Ari was glad to have his team around him again. The squat little detective he called Toad stood as usual in the corner, hands in pockets, while Miner—an engineer with a peninsular nose and a gift for detail—towered over piles of evidence laid out in plastic bags on the table. In Miner’s lab, they could get some work done. Ari had scattered photos and a diagram of the Sancta Sanctorum on the table.
“See?” Ari gestured at the diagram and measured the air with his arms. “The Pope never gets closer than two meters from the altar. First, the chest shots—big arterial splash on the floor. Then a head shot, a smaller spray mark here. Then a long blood trail to the exit. And now we know the blood on the altar isn’t the Pope’s: it belongs to Chandos.”
Miner was excited. “But Chandos falls where he shoots himself, too far away to get so much blood spray on the altar.”
“But that’s the point,” Ari said. “He couldn’t have shot himself. There must have been a third person in that room. Either somebody shot him and moved him, which isn’t likely because there are no drag marks; or somebody carried his blood to the altar and scattered it there.”
“What possible reason would anyone have to do that?” Miner asked.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out for the last two days.” Ari boosted himself up on the table and sat to compose himself, trying to decide how to make sense to his team.
“Why scatter blood on an altar? To make atonement. To pay for transgression. It’s all in Leviticus—the priest slaughters the sacrifice, collects the blood, and sprinkles it on the altar. It was done in the Temple of Solomon.”
Miner interrupted, smirking. “So, your idea is this—the killer breaks through an impenetrable cordon of police, draws on the Monsignor and the Pope, shoots the Monsignor and collects his blood to perform some ancient ceremony, shoots the Pope as the only witness, and then escapes—again, through an impenetrable line of police who are rushing the place. Oh, and all within about five minutes.”
To himself, Ari added, “And while carrying a big wooden icon in a fifty-kilo silver frame.” He looked silently at Miner and made a face, hesitating. “All right. I’m waiting to hear your explanation.”
“Simple. Just what the police said. Chandos shoots the Pope and, while standing next to the altar, shoots himself, spraying blood across it. He staggers a few steps and topples where they find him.”
“You don’t ‘stagger a few steps’ with that kind of injury: you drop where you are. Even the police admitted that. And there were no staggering footprints and no blood trail. Your theory doesn’t work.”
“It’s more likely than yours…a mysterious third party in there carrying out some bizarre ceremony.”
“Sha. Just let me finish. The killer sprinkles blood on the altar, which makes the whole thing a ritual murder. There’s more. The killer then removes the Monsignor’s red sash from his robe and wraps it around his head. Now, why would he do that?”
“Chandos did it himself,” Miner shot back. “After firing at the Pope, he decided to hang himself with his sash. But the Pope escaped from the room. Chandos realized he had no time, so he shot himself instead.”
Ari considered this, examining the photos of the chapel that lay on the table and slowly shaking his head. Miner’s view was plausible, but wrong. The photos were not clear enough to show this, but Ari had seen the chapel for himself. The Monsignor’s blood on the altar was not like the wound sprays he had examined so many times before—it had been flung there.
“All right,” Miner said. “Tell me why the ‘killer’ would wrap the Monsignor’s sash around his head.”
“It’s another ritual. I checked this with my father this morning. The ancient priesthood would choose a goat to carry away the sins of Israel—they called it the scapegoat—and they tied a red cord around its horns to symbolize the blood guilt of the people.”
“Therefore,” Miner picked up, “our ritual murderer not only killed the Pope but also transferred his own guilt to a scapegoat and sacrificed him, too?”
“Not quite. There’s tension in the Catholic Church over this Pope. According to some, he was a heretic. A betrayer of the faith. He changed a lot of things, like allowing women to be priests and so forth, and a good many people have made a row over it. Maybe somebody thought he needed to be stopped. Chandos was the Pope’s man, and maybe that same person thought Chandos would make a good scapegoat—you know, in the ordinary sense. To make it look like Chandos did the deed.”
“So…a religious nutter is behind everything.”
Ari jumped from the table. “How many times have we dealt with this sort of thing? We live in the center of it all. You know the Jerusalem Syndrome…a perfectly ordinary tourist cracks, gets up on the Old City wall and declares he’s the Messiah. A nun sits in the Via Dolorosa and gouges her hands and feet until she bleeds like Jesus. A crazy businessman from Jakarta sets himself on fire to protest the infidels in Palestine. We’re surrounded by it. We even have a special hospital for religious cranks.”
“And these things add up to what?” Miner was a little impatient. “How does any of this help explain the murder of Emanuel Shor and the theft of the whatsit?”
“Two things. Both victims wore gold rings with the same inscription.”
“Right. ‘Until he comes who has the right to rule.’ ”
“Suppose there was some cultic connection between them. Everything I saw in France points to it.”
“An Orthodox Jewish scientist and a Catholic priest? That’s some cult,” Miner snickered.
“That’s the second thing. A missing DNA sample belonging to someone named Chandos—the only missing sample from a locker our victim probably entered minutes before the murder. And it happens to bear the name of our Catholic priest.”
Miner looked chastened. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it does. When I was in France I saw a sculpture, a statue of Saint Peter, the first Pope. He was dressed in the robes, not of a Pope, but of the cohen gadol, the High Priest of Israel. The special breastplate with the twelve stones, the turban. Look at this.” Ari flicked at his GeM and up on the wall came the image of the high priest from the Tanakh. Then a photo of the statue of St. Peter on the North Porch of Chartres cathedral.
“The same costume.”
Miner shook his head. “What are you getting at?”
“I think I understand.” Toad spoke for the first time, and Ari looked at him hopefully. “Catholics see the Pope as the successor to the high priest of Israel. The statue shows that. But according to Torah, the high priest must be a cohen, a direct descendant of Aharon ben-Amram. If Chandos believes he is himself such a person, he considers Zacharias illegitimate.”
“Thus the DNA sample in the Cohanic collection,” Miner concluded. “Sara Alman is typing the Monsignor’s DNA at Technion right now. I wonder what she’s found out.” He made a call on his GeM and stepped out of the room.
Ari and Toad looked at each other. “I didn’t know he was still in touch with her,” Ari said. “She’s at Technion?”
