Fleeced

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife Catherine.

Her support and motivation were keys to its getting written, and she suffered elegantly and with a wonderful sense of humour through the torture of the process.

Foreword

Fleeced is a work of fiction inspired by experience, triggered by events, and tempered by many insights of friends and expert associates. The first inkling of the story came years ago when I read Tom Harpur’s excellent book "The Pagan Christ; but the trigger was the 2009 excommunication of a Phoenix-based nun who faced grey-area issues and was judged harshly by black-and-white thinkers.

Many helped with facts, editorial review, and realmarketing (my term lifted from realpolitik) so essential to those of us who must self-publish. These include Tony Afecto, Steve Ackerfeldt, Linda Ahmet, Cindy Anderson, Marie Andryjowycz, Bill Ardell, Henri Arnaud, Brad Ashley, Elad and Sasha Barak, David Bell, Peter Blaiklock, Joan and Richard Boxer, Diane Brooks, Wes Brown, Mary and Terry Bryon, Brenda Buckingham, Jeremy Busch, Brendan Calder, Robin Campbell, Steward Campbell, Leonard Cappe, Don and Martha Carr, Frank Caruso, Mario Causarano, Diane Chabot, Peter Clark, Nancy Codeanne, Donna Cohen, Chris Coombs, Jim Coutts, Joan Curran, Allison Dellandrea, Jon and Lyne Dellandrea, Meredith Dellandrea, George Denier, Nick DiRenzo, Colleen and Mike Dolan, Jack and Sue Duffy, John Earle, Lihi Eder, Eric and Kristie Ehgoetz, Diane and John Elder, Tina Epps, Mike Fedchyshyn, Dusanka Filipovic, Jonathan Fine, Ken Florence, Rivi Frankle, Fred Fuchs, Matt Gassenbeek, Charles Goldsmith, Bob Gorrie, Elaine Gray, Lorne Greenspan, Tony Griffiths, Gordon and Wendy Hall, Deborah Hall, Liberte Halkidis (for whom one character is named), Rob Hamilton, Bob Harper, Mary Hayes, Grant Haynan, George Hood, John Hughes, Judy and Warren Hurren, Heather Kaye, Doug and Peggy Kelcher, Claire and Stirling Kenny, Roger Kenrick, Suzanne Kernahan, Rudy Koehler, Jacques Krasny, Joel Kulmatycki, Beverly Larkin, Mark Ledwell, Helen and Larry Leduc, David MacCoy, Murray Makin, Uwe Manski, Melissa McGuire, Lance McIntosh, John McKay, Joanne McKenna, Sue McKee, Bob Mitchell, Bill and Sharon Moriarty, Joan Murphy, Rob Nihil, Frank and Martha O’Connor, Karyn O’Neill, David Pace, Cathy and Wally Palmer, Lawrence Partington, Jane and Stephen Pasquale, Emil Petko, Alan Pyle, Emily and John Osborne, David Pace, 1ohn Robertson, Kirstin Rochford, Judy and Tim Rodenbush, Rhea Roebuck, Don and Joyce Rogers, Ben Rovinski, Kara Russell, Jim Saloman, Alan Schwartz, Martin Sear, Brian Shaw, Leslie and Tony Sinclair, David Smith, J’aime Spork, Lee Strickland, Greg Sutherland, Yvette Sutherland, Ed Swerhone, Shaul Tarek, Margot Taylor, Norm and Wendy Trainor, Sharyn Varty, Frank Vasilkioti, Sybil Veenman, Deborah Vittie, Marni and Roland Wieshofer, Lee Williams, Rochelle Zorsi.

Errors are mine. Please forgive any omissions.

Chapter 1

In the jungle at the end of the garden, the violent feeding chain prepared for the day shift. These were honest labors.

Sarah tossed in predawn darkness, threw off her bed sheets, arose to meet nature’s call, then slid quietly downstairs. She planned to start the coffee brewer, then perform personal ablutions before a day of teaching and caring for the sick, the lame, and the math-mystified.

