Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

When we finished the pizza, I told Frank I wasn’t feeling great—still totally bummed about Julian’s suicide, I wasn’t faking it—and told him I was going home.

I didn’t go home.

Instead, I walked to the dark side of the shopping center’s parking lot, where I’d hidden the .22 on the way over to Frank’s, and crossed the street mid-block, away from any lights. The church itself was large, cavernous, and dimly lit, although as I had anticipated and hoped, at this time Friday night, it was empty of worshippers. Friday was not a normal confession night, and I didn’t really expect any of my fellow retreat members to be taking advantage of Father Hersey’s offer on what was every teenager’s date night.

There were four confessionals, but only the one at the back on my left had the little white light over the confessor’s door that indicated a priest was inside. The doors to the cubicles on either side of the priest’s had green lights over them, indicating that they both were empty.

I pulled the revolver from my belt where I’d hidden it under my letter jacket. Cocking the hammer, I opened the door and knelt down on the padded riser just in front of the sliding window that separated the penitents from the confessors.

That window slid open.

For a long beat, I could not force myself to move. I had been to confession at least twice a month for the past ten years, and every time I had begun with the words “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

This night, though, I was mute.

The figure on the other side of the screen leaned forward and came into my field of vision.

“Father Hersey?” I asked.

“Yes, my son.” No doubt he placed me correctly among the MOM students who’d taken part in his retreat. He came closer to the window. “It’s all right, whatever it is,” he whispered.

“I know.”

I put the muzzle of the gun against the screen of the window—three inches from his head—and pulled the trigger.

After spending most of a lifetime on the bench working in the criminal justice system, I should perhaps be surprised at how cleanly I got away with my one homicide. After all, my father himself was a cop. I was there the whole time he was investigating the case, and neither he nor his colleagues even once looked at me crooked, much less questioned me about my activities on that Friday night. Someone, it seems to me, should have had the instinct or intelligence to put together the ICBM moment at the retreat, Julian’s reaction to it and subsequent suicide, and Father Hersey’s murder, and at least come to ask me some questions. Especially since it was the only gunshot murder in our little town of Belmont during that entire year.

But no one did.

I finished high school at Mother of Mercy, went on to Santa Clara University, then Boalt Hall for my law degree. At thirty-six, I got appointed to the Superior Court in San Francisco, and four years ago, Obama made me a federal judge. Bonnie and I have raised four good young atheists of our own, and two of them have gone into the law as well. The other two are artists—a musician and a painter. Go figure.

Last week, I received my own nonprank death sentence—Stage Four pancreatic cancer—far enough advanced that they have sent me home for hospice. My doctor is a good guy who didn’t want to get my hopes up. He told me I might last another twenty days, tops.

One of the last remnants of my long-dead faith is a stubborn belief in the healing power of confession. I’ve seen hundreds of criminals in the course of my career give in to this basic need to admit the wrongs that they have done. In my case, I find it highly ironic that I don’t know what I would accept as the definition of “wrong.” All my life, I’ve acted and ruled as though murder was the ultimate crime, but I have committed murder and have no feelings of guilt about it. I would do it again tomorrow if the circumstances were the same.

And yet, something in me feels relief at this confession. I don’t need or ask for forgiveness. But someone should know what I did and why I did it.

That seems important.

And so does this: Julian, you are avenged.

At seven o’clock on an August morning, Fraulein Doktor Anna Klaas joined the crowds hurrying into Munich’s Central Railroad Station. In her mid-thirties, she was a pretty woman, with glossy black hair, large black eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, and porcelain skin that was a little too pale. She was dressed in a fitted brown jacket, a matching wool skirt, and sensible brown pumps. As if it were a talisman, she held her briefcase in both hands close in front of her. She walked purposefully.

The train station was the city’s largest. Handsomely rebuilt in modern architecture by Krupp, it’d opened only two years before, in 1960. Like nearly half of Munich’s buildings, its predecessor had been destroyed by Allied bombing. She could still feel the ground shuddering under her feet, hear the thunderous explosions in those last terrifying months.

Nervous, Anna glanced around the massive station. The spicy aroma of breakfast wurst drifted across the crowds. Long lines of commuters queued up for tickets. As the wood wheels of baggage carts rumbled across the floor, she headed down a short corridor, pushed into the ladies’ washroom, and waited. When the second stall from the window was empty, she entered and locked the door behind her. Opening her briefcase, she took out a playing card sliced in half. It was the five of diamonds. She crouched, reached behind the stool, and lodged it between the pipes. She flushed the toilet, left the stall, washed her hands, and walked out of the station.

Promptly at 7:55 a.m., Anna strode down Sendlinger Strasse in the Alstadt, Munich’s historic center. Tall cathedral spires loomed over her, gray against the cloudy sky. Tired and worried, she closed in on the eighteenth-century rococo building where she worked. The elegant brass sign announced Forschungszentrum Für Historische Landwirtschaft—Center for the Study of Historical Agriculture.

She climbed the granite steps and, forcing a pleasant smile, entered an expansive room, a library of some ten thousand books dealing with crops and practices of farming dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Passing antique reading tables and chairs, she skirted the carved wood counter.

A librarian was sorting through the card catalog. She looked up and smiled. “ Guten morgen , Fraulein Doktor.”

“ Morgen , Frau Schröder.”

Behind the librarian stood rows of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that extended to the back wall. Anna walked down the end aisle, opened a door labeled Mitarbeiterstab (“Staff”) and entered a short corridor. At the end, she reached a door that had no sign and no knob. She stopped.

A moment later the door swung inward, and she stepped into a secret world of scientists and engineers, technicians and secretaries. The hum of voices and the tap of typewriters sounded from open doors along the hallway. The agriculture library she’d just left was used primarily by scholarly researchers—but it was also a front for the work that went on here. She liked the irony of it—the research library celebrated the past, while this hidden research institution focused on the future.

The duty guard looked up from his desk. “ Willkommen , Fraulein Doktor.” He pushed a button, and the door swung closed behind her. Encircling his desk were screens displaying the corridors throughout the library and the research facility. Anna’s employer, Siemens AG, had pioneered the first closed circuit camera system, in 1946, so naturally the latest version was installed here.