Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"I don't know about that girl," Lyle said.

"Woman." Russ picked up the sheets and shuffled back to the first one. "She'll do fine. She's coming along."

"I got two kids older'n she is. That makes her a girl in my book."

"Yeah? Your hunting rifle is older than Kevin. Doesn't make him a Remington."

Kevin quivered to attention. "Anything else, Chief? You want me to check out St. Alban's for you?"

"No, thank you, Kevin. I'll handle that myself." He ignored Lyle's huff of amusement. "See you tomorrow."

Kevin left with a great deal more reluctance than Hadley Knox had shown. When it was down to just the two of them, Russ let his feet wander to the big worktable. He hitched himself up onto its top. "Sister Lucia's van-" he stopped. Shook his head. "A van with a load of Hispanic men gets shot in April."

Lyle crossed to the whiteboard and wrote it down.

"Also, sometime in March or April, Rosario de las Cruces is killed in Cossayuharie."

"Or dumped there."

Russ nodded acknowledgment. "In May, Hadley and Kevin run across a carload of Punta Diablo gang members."

Lyle jotted on the board.

"End of June, Amado Esfuentes is kidnapped and his residence is searched."

"If that kid was a gangbanger, I'll eat my shorts."

"We agree on that." Russ tapped the circ sheets and arrest papers against his chin. "Maybe we're looking at this from the wrong end. What if it's not a power struggle?"

Lyle shrugged. "I dunno. I like that idea. It fits."

"It fits de las Cruces. It doesn't fit Esfuentes. Or the van shooting. What if what we're dealing with is the fallout from an intergang rivalry? Something happened. Maybe involving the older, unidentified bodies. And now what we're seeing is a hunt for witnesses."

Lyle squinted at the ceiling for a moment. "Possible." He glanced at the whiteboard. "A witness who has physical evidence. Money, the.357 Magnum, and this could-be list of distributors."

"You think I'm barking up the wrong tree with that? They were just looking for money when they tossed Clare's place?"

"Nope. Ten thousand's a lot to you and me, but if we're talking guys who import junk wholesale, it's penny ante. Job money, for the driver."

"Shut-up money?"

"Maybe. What's the definition of an honest politician?"

Russ smiled a bit. "One who stays bought. I take your point." He slid off the table. "I'm going over to St. Alban's. Maybe I'll find this mystery list and you and I can stop chasing our tails."

Russ expected his deputy's usual lazy assent and was surprised when Lyle stopped him with a hand to his arm. "We should call Ben Beagle tomorrow. Catch him up on some of this and tell him that we've searched the church and the rectory and come up empty-handed."

"What? Why?"

"Because." Lyle looked dead serious. "When the Punta Diablo boys figure out Esfuentes might have hidden something at St. Alban's, they'll be over there themselves."

"What are we looking for?" Clare asked.

"I don't know." Russ frowned at the bookcase taking up one wall of her office. "Something that doesn't have anything to do with Jesus or the Episcopal church, I guess."

She pulled one of her Lindsay Davis mysteries off the shelf and handed it to him.

"Or Roman history," he said. "Smart-ass." He looked at her with a mixture of amusement and exasperation. He had been in what she'd have described as a fey mood since he arrived; restless, upbeat, talkative.

"It could be a journal or a diary or a notebook. I suppose it could even be a few papers stapled together."

"We ought to start in the office, then. There are a lot more bits and pieces there." She led him into the main office. He groaned when he saw the bookcase built into the wall. It ran from the doorway to the corner, ceiling to floor, filled with ledgers and books and file boxes and three-ring binders.

"It's a church. What the heck do you do that generates so much paperwork?"

She almost laughed. "Let's split the job. Do you want here or my office?"

"I'll tackle this."

She retreated back to her own bookcase, grateful for the space between them and resenting it at the same time. He shouted out questions now and then: "What's a proposed canonical amendment?… Did you know you have minutes to meetings from 1932?"-while she worked her way across her shelves.

She had removed and replaced everything on her bookcase and was considering the feasibility of checking the coloring books and picture Bibles in the nursery when Russ charged up the hall with a spiral-bound notebook in his hand. He flipped it open to show her the printed entries: names, dates, numbers.

"Sorry," she said, taking it from him. "This is the overflow baptismal registry." She walked back to the main office and eased an oversized leather-bound volume from its place on the middle shelf. BAPTISMS was impressed in gold leaf deep into its cover. "We need to buy another one of these, but they're ridiculously expensive." She opened it. "See? Name of the baptized, godparents or sponsors, date, age at baptism. Celebrant's initials." R.H.D.D., in the entry she was pointing to. "Robert Hames, Doctor of Divinity," she said.

He glanced at the notebook. It was arranged identically, although, without the example of the bound baptism record, the entries looked like strings of names. "C.F.M.D." she said. "Clare Fergusson, Master of Divinity."

"How come you don't just put down your name? Or 'The Rev. C.F.'?"

"I don't know. It was the first time I've ever been in charge of a baptismal registry. I just copied what the last guy did."

He snorted. "That's probably the origin of half the traditions you Episcopalians are so gung-ho about. Just copying what the last guy did."

"Mm-hmm. Which doesn't sound like much until you try to do something differently. How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?"

"Uh. I don't know. How many?"

" What ? Change the lightbulb?"

He laughed, which she appreciated, since it was a very old joke. "I didn't find anything," she went on. "We've got some odds and ends in the nursery. Do you want me to look there?"

"I guess." He replaced the heavy old leather-bound book and then the fifty-cent spiral-bound version. He took the same care with each one.

"You guess?"

He made a noise in the back of his throat. "I don't want to rule anything out. But let's face it, sticking a list of dealers where any three-year-old might turn it into an art project isn't likely." He stepped back to size up the office bookcase again, almost knocking into her. He turned and grabbed her shoulders, steadying her. "Our best bet was right here. More loose bits and pieces. It woulda been easy for him to slide something in. If you or your secretary accidentally pulled it from its hiding place, you would have just put it back again as soon as you saw it wasn't what you were looking for."

He was right. She could picture Amado, vacuuming in here, maybe wiping the shelves and the woodwork with a dusting cloth. Reaching into his pocket and slipping something between the papers. Hidden in plain sight. She poked her hair into place. Tried to get her mouth around the unpalatable truth. "It's not looking good for Amado, is it? I mean, if he was hiding something important from whoever snatched him."

He looked at her. "No. It isn't."

She rubbed her arm. Once in a while, she wished Russ would sugar-coat things for her. "Why wouldn't he just come to the police, if he had seen something illegal? Or come to me? I would have helped him." She looked at her hands. Folded them up tight. "I could have helped him."

Russ smiled a little. "You did everything you could, darlin'. You gave him a job and a place to live and you beat the crap out of the Christies when they tried to attack him."