Some Rise by Sin

Author:Philip Caputo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

He had broken the seal, excommunicated himself. Laete sententiae, meaning that it was automatic, arising from the act itself, no trial or tribunal or public rite of expulsion necessary. If knowledge of what he’d done (in canon law, it was called “betraying the penitent”) reached the bishop, he would be suspended from all clerical duties while his case rattled up through the hierarchy to the Vatican itself. Only the Pope could rule on such an ecclesiastical crime. And if the pontiff ruled against Riordan, he would be formally deposed from priestly office—that is, laicized; that is, defrocked.

But the only way the bishop could find out would be if Bonham or the captain told him, or if Riordan himself confessed. He wasn’t going to, because he had every intention of carrying on as if nothing had changed. Otherwise, he would be an ineffective asset. The priesthood would be his cover. He had betrayed García, and if in the future others came to him seeking to be absolved of extortion or smuggling or murder, he would betray them, too. Again and again and again until the Brotherhood was smashed and Ernesto Salazar was, in Valencia’s memorable phrase, carried “out of these mountains in irons or in a body bag.”

The deception would be on his conscience alone. Ah, what had happened to his conscience, which in its scrupulosity had so often freighted him with remorse for doing or saying or thinking things that weren’t wrong? Why did it not weigh on him in this instance? Maybe it had worn itself out through overuse.

* * *

Search parties failed to find Domingo’s body. His head was placed in a wooden box—that would have to do for a coffin—and carried out to the cemetery overlooking San Patricio. Another requiem, another widow, another recitation of empty words. Dozens attended the funeral, but they were not as stunned and outraged as Riordan wished them to be. They were inured to abominations, and he later heard murmurings that maybe, maybe Domingo had been tied up with the narcos. The thought that a perfectly innocent man would be murdered and butchered, his head delivered to a church on Christmas Day purely for the shock effect, was too awful to contemplate; therefore, he could not have been innocent. That was the logic throughout Mexico: only the guilty were killed, and the proof of their guilt was the fact that they had been killed.

During the first week of the new year, federales disguised as miners arrested Danielo García when he walked into the mine offices with his black bag. He was taken to Federal Police headquarters in Hermosillo, where, Bonham reported, he admitted to a number of crimes but not to involvement in Quiroga’s murder. The confession being sufficient, the formality of a judicial hearing was dispensed with, and he was shipped off to the Altiplano maximum security prison.

It was a farmer trucking produce into San Patricio for market day who found Jesús Delgado hanging from a tree alongside the Mesa Verde road.

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