The Cardinal's Sin Read online

  Forget it. I did my job. Someone else screwed up and owed me an explanation. Make them reach out. I wasn’t wasting my time. I went into my sanctuary, took a seat in the screened porch, and pulled up Cardinal Giovanni Antinori on my iPad. He had a fountain of hair, a Madison Avenue smile, and that permanent tan that God bestowed upon the Italians as compensation for their lack of self-governing acumen. If the church shtick hadn’t worked out, Hollywood would have welcomed him.

  He was also a goner. And in the corner of England that I had just come from, his demise was big news. I perused the headlines.

  Cardinal Gunned Down While Taking Morning Meditation Walk

  Execution-Style Murder Reminiscent of Mob Hit

  Eyewitness Points to Mystery Ponytail Man

  That last one was of particular interest to me. A woman jogger who had passed me from the opposite direction while I was trailing Paretsky—really, Antinori—claimed that she saw a runner with a ponytail and glasses. She remembered him because “you don’t see many guys running with eyeglasses on.”

  I remembered her. I’d kept my eyes down as we passed each other. Tube socks. Who the hell wears tube socks? And she was on me for wearing glasses? If that was all they had, I wasn’t worried. But the investigation was ongoing, and the police only release what they want the public, or the perpetrator, to know.

  What was Cardinal Giovanni Antinori doing taking such an early-morning stroll? It wasn’t his habit. No one was aware of him doing it in the past, and his reason for being there remained shrouded. Yet I’d been told that Paretsky did take a customary morning stroll. Someone dressed like him had obviously duped us—put a lot of thought and effort into the deception. How did Paretsky lure him out there? Blackmail? A benign request for a clandestine meeting? Would I ever know?

  Antinori was instrumental in championing food for infants and farming skills in Africa. He’d settled past sexual impositions of Catholic priests and was credited with moving the stoic institution into the new millennium. “Religion,” he was quoted as saying, “is not an institution administered by man for the benefit of the administrators, but, rather, religion is the common man. It must address the questions and temptations of the modern world and cannot cling to outdated and unsubstantiated beliefs.” That last comment had landed him in hot water. After all, what was religion if not “unsubstantiated beliefs”? Antinori was adamant that the church must face its own past transgressions. That brought more cries for censure from Rome and applauds and accolades from the crowd. His popularity seemed to have exploded over the past couple of years.

  He was labeled ‘The People’s Cardinal.’ His official residence was Granville Estates, north of London, where he held an annual fund-raiser for children of low-income families. It was an old-fashioned church bazaar held the third weekend in June. He’d been a young priest at a nearby parish early in his career and had started the carnival during that tenure. He personally manned an ancient high-striker attraction where contestants swung a sledgehammer in an attempt to ring a bell at the top of the tower. Several pictures on one site showed a smiling Antinori through the years, surrounded by children in front of the high striker. One picture, taken a little over twenty years back, before he became a cardinal, caught my attention. Everyone smiled at the camera except for an attractive young woman in a white sweater, who stood off to his side and smiled at him. Something about her…I plowed ahead.

  He’d spent six months trekking across the globe, including a three-week sojourn in the Swiss Alps, before the age of thirty.

  He still heard confessions.

  Celebrated Mass at his childhood church.

  Dropped unannounced into a kitchen for the homeless and toiled for hours.

  A seven handicap—oh, come on, now.

  I flipped the lid shut before the man fed Africa with a loaf of bread and clocked a four-minute mile.

  I couldn’t sit. I jumped in my truck. Half a mile later, I parked and hiked over the arched boardwalk that connected the parking lot and the beach, keeping foot traffic off the dunes and sea oats. I took a seat on a concrete bench. It had a plaque with the name of a dead person on it. That would be me someday. On the gulf, a light above the surface slid south—the top of a sailboat’s mast. If a boat serves to facilitate coming and going—like Hemingway’s house—but someone lives on it, what direction is he headed? I’d leave those issues to Morgan. He grew up on a sailboat and claimed movement was his natural state. I kept my thoughts at bay.

