Alex Kava - A Necessary Evil

"It's quite a classroom." Nick hoped he didn't sound like a starstruck fifteen-year-old.

She smiled, and Nick couldn't help thinking she didn't look like any of the nuns he'd had in grade school. For one thing, he didn't remember any of them wearing makeup, let alone lipstick. Although Sister Kate wore soft colors, she didn't really need makeup, with her short but full and silky hair, creamy smooth skin and warm blue eyes.

"If you don't mind my asking, where… or how did you get some of this stuff?"

"It's amazing the things people want to give me when they discover what I do," she said. "Many of these pieces started out as loaners and became permanent donations. Some I've found myself in out-of-the-way places, antique stores, flea markets, even on eBay, believe it or not. There are so many people who don't recognize what they have sitting in their closets, especially if it's something that was left to them by an ancestor. Take this braquemard," she told him while lifting a flat-bladed sword from the counter. "I'm going to show this to the students today. It's from the 1400s."

"You can't tell me this was sitting in someone's closet collecting dust?"

"No, I accidentally found it in a butcher's shop outside a little French village called Machecoal. Someone had given it to the owner's father, but it originally belonged to a wealthy baron, a soldier who fought alongside Joan of Arc. See the engravings?"

She held it up for him, and he ran an index finger over the worn engraved stamp above the hilt. There wasn't much left, but it was some kind of archaic symbol, no initials like one would expect. He could smell the metallic, acrid cleaner on his finger. Sister Kate took good care of her artifacts.

"Amazingly it had not traveled far in almost six hundred years," she told him.

"Joan of Arc, huh? I guess it makes sense that you'd like to collect pieces that belonged to saints and heroes."

"Oh, Gilles de Rais, the baron, was hardly either, though many believed him to be. He led what you might say was a secret double life." She set the sword down now with what Nick would call almost a reverence. She gently rubbed her fingertips over the wide flat blade that was pointed and sharp on both edges. "It's believed that he used this very horseman's sword to slice open the bellies of over a hundred and forty boys, sometimes beheading them, too. That is, after he choked and hanged them and masturbated over them. No, he was hardly a saint or a hero."

Reagan National Airport

Washington, D.C.

Maggie had barely settled into her newly assigned first-class seat when the flight attendant named Cassy brought her the Diet Pepsi she had requested. She included a glass of ice and several bags of "premium" mixed nuts. They were giving her the royal treatment. Earlier Cassy had tapped her on the shoulder and whispered that the captain had insisted she be moved to first class, upgrading her from her coach window seat almost at the back of the plane.

Well, Maggie wasn't going to argue. Coach was full, first class half-empty. She knew it was because somewhere on the passenger docket the captain had discovered he had an FBI agent on board and wanted her close to his cockpit door. Her weapon had been confiscated for the flight, but she didn't blame them for wanting as many reinforcements as was available and close by. These unexpected upgrades had happened to her several times on other flights since 9/11. And each time she avoided telling them that she might be worthless at thirty-eight thousand feet. She hated flying. Each time was an effort just to get on the plane.

As soon as she was able to, she'd bring out anything and everything that might distract her. This time she pulled out both tray tables _ since the first-class seat next to her was unoccupied __ and began sorting through files and notes, including those Cunningham, her boss, had e-mailed her early that morning. One of his e-mail attachments had an assortment of crime scene and autopsy photos. She kept those in a folder even when she looked at them. No sense in tipping off anyone else about what she did for a living. The photos were not quite as disturbing as the decapitation ones. In fact, other than a single stab wound to each of the bodies there appeared to be no other injuries. No mutilation. No grotesque display of the dead bodies. No bite marks. No signs of torture.

There were supposedly three cases: two priests, one former priest, all stabbed to death in very public places. Maggie's job was to figure out if the cases were related, to determine if they were the work of one killer, or perhaps two working together, and then to come up with a profile.

She found the police report and scanned the details on the case in Omaha. Fifty-seven-year-old Monsignor William O'Sullivan had been stabbed once in the chest while using an airport restroom on a busy Friday afternoon. Not only a busy Friday afternoon, but a holiday weekend. There were no witnesses with the exception of a Scott Linquist who allegedly may have bumped into the killer on his way into the restroom. Linquist's description was brief: a young man in a baseball cap. He mentioned no weapon, no blood.

The autopsy report presented little evidence, as did the toxicology and the crime lab reports. Maggie stopped and flipped back to something that caught her attention in the autopsy report. This was interesting. The weapon, according to the M.E., was a double-edged, nine-to ten-inch blade that appeared to have been wider in the center and thin at the edges, with an unusually large hilt that may include possible engravings. The M.E. had drawn a sketch in the margin of what looked like an antique dagger.

A dagger. The last time Maggie was in Nebraska, a fillet knife had been the weapon of choice for the killer. She could still remember every detail of that case: the small white underpants, the Halloween mask, the ritualistic oil on the forehead. But mostly when she thought about it __ and in recent months, she tried not to __ she remembered the bitter cold, the snow and ice chunks in the Platte River. And no matter how she tried, she could never forget the image of those little blue-gray bodies abandoned along the muddy riverbanks, each one with crude, raw X carved on the chest. Only, later, they discovered it wasn't an X at all, but a cross.

Two men were serving life sentences, but Maggie had always been convinced that the real killer had gotten away. For months afterward she had tried to track him, unsuccessfully, of course. She had no jurisdiction in South America and no cooperation and no official support. Moreover, Platte City, the community he had ravaged and betrayed, seemed eager to move on, unwilling to accept that a young, charismatic Catholic priest could do such things. No one wanted to believe that evil could lurk within a man who had been ordained to do good. Yet Maggie wondered if, even in his own twisted mind, Father Michael Keller believed he had been doing the work of the Lord. Why else would he have bothered to give each of his young victims the last rites?

She had told Gwen that she was fine returning to Nebraska. After all, she was going to Omaha this time, not the small rural Platte City thirty miles to the south. She wouldn't be close to any of the crime scene sites. And instead of a small-town, inexperienced sheriff like Nick Morrelli, she'd be working with a veteran detective of a metropolitan police department. So there should be no similarities, no reasons to be reminded of or even haunted by that case that had been closed for almost four years. Now if only she could close it in her mind. It was difficult to just forget such things or even put them out of her mind when every day she had to look at the scar on her side where the killer, the real killer had cut her… with a fillet knife.