The Smoking Nun Page 15

  Coop propped the door open to let us through, the warmth inside instantly greeting me as Higgs carefully set me down on the floor and helped me hobble to a pew.

  I have to admit, I was a little flustered after clinging to his back. Flustered and feeling all manner of butterflies in the pit of my belly, but I think I did a good job of covering my breathlessness when I smiled up at him.

  “Thanks, Higgs,” I said, fighting my shyness.

  He smiled down at me, his dark hair soaked, his black jacket covered in fat splotches of rain. “You bet. Now stay put. Don’t try and walk on that or you might make it worse. I’ll go check on Father Rico and get some ice for that ankle, okay?”

  I nodded, pulling my phone out of my back pocket. “You got it.”

  Coop gripped my shoulder. “Do you mind if I go with him, Trixie?”

  “Nope. Scoot, the both of you. I’m just going to handle some emails for the shop while I wait. Go-go!” I ordered with a grin as they both scurried toward the back of the church to find Father Rico.

  Looking over the long row of pews toward the pulpit, seeing the beauty of the candles lining the steps, and the gorgeous stands of flowers bracketing the altar, I sighed.

  The peace resonated with me in a way I’d ignored since I left Saint Aloysius By The Sea. There were so many aspects of being a faithful servant of the church that I missed, and this truly was one of them. The quiet whisper of the joy I’d once reveled in slipped into my heart, and I closed my eyes and relished the moment with a deep inhale.

  The ping of my phone disturbed that, and it had me fumbling to click on my texts. A chill raced up my spine when I realized it was from Tansy.

  Some information on the headless corpse found at Our Lady. Not much, but thought you’d like to know we have but one small clue. A pack of matches from a restaurant in China. Yes, you read that right. China. Coroner found it in a hidden pocket sewn inside the victim’s pants, along with a fifty dollar bill. Busy as a bee here. Be back with you shortly.

  I texted her back as quickly as I could and asked after Sister Patricia, but those infuriating three dots, indicating she was texting back, went away and didn’t show back up again.

  I clenched my fists and fought a scream. When I finally got my hands on her, I was going to give her the old what for. I realize we’d made a deal, and she said she’d feed me information as she saw fit, but Christmas alive, she was killing me with her dribs and drabs.

  I needed to know how Sister Patricia was, for gravy’s sake.

  Looking down at my phone, I reread her text. Matches from a restaurant in China…huh. How bizarre. And who had an inside pocket in their pants?

  Frustrated, I decided to watch a little of Unsolved Mysteries in order to feel closer to Sister Ophelia. Being here in the church, going over and over what happened, was driving me nuts and ruining the peace I’d felt moments ago. Plus, my foot ached like a son of a gun. I needed a distraction while I waited for Coop and Higgs.

  What was it again? Season twelve, episode ten. Clicking on the episode, I grimaced at how tiny my phone’s screen was. Robert Stack appeared, a man Sister Ophelia once told me, had he knocked on her door and asked her to run away with him, she’d do so, lickety-split.

  I’d laughed and laughed when she’d shared that, and already the memory had me smiling, despite the horror of the episode featuring a man named Emile Franklin, wanted in connection to the 1997 kidnapping, torture, and murder of an oil tycoon from Oklahoma by the name of Roscoe Wyatt.

  They’d found Roscoe’s dismembered body in a silo on a farm in Idaho, but only after Emile Franklin’s partner, Paxton Raye gave up the location of the body and that Emile had been his accomplice.

  However, Emile was still at large as of the time of the broadcast, which put this crime’s timestamp at sometime in the nineties. But the really scary part? The pair were both twenty-two at the time they’d pulled off the crime, and they’d snatched Roscoe right from his bed where he’d been sound asleep.

  The motivation? Money. “Duh,” I murmured to Robert Stack. It was the root of all evil. They’d wanted five million in ransom for his safe return.

  Except, Roscoe’s only living relative, his son, Garth Wyatt, refused to pay it. Apparently, there was no love lost between father and son.

  Yikes.

  Sister Ophelia had some pretty gruesome nighttime viewing. Not that I didn’t watch things of this nature, too. I was just surprised Sister O watched it before bed. She was a tough old bird, I’ll give her that.

