DHL and The Snow Girls

Hi - I'm reading "The Snow Girls" by Chris Mooney and wanted to share these quotes with you.

"He picked up a stack of files from one of the two chairs in the corner of the room. Darby looked out through the window, into the bullpen, where a handful of cops were openly staring at her in disgust and contempt. Years ago, back when she was working an investigation for Boston’s Criminal Investigative Unit, she had uncovered a decades-long string of police corruption that extended up to the commissioner and the FBI’s Boston office. These same people who had sworn to protect and serve had also orchestrated the murder of her father, Big Red McCormick, who had discovered the seeds of a criminal enterprise operating within the Boston PD. He had been shot while on duty. Her father was strong. He had lasted a month before her mother decided to take him off life support. Darby insisted on being at the hospital. She was thirteen. The reason for the vitriol she was witnessing right now was a result of her committing the cardinal sin of law enforcement: going public with the truth instead of playing the role of the good soldier and keeping the matter confined within Boston PD, where the bureaucrats and spin doctors would work tirelessly to bury the matter. She was branded a rat, ostracized for not following their rules. Then she’d lost her job. Kennedy saw where she was looking.

‘Ignore them.’

Don’t worry, I am. She said,

‘You must’ve made a helluva lot of friends, asking me to come here.’

‘You’re the best at what you do. Granted, you have the subtlety and grace of a wrecking ball, but you do get results.’ He chuckled.

‘Have a seat.’

Kennedy was well into his early fifties but except for his hair, which had gone from black to a steel-grey, and maybe an extra ten or so pounds, he still looked like the same beat cop she remembered from her days in Boston –the tough and crafty baseball catcher who’d earned a free ride to Boston College. He would’ve gone pro if he hadn’t suffered a devastating knee injury, one that tore both his ACL and MCL, during his junior year.

‘Who’d you piss off?’ Darby asked, looking around his office.

‘That’s a mighty long list. Could you be more specific?’

"‘You worked homicide; now you’re stuck in Bedlam working cold cases.’

‘I needed a change of pace.’

‘What’s the real reason?’

‘Doctor’s orders.’

‘High blood pressure?’

Every homicide detective she knew suffered from it. That or alcoholism. Depression. The list went on and on.

‘That and the two heart attacks that followed,’ Kennedy said.

‘Why didn’t you retire? You put your time in.’

‘And do what? Take up golf? Besides, my wife would kill me, having me around all day. Can I get you coffee? Water?’

‘I’m all set.’

Darby took a seat.

‘So,’ he said, hiking up his trousers as he lowered himself into the chair. ‘Claire Flynn.’

Two days ago, Darby had been in Long Island, New York, winding up her consulting gig on a possible serial killer who, over a three-year period, had dumped the bodies of six women, all prostitutes or runaways, in the dunes. Kennedy called her out of the blue, asked if she’d take a look at a case Darby had worked more than a decade ago, and one that still haunted her: Claire Flynn, a six-year-old Belham girl, who, on a snowy night eleven years ago, went up a hill with her slightly older friend and never came down. It had been Darby’s first case. She’d flown in yesterday morning and spent the next twenty-four hours poring over the evidence, the police reports, everything.

‘What’s your verdict?’ he asked.

‘She’s dead.’"

"‘You’ve got stacks of cold cases in here. Why Claire Flynn?’

‘Because I don’t like paedophiles,’ he said.

‘And I especially don’t like how the Catholic Church, under the leadership of that arrogant prick, Cardinal Law, may he not rest in peace, knew full well that Byrne and those other priests were paedophiles. What did he do? He shuffled them around for something like fifteen years, put the reputation of the Church ahead of stopping child rape.’

Kennedy was right. Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law had, for nearly two decades, shuffled known paedophile priests to other parishes all over the Commonwealth of Massachusetts rather than reporting their crimes. It went on until 2002, when the Boston Globe broke the story, which went global. It seemed Law wasn’t the only one who’d put the needs of the Church above the needs of humanity: hundreds of similar stories kept popping up not just in the US but also all over the world. The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston had sold many of its properties to help defray the staggering legal costs and the nearly $ 100 million settlement for the victims of sexual abuse.

