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she could bring herself to hit the speed dial.
    “McKenna.”
    “Detective, this is Rachel Wallen. I found something, but you have to promise me that if it’s not necessary to tell my parents, they won’t be told.”
    “I’ll have to be the judge of that, Rachel. What is it?”
    “I’m sending you a link. It’s a scene. A sex scene. With Olivia. There are other people in it.”
    “You’re sure it’s her?”
    “It’s my sister. She’s wearing the jade pendant I gave her for her birthday last year.”
    “I’ll look into it right now.”
    Rachel buried her face in the pillow. In her tangled mind, she tried to fathom how such a transformation could take place. Then Father Massey’s words came back to her with new meaning.
    The infinite power of human transformation.



want to thank you for your support, ladies and gentlemen. Together we’ll prevent what happened to Dina Anne Sullivan from ever happening again.” Father Massey stepped down from the podium to vigorous applause. The guests had paid three hundred dollars a plate for this fund raiser. Transcendence House was one of the most popular causes in the city, one that brought politicians of both parties into the same room. The murder of Dina Anne Sullivan three years earlier was one of the few things they could agree on.
    An eleven-year-old girl runs away from her abusive stepfather and seeks refuge in a convent. Instead of taking her in, she is turned over to a city agency which, after a cursory review of the case, sends her back home. One month later, the stepfather rapes and kills her in a drunken rage. The incident mortified the Church and embarrassed social welfare agencies.
    Enter Father Massey, who proposed a bill which would allow the state to underwrite selected religious institutions of all faiths for the specific purpose of taking in, educating, and caring for runaway children under the age of fourteen while their cases are under investigation.
    Such a bill would have been subject to the full force of separation of church and state arguments had it not been for the few pints of blood that Dina gave and the tons of ink which followed. Dina’s Law had just been signed by the Governor, and it meant that a child could seek refuge in one of these institutions and have the cost of their needs covered by the state.
    As Father Massey worked the tables like a bridegroom, the cameras flashed in pursuit. Indeed, to the audience, he was wedded to his unending fight against child abuse. Every politician in New York wanted to be associated in some way with this young, charismatic priest who managed to help illiterate street kids score in the top tenth percentile on their SATs and took hookers off the street and transformed them into IT technicians and computer programmers.
    This dinner at a Long Island VFW raised twenty thousand dollars for new computer equipment for the shelter. The new website had donor items ranging from sponsoring a day’s worth of medical care in the clinic for ten thousand dollars to buying a tank of gas for the outreach vans and uniforms for the intake staff.
    Massey was careful to keep his accounting hound’s tooth clean, showing exactly where each and every dollar went. Donors liked that, and city officials did, too, as it was a trick they had never mastered. Every year, Massey brought in independent auditors to go over the books of Transcendence House, Inc. and made the results available on the Internet. This kind of transparency, along with the results made him command the unquestioned respect of all.
    The idea was to go national, then world-wide. For this, hundreds of millions would have to be raised, and Father Massey was a born fund-raiser.
    As he drove back to Transcendence House in his ‘99 Honda Civic, Massey thought this had gone well, as had yesterday’s trip to Washington. Gabriella had recorded his subcommittee testimony, and he wanted to review that as soon as possible to critique his performance. Then he needed