  As the picture of the remaining fugitive of the law flashed across the screen, I was impressed with how clear it was. Most of them were so grainy, you couldn’t tell who it was even if it turned out to be your next-door neighbor, but this one was clear as day. I pressed pause to study it, but I couldn’t put my finger on why I found it so fascinating.

  Also, I hate to admit it, him being a killer and all, but he sure was a looker. Dark, tan, tall, built like a linebacker.

  I blinked.

  Wait.

  Sister Ophelia had been watching this before she went to the speed-dating event. I knew that for sure because of Sister Rita. At the speed-dating event, she’d had something important she wanted to talk to Father Rico about, but never had the opportunity because he’d been too wrapped up in his duties as host.

  The episode she’d been watching featured a guy who was good-looking and, according to this broadcast from 1999, would now be forty-four years old.

  I gulped as I stared at the picture on my phone. This must have been the “something important” she’d wanted to discuss with Father Rico.

  In fact, it would also explain why she was stress-smoking the afternoon of the speed-dating event, when I’d seen her by the dumpster. She had, quite by chance, discovered a wanted killer, on the run for over twenty-two years.

  A killer who looked just like—

  “Evening, Trixie. Can I help with something?”

  Chapter 16

  Deacon Delacorte. He looked just like Deacon Delacorte.

  Oh. Gravy.

  In that moment, much like all the moments just before I figured out the identity of a killer, all the information I’d been gathering or had heard up to that point rushed into my brain, smooshing facts together against more facts until they all came at me in one tidal wave of startling clarity.

  Now I understood why Artur had drawn a television. He wasn’t trying to show me a TV, per se. He’d tried to lead me to the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries. Understanding how and why he’d done that was for another time.

  For now…

  Why, universe, why, oh why, do you wait until the eleventh hour to give me the gift of sight?

  Deacon Delacorte wasn’t the real Deacon Delacorte back from a peace mission in China, and he sure wasn’t fifty-six. Not even. He couldn’t be, because he was, in fact, Emile Franklin, now forty-four.

  And listen, don’t hate me for saying this because he’s a super-bad guy, but I promise you, he doesn’t look a day over thirty-five. A life of crime hasn’t aged him even a little.

  Couple that with the fact that we had a fingerprint-less, unidentified body on our hands and Roscoe Wyatt had been found in a similar condition, and I had a theory…for all it’s worth at this heightened moment of fear.

  Sister Ophelia recognized fake Deacon Delacorte on Unsolved Mysteries, she was going to tattle on him, which was what got her strangled.

  Why she simply hadn’t gone to the police instead of waiting to talk to Father Rico was a question I might never have an answer for.

  Fake Deacon Delacorte must have killed the real Davis Delacorte, stolen his identity and, to prevent the body from being identified, burned his fingerprints off and hacked off his head. Not that it mattered, because the headless body had given him up.

  Know how I know who the body in the closet is?

  China. That’s how.

  The real Deacon Delacorte had just returned from China, and the body in the church closet had a pack of match
es from a Chinese restaurant in a secret pocket sewn into the inside of his pants.

  And of course, the fake Deacon Delacorte had flashed Chinese money at our meeting at the coffee shop earlier today. So not only had he killed the real Deacon Delacorte, he’d stolen his money.

  How rude.

  But now the question was, why the heck would he put the real deacon’s body in the church storage closet anyway? I mean, hello. Isn’t that just inviting disaster to take you out on a date?

  “Trixie? Is everything all right?” Deacon Delacorte asked, leaning his hip on the pew, pleasant as could be as he smiled his handsome smile.

  Oh, yeah. It’s great. Know why? I just put together that you’re a cold-blooded killer and you’re standing here in front of me with your cold-blooded killer smile, and I have to pretend like nothing’s wrong.

  Yep. I’m right as rain.

  My heart began to pound so hard in my chest, I was sure he’d hear my sheer terror and panic in its rhythm. Holy Hannah, I’d better keep it together and act like nothing was wrong, or I’d be dead in the water.