‘The state didn’t have a mandatory reporting law,’ Darby said.

‘Cardinal Law wasn’t under any legal obligation to come forward with any sexual-abuse claims.’ ‘Doesn’t make it right.’

‘Didn’t say it did.’ Kennedy waved his hands, as if surrendering.

‘But we’re not talking about that sick bastard Law. We’re talking about our sick bastard. Byrne abducted two girls before Claire Flynn.’

‘There’s no evidence that supports he –’

‘First church Byrne was sent to out of seminary was down in New Bedford,’ Kennedy said.

He was leaning forward in his seat now, elbows resting on his thighs, his eyes heated with anger, or frustration, or maybe a combination of the two.

‘He was an English teacher at St Bartholomew, taught first and second grades. Was there for something like fifteen years.’

‘Eighteen.’ ‘Right, eighteen. Sorry, senior moment.

"‘Now, we don’t know too much about what happened back then. Totally different time period –nobody would believe a priest was capable of molesting kids and, because the victims were underage, their parents didn’t want to go to the police, have it get around town. What we do know is that Byrne took a special interest in his female students, asked certain ones to stay after class, to come visit him alone in his office for talks that often involved their sitting on his lap. And now we know the Church, behind the scenes, came in and intimidated the hell out of the families, bought their silence. Cardinal Law didn’t put a stop to it, even after Byrne’s last year there, when Mary Hamilton vanished without a trace during a snowstorm.’

Darby had read the case file: how the Hamilton girl, who was roughly the same age as Claire Flynn, had been abducted while playing in a friend’s backyard. The friend’s mother, who had been out with the girl, supervising, had gone into the house to fetch her cigarettes. When she came out, Mary Hamilton was gone: her daughter told her that a man had come out of the bushes and grabbed Mary. She was never seen again. The friend told the police that the man who had grabbed Mary Hamilton wore a priest’s collar. She hadn’t seen the abductor’s face.

‘A few months after that,’ Kennedy said, ‘the Catholic Church sends Byrne for a little R & R at that private spa resort they’ve got in upstate Connecticut for treating priests who like molesting kids. Our man spends not even a month there and the Church decides that’s enough, he’s rehabilitated, and Law sends him to another church –this one up north, in Nashua, New Hampshire.

Year goes by, everything’s hunky-dory, and what happens next? Ten-year-old Elizabeth Levenson disappears, again during a snowstorm. Mother called the school: Byrne had offered to give the Levenson girl a ride home, and did. He admitted to that.’

‘The Nashua police found no evidence or eyewitnesses tying him to that crime –he wasn’t even a suspect at the time. Same deal in New Bedford.’

‘Then the Church ships him here and we know what happens next. This isn’t a series of coincidences –it’s a goddamn pattern.’

‘Any particular reason you’re so laser-locked on Byrne?’

‘You don’t think he’s our guy?’

‘I was wondering why you’re so heated up about him all of a sudden.’

‘It’s got to be Byrne. Who else could it be? And please don’t tell me Mickey Flynn’s old man. I don’t buy for one minute that Sean Flynn was behind his granddaughter’s disappearance.’

‘He made Mickey’s mother vanish into thin air.’

‘A theory that was never proven,’ Kennedy said.

‘I’m not saying it’s a bad one. After all, what sort of mother would abandon her kid, leave him to be raised by an animal like Sean?’"

"‘He’s not a priest any more. The Vatican finally stripped that from him. That was in the article right there on your lap.’

‘Yes, I know. The article also said he’s dying of pancreatic cancer.’

Dying. The word pressed against his chest like concrete blocks. It hurt to breathe.

‘I’m worried his impending death might cause you to confront him again,’ she said.

Mickey stared at the painting behind her desk and thought about how it didn’t matter that Byrne owned a winter jacket that was an exact match to the one described by the witness, the boy on the Hill, Danny Halloran. It didn’t matter that the next morning, Saturday, when the storm broke around nine, the bloodhounds had followed Claire’s scent through the trails to the boyhood home of Richard Byrne, an old weather-beaten Victorian house where his mother still lived. It didn’t matter that Byrne was a now-defrocked priest who had abducted three young girls, including Claire.