Sidestepping the creak of the third step, she muttered an obscenity about darkness, unsteady stairs and old wood, then immediately crossed herself in apologetic outreach to her heavenly father.

On the main floor, Sarah noticed light under the once-was study, now seconded to dormer. A recent arrival had upped the head count to one person over capacity in this hellish Eden. The latest addition was Sister Therese, forced to Florida by a medical condition requiring more warmth than Rome offered.

Assuming the light meant Therese was awake, Sarah knocked to offer a Good morning. No answer. She knocked again. No answer. With deliberate palaver, she opened the door. All her senses assailed, she stopped in horror.

Blood. Dead eyes. The smell of shit. Silence. No breathing. Inhuman pallor. Inert. Lifeless.

There lay Therese, dead as a mackerel. Stabbed by a knife still buried at an oblique angle. Sarah’s first thought was Golgotha.

Light-headed. Sweat. Her heart smashed frantically in her chest, pounded in her ears. Tremulous. Fascinated. That thing; the knife. It was jammed straight into what used to be the dead nun’s crotch, sticking obscenely from her ravaged vagina.

Alien-like and outside her own body, Sarah floated, horrified, removed. Transfixed, she studied the scene in shock.

Therese’s wide-open, lifeless eyes mutely screamed the terror, the pain, the humiliation of her last living seconds. Dark red blood had pooled and begun coagulating around the cruel obscenity left in her. An arc of pubic gristle blotched the corpse, spilled to the bed and floor. Cloying sickly-sweet dankness of blood, headiness of morbid tissue and stench of involuntary post-mortem bodily issue pervaded, assailing Sarah’s senses, brain, soul. She opened her mouth to scream, then dammed it to stifle the vomit.

She wrenched her eyes away for modesty of the dead woman.

But the corpse and phallus were magnetic. Living and dead eyes locked for the eternity of a minute. The dead ones penetrated with onus, obligation, plea.

Nausea abated. Fear subsided. Sarah knew her own awful death was not imminent; coagulation meant the killing was hours old, the doer now gone.

Jesus, it’s a cross, she muttered, then crossed herself for saying and considering the sameness of the murdering knife and the cross of salvation. God’s interjection triggered reversion from her near-catatonic state; Sarah returned to her body, to the present, and her mind began to work.

Oddly, her first deliberate thought was the computer. The thing never left the dead woman’s side. It was clearly important. Was she killed for it? Because of it? What should she, Sarah, do now?

Within minutes of the grizzly find, taking just enough time in her own cell of a room to blow her nose and calm her heart, Sarah tapped on another door, that of Mother Superior.

Light knocks to no avail, Sarah let herself in to avoid waking the others in panic. Heavy regular breathing informed that so far as Sarah knew only one murder had occurred.

The matriarch displayed more panic than Sarah had, seizing initiative only after, and precisely as, Sarah ordered her; see the body, call the priest, call the police, tell the nuns.

With the respite of transferred obligation, Sarah submitted to emotion in the privacy of her own room. Lying prone abed, seeing only the vagina mutilating cross of the knife, she allowed herself to weep. She wept only for a couple of minutes, then willed herself from the selfishness of such personal release; a luxury for which she and the convent did not have time.

In a trance, Sarah began girding herself in the old style. The outdated habit every nun owned but no longer wore which was the armor of black serge, underskirt, overskirt, and tunic. She rolled up her flaming red tresses and crammed them into the white cotton cap, made severe by the bandeau, turning her image to monotonous and stale. The scapula over her head, pulled down tight, locked in place with the Spartan woolen belt. The wimple completed her transition to medieval.

Thus attired in the retro armor of her calling, Sarah sallied forth, door-by-door to check for causalities and whispered disclosure to each sister, all of whom had had an uninterrupted night. Each looked starkly blank as Sarah delivered the news, then silently closed their door.