  And where the heck were Coop and Higgs, anyway? How long did it take to check on Father Rico? I felt exposed and caught before I’d actually been accused of anything.

  My clammy hands clung to my phone as I tried to find the button to click the screen off, but I managed a slow nod.

  “Oh, I’m fine, Deacon Delacorte. Just waiting for Higgs and Coop. They’re checking on Father Rico. He was so distraught earlier today, we thought we should do a quick mental health check.”

  Yeah. That sounded good to my ears. My voice didn’t shake and I smiled almost the entire time.

  “Why aren’t you with them then?” he asked, cocking his head and leaning in close—close enough that I could smell his cologne.

  A nice scented mix of springtime and musky woods, if you must know.

  When he leaned farther into me, I noticed something else—the final nail in his coffin, so to speak. His stole, a vestment he still wore from afternoon mass and the color purple for Lent, had a burn mark on the underside.

  A round burn—likely a cigarette burn from his struggle with Sister Ophelia.

  But I clung to my fight to stay calm. I held up my foot to show him, which had grown fat and ugly as I’d sat and neglected to elevate.

  “Twisted my ankle on the way over. Fell in a pothole, of all things. I’m sooo clumsy sometimes, I could just cry. It was too hard to walk, so I plopped a squat here to wait for them.”

  His brow furrowed—his smooth, unlined, not-fifty-six-at-all brow. “Oh no. Let me take a peek.” Davis leaned down and reached for my leg, but I jumped, and I jumped so fast, I even scared myself.

  “No!” I cried out, cringing at his attempt to touch me before I lowered my voice and clenched my hands together around my phone. “Sorry. It just really hurts.”

  In that very brief second, when he appeared as though he were working something out in his mind, I somehow un-paused Unsolved Mysteries. Probably because I was shaking so hard.

  As is the way of my luck, Robert Stack was in the middle of repeating the name of Deacon Delacorte’s, a.k.a. Emile Franklin’s victim, and if he’d used a megaphone, with the help of the acoustics in the church, it couldn’t have been any louder.

  That was the moment the jig was up. I knew it. I saw it—and so did he.

  He snaked a hand out and grabbed my ankle, wrapping his incredibly strong fingers around it and squeezing with such brute force, it brought tears to my eyes.

  We looked at each other then. Me, I’m sure, with all the horror and fear of discovery in my wide eyes. Him, with a narrowed gaze that burned holes in my face.

  Then he squeezed tighter, clenching his teeth with the effort. “Does that hurt, Trixie?”

  I swallowed hard, fighting the sting of tears. “Please let me go,” I whimpered.

  “I’m sorry it hurts, Trixie,” he said with a cold, empty smile that never reached his eyes. “I hate the idea that you might be in any pain—ever.” Upon those words, he yanked my leg, pulling me from the pew with such a vicious tug, I fell backward and hit my head on the hard wood. My hip popped; leaving me more than surprised he hadn’t dislocated my limb.

  The burn of my ankle, coupled with the agonizing white-hot heat of my abused leg, made it hard to focus on what to do next.

  So I cried out instead. “Deacon Delacorte! What are you doing?” I screamed, gripping the edge of the seat of the pew for all I was worth to keep from being dragged.

  He stopped for only a moment. “Oh, Trixie,” he rumbled, still as pleasant as he’d been since the day I’d first met him. “I think you know what I’m doing. Or what I’m going to do—to you, that is.”

  Deacon Delacorte was stronger than I’ll ever be, because he yanked again, making me cry out at the stabbing pain in my swollen ankle. His face remained placid and determined as he dragged me from the pew and into the aisle.

  When he began hauling me toward the front of the church’s vestibule, it was with almost no effort at all. I’m not a skinny girl by any stretch of the imagination, but you’d think I was nothing more than a wet noodle with the way he hauled me across the hard floor, scraping my back and stretching my leg till I thought it would snap.

  His grip on my ankle was made of steel, but I tried kicking at him with my other foot anyway.

  “Stop! You don’t want to do this! I already told the police who you are, Emile Franklin!”

  That stopped him dead to rights. He went completely motionless, turning around to look at me as my chest heaved, and I tried to sit up on my elbows to stare him down.

