Dan O'Shea - Penance

“At that distance, with that weapon and in that wind? No, sir. There are only a few who could have made the shot at all, with anything.”

“So he shoots an old lady coming out of church just for kicks.”

“A Catholic church?”

“Yeah.”

“Had she just attended the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation?”

“Reconciliation? What the fuck is that?”

“The sacrament previously known as confession. The victim in Wisconsin had just left reconciliation.”

“Don’t know. We’ll check. But that feels like something. Fisher had the Jesus bug pretty bad.” Weaver stopped for a moment, rubbed his face. It had been a long day, and there was the prospect of longer days to come.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, sir.” Chen pulled another small envelope from her pocket. The envelope held two tiny electronic devices: a camera half the size of a pencil eraser and a transmitter smaller than that, two thin wires sticking out of it like antennae. “These are our most advanced audio and video surveillance options. I found the audio transmitter wedged into the molding inside one of the confessional booths in the church the victim had just left. The camera was affixed to the bottom of the last row of pews. The camera was directed at the door of the booth in which the transmitter was hidden.”

“You check with Paravola?” Tom Paravola headed InterGov’s technical section.

“Thirty sets of these units are missing.”

“So we can assume another set is sitting in the church in Chicago just waiting to get us in this up to our asses. Locals tumble on those, nobody’s going to think they came from Radio Shack.”

“Yes, sir. Their discovery would prove problematic.”

Weaver thought for a moment. “Get to Chicago, Chen, but I don’t want you anywhere near that church. Let’s get a local on this. Who’s that guy we used on the University of Chicago break-in down there? Villanueva? See if we can get to him. This goes south, I don’t want our fingerprints on it.”

“Yes, sir. I will make arrangements. Is there anything else?”

“Bring Ferguson up to speed, will you? Tell him to get a team together by tomorrow, get the war wagon loaded up. We need to get Fisher inside a body bag before some cop gets his mitts on him. If Fisher decides to start answering questions, well, that would add up to better than thirty years of the wrong sorts of answers.”

“Yes, sir.”

Weaver sat alone in the office, nursing a drink. Hide and seek with Ishmael Fisher, Ferguson was gonna love this one.

Weaver closed the files on his desk and put them in the drawer. Lease renewal two months out, request from research for another $150,000 in computer shit, open enrollment for the health plan coming up. Couldn’t think with all that crap in front of him. Needed to get a line on Fisher.

OK, Fisher was driving almost certainly. Just too hard to hide traveling by air now. Also — ten days between Wisconsin and Chicago, so he was taking his time. If he had slipped his moorings, and Weaver was pretty sure Fisher was well away from the dock at this point, there wasn’t anything wrong with his navigation. Everything aboard the SS Fisher was battened down and squared away. Just working off a new set of charts was all. Charts from Mars or somewhere.

Get PsyOps back on it, of course. See if the behavioral witch doctors could get a reading. They were right more often than Weaver expected them to be, but he still didn’t trust that psychic hotline bullshit.

Two killings, though. So that gave him two dots to string together. Enough to start looking for a pattern. Weaver punched up the two churches on the computer, plotted them on GPS. Dot two was damn near exactly due south of dot one — within yards of due south of dot one. OK, that’s odd. Could be a one-in-360-degree coincidence, but at least it was a place to start. Something about Fisher’s moral rigidity and an exact north-south line resonated with Weaver. He sent an email down to research.

Needed to muddy up the waters, too. Dot one was working out. Locals didn’t have squat, and they weren’t going to find the slug or the electronics now.

He had Eddie Marslovak attached to dot two. Guy with that kind of money, those kinds of connections… Weaver figured they could play the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game with him pretty easy. Wouldn’t be too hard to put some stink on him, to get the cops interested. It’d fall apart, but Weaver didn’t need a conviction, he just needed time.

Weaver’s to-do list was getting crowded. Get research to expand their parameters on the Fisher search. See what they could do about grabbing any public video — ATM cameras, security cameras, toll booth cameras, traffic cameras. Chicago was pretty wired up. Run all that through the recognition software, see if anything comes up. What else? Toss Fisher’s place again, couldn’t hurt. He must have squirreled away some identities, he couldn’t be doing all this on cash.

Weaver wondered what Fisher’s old man would have made of all this. Ezekiel Amos Fisher had been Weaver’s mentor. Zeke had started in the OSS. After Buchenwald, he’d gone zealot, convinced you had to fight evil with evil. Weaver remembered when he’d joined the team, right after Korea, Zeke going on about the just war doctrine, whatever Catholic shit that was, about how violence was only justified when it prevented a greater harm. For Zeke, Communism was the greatest harm imaginable. Which meant Zeke would do anything as long as it hurt the Reds more than it hurt Uncle Sam. Now Zeke’s kid had popped a couple civilians, one of them in Chicago. Zeke Fisher and the FBI COUNTERINTELPRO guys had done some shit in Chicago back in the day, playing ball with Hurley and his Red Squad. There was the Hampton raid, where Zeke helped the FBI tee up the Chicago Black Panther party and let the Chicago cops butcher them in their beds. And there was the other thing. Weaver didn’t want to think about the other thing just yet. But Fisher killing people in Chicago? Weaver didn’t close this down fast, Clarke would really start wetting his drawers.

Weaver was not just leery of the upcoming Ides of March, he was having his doubts about the entire fucking month. And April was looking very cruel indeed.

February, 1971

“Jesus, Stosh, I know you’d stick your dick in a light socket if you thought you’d get away with it, but this is fucking nuts,” Riley said, looking down at the bodies.

Hastings Clarke stood by the door watching Riley. Clarke hated Riley. Hated the big, round Irish head, the massive shoulders, the ill-fitting suit, the too-short tie on the slope of the unapologetic gut. He hated Riley as the venial representation of everything wrong with the city. When Clarke came west to join the Hurley dynasty, he found not corruption as a rash overlying the sound skeleton of government but a body politic completely rotted through. Urbs in Horto , City in a Garden, was Chicago’s official motto. But Qua Mei? was its operating principle. Where’s mine?

Clarke understood self-interest. He’d met David Hurley, Jr at Yale Law and had seen the Chicago opportunity early. The East Coast was complicated. You had Kennedys and Tafts and Roosevelts. Dozens of old-line links to power, all with money and connections, all from the same schools, all looking for a way in. Clarke’s family was in the mix, of course, New York money back to the Revolution. But in Chicago, one family ran an entire state. David Hurley was going to be Clarke’s shortcut to the head of the class. Clarke went back to Chicago with David, ran his campaign for DA, served in his office, and now ran his campaign for the US Senate. Clarke would use his family money and contacts to ease Hurley onto the national stage. Then Hurley would back Clarke in Illinois. Maybe a congressional seat next cycle. Maybe Hurley would make a play for governor and Clarke would move to the senate. While his prep-school cronies were still angling for some backwater undersecretary slot, Clarke would be on the lead lap.