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  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Stephanie replied. “I mean, two people? Right here?”

  Anna wanted to tell her that Philip and Emily were not just two people. What did Stephanie know about them? She was just a part-time employee with no stake in the church or its people. She would go home tonight having an interesting story to tell, but her life wouldn’t be altered in any measurable way by what had happened.

  Of course, Anna couldn’t say any of that. “Yes. It’s terrible,” she agreed. “I can’t believe it either.”

  She folded her hands on the table. She remembered Philip’s voice last night when he’d phoned her at home and asked, “Did Peter call you yet, Anna?” Philip was the only vestry member who didn’t preface Anna with Mother when he spoke to her.

  “How did you know he called me?”

  “He’s calling everyone on the vestry tonight. He’s lining up votes for his cemetery proposal, and I want to caution you.” His voice had been a silky whisper, and she’d wished she could crawl through the phone to get to it. “He’s not an evil guy,” Philip acknowledged. “He’s not like some of the backstabbing vestry members we had when you first got here, but we have a little problem with him. I’ll stop by the church tomorrow and fill you in. It’s complicated. I’m going to need your help at the meeting.”

  Philip had spoken with an intimacy that made her feel calm despite his news. She knew he would take care of things. He always had—ever since she’d come to St. Paul’s. Without his “hand of God,” she wouldn’t even be the church’s rector. Four and a half years ago, when the search committee had narrowed the field to two finalists, he’d confided, “I know you’re the right leader for this church, and I’m going to help you.”

  They’d met for coffee at Edgar’s Café, and he’d told her, “Some of the vestry members are still undecided. Vivian Wakefield, our junior churchwarden, wants to meet you again. She’s very influential.”

  “She’s the older African American woman,” Anna had remembered out loud as she raised her cup to her lips. Her hand was shaking slightly, and she steadied the cup with her other hand.

  “That’s right. She’s been a St. Paul’s member since birth, and many people, particularly our black parishioners, look up to her. If she endorses you, so will her followers. But there’s one small catch. The other finalist is black. He’ll certainly use that to his advantage. What will your advantage be?”

  In the silence after his question, Anna recalled now, she’d heard the hiss of steam from the espresso machine behind the café bar. She’d studied Philip’s windblown hair. When he smiled, the lines in the outer corners of his eyes made him look boyish, although she guessed he was in his early fifties. He touched the edge of her hand for just an instant, and the touch traveled up her arm like an injection of some powerful, euphoria-inducing drug. “I don’t know,” she finally said.

  He leaned in. The smell of his citrus cologne made her want him even closer. “Listen carefully,” he said. “Your advantage will be your underdog status. You’re going to make Vivian Wakefield determined to help you.”

  “How?”

  “By making her see that you are just like her deceased son.”

  “But I don’t even know her son.”

  “Get her to talk about him. It won’t be difficult.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

  Then Philip sat back in the wrought-iron chair and smiled again. “That’s all you need. The rest is up to you.”

  Anna’s thoughts flashed to Vivian at the meeting tonight, her head held high as the conversation became more and more heated. She had held her head like that when Anna met with her four years ago. Like Anna, Vivian’s son had been ordained five years before. He had served interim posts as an associate rector in three cities while searching for a permanent position, and he’d finally given up the search and accepted a pastoral counseling position in New Orleans. “He was killed by a drunk driver in the French Quarter six months ago,” Vivian told Anna in a voice hardened to conceal her sorrow.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” Anna told her.

  “I would have liked to see him interview for the St. Paul’s rectorship.” The junior churchwarden smiled wistfully. “But he went where the Lord wanted him to be, and now God has called him home.”

  For some reason, a quotation from Proverbs came into Anna’s mind. “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans,” she whispered just loud enough for Vivian to hear. She told the older woman she had taken comfort in this quotation during her long and so far unsuccessful search for a parish. “The seminary prepares us as spiritual servants, but it doesn’t really prepare us for the politics of finding a place to serve. I sincerely hope you find the right rector for St. Paul’s.”

  By listening to Philip’s counsel, Anna had won Vivian’s vote, and she had listened carefully to his advice ever since, including last night. But now he was gone, and she felt unmoored. How was she going to get through this? How was she going to make critical decisions for this church without him?

  She jerked her head up when she heard footsteps approach. Detective Haggerty appeared in the doorway. “Stephanie Lund,” he called out, “can you come with me please?”

  CHAPTER 27

  Muñoz closed the Blue Lounge door behind them. “Have a seat, Mr. Brookes.”

  Todd Brookes frowned. “Where’s my wife? Is my wife okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Muñoz assured him. “Please. Have a seat.” He smiled.

  Todd held his arms around his sleeping child. He didn’t sit. “No one’s told me what happened. Why are all these police officers here? I saw lights in the garden and a group of people around a van.”

  “Two people have died, Mr. Brookes. We’re speaking to everyone who was here tonight. We need your—”

  “Who?” Todd interrupted. “Who died?”