  But he didn’t appear at all afraid I’d called him out. In fact, for someone who was teetering on the edge of being caught after being on the run for twenty-two years, he was remarkably unruffled.

  And that scared me more than any other killer I’d come in this kind of contact with so far.

  He wasn’t at all fearful of the notion I’d really called the police. In seconds, I found out why. Emile Franklin stared me down with his suddenly soulless black eyes and whispered menacingly, “You didn’t call the police, Trixie. Know how I know?”

  I gulped, forcing saliva into my mouth so I could speak. “H…how?”

  “I just heard Coop and your boyfriend tell Father Rico they had to get back to you, because you wanted to bring Sister Ophelia’s iPad to the police.”

  My heart nosedived to my feet and my pulse throbbed in my ears. “But they don’t even know what I found. Please! I’m begging you, don’t hurt them!”

  He gave me a scathing grin, full of a psychopath’s special brand of twisted malice. “But it wouldn’t have been long until they found out what you know, Trixie, would it? Because I know all about you. Yes, I do. You would have told them the second they left Father Rico’s office. I couldn’t let you do that and I couldn’t let them do that either. You don’t know how to leave things alone, and I knew if you hadn’t already, you’d figure it out eventually. Or at the very least, you’d take it to the police and they’d figure it out—and I was right, wasn’t I?”

  Fear coursed through my veins, making my blood run cold. Shoot. This reputation I had for sticking my nose into a crime didn’t always work in my favor, because he was right.

  Emile gave me a knowing look then. “See? I knew it. Just like Sister Ophelia. She had the same look on her face as you do. She found out, too, you know. I heard her tell Father Rico she had to talk to him. That’s why I followed her outside. I knew something was wrong from the second she saw me when she arrived at the speed-dating event. And if I didn’t know then, I would have known when she realized we were alone outside. Everyone gives me that same look when they recognize me from that stupid, stupid show. That look of pure terror and disgust they can’t hide no matter how hard they try—and you know what that means, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “It means I have to kill them,” he rasped. “It means I have to eliminate any possible chance someone might
put it all together. Like Sister Ophelia. Like your friends. Like you.”

  I blinked, trying to sit up as more ice ran through my veins and his words sank in. He’d said everyone gave him that same look of pure terror.

  Which meant…

  Licking my lips, I asked, “Wait! What do you mean by ‘everyone’? You’ve killed other people for recognizing you from Unsolved Mysteries?”

  Emile winked and flashed a toothy, white grin. “Aw, sure, Trixie. At least two, and I’ll keep right on killing them if they keep cropping up. No way am I going to end up like that dipstick Paxton. Doing a life sentence, even after he gave me up! I ask you, what kind of deal was that?”

  As a side note, wowzers, huh? I guess the show really had been instrumental in catching fugitives. I was never sure if they plumped their stats for ratings or they really did catch a lot of criminals.

  As another revelation came to me, I tried to do two things at once. Figure out how to get away from him with a bum ankle and leg and find out why he’d done this.

  My arms shook, trying to keep me propped up, my stomach muscles ached, but I needed to hear him confess.

  “So you strangled her with your vestment, didn’t you? That’s how you got that hole in it.”

  He used one hand to lift up the purple stole and shrugged his shoulders with another dazzling smile. “Niiice work, Trixie. You’re really not half bad at this, Miss Marple…” he taunted.

  I almost gagged on my next question, but for some sadistic reason, I had to hear it anyway. “So was that the real Deacon Delacorte in the storage closet?”

  He sighed dramatically, mocking my question. “Yeeeah.”

  “Why?” I croaked, straining with everything I had to stay upright. “Why him?”

  “I was high and dry, Trixie. Someone had tipped off the FBI about seeing me in Wyoming. I needed somewhere safe to hide. That I ran into Deacon Delacorte at a diner here in Cobbler Cove was pure dumb luck. Luckier still when I heard him tell the waitress he was just back from China after some religious journey garbage, and on his way to meet his new congregation. I mean, I was raised by two religious nuts in the Catholic church. I knew everything I needed to know to step right into the role of deacon. So I made an executive decision.”