What mattered was evidence. Evidence, Mickey had learned, was the Holy Grail.

No evidence, no case. The Belham detectives and Boston’s top crime-scene investigators had gone in with all their collective forensic expertise and power. They examined every inch of Byrne’s mother’s house, the tool shed in the backyard and the battered Ford van he drove; yet they had failed to come away with the two most important elements: DNA and fibre evidence. That meant Richard Byrne could hold a press conference and play the victim, right down to asking the public to pray for the safe return of Claire Flynn. He could, if he wanted to, stand at the top of the Hill and watch little girls sledding. Byrne was a free man and free men could do anything they wanted. Building a case takes time, Mr Flynn.

You need to be patient, Mr Flynn.

We’re doing everything we can, Mr Flynn.

Your daughter’s case is our top priority. The police were good men, he supposed, but they didn’t understand what it was like, losing a child, even though a lot of them had kids of their own. Claire was his daughter, and to ask him to be patient while the motherfucker who took his daughter went about his daily life … Mickey had reached his limit, couldn’t stand the idea of dragging that knowledge with him to bed, waking up chained to it again the next morning. Something had to be done.

Something was done.

‘Mickey?’ she asked. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Yeah.’ He swallowed, then cleared his throat. ‘Yeah, I did.’"

"Cullen turned his head to the side, his gaze darting back and forth across the tall pines, the sky. He looked as though he had aged a decade. Maybe it was the angle of the sun. He definitely looked troubled, though.

‘There’s this wonderful quote about the Devil that I believe is attributed to James Garfield, our twentieth president,’ Cullen said.

‘A brave man, he said, is one who looks the Devil in the face and tells him he’s the Devil. It’s a nice sentiment, very noble, and makes for a good story. But those stories don’t talk about the consequences a brave man or woman suffers for doing such a thing.’

Cullen turned back to her.

‘I’d hate to see that happen to you.’

‘I’ve dealt with his kind before.’

‘And at significant physical and mental costs, from what I’ve read.’

‘I appreciate your concern, Father –’

‘But you’re going to talk to him anyway.’

‘The man is dying. If I can convince him –’

‘Richard isn’t going to give you what you want. He isn’t going to tell you anything about those girls. That he asked to speak to you tells me he has something he can use to hurt you.’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know. What I do know –what I can promise you –is that when you’re done speaking with him, you won’t be the same person. The man is evil, and that’s a word I don’t often use, Doctor.’

‘But that didn’t stop you from administering the last rites to him.’

‘I denied him the sacrament,’ Cullen said. ‘I won’t bore you with the specifics of canon law, but suffice to say that if someone refuses to show signs of repentance before death, the Church can refuse funeral rites, and a Catholic service. I denied Richard both. If he wasn’t willing to confess his sins to me and ask God for forgiveness, what on earth makes you believe he’ll confess anything to you?’"

‘They were right about you, what they said. You are a rat.’

She flinched at the last word.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he had crossed a line –knew too that what he’d just said wasn’t entirely true.

She had exposed crooked cops and crooked politicians, one of them the Boston Police Commissioner, the first woman who’d ever held the job, for getting in bed with a well-known Irish gangster Sean had worked for once upon a time.

She had stood up and done the right thing, and she’d lost her job because of it.

Her voice was calm when she spoke.

‘You’re a good man, Mickey. I’ve always respected you, and I can’t even begin to explain how truly sorry I am for your situation. And you probably won’t believe me when I say this, but I’m on your side, and I’m trying to protect you. Which is why I’m going to ask you one last time to leave. I won’t ask you again.’

Mickey looked away from her, at the dimly lit windows of the house, and felt as though every inch of his skin were wrapped in barbed wire.

Get arrested and risk going to jail, or trust her to do whatever job she’s come here to do?

Darby’s gaze dropped to her phone.

She began to dial.

Mickey turned around, his heart tearing in half, and when he took that first step, heading back to his truck, he was so light-headed he thought he might pass out."

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Thats a win for DHL - They can get away with bullying