With all accounted for and informed, Sarah raced back to the crime scene. Mother Superior Marie stood sobbing over the corpse. A cadre of nine nuns became ten, each dressed exactly as Sarah. They surrounded the deceased, each kneeling in feverish silent prayer.

No priest.

Sensing Sarah’s presence, the ten rose from their prayer and Therese’s sightless challenge, looking passively to Sarah, so that she might direct them.

Chapter 2

Ted Coulson loved his early repast. The sun had risen but not too many humans had. In another hour the place would be crawling, but for now, it was his. The early Florida sun offered gentle warmth that would later turn to swelter. Sitting alone at Jimmy’s wharf-side diner, breakfast inhaled, he now reached for the highlight: the daily Sudoku puzzle. Ah, ‘Diabolical!’ – my favorite, he muttered into the background chatter of pelicans and gulls. Ted had already been up for hours; first playing catch with the fish, then going from cover to cover of both the Miami Herald and USA Today, and now, finally, his pièce de résistance. A pelican perched ten feet away studied him as Newton did that apple.

Ted had been coming here to Ophrah for years now. It was his haven. No Miami. No traffic. Just the fish. And his sister. More correctly, the sisters.

Ophrah existed because of fishing, wilderness tours, the US Corps of Engineers, drug control and enforcement, and a botanical outpost at the University of Miami. The Orandu, a spring-fed river to the north, provided fresh water sufficient to the needs of the some 3,000 people that called Ophrah home.

Unemployment here never got much below 25 percent, every family had at least two guns but no dentist, and most of the indigenous population hadn’t read anything longer than a menu. Ophrah boasted itself to be the world’s best wilderness outpost, but tourists didn’t seem to care, and the town slumbered in a kind of expectant mediocrity, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be saved. It would have been different if it had sand for a beach. The sea qrapes that would save the land might very well kill the town.

For ten years Ted had made this pilgrimage. He came for two weeks of fishing and visiting with his sister, and now really all the sisters. They had become his family. He ate, prayed, and lived among them. Occasionally they had called upon him in Miami in his official police capacity for information, advice, assistance, or help on behalf of those in crisis. Time off purgatory, he thought each time as he cheerfully complied. But that was a dog’s age ago, as Ted was now in his eighth year of retirement.

Ted was a lonely man. He had no real friends, and no family other than his sister, Sister Mariah, and no interests to bring him into contact with others. His time in Ophrah was the least lonely of his existence. It kept him going.

Deeply into his puzzle, the first siren went unnoticed. The second crashed the game. The third wrenched him to acute awareness. What? Too many zebras for something minor. Kind of close to the convent. Better have a look, he thought. He heaved his 265-pound, fifty-three year old, out-of-shape frame into motion and lumbered toward his fate.

In minutes Ted was on the scene, and sure enough, there were the black-and-whites, parked helter-skelter, doors ajar, all three of them. This must be about everyone on duty! Christ! Someone must have died!

Hackles raised, Ted crossed what would become the perimeter; succeeding only because the yellow barrier tape wasn’t yet in place. Perversely, Ted felt good, alive, back. A crime scene was home, his comfort zone.

He knew where the perimeter would be set, how the detectives would soon take over, then cede it to the CSIs who would scour for hours in a relentless search for the minutia that make cases. They would most likely come from Naples, maybe Miami, or perhaps Tampa.

He knew the detectives would view him as suspicious.

Eleven ashen-faced penguins surged toward him, swallowing him into their midst. What’s with the outfits? he wondered.

Notwithstanding the obvious, which was crisis and loss, Ted felt alive, excited, and needed to help the police with the case and his girls with their ordeal. Instinctively he knew, based on twenty-five years at Miami homicide, that he was senior in skill and experience to everyone now on the scene. Eight years of retirement fell away in an instant. He was back.

When the answer to his first question was, It’s Sister Therese, she’s been murdered, his reaction was smiled relief that one of his personal flock hadn’t died.

That smile was unobtrusively noted by detective Sergeant Liberté Alvarado, of the Town of Ophrah police force.

