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heart attack, as you know, was a mild one. It was the lengthy trip to the hospital, the lack of immediate care, that complicated my misfortune. Serious damage was done to the heart, I am told, and it is unlikely that I could survive another attack. The doctors presumed that I would not come back to you, that life in Assumption was a hardship I would dare not risk. When I informed them of my intention to the contrary, they said, ‘But Father McMullen, you must slow down. Your heart has sent a message to your body.’ So I told them, ‘Then my soul will send a message to my heart.’ And that message is: Faith is the power that makes us whole.”
    He pauses for a moment, then concludes, “My dear friends, I shall burden you with no more of my prolixity today—it is far too warm. May the blessing of almighty God descend upon all of you and remain with you always.”
    Father James McMullen then returns to the altar and performs the rite of sacrifice that symbolically reenacts Christ’s death. The liturgy proceeds steadily toward the solemn climax of consecration, the moment at which the sacramental bread and wine are transformed for the faithful into the body and blood of Christ. It is the moment of the Mass for which Father McMullen was ordained, the focus of all his priestly powers.
    It is the moment at which he will summon the physical presence of God.
    It is also the moment at which he will be haunted by a recurring, unshakable memory.
    He bows low over the chalice. “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei, ” This is the cup of My blood, he whispers. As he genuflects in adoration, an altar boy rings the tiny silver consecration bell. But as the priest peers into the golden goblet of wine-turned-blood, he hears another bell—a louder one, an alarm—and sees himself many years ago rushing down the long hall past a row of identical doors till he reaches the one he knows he must open. He grips the knob with fingers colder than the brass itself, then sees inside the room.
    White sheets fall to the floor from the steel-framed bed, drenched with the still-warm blood of the boy who lies there, his eyes frozen wide with terror, his throat gaping open, savagely slashed.

Monday, October 5
88 days till deadline
    B Y MONDAY MORNING, THE long autumn rains have settled over the Midwest. Manning drives north on Sheridan Road toward the Carter estate in Bluff Shores. The pavement glistens black beneath dense trees, their wet foliage hanging low against a formless sky.
    Something Italian—something frivolous and operatic—warbles from the radio and fills the car’s chilly interior, a contrast that Manning finds more irritating than uplifting. The motors of the windshield wipers whir with each swipe of the blades, syncopated with the tempo of the music. Mercifully, the aria climaxes and dies.
    “Good morning, friends and neighbors, wherever you are …” It is the drawling radio voice of Bud Stirkham, a local commentator cut from the same philosophical cloth as Humphrey Hasting. In contrast to Hasting’s eloquently affected manner, though, Stirkham’s gravelly style is that of a down-home aw-shucks man of the people.
    “… and if the crisis in Ethiopia isn’t enough to shake your faith in international diplomacy, just look at the antics of officials here at home in their clumsy efforts to snag airline heiress Helena Carter’s killer. This spirit of apathy and indifference extends even to the Chicago Journal, which historically prides itself as watchdog of the public interest …”
    “Ranting demagogue,” Manning mutters to the radio as he switches it off. Shaking his head as if to clear it of Stirkham’s words, he slows the car at an intersection, peering through the rain at a street sign. He turns off Sheridan Road onto a quiet thoroughfare that leads him past unmarked roads to the vast, secluded estates perched on the lakefront.
    Manning slows the car as it approaches a driveway marked by a white rail fence and a country