Without forcing him to admit his guilt, the church had suspended him at first; then, when the media glare grew too bright, they’d defrocked him. He was ordered never to wear the collar again or participate in administering religious services. He was told to take down his website, through which he conducted a digital ministry. It had been ten years, and the website was still up. The men who had accused Stanton of inappropriately seducing and touching them had been told by the District Attorney’s Office that the statute of limitations had run out, and there was no possibility of filing criminal charges. So the accusers’ attorneys had brought a civil case that the church quietly settled just weeks after its filing. Two hundred and fifty thousand per man with no admission of guilt by the church or Stanton.
It was a total miscarriage of justice. Stanton had been accused of pedophilia years before even meeting these boys. The church knew all about it but either largely ignored the complaints or tried to keep them away from the public. They paid for psychiatric therapy for one victim and gave the family of another boy in Dallas $10,000 after they signed a settlement agreement that forbade them from ever disclosing its details. When word finally got out that Stanton had been accused of sexual improprieties, the church publicly stated that he would face internal discipline; then they transferred him to a small parish in St. Louis, where he continued to minister to young children, teaching, of all things, sex education. That was what he’d been teaching when he was transferred to St. Mary’s School just outside of Chicago in a small town called Blue Island. The five boys had been only in middle school when he had seduced and raped them repeatedly, telling them it was important he demonstrate for them behaviors prohibited in the Bible.
The scarred walnut-colored door to the apartment building opened and out walked the former Father Stanton. Along with his defrocking, he had been officially demoted to just Mr. Stanton. The church leadership had argued that this was a punishment worse than excommunication, because it was permanent, whereas an excommunication lasted only as long as the person was committing the sin. I wondered if his victims and their distraught families agreed with the church’s assessment, considering he was still a free man walking around and living his life as if nothing had ever happened, while they remained tortured by the psychological aftermath of his perverse predations.
He was still handsome, his hair a little grayer at the temples, age starting to pull at the corners of his eyes. In a dark dress shirt and jeans, he looked like a television news anchor on his way to do the evening news. He walked east down North Avenue, dropped a dollar in the cup of a man in a wheelchair selling Street Times, then walked into the Hollywood Grill. I turned the van around and drove farther down the street and parked across from the diner’s windows. I slid into the back of the van, which I had specially retrofitted with reinforced steel, cameras, and an observation scope that vented from the roof. I adjusted the camera lens, then increased the magnification. Stanton sat at a small colorful counter. I could practically read the print on the newspaper sitting on the table next to him.
A stout woman wearing a red checkered apron and white hairnet slid him a plate filled with an egg-and-cheese omelet, three strips of overly cooked bacon, and a pile of hash browns. He sipped from his coffee as he read through the Sun-Times, starting with the sports section at the back of the paper. An old man hunched on a cane walked by and gave him a friendly tap on the shoulder before sitting down two seats away. Stanton acknowledged him with a quick nod.
Stanton got through most of the Sun-Times, ate almost all his food, then got up and walked outside. He stood near the door, pulled out a cigarette, and smoked half of it before flicking it to the ground and returning inside. He picked up the Chicago Tribune next, then leafed through the entertainment section. He read it while finishing most of what was left on his plate. The woman refilled his coffee, and he went through the same routine—three spoons of sugar and two creamers—then back to his paper. After fifteen minutes, he placed a small pile of bills on the counter, left his papers folded next to his empty plate, waved at the old man, then walked out of the diner.
I jumped into the driver’s seat and started the van. Stanton continued walking north for several blocks, then ducked into a sliver of a barbershop with the name THE FINER THINGS painted across the window. I watched him sit in the chair, smiling and laughing with the barber, admiring himself in the mirror; not a care in the world. Yet his victims were scattered across the country, some of them hooked on drugs, unable to form relationships with people, blaming themselves that he had violated them. The barber ran the razor up Stanton’s throat, and I couldn’t help but think about how much justice there would be if I could push it right into the side of his neck and watch his carotids pump blood onto his ironed shirt until it pooled on the floor. I longed to see that arrogance wiped from his face and replaced with the look of fear at knowing that death was imminent. His victims and their families deserved to see his face twisted with dread and agony.
Once his cut was finished, Stanton paid, said something to the barber that made them both laugh, then walked outside to the corner and boarded a bus heading downtown. I looked at my watch and wrote down the time. It had been exactly sixty-nine minutes since he walked out his door. I needed to know his routine precisely. When the time was right, there would be no room for error.
A FULL TWENTY-FOUR hours had elapsed since Violet Gerrigan had walked into my office and dropped an overly generous retainer check on my desk. The critical seventy-two-hour window of discovery had closed, but that didn’t mean Tinsley couldn’t be lucky and beat the odds. I would have to move quickly and keep pressing. I drove to my office with the windows down and took in the clear September morning, one of those days when summer had pushed its last gasp, the leaves were starting to change colors, and a light jacket was enough to fight the early chill.
Part of me wanted to be out on the course working on bringing my club face closed on the downward part of my swing, but I needed to push forward on locating Tinsley. So, I found myself sitting and thinking in the quiet of my office while I looked across Grant Park at the whitecaps rolling in from Lake Michigan. Several small boats crossed each other on the open water. There was nothing like Lake Michigan on a clear day. Sitting there and watching it shiver was hypnotic enough to make you fall asleep.
My cell phone rang. It was my father, the eminent doctor Wendell Cayne.
“It’s good to know you’re still alive,” he said.
“Hello to you, too, Dad.”
“I haven’t seen you in over a week,” he said. “It would be nice if I got somewhere close to the priority of that ridiculous golf ball you like to whack around grassy pathways.”
“They’re called fairways, not pathways.”
“Whatever. A complete waste of an otherwise enjoyable walk in the woods.”
My father hated golf, not because he didn’t like the game but because he thought it had distracted me from playing tennis. He had always dreamed of watching me at Wimbledon or the French Open, sitting in the family box, pumping his fist at me while the crowds cheered me on to victory. Unfortunately, that was his dream, not mine. Then I stumbled upon golf and got addicted.
If I wasn’t going to be a tennis star, the least I could do as the son of a doctor and a corporate attorney was go into an honorable profession like all the other children of my parents’ friends and colleagues. But I wanted to carve my own path. The idea of solving crimes and sorting out right from wrong had always appealed to me, even at a young age. I really broke his heart a second time when I entered the Chicago Police Academy. He felt that was beneath “my station,” as he called it. Our relationship still hadn’t recovered.