The detective approached Ted, and as she did, despite all else that was going on, Ted sized her up. He noted a nice face, workable chest, the wide good for babies hips he found so enticing. He thought her a bit short, apparently fit but prone to weight gain and later-on dumpiness, maybe forty-five at the outside, and purposeful, but somehow not quite comfortable in this situation. She wore slacks. Ted preferred his women in skirts.

Before he could disengage from his penguins, the object of his assessment arrived and offered an outstretched hand.

Hello. I’m Detective Liberté Alvarado. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. First being, ‘who are you?’

Sure. Ted Coulson. What happened?

Mr. Coulson

Please, call me Ted.

OK Ted. There’s a deceased nun here named Sister Therese. She died violently about four hours ago. Ted, if I may say, you kind of stick out in this crowd.

He looked blank, then gave a half-smile kudos for her apparently unintended joke. Her steel-trap mind noted his ability to see humor, and to have appeared amused earlier.

Ya, said Ted, See that woman over there, on the far right? She’s my sister. Mariah. I come here every year. Fishing. These people are my family. I mean, she is my family. I live here. Well actually, in the cabin out back.

Liberté guided Ted to a chair in a manner that suggested she wasn’t so much asking as telling. I need you to not talk to the witnesses. Do you understand?

She plunked him in the targeted chair. Stay put, sir. I’ll be right back. Can we get you something? Water?

Sure, but really you don’t need to. My prints are on file. I’m ex-Miami homicide. I’ve been at a lot of crime scenes, ma’am. I can probably help you with this. For now you don’t need the prints, but the water would be nice. Thanks.

Then she was gone, and he was left to watch. As she left, she talked briefly to a Uniform who then hovered by Ted, leading him to the correct assumption that he was in a sort of temporary protective custody. A dark thought flashed through his mind, I wonder who they are protecting from whom? But more than anything, Ted held a blind faith in the system within which he had toiled for his entire working life. He would give her answers, she would see that he was innocent, and then he could help her to catch the real killer. He thought that would be fun. She was sort of attractive. Who knew?

This woman, Liberté, returned with his water and then excused herself. She did not return to him for just over an hour, but for most of it, she was within his eyeshot or earshot, so he got to watch in growing amazement.

There was no team as such, just this one woman. She had four Uniforms with her, one watching him, one outside maintaining the perimeter, another studying every door, window and ounce of earth for clues of entry and departure, and a fourth who did this woman’s every bidding.

He watched as detective Alvarado sent each nun to her room, and then interviewed each separately. It would have taken forever because she made copious notes, except each had almost nothing to say. Ted was able to glean only that everyone in the house had been asleep for the event, and that the body had been discovered by the young one, Sarah.

Notwithstanding the trauma of the moment, or perhaps because of it, he noticed Sarah for the first time, as a woman and not as a nun. This was ironic since the traditional outfit Sarah now wore did more to hide her than any of the modern smock outfits ever had. Maybe it was the jolt caused by the death, but at that moment he could feel the vitality of his old job and the stimulation that brought to him. Maybe it was how Sarah seemed to have changed. The girl was, well, regal, magnetic, compelling. Not just tall, she was six feet if not an inch over, and erect. She didn’t so much walk as glide. Her gaze, while kind, penetrated. One felt examined, probed, exposed under that gaze. Maybe it was the eyes that were a deep, remarkable blue. Contrasted against her blue-veined marble skin and her flaming red hair now hidden, they were intense.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He was, he realized, a little excited. He loved strong, dominant women, but always from a distance because he was also cowed by them. Ted caught himself in a momentary fantasy of gaining this woman’s attention. Immediately ashamed, he began a silent round of prayer, using his fingers to count. While he felt he should pray, he didn’t want to become a spectacle, and so left the rosary in his pocket.

While praying, Ted kept an eye on the proceedings. He noted that each nun had been Dapper-tested for gunshot residue. After processing, each had then been evicted to the back yard, where he guessed they would just mill about until bussed to the police headquarters for videotaped statements.

