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“Of course. He weeps for her.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“What happened to her?” Bell asked.
“Wait for me here,” the priest said. “I’ll only be a moment.” He entered a building and came out shortly. As they continued along the block, Father Jack said, “There are wicked men living in this community who live by stealing from poor, ignorant people. They’ll steal their money, and if they have no money they will steal their drink. If they have no drink, they’ll steal their children. Whatever the wicked can sell or use themselves. The child was kidnapped.”
“Billy’s sister?”
“Snatched from the street-no more than five years old-and never seen again. Surely she courses through Billy’s brain when he injects the morphine. Where was he when she was stolen? Where was he ever when the poor babe was needful? He looks back now and loves the idea of that wee child. More than he ever loved the child herself.”
The old priest shook his head in anger and disgust. “When I think of the nights I prayed for that child… and all the children like her.”
Bell waited, sensing a natural ebullience in the old man that would rise to the surface. And it did after a while. His expression brightened.
“In truth, it was Brian O’Shay who cared for that little girl.”
“Eyes O’Shay?”
“He looked after her when Billy and his shiftless parents were drunk.” Father Jack lowered his voice. “They say that O’Shay beat her father to death for sins against the child only the Devil could imagine. She was the only soul Brian O’Shay ever loved. It was a blessing that he never knew what happened to her.”
“Could Brian O’Shay have kidnapped her?”
“Never in this life! Even if he weren’t long gone to Hell.”
“But what if he was not killed when he vanished? What if he came back? Could he have kidnappe
d her?”
“He would never hurt her,” said the priest.
“Evil men do evil, Father. You’ve told me how wicked he was.”
“Even the most wicked man has a streak of God in him.” The priest took Bell’s arm. “If you remember that, you will be a better detective. And a better man. That wee child was Brian O’Shay’s streak of God.”
“Was her name Katherine?”
Father Jack looked at him curiously.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t really know. But I’m asking you, was it?”
Father Jack started to answer. A pistol shot cracked from a tenement roof. The priest tumbled to the pavement. A second shot drilled the space Bell had occupied an instant before. He was already rolling across the sidewalk, drawing his Browning, snapping to his knees, raising his weapon to fire.
But all he could see were women and children screaming from their windows that their priest was murdered.
“I WANT A DIRECT telephone connection to the chief of the Baltimore office now!” Isaac Bell shouted as he stalked into Van Dorn headquarters. “Tell him to have his Katherine Dee file on his desk.”
It took an hour for Baltimore to telephone back. “Bell? Sorry I took so long. Raining like hell again, half the city’s flooded. You’ll get yours, it’s another nor’easter.”
“I want to know exactly who Katherine Dee is and I want to know now.”
“Well, as we reported, her father went back to Ireland with a boat-load of dough he made building schools for the diocese and took her with him.”
“I know that already. And when he died, she went to a convent school in Switzerland. What school?”
“Let me go through this while we’re talking. I’ve got it right here in front of me. The boys have brought it up-to-date since we sent our last report to New York… Takes so long back and forth to Dublin… Let’s see here… Well, I’ll be. No, no, no, that can’t be.”
