The old man always stood covered before the Tomb and always prayed the same prayer, over and over—“May he come into his kingship in my lifetime and in my days and in the lifetime of the whole family of Israel swiftly and soon.”
The drives back to Haifa were long and dispiriting. Uncharacteristically quiet, Manny would sit behind him poring over worn-out maps of Mount Zion or reading some new article that promised a breakthrough. But the remains of King David remained undisturbed—wherever they were.
In the final few months, Rappaport had noticed a new energy in his colleague. Even though he rarely came to the lab, Manny was excited about the prospect of triangulating on the Aharonic genome—the genetic profile of the first great high priest of Israel, Aaron, brother of Moses. Of course, without a bone or two, there could never be certainty. But mathematical possibilities became probabilities as Manny studied and compared the profiles of thousands of Cohanic descendants. Rappaport cooperated politely, waiting for the opportunity that would inevitably come.
And now the old fool was gone and he was at last Director of the Centre—even if temporarily. It would soon be permanent, he was sure. He stood up and looked around at the lab through his glass office walls; with the past taken care of, he would spend the afternoon planning the future. He hoped that, if Heaven existed, Manny had found his discussion group.
A lanky young woman, one of the lab technicians, was crossing toward his office with an electronic notepad in hand. She was an intriguing case—a carrier of Tay-Sachs, she had joined the lab hoping to work on a therapy for it and turned out to be quite competent. He had come to rely on her, and in fact had just given her a highly confidential assignment.
“What do you have for me, Sarah?”
“We finished running the profiles the police wanted. Here are the results.”
Rappaport glanced at the data. “What’s the story?”
“We compared the sample we got from Rome with the Cohanic profile. It’s a very pure strain—95 percent match.”
“Hm. But nothing on sample 3111.”
“Sorry. As you know, we don’t keep printouts of the Cohanics—that one’s gone. Unless it’s in one of the old control studies. Still, there’s something else I thought you’d find interesting.” She scrolled quickly to a stop on the luminous blue screen of her handheld. “Here,” she pointed. “And here. Mutation at this point…this point…”
“MAO-A1 defect—severe, too. Whoever our Roman is, you wouldn’t want to get on his wrong side. Thanks, Sarah.”
She turned to leave.
“Wait. Where do we keep the backup files on those old control studies?”
Queen Helena Street, Jerusalem, 1000h
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.”