Apparently the only thing the nuns had been able to add was that a computer was missing. Therese took the thing with her everywhere she went, and spent almost every waking hour using it. It should have been in her room, probably on the desk and most likely tethered to an electrical outlet. But it wasn’t.

He was surprised that no one from the diocese, no priest, had showed up. He heard some chatter about well-wishers dropping gifts, mostly flowers, at the front gate, and wondered anew at how news, especially bad news, traveled.

He watched as much as doors and walls would permit, as Liberté seemed to stalk the dead woman’s body searching for anything that could be called a clue. He sensed she wasn’t getting much.

The detective took as much time with Sarah as with the rest of the woman combined. She made poor Sarah retrace her steps to discovery and thereafter, at least ten times. Just before checking Sarah for gunshot residue, she had sent Uniform number four on an errand of search and discovery in Sarah’s room. It was apparent that the nuns were all clean. He had seen, or rather heard, sparks when the cop had referred to Sarah’s attire as kind of medieval and the nun had spat back that modern America with all its security might be leaning in that direction. Well, thought he, some spice. This feisty little thing had struck a chord in him. He liked Sarah, and felt filthy for doing so.

Finally, it was his turn. As the detective approached, she handed a bagged Blackberry cell phone to Uniform number four with instructions that the call history and calendar be fully documented, stat.

She then coiled into the chair across from him. So Mr. Coulson, er, Ted, you live here?

This was his moment. He explained he was a retired homicide detective from Miami and that he was impressed with her performance so far, although shocked at the lack of resources given her. She thanked him, and he continued to explain. He told her about Mariah, the fishing pilgrimages, the old service piece, a Glock 22 she would find in the cabin. He mentioned the fact that just last evening he had gone to the shooting range for his weekly target practice, and yes there would be residue, that he had a key to the main house but in ten years had never used it, that he slept in the cabin, that he had been up at four to go fishing, that he had raced back because of the sirens.

Ted shared his take on the missing computer; that it was most likely the target of the raid, and the brutal violation a ruse. He told her that crime solving is like Sudoku, Good players follow each new fact as far as it will take them before moving on, and Every new fact requires a new assessment of all unknowns. She had actually seemed a bit testy and only wanted to know if he had a computer, and could he please show it to her and turn it on. He had found this a bit annoying. By now she ought to have seen the light and understood how helpful he was being. It was proving difficult to get this woman to understand how smart he was and to make her like him.

A little desperate to get through to this new challenge, Ted had reached back into history and told her about a case from his past, where the dots hadn’t fit together until viewed within context. That, as in Sudoku, the key is the pattern. From what he saw, this had been planned and it was about the computer. Based on that case of several years ago, he predicted another killing and that by now the murderer, himself a patsy, would already be dead.

He took her to his cabin, gave her the Glock, and was then ushered out where he remained under the silent guard of Uniform number three. When she emerged from the cabin, Liberté wore the latex gloves common to detectives, medical practitioners, and sex trade workers. Ted found it kind of exciting. She instructed Uniform number three to collect the bagged and tagged items of laundry: clothing, bedding, towels...and Ted’s personal computer. She asked Ted to confirm the clothing he had worn last evening at target practice, then asked him to strip and surrender all the clothes he was now wearing. She also took his cell phone.

By now the CSI team had arrived from Miami. Ted looked them over in search of a friendly face, but a lot happens in eight years. There were no people he could call later for an off-the-record update.

One more thing, Ted, began the police detective, Are you close to Sister Sarah? Is there anything that you want to tell me now?

Nothing. I mean she’s here. But no, nothing special. Why?

Well Ted, I find you interesting. Forgive me for jumping steps, but right now all I know is that I have a dead woman in there and a man with a gun out here. So far, all circumstantial, both means and opportunity. Not good if I find a motive. Tell me, Ted, what would you see?

He realized he was being tested. "Uh-huh. I would see it the same, Liberté. But my gun didn’t shoot that woman. I didn’t shoot that woman. Do what you gotta do. Just remember the