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A long pause ensued after I said the name Aldous. I was about to ask the friar if he was still on the line, but Friar Driscoll spoke up before I could.
“What’s he done?” Driscoll asked.
“Who are we talking about?” I said. I tried to get Sampson’s attention, but he was focused on his own call, scribbling notes furiously.
“Aldous Campbell, I assume,” the friar said.
“Aldous Campbell,” I said, writing down the full name. “Was he kicked out?”
“He was, three years ago. What’s he done?”
“Nothing that we know of for sure. But we want him for questioning in at least three murders.”
“Murders! Why do you suspect Brother Campbell?”
“We know that he had a connection to at least two of the victims. Why did you kick him out of the seminary?”
After another long pause, Friar Driscoll cleared his throat and said, “Brother Campbell revealed a… fondness for the beer we brew here and was warned. Then he was found with pornography and was warned again. Then he was caught torturing one of the farm animals we keep here on the grounds. Three strikes and you’re out.”
I closed my eyes, feeling in my bones that Choir Boy was our killer. Serial killers often begin by acting out their sadistic fantasies on defenseless animals. Humans come later.
“Tell me everything you can about Aldous Campbell,” I said. As I listened, I heard Sampson thank someone, then immediately make another call.
I spoke with Friar Driscoll for another fifteen minutes and hung up feeling like we were about to blow the case wide open. I stood up and pumped my fist just as Sampson ended his call and made the same gesture.
“We just caught a big break,” he said.
“You have no idea how big,” I replied.
52
JOHN SAMPSON FROWNED. “ARE we both talking about the defrocked Reverend Dylan Sentinel, recently of Roanoke?”
“Who? No. I’m referring to the booted novice Aldous Campbell, recently of a Trappist monastery near Putney, Vermont.”
“You actually got Choir Boy?” he said, breaking into a grin. “You’re up first, then.”
I gave him the highlights of my chat with Friar Driscoll: Orphaned at six and a product of the New Hampshire foster-care system, Aldous Campbell had come to the grounds of the Trappist order at age nineteen. He’d openly admitted to a checkered past in his interview with Driscoll, having been arrested once for shoplifting and once for abetting grand theft auto. But he’d expressed an intense desire to lead a monastic life.
“The friar said Campbell seemed very smart and earnest about taking his vows,” I said. “Oh, and apparently, he’s a great singer, a tenor. He sang so well, the monastery choir gave him a solo during his first Christmas Mass.”
“Doesn’t sound like a serial killer.”
“Give me a sec,” I said, then recounted what Driscoll had told me: Campbell was repeatedly inebriated, was found with porn on an iPad he wasn’t supposed to have, and had tortured and then strangled one of the farm animals the monastery kept, a piglet.
“After the piglet incident, the friar gave Campbell the toss. That was three years ago, and they haven’t heard from him since,” I said.
“Alcohol, pornography, and animal abuse?” Sampson shook his head. “That’s not good.”
“We know where it can lead,” I agreed. “So who’s the defrocked Reverend Dylan Sentinel?”
“Our victim in the Audi under the ghost ramp,” Sampson told me. “Boog was right about the collar. We got a DNA match. And Sentinel was evidently a real piece of work.”
The DNA match also triggered a hit on a missing person report that had been filed by Reverend Sentinel’s sister. Sampson had just gotten off the phone with the detective working the minister’s disappearance.
Sentinel was forty-nine years old, a native of Tampa, Florida, and a Methodist minister with a troubling past.
According to the detective, the reverend’s career had started out with noble intentions. After graduating from a theological school in Florida with a reputation for delivering stirring sermons about the plight of the poor, he’d eschewed offers of ministerial positions in affluent suburbs and instead turned the streets into his ministry, working to shelter and feed homeless people in Jacksonville and then Atlanta.