  Muñoz controlled his irritation. Play it nice and calm, Codella had instructed. “The vestry warden, Philip Graves, and one of the vestry members, Emily Flounders.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Todd closed his eyes and shook his head. Muñoz debated whether the gestures were spontaneous or calculated. He couldn’t tell. People reacted in many ways when they heard shocking news. “How did it happen?”

  “Sit down, Mr. Brookes. I need you to answer my questions. I need your help right now.”

  “Of course.” Todd lowered himself to the couch in slow motion, as if the slightest jolt would wake his child. He shifted the small boy onto the middle cushion next to him and propped his head with a throw pillow. The boy’s mouth hung open, Muñoz noticed. He was sleeping very soundly.

  “You were on the second floor of the church when Sergeant Zamora found you, is that right? How did you get up there without one of our officers seeing you?”

  Todd shrugged. “I came in through the north entrance. I would have come through the garden to the south entrance, but when I came out of the rectory, there were so many people standing around.”

  “The north entrance is where the homeless guests enter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It wasn’t locked?” asked Muñoz.

  “It was, but I used the spare keys Anna keeps at home.”

  “You brought the keys with you when you left the rectory?”

  “No. I went back for them when I saw all the police in the garden.”

  Muñoz jotted notes and gave no reaction. “How long were you in the parish house before Sergeant Zamora saw you?”

  Todd shrugged. “I don’t know. Not long. A couple of minutes, I guess. Why?”

  Muñoz’s instinct to seriously grill the man kicked in. Why did you go to so much trouble to avoid those police officers? Why didn’t you go up to them and ask what was happening? Were you looking for something? What are you hiding? Instead, he leaned forward, looked at the worn Blue Lounge carpet, and shook his head like a man desperate for help. “You know this place, Mr. Brookes. You know these people. We’ve g
ot two probable homicides. Did you see anything while the rest of these witnesses were holed up in their meeting? Tell me everything you did from the moment you entered the building.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Codella wasn’t at all pleased as she returned to the parish house. If Zamora’s officers had failed to notice the door leading from the rectory to the garden, what else had they overlooked? This was an old church, and for all she knew, it contained secret rooms, hidden passageways, and any number of other unmarked egresses a murderer could have used. She walked into the Community Room where Anna Brookes now sat alone. “I’d like you to give me a tour of the church, Rector,” she said in an amiable voice she hoped concealed her irritation.

  The “tour” began on the first floor. The rector used her ring of keys to unlock each small first-floor staff office. She led Codella to the large commercial kitchen where Vivian Wakefield had reportedly rinsed out the tea service and where, according to Haggerty, Rose Bartruff had made a surreptitious phone call. From there, they entered the “dish room,” where tall stacks of restaurant-style dinner plates, bowls, serving platters, and glassware sat on painted shelves. “We host a pasta dinner for the congregation once a month, and we serve two hundred or more homeless people supper every Saturday,” the rector explained as if she needed to justify the massive inventory of tableware.

  Down a side corridor from the kitchen was the church’s nursery, equipped with three cribs, a round ABC rug, and shelves of toys. Codella stood by a counter just inside the door, reading a note posted in a clear acrylic sign holder: “Parents, please sign in and tell us your pew row in case we need to find you during the service!” On the counter below this note was a clipboard with a sign-in sheet.

  They left the nursery and passed the restrooms, and the rector pulled open a heavy wooden door that led into the St. Paul’s nave. Codella stepped inside, and the first thing she noticed was the cool still air. Then she heard the silence. The expression “pregnant silence” came to mind as she looked around. She had never considered herself a religious person. She did not pray—although she’d allowed a hospital chaplain to pray at her bedside while she was hospitalized for cancer—and she didn’t believe in an idyllic afterlife, a “heaven.” Still, there was no denying the energy she felt in this space.

  She walked to the front of the nave, stopped just below the steps to the chancel, and stared down the central aisle between the symmetrical rows of pews. She gazed up at the high barrel-vaulted ceiling. This was no ostentatious Cathedral of St. John’s the Divine, advertising its grandeur to the world. This was a hidden gateway to the divine, camouflaged from the street—a holy rift in an unholy city, she thought. And although she didn’t miss the Catholic masses of her childhood, she could understand why stressed-out Upper West Siders would gravitate to this sacred space on a Sunday morning.

  In the low light, she strained to make out the stained-glass depictions of Christ and his disciples in the lancet windows to her left and right. On Sunday mornings, she supposed, the sun would shine iridescently through these intricate panels and make worshippers feel exalted. She turned to the rector. “You have a beautiful church.” And then her eyes moved to the staircase on the left side of the nave, and she walked toward it.

  At the top of those stairs, Codella found herself in a corridor with several doors on either side. She turned to the left and entered what appeared to be a library. Dark bookshelves lined two of the walls. Identical blue spines across three of the shelves all read, “Holy Bible.” A portable chalkboard stood at one end of a scratched rectangular table that dominated the center of the room. “Our fifth- and sixth-grade Sunday school class meets here,” explained the rector.

