The Darkest Evening of the Year

OF N ICKIE,
THE FIRST MASCOT OF M ATER M ISERICORDIÆ,
WHO WAS EVERYTHING A GOOD DOG SHOULD BE.
     
    Brian said, “I understand you so much better now—the commitment to dogs, the risks you take. Your life was chaos, and Nickie brought order to it, order and hope. You’re repaying that debt.”
    Everything he said was true, but the story she had set out to tell was not yet entirely told.
    What came after that night in the quadrangle took far greater courage to discuss. She had not spoken of the next part to anyone in more than eight years.
    In telling him of her first dog, Amy had discovered an intensity of emotion greater than she had expected. Shaken by the depth of that revisited grief, she didn’t feel that she could tell him the rest of it now.
    She was tired, exhausted. So much had happened in—what?—maybe nineteen hours, and another busy and emotional day most likely lay ahead of them.
    Although she had steeled herself to tell it all, she could not proceed to the end. Better to wait now until they had found Brian’s daughter and brought her into his life, where she belonged.

 
    Chapter
47
    G unther Schloss, hired killer and pilot and happy anarchist, with a wife in Costa Rica and a second wife in San Francisco, had a girlfriend in Santa Barbara. Her name was Juliette Junke, pronounced junkie, which was ironic because she was so adamantly opposed to the use of illegal drugs that she had once castrated two small-time dope dealers who had sold marijuana to her niece.
    Juliette Junke did business under the name Juliette Churchill. She was a mortician. She, her sister, and her two brothers owned and operated Churchill’s Funeral Home, an elegant and stately facility with four viewing rooms that were frequently in use at the same time.
    Although the funeral business turned a profit, the Churchill clan moonlighted by smuggling terrorists—among other things—in and out of the United States in specially designed caskets that contained bottled oxygen and a clever system for collecting and storing the urine of the terrorists therein transported.
    Many murderous thugs just hiked across the unprotected border or used international airlines and—wearing T-shirts that proclaimed DEATH TO ALL JEWS in Arabic—breezed through U.S. checkpoints, where highly suspicious federal security personnel strip-searched Irish grandmothers and Boy Scouts on field trips.
    Juliette and her family specialized in the smuggling of those terrorists who were so notorious and whose faces were so well known to police organizations worldwide, they couldn’t even risk traveling in disguise and must be shipped on missions of jihad while posing as embalmed cadavers. These were the most successful of all terrorists, of course, and therefore the richest, and they paid well.
    Arriving in Santa Barbara after viewing hours at the funeral home, Billy Pilgrim met Juliette at the garage entrance. He pulled the Shumpeter Cadillac into an empty bay in the row of black hearses.
    Juliette Junke-Churchill was a good-looking woman, terrific-looking for a mortician. She reminded him of a young Jodie Foster: those fine cheekbones and those blue eyes that with just one wink could set your heart racing or, with one tear, break it.
    Juliette probably did not cry much—or ever—and she would never do anything as coy as wink. She looked soft, but she was hard. If she claimed to be able to crack walnuts with her thighs, Billy would want to watch but only while wearing goggles to protect against walnut-shell shrapnel.
    She greeted him with the nickname she had given him—“Bookworm, you are a sight for sore eyes”—and they hugged because everyone felt they had to hug Billy and because Billy didn’t mind hugging someone as delectable as Juliette.
    They set right to work unloading the trunk of the Cadillac. Juliette carried the bag of shredded dog’s-eye drawings, and Billy toted the wastebasket full of e-mail files.
    The funeral home had two superefficient Power-Pak II Cremation Systems, and one of them was ready to be fired up.
    Billy left the wastebasket full of e-mails with Juliette, and by the time he returned with the brain to Brian McCarthy’s computer, she had fed all the papers into the cremator. He tossed in the bag of shredded drawings, and pointing to the computer logic unit, he said, “I want to pour something corrosive into it.”
    “Why, if we’re going to burn it down to char and twisted scrap?”
    “I like to be double