In Death 27 - Salvation in Death

others, to counseling them, and leading them away from sin, it would be restitution, and he could continue his life. As if a slate had been wiped clean.”
    “You disagreed.”
    “It’s more than good deeds. It’s intent. Are the good deeds done to balance the scales, or for their own sake? Did the man truly repent? Miguel debated that the deeds themselves were enough.”
    “You think he was Lino?” López put in. “And this debate was about himself, about using the time here to . . . balance out something he did in the past?”
    “It’s a theory. How did he handle your take on this discussion?” Eve asked Freeman.
    “He was frustrated. We often frustrated each other, which is only one of the reasons we enjoyed debating. All the people he deceived. Performing marriages, tending the souls of the dying, baptisms, hearing confessions. What’s to be done?”
    “I’ll contact the Archbishop. We’ll protect the flock, Martin. It was Miguel . . . It was this man who acted in bad faith, not those he served.”
    “Baptism,” Eve said, considering. “That’s for babies, right?”
    “Most usually, but—”
    “Let stick with babies, for now. I’m going to want the records of baptisms, here at this church, let’s say from 2020 to 2030.”
    López looked down at his folded hands, nodded. “I’ll request them.”
     
    Peabody sat thoughtfully as they drove away from the rectory. “It has to be really hard on them. The priests.”
    “Getting snookered’s always a pisser.”
    “Not just that. It’s the friendship and brotherhood, finding out that was all bullshit. It’s like, say you go down in the line.”
    “You go down in the line.”
    “No, this is my scenario. You go down—heroically—”
    “Damn straight.”
    “And I’m devastated by the loss. I’m beating my breasts with grief.”
    Eve glanced over, deliberately, at Peabody’s very nice rack. “That’ll take a while.”
    “I’m not even thinking, ‘Hey, after a decent interval I can jump Roarke,’ because I’m so shattered.”
    “Better stay shattered, pal, or I’ll come back from wherever and kick your ass.”
    “A given. Anyway, then the next day it comes out that you weren’t Eve Dallas. You’d killed the actual Eve Dallas a few years before, dismembered her and fed the pieces into a human-waste recycler.”
    “Go back to beating your tits.”
    “Breasts, otherwise it’s not the same thing. So anyway, now I’m shattered again because the person I thought was my friend, my partner, and blah de blah, was in reality a lying bitch.”
    Peabody turned to stare, narrow-eyed, at Eve’s profile.
    “Keep that up and you’ll be dismembered and fed into a human-waste recycler.”
    “I’m just saying. Anyway, back to Flores, who we’ll now call Lino.”
    “We get the records, check out all the Linos, narrow it down.”
    “Unless he wasn’t baptized there, because his family moved there when he was, like, ten. Or he was never baptized, or he stuck a pin in a map to pick this parish for his hidey-hole.”
    “Which is why EDD will be working on the fake ID, and why we’ll be running his prints and his DNA through IRCCA, Global, and so on. Something’s going to pop out.”
    “I think it’s pretty damn low,” Peabody added, “faking the priesthood thing. If you wanted to fake something, you could fake something else. Like something you did before, something you were. Hey! Hey! Maybe he was a priest. I mean not Flores, but another priest. Or he tried to be one and washed out.”
    “That’s not bad. The washing out. We get the records, you cross-check with guys who washed out of the priesthood. Then do another check on the seminary where Flores trained. Maybe the vic knew him, trained with him.”
    “Got that. I’ll kick it back a little more, do a search on men of the right age span who went to the private schools with Flores, might have connected with him there.”
    It was an angle, Eve thought, and they’d work it through. “The guy had to figure he had the ultimate cover. Nobody’s going to run a priest, at least not like we’re going to. Not when he keeps out of trouble. And the only time we’ve learned he came close to the line was with this Solas. And we’ll be checking that, too.”
    As she spoke, Eve pulled over to the curb in front of the Trinidad, a small business hotel on East 98th. She flipped on her On Duty sign.
    It didn’t run to a doorman—which was a shame only because she enjoyed snarling