Precise, repetitive work always was. It turned his brain down a notch.
Halfway through, the steady background chatter of a quiz show cut out and was replaced by the blare of an advertisement and then a smooth, practiced voice. Grade glanced up and caught the tail end of some school event on the news.
Mrs. Fowler waved the remote at the screen, her finger jabbed down on the volume button as she tried to turn it up.
“I saw the first report this morning before I left the house,” she said in an aside to her friend. “They didn’t have many details then.”
Her friend tched her tongue against her teeth. “It’s terrible. And such a nice neighborhood.”
The house on the TV looked different in daylight, fenced off behind strips of yellow police tape. Behind the reporter, police roamed in and out of the house, bags of what shouldn’t be evidence if Grade had done his job right in their hands.
“…behind me, the police are still in Ms. Ledger’s house,” the round-faced woman said as she squinted into the wind. She hooked her hair out of her face with one hand as she went on. “Sheriff Anderson has yet to confirm whether this could be related to Ms. Ledger’s work at the Cargill County District Attorney’s office.”
Shit.
“I’m telling you,” Fowler said, voice pitched to carry and nearly drowning out the reporter. “It’s not just Sweeny. Doglan has gone to hell too, just criminals and whores everywhere you look.”
Next to him, Dory had stopped mid-sort, a camisole dangling from her fingers as she watched the news play out.
“Although Ledger, then an assistant district attorney,” the reporter went on, “was not directly involved in the 2019 investigation into the use of jailhouse informants, she was still forced to resign in the wake of the scandal.”
It was his own fault, Grade thought grimly. He’d had a bad feeling about this job from the start; he should have listened to his instincts. It didn’t matter how Clay had spun subcontracting, it was still working for an amateur.
“Poor woman,” Dory said. “I hope they catch whoever killed her.”
That was family loyalty for you.
Chapter Eight
Clay pulled up outside the one and only Catholic church in Sweeny, a small stone building that was currently tucked in between a charity shop and a rundown Subway.
The Baptists had gotten all the good real estate around here.
He parked the bike up on the curb and pulled his helmet off to hang it on the handlebars. One of the old women on their way out, propped up on each other’s arm as they headed down the street, gave him a disapproving look.
“You missed mass again, Clay,” Deirdre Mills said and tched her tongue against her teeth. “How am I ever going to introduce you to my granddaughter if you don’t make a respectable man of yourself?”
Clay used his heel to put the kickstand down and tilted the bike over onto it. He swung his leg off it and gave the old lady his best charming-bastard grin. Old ladies loved a bad boy.
“I thought that was what a good woman was for, Ms. Danvers,” he said. “To make a man respectable.”
The other old woman, Ellie Benson, gave Clay a scathing look over the top of her glasses.
“It’s 2022, Mr. Traynor,” she said tartly. “Young women today have better things to do than rehabilitate assholes.”
“And God doesn’t?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” Deirdre said.
At the same time, Ellie lifted a finger heavenwards. “He,” she said, “signed up for the job.”
Clay shoved his keys into the pocket of his jacket.
“Next time,” he promised with a wink that made Deirdre cackle. Ellie tutted at her friend for being easily pleased while Clay headed into the church. It smelled like floor polish, candles, and stewed cabbage from the weekend soup kitchen.
Habit made Clay dip his fingers in the font on the way in. He dampened his brow and balls on autopilot, the flick of his fingers to each shoulder an old habit pinched into Clay by his grandmother.
The soft murmur of prayers, cut through with the familiar murmur of the rosary being said, provided a muted background sound as Clay paused in the doorway to look around. His gaze flicked over a couple of nuns sat in the middle, heads bowed over their rosaries, and a couple of homeless men sitting quietly in the back as they drank from thin plastic cups of soup.