  Farther out on the gulf, lightning streaked the sky. It was distant and small. Yet, if you were caught in the isolated storm, the tempest would be anything but inconsequential. A woman giggled off to my left. To my right the pink hotel stood against the dark black, its Moorish towers giving nothing away.

  Somebody used me.

  That person would pay.

  Alexander Paretsky was still alive.

  That wasn’t my problem. Unless Paretsky had been the one to set me up. The Garrett theory.

  I rearranged the questions, hypothesized on what might be, and accomplished nothing. After a while I stood and defiantly faced a stiff breeze that had swept in off the gulf. I bid the plaque a good night’s sleep and went home.

  He came to me that night, like he had on the plane when I’d dozed off as it pulled back from the gate. His back was to me, and his cardinal vestments fluttered in a breeze, but there had been no breeze the morning we had met, and I knew that wasn’t right. I told myself—in the dream—that I was dreaming, but that admission in no way empowered me to break free. He reluctantly turned. He did not speak. His eyes pleaded for resolution.

  I tried to wake myself up, but I was a prisoner in a different sphere and powerless to leave.

  “Why are you here?” I demanded.

  He did not answer. Instead, Cardinal Giovanni Antinori said, “Forgive me my sin.”

  I bolted up. My room was dark except for the light from the moon’s reflection on the bay filtering through the slats of the venetian blinds. My window was cracked open so I could hear the sound of the water, but all was still, and I heard nothing. Hadley III appeared at my door. She hesitated, her green eyes catching a streak of light. She backed away. I was sweating as if I’d broken a fever.

  It was wrong. All wrong.

  If Garrett’s theory—that Antinori was somehow coerced by Paretsky to take the walk—was correct, wouldn’t it be the other way around? Wouldn’t he be forgiving me? After all, my gun was drawn when Antinori turned. Even in the dim light, he certainly saw it. And who the hell only has one sin or a sin that outweighs all the others?

  I do.

  For I have killed a cardinal of the church.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was the second time I’d found him nesting at the end of my dock.

  A year after Garrett Demarcus and I left the army, Colonel Janssen parked himself on the bench that ran across the back of the twelve-by-twelve deck at the end of the dock. The December sun had broken the horizon directly across the bay. His arms were spread out on the bench like a bird drying its wings. He asked me if I had enjoyed my yearlong drinking binge. I told him to hit the road. He recruited me for clandestine work. Now he was back at the same spot, but today the late-summer sun broke the horizon far to his left.

  I finished my run and rinsed under my outdoor shower-head at the side of the house. I put on a pair of shorts and a V-neck T-shirt, brewed a pot of coffee, and poured a cup. I strolled down the hundred feet of my dock. I took a seat at the opposite end of the bench. He was long, gangly, and pale—like a great white egret with clothes. Beltway born and bred, he wore khaki pants, loafers, and a white, long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Two pens stood at attention in his shirt pocket. To his right was a rust-colored attaché case with a leather handle. It looked as though it had been thrown under the bus a few times, dragged behind a stagecoach, put through an industrial washer, and finally donated to the zoo’s gorilla exhibit.

  “Under Florida’s ‘stand-your-ground’ law,�
�� I took a sip of coffee; I had not brought him any, “I could have put a couple of rounds in you from my rear porch and walked a free man.” There was a small patch of white, baked-on bird shit between us.

  He didn’t bother to look at me but kept his eyes on a blue cruiser churning the waters toward the bridge across the bay. Its loose aft curtain flapped violently in the wind, as if trying to tear away from the boat.

  “We catch more heat killing a civilian in Iraq,” he said, “than someone does for wasting his neighbor in Florida. God’s waiting room has some real cowboys up in Tallahassee.”

  “That’s a considerable insult to the cowboys.”

  “What do you know?”

