Read The Man Who Murdered God for Free Online

murder, too. You’ve got jealousy, you’ve got revenge, you’ve got escaping arrest or custody.
    Then you got your greed, your self-defence and your sexual reasons. Last of all you’ve got your psychotics. You figure out which slot to put your murder into, the one you’re working on today, and you follow the pattern. Just get the slot, and you’ve got the pattern.
    â€œBecause all murders follow patterns, Joe. Nobody’s less imaginative than a murderer. Bam, they kill. Slam, they go. That’s it. Understand that, and our work gets easy.”
    McGuire believed it. He was convinced they would discover something in Thomas Lynch’s past, something the priest had said or done, which led to his death. “We are agents of our own misfortune” was a creed McGuire clung to. He placed no belief in faith or fate. He believed only in what people did to themselves and others, acting on their own needs and their own emotions. Love. Hate. Fear.
    The Desmond record finished, and a Duke Ellington tune began. McGuire drained his cup. A cheer erupted from the direction of Fenway. The Sox got a hit. Or an out. McGuire thought about the early season baseball crowd gnawing on hot dogs and huddled together in the evening chill. He thought about inviting Ralph Innes to join him at a game some evening. Or better still, one of the women at work.
    He thought about the last time he had enjoyed a woman’s company for more than three evenings.
    Then he clicked off the radio and went to bed.
    â€œYou got nothing, right?”
    It was mid-afternoon, and Jack Kavander was leaning on the door frame of McGuire and Lipson’s cubicle. A toothpick was being worked frantically around his mouth, in and out, from side to side. After twenty years Kavander had finally stopped smoking by replacing cigarettes with various surrogates. Pencils, paper clips, peanuts, usually a toothpick.
    â€œOld Jack’s just trading one disease for another,” Ollie Schantz had observed a few months earlier. “He gave up cigarettes because he was afraid of emphysema. Now he’s chewing so many toothpicks, he’s liable to get Dutch elm disease.”
    â€œAm I right?” Kavander growled from the doorway.
    McGuire tossed a pencil on his desk and leaned back, his hands behind his head. “We’ve got a partial print and an approximate time,” he said, staring back at Kavander. “We’ve got a reasonable guess at the weapon, and we’re pretty sure he was using Remington shells.”
    â€œWhat else?”
    â€œThe woman who found him, Mrs. Kelley,” Lipson added before McGuire could reply. “We talked to her.” He shook his head. “No help at all. Said everything was normal. Didn’t see or hear anything unusual.”
    â€œLike I said, you’ve got fuck all.” Kavander pulled the toothpick from his mouth and gestured with it as he talked. “I’m getting flak from a lot of corners. The bishop’s upset, the mayor’s concerned. People don’t like the idea of priests getting their guts blasted in Boston.” He studied the mangled end of the toothpick before returning it to his mouth. “Give me something to feed them. Anything.”
    â€œWe’re working on two theories,” McGuire said. “One, it was a revenge killing. Something Lynch said or did, maybe in the last few days. Two, it’s a psychotic, somebody who just felt like blowing a guy away, and the priest was handy.”
    â€œYou getting any leads? Anybody calling in?”
    â€œSo far, three,” Lipson answered. He glanced at a sheet of paper on the corner of his desk. “This one guy over at City Hospital, tried to take out his own appendix with a pocketknife. Phoned up to confess, but the hospital says no way he’s been out of bed in three days. Got another guy said he killed the priest just like he killed Kennedy and shot the pope in eighty-one.