William Kienzle - Marked for Murder - The Father Koesler Mysteries:

“A little lower, Zoo. Bight there between the shoulder . . . ahhh. So, like I said, the priest was more help than you thought he’d be.”

“There were times when I thought he was more of a hindrance than a help. But when he located the branding iron Kramer used, I had to admit you were right.”

Alice sat bolt upright. “He found the iron!”

“Yup. That hasn’t got to the news yet.”

“And you didn’t tell me!”

“I been busy.

“Actually, he didn’t find the thing; he told us where to look. He said he got the idea from talking to some old priest in a nursing home. It was some kind of joke about a guy who flunked his priest test when he said they should burn down a church and throw the ashes in a sacrarium.”

“A suck-what?”

“Somebody—Mangiapane probably—was talkin’ to Koesler about how we’d looked everywhere for the iron. We practically took Kramer’s car and the rectory and the church apart lookin’ for that iron. So Koesler ups and says how Kramer probably considered the iron a sacred instrument in what Doc Moellmann said was a ritual. And when they’re done with sacred items, priests are supposed to dispose of them so they won’t be desecrated by us human beings. And the traditional place to do that is the sacrarium.”

“The suck-what?”

“Babe, I’m gonna end up knowin’ so many Catholic words I’ll be able to teach catechism. In the sacristy—where the priest gets dressed for Mass—there’s a sink they call the sacrarium. It don’t lead to the sewer system. It goes straight into the ground. We dug out the sacrarium in Mother of Sorrows church and—voila!—the branding iron. And with all the letters on it . . . just like Koesler found in that Pope’s motto.”

“Your turn,” Alice announced.

He did not object as they traded places and she began to knead the tension from his shoulders.

“Well, that pretty well wraps it up” She paused. “You know, you could feel pretty sorry for that Father Kramer.”

Tully was in deadly earnest. “I could feel lots sorrier for him if I didn’t feel so bad about three ladies who would be alive today if it weren’t for him.”

Acknowledgments

Gratitude for technical advice to:

Robert Ankeny, Staff Writer, Detroit News

Roy Awe, Investigator, Attorneys' Grievance Commission

Olga Bachmann, Ph.D., and Rudy Bachmann, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologists

Ramon Betanzos, Professor of Humanities, Wayne State University

Sister Claudia Carlen, I.H.M., Archivist, Archdiocese of Detroit

Detroit Police Department:

Robert Hislop, Commander, Major Crimes Division

Sergeant Mary Marcantonio, Office of Executive Deputy Chief

Thistleton Robertson, P.O., Organized Crime Division

Barbara Weide, Lieutenant, Homicide Section

Jim Grace, Detective, Kalamazoo Police Department

Sister Bernadelle Grimm, R.S.M., Samaritan Health Care Center, Detroit

Sister Elizabeth Harris, H.V.M., Director, Women ARISE

Margaret Hershey, R.N., Pulmonary Care Unit, Detroit Receiving Hospital

Timothy Kenny, Deputy Chief, PROB, Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney's Office Noreen Rooney, Editor, TV Listings, Detroit Free Press

Andrea Solak, Principal Attorney, Grants and Legislation, Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney's Office

Werner Spitz, U.M.D., Wayne County Medical Examiner

Any technical error is the author's

Marked for Murder copyright © 1988, 2012 by Gopits, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews.

Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC

an Andrews McMeel Universal company,

1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106

This is a work of fiction and, as such, events described herein are creations of the author’s imagination. Any relation to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental and accidental.

ISBN 978-1-4494-2367-4

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

William X. Kienzledied in December 2001. He was a Detroit parish priest for twenty years before leaving the priesthood. He began writing his popular mystery series after serving as an editor and director at the Center for Contemplative Studies at the University of Dallas.

The Father Koesler Mysteries

1. The Rosary Murders

2. Death Wears a Red Hat

3. Mind Over Murder

4. Assault with Intent

5. Shadow of Death

6. Kill and Tell

7. Sudden Death

8. Deathbed

9. Deadline for a Critic

10. Marked for Murder

11. Eminence

12. Masquerade

13. Chameleon

14. Body Count

15. Dead Wrong

16. Bishop as Pawn

17. Call No Man Father

18. Requiem for Moses

19. The Man Who Loved God

20. The Greatest Evil

21. No Greater Love

22. Till Death

23. The Sacrifice

24. The Gathering

Here is a special preview of

Eminence

The Father Koesler Mysteries: Book 11

1

He killed the first guy he ever shot.

Dumb luck, expertise, or a finely tuned reflex response? It didn't make a damn bit of difference to David Powell. He was dead.

David Powell, fifteen years old, grade school dropout, with a prodigious arrest record; purveyor of just about every manner of controlled substance, from the relatively innocuous marijuana to the current drug of choice, crack cocaine.

The essence of David Powell-soul or whatever-was gone now. What remained had been dropped on a slab in the morgue. How had Shakespeare expressed it-"Shrunk to this little measure . . . a bleeding piece of earth."

Alonzo Tully was not particularly strong on Shakespeare, but he was pretty sure of those phrases from Julius Caesar .

Zoo, as he was known to just about everyone, had been a Detroit police officer for twenty-two years, thirteen of them in Homicide. He dealt in death. He could not count the times he had stood in this dank, gray room in the Wayne County Medical Examiner's building, attending an autopsy. Certainly he had been here for each and every murder case he'd investigated.

Tully believed that each investigation needed all the help it could get. And, after the murder scene itself, the next best place to build one's case, chronologically and every other way, was the morgue. The autopsy process, and the morgue's boss, Dr. Wilhelm Moellmann, were instructive teachers.

However, Tully needed little enlightening with regard to the death of David Powell. The case, as Hollywood was wont to put it, was open and shut. Or, in the jargon of the police, a platter case, i.e., presented on a silver platter.

Tully had killed Powell. It was as simple as that-on paper. It was far more momentous to Tully.

In his twenty-two-year career as a police officer, Tully had had to draw his gun numerous times. But outside of a firing range, he had never pulled the trigger. A record by no means unique in the department.

He had told no one, but, last night, after it was over and the details were wrapped up, he had wept. It was the first time since his childhood. And it hadn't happened that often even then. However, last night, at home, in Alice's arms, he had wept.

Tully dealt in death, but this was the first time he had ever killed anyone. And it had to be a kid!

Moellmann removed Powell's clothing meticulously. More than once, the M.E. had found bullets among the deceased's garments. Bullets that had plowed through a body, exiting to lie among the clothing. Once a bullet entered the body there was just no telling where it might go. The course and extent of damage depended on such variables as the angle of entry, the distance between weapon and target, the class of weapon, the type of bullet, and the path it took inside the body. Bullets had been known to ricochet off bones. Bullets had been known to penetrate the aorta and be transported via the bloodstream elsewhere in the body.