  “You sent me on a mission in which I killed an innocent man.”

  He turned to me. Drops of perspiration dotted his forehead. “Yes, you did.” He looked older than the last time I’d seen him; I wondered if he thought the same of me and why I cared. It didn’t escape me that he was fine with my statement implicating myself, but he wasn’t about to share the guilt. Yes, you did.

  “When we got word, we hustled you out of the flat in order to get you through airport security as fast as possible,” he continued. “The collateral damage is unfortunate. That’s not what concerns me.”

  “Concerns me.”

  “You’ll get over it. If not, there are plenty of stolen boats to recover.”

  He was referring to a side business I have of recovering missing boats. “If all you do is issue orders based on compromised or incomplete information, then I’d rather be chasing boats.”

  “We were a hundred percent positive and—”

  “You were a hundred percent wrong.”

  His jaw tightened, and his face scrunched. He gazed over the water. I kept my eyes on him; I wanted to be waiting when he came back to me.

  “You got a leak, Colonel,” I continued. “That’s why Paretsky knows the location of his targets. Why he knew I was coming. Your ship’s taking on water, and you don’t know where. Or do you?”

  A sailboat with a dog sticking its nose over the bow glided by us. His eyes followed the boat. “We don’t know how he gets his information. Your assignment was known to only a very few. No one in that group talked. We—”

  “Someone sure as hell did.”

  He turned to me. “I will remind you that when conducting business with me, you are still—”

  “Someone spilled. That needs to be your primary focus, your obsessive focus—not my lack of protocol.”

  “We’re working on that. That’s not your problem.”

  “Like hell it—”

  “This is your problem.”

  He pulled an envelope from his attaché case. He tossed it in my lap, and it nearly slid off and onto the composite decking. I opened it and extracted a picture. It was dark. Grainy. Nonetheless, I could make out my back as I stood over the fallen cardinal. I turned it over. Nothing. I brought it back around so the picture was facing up. I returned it to the envelope and tossed it back onto his lap.

  “They’ll never make me for it,” I said. He had not bothered to pick the envelope off his lap. “I was layered so thick with disguise that I wouldn’t even recognize myself.”

  “It confirms Paretsky as our man and that he knew you were coming and set us up. We received similar pictures through the same channel when the couple south of you was hit, as well as the Colorado girl and the teacher. It’s his way—”

  “And you’re positive those were him?” It didn’t escape me that he didn’t offer a supportive remark after my statement that I couldn’t be identified in the picture.

  “No ques…as positive as we can be.”

  “Recent events indicate that’s not saying much. Maybe someone knows Paretsky’s habit and is trying to pin it on him.”

  “That’s overanalyzing. We—”

  “Your lack of analysis is why we’re sitting here.”

  “You want off this?”

  “I want to kill Paretsky and, if it wasn’t him, whoever set me up to kill the cardinal.”

  “Then listen, soldier. Paretsky knew we were coming after him. He wants us to know; otherwise, why send the picture? He’s telling us that any attempt on his life will be met with the death of another, and that—”

  “You’re avoiding the issue.” I interrupted him despite his instruction. “Your leak is closer than you thought. You knew there was a leak that led to the previous deaths, but this tells you the leak is in your inner—”

  “His source of information that led him to his other targets is not necessarily the same source that gave him knowledge of your presence.”

  “And that is why the army keeps recruiting. You need fresh bait to spin your bullshit on. Explain how this went down without it being the same leak.”

  “We can’t.”

  I started to resume my attack, but his reasoning was correct. The cardinal job likely was from the same leak, but not necessarily so. Assuming it was the same leak could lead us down false paths. He’d reached that deduction before I had. That would put me in a foul mood all day.

  He picked up the envelope with the picture in it and placed it back into his attaché case, which was packed with red, white, and blue folders.

  I asked, “What color am I?”