  In a larger room directly across the hall were three low kidney-shaped tables and matching diminutive chairs. Another Sunday school room, Codella presumed, and she imagined small children piling in here to learn Bible stories. In the year following her father’s murder conviction and incarceration—when she was eleven—her first foster family had taken her to mass every Sunday without fail, as if they feared her father’s crime had tarnished her soul. They also enrolled her in a new school, St. Ann’s Catholic Prep, where an older nun named Sister Mary Catherine placed herself in charge of Codella’s salvation. Like the other students, Codella was assigned Biblical verses to memorize and recite, and all the verses assigned to her were harsh reminders that mortal sins—like the murder her father had committed—would consign her to eternal damnation. Codella recalled some of those verses now: “Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death . . . The soul who sins shall die . . . Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” Sister Mary Catherine of course conveniently overlooked all the Biblical passages that sanctioned the killing of nonbelievers.

  The rector led Codella into and out of two more Sunday school classrooms. As they headed toward the second-floor reception hall, Codella pointed to a closed door on her right. “What’s in there?”

  “Oh, that’s just a storeroom for the Sunday school supplies.”

  “I’d like to see it,” said Codella.

  The door wasn’t locked, and the rector opened it and switched on the light, revealing a walk-in closet about twenty feet deep. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves on either side of the little room held every craft supply imaginable. Codella stepped in and ran her eyes over plastic bins containing markers, crayons, glue sticks, and safety scissors. She noted stacks of construction paper and clear plastic bags of Noah’s ark stencils, minicrosses, and plastic lanyard string. And then something caught her attention.

  Codella pulled her phone from her pocket as she backed out of the closet. “I’m afraid I have to cut our tour short.” She gestured apologetically to the phone in her hand. “Would you mind waiting for me in the Community Room? I’ll find you there as soon as I can.”

  She gave the rector time to return to the Community Room. Then she rushed outside and found the lead CSU investigator standing on the street near the hood of Emily Flounders’s minivan. The hatchback and all four doors were open, and investigators wearing disposable jumpsuits were dusting for prints under harsh spotlights. She called out to him, “Can you come with me, Banks? I need to show you something.”

  “Fuck, Codella.” Banks’s face was a silent plea for sympathy. “Tell me there’s not another body.”

  “There’s not a third body,” she assured him.

  “Then what?”

  “Just come with me.”

  Banks followed her back inside and up to the second floor. Codella stopped in front of the supply closet door and tugged on a pair of nitrile gloves before she grasped the doorknob. She pointed to some fine granules of sediment on the tiles a few feet inside.

  Banks looked where she was pointing. “Yeah? So what? Anyone could have tracked dirt in here.”

  “Yeah, but not just anyone did.” Codella took out her iPhone and photographed the debris. She pointed to the back left corner of the closet. “Go all the way in and look in the little pocket of space between the shelves and the wall,” she told him.

  Banks stepped in and peered behind the high wall of metal shelving into the tiny alcove of space. He looked back with a sober expression that told her he’d seen the garden shovel propped in the corner and understood its significance. Then he dropped to his hands and knees, and she knew he was examining the rusty-colored blood on the back of the steel shovel blade. When he finally stood up, he whispered, “Looks like you found the murder weapon.”

  “I just don’t get why it’s here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If these deaths were the work of a random person outside the church, they wouldn’t have come all the way up here and found this closet. The fact that this shovel is here points to an inside job. But if I were a church member who just killed someone, why would I bother to take the shovel upstairs and stash it here? I’d leave it at the scene so the police might think an outsider was responsible.”

  “Unless you kn
ew your prints were on that shovel, and you didn’t have time to wipe it clean, so you stashed it here hoping to find a more permanent resting place for it later.”

  Codella nodded. “Could be.”

  “Or the killer panicked and didn’t think things through.”

  She smiled at him. “Why did you go into forensics, Banks? You’d have made a good detective.”

  “People are too complicated,” he said as they stepped back into the hall. Codella closed the closet door, and Banks asked, “How much longer before you’re done taking statements?”

  “We should be done within the hour,” she said.

  “Okay. Then we lock down this whole church and go through it with a fine-tooth comb tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 29

  “What time did you arrive at St. Paul’s tonight, Miss Lund?” Haggerty knew he sounded more like an interrogator than interviewer, but he was tired of asking the same questions and getting the same answers.

  Stephanie Lund cleared her throat. “Around eight o’clock, I guess.”

  “What brought you here?”

  “The Hook and Hastings,” she said.

  “The what?”

  “I’m sorry. The church organ. It has a hundred stops and five manuals.”

  Haggerty looked at her blankly.

  “Keyboards. Five keyboards. I’m still getting used to them. I’ve only been at St. Paul’s a couple of months. I was practicing the processional hymn for Palm Sunday. I was in the choir loft for about an hour,” she volunteered. “And then I went to the piano in the second-floor reception hall. That’s where the choir usually rehearses.”

  “What hymn did you practice?”

  “Hymn one fifty-four,” she answered without hesitation. “‘All Glory, Laud, and Honor.’”