Free The Inquisitor's Key by Jefferson Bass Page B

Revolution?”
    “The revolutionaries considered religion an institution of tyranny,” he began, and my fears were confirmed. “All over France, they destroyed churches, religious statues, other symbols of oppression.”
    God save us from oppressors, I prayed. And from pedants.
    “ But, ” Miranda interrupted, snatching back the reins of the narrative, “here’s some trivia you’ll find interesting. He was an Incorruptible.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Bénézet. He was an Incorruptible.” She stopped and nodded at the stone chapel, whose stout wooden door faced the bridge. “Bénézet’s body, lying here for centuries, did not decompose. Leading one of the popes, in the sixteen hundreds, to proclaim Bénézet one of the Incorruptibles.”
    “The Incorruptibles.” I sounded it out slowly, savoring the syllables and the meaning. “Sounds like a band of crime-fightingcomic-book superheroes waging war on bribery and embezzlement. ‘Holy hedge fund, Miranda—someone on Wall Street is making insider trades! This looks like a job for the Incorruptibles!’”
    She groaned, as I’d figured she would, and as I’d hoped she would. But she was right: I was intrigued to learn that Saint Bénézet was an Incorruptible—someone whose corpse did not decay. Catholics considered incorruptibility a sign of sainthood, but I looked at it through the lens of science. A few years back, I’d examined the body of a young woman—a pregnant young woman—who’d been killed and hidden in a cave for thirty years. The cave’s cool, damp conditions turned her soft tissue into a substance called adipocere—sometimes called “grave wax”—and the transformation was so complete, she might almost have come from a wax museum rather than a crime scene. In the morgue, I’d paused to admire her lovely features, and then I’d sprayed her body with hot water, watching with wonder as her prettiness and her half-formed baby melted away, dissolving like some sweet sad dream in the heat of a summer’s day.
    I thought of her—that lovely murdered young woman who had spent three decades as an Incorruptible—as I stood on the ancient bridge beside an antique chapel where a shepherd-turned-engineer had lain in state