  Janssen kept his case open. “We fear that Paretsky may be recruiting a team to do hits on US soil. Not on agents but rather, as we have begun to witness, the immediate families of agents. We suspect that money remains his primary motivation and that he is likely financed by the world’s latest religious nuthouse, PTO.

  “Our primary goal, which you failed at and as of now are still engaged in, is to erase him. You are red. I don’t plant my ass on a dock in this suffocating freak show of a state for whites and blues.” He bent his head down, brought up his right shoulder, and wiped his forehead with his shirt.

  I decided not to contest his assertion that I had failed or defend against his slanderous assault on my home state. “Your source,” I said. “Who tipped you off that Paretsky would be in Kensington Gardens?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Who he is.”

  “What type of operation do you run, Colonel? You sent me on a job, and you didn’t verify your source. That is what you indicated, correct?”

  He took a breath and seemed to settle down, as if the worst was behind him. A pelican dive-bombed the water. Janssen ignored it. “He gave intimate details.” I sensed the first hint of an apologetic and conciliatory tone, as if he too had been duped. “The source knew things about Paretsky’s past that only we knew. That only someone who knew him could possibly know. We didn’t have time to verify. That he knew Paretsky was never in doubt. We traced the movement of other cardinals that were in the known area. It made sense; he’d disguised himself as clergy in the past. We did our background work to ensure that—”

  “Paretsky,” I cut in. “He led you to himself so he could sacrifice someone and teach us not to mess with him. Played you like a dime-store harmonica, didn’t he?”

  “He’d have nothing to gain by doing so. He kills for money, not kicks and giggles.”

  He withdrew another envelope from his still-open attaché case and handed it to me. I opened it and took out a picture of a young woman. She had thick, dark, shoulder-length hair. Her bangs hung over her eyebrows to her lashes. Pale-green eyes and plump, red lips. Not a ruby red, but soft, like a rosé summer wine. She looked like the girl next door who’d grown up into a runway model. She was with a man whose back was turned and head was down.

  “We believe,” Janssen started in, “that’s Paretsky in the photo and he’s been spending time with that woman. Therefore, she might have been our anonymous tip. And even if not, she could lead us to him.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Renée Lambert. American. Sometime model. Used to favor the islands, casinos in Macau, and nightlife in Dubai. Last couple of years, she shed that skin and has taken up social issu
es. A do-gooder. We’ve been able to produce two more sightings of Paretsky: one with Ms. Lambert and the third,” he pulled out a color eight-by-ten, “with this lady.”

  He held up a picture of a blonde with sunglasses half the size of her head. She stood on the deck of a yacht. Paretsky was behind her and slightly off to her left. He wore tan slacks and a black, short-sleeved shirt. That told me he spent his boat time in the air-conditioned stateroom. His frame was small, almost delicate, but his eyes, under pencil-thin brows, were dark, and his face was tight.

  “We think that when he’s away from London, he spends considerable months on the water; boats of different registries and names make it even harder to pin him down. One more thing.” He paused, obliging me to go in.

  “Yes.”

  “Renée Lambert’s father, Donald, is living the American dream. Shuffleboard. Florida sunshine. Two-for-one every day. Moved to Treasure Island four years ago.”

  “You withheld this from me?” Treasure Island was the spit of sand north of me.

  “We didn’t know if it meant diddly-squat, and we still don’t know.”

  “You led me to believe that you only had one picture of Paretsky.”

  “This is recent, and—”

  “Not that recent.”

  He extracted another picture from his attaché case. “Last night we came across this picture of Ms. Lambert with this unidentified man. He’s not her father, and he appears too large to be Paretsky, but as you can see, his turned head makes identification difficult. Paretsky, as I’m sure you’ve noted, is of a smaller stature. This man,” he handed me the picture, “is quite large.”

  The background looked familiar: boats to the left and a park of some sort directly behind them and lower. It registered. “The mezzanine of the Valencia,” I said. The Valencia is a grande-dame hotel built in the roaring twenties in downtown St. Pete.