saying you didn’t come through the gate?”

  “No. I came through a door from the rectory into the garden.”

  Codella frowned. “What door? Show me.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, now,” she said.

  Codella and Muñoz followed Todd along the sidewalk past the south gate. They climbed the front steps of the rectory and watched him unlock the door. He gestured them inside as he flipped a light switch, illuminating the spacious parlor level of the brownstone. Without a word, he led them across herringbone parquet floors into a large kitchen with a door that led to a side stair and a garden exit.

  “Who has access to this staircase and door?”

  “Just Anna and me—we have the first two floors of the rectory—and Mr. Curtis, the church janitor. He lives in one of the top-floor apartments. The other apartment is empty right now. The choir director moved out a few months ago.”

  Codella stepped through the door and into the dark night. Straight ahead of her were spiked wrought-iron bars of a fence separating the north side of the church from the sidewalk beyond. She rounded a corner and found herself in the garden, staring at the spot—not twenty-five feet away—where Philip Graves had fallen. Beyond that was the stone path that led to the parish house entrance on the south side of the church.

  Codella turned back to the rectory door. “Where have you been this evening, Mr. Brookes?”

  “Right here,” he said. “At home.”

  “Alone?”

  “With my son.” He glanced down at the small child sleeping against his chest.

  “Did you not hear the emergency vehicles arrive?”

  Todd shook his head. “After I put Christopher down, I took a shower and went to bed. My allergies have been crazy this spring. I took an antihistamine.”

  “What brought you into the church just now?”

  “Anna wasn’t in bed when I got up to use the bathroom.”

  Codella studied his face. His dark eyes were close together in a way that made you want to keep staring into them. She smiled. “Wait here, please, Mr. Brookes.” Then she gestured for Muñoz to step outside. She led him around the corner and toward the crime scene where they could not be observed or overheard. “Take him into the Blue Lounge. Play it nice and calm—a routine interview—but find out everything he’s done since that vestry meeting started.”

  “Got it,” said Muñoz.

  “And don’t let him utter a syllable to his wife or anyone else.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Anna stared at Stephanie Lund’s blue hair. Vivian, Roger, Susan, and Peter had gone now, and the part-time choir director was the only other person in the Community Room except for the yawning police officer propped against the wall of windows. How much longer would it be before the detectives got to her? She thought of Todd in their bed next door, unconscious and unsuspecting. She visualized Christopher sleeping soundly in his little bed. And then she pictured Philip’s dead body for the hundredth time. Seeing it sprawled on the stones had forced her to acknowledge—to name—her feelings for him. She h
ad loved him—or at the very least, she had loved the idea of loving him, and she had wanted him with a hunger no amount of prayer, Christian fellowship, or sexual fantasizing would have extinguished. If Philip hadn’t died tonight, and if he’d extended even a subtle invitation for more, she would have given herself to him, she knew, ignoring all the warnings drummed into her in seminary and yearly Safe Church training sessions.

  She rested her elbows on the round table and buried her face in her warm palms. She found it tempting to think that God had intervened to remove her temptation and save her from a career and marriage-ending mistake. But that would mean God had taken two lives to save hers from ruin. That preposterous—and narcissistic—thought contradicted everything she believed. God was not a puppet master sitting on a heavenly cloud staring down at earth and pulling the strings of individual lives. She thought of God more like the C. S. Lewis quote she had once highlighted: “God created things which had free will.” Human beings had to choose the path toward God over and over. They made wrong choices all the time. In her four years at St. Paul’s, how many parishioners had confessed their guilty consciences in her office? She knew all too well that when they left her, they would repeat those same offenses again and again. They came to her for temporary relief, for permission to be imperfect. Why couldn’t she give herself that same permission?

  She stared at Stephanie Lund’s mascara-lined eyes. What could a man possibly find attractive about her heavily made-up face and the buzz cut on one side of her head? When Stephanie noticed her staring, Anna quickly dropped her gaze. The choir director probably wondered what any man would find attractive about her too, she realized. The silence between the two women grew, and Anna knew she had to say something. “How are you holding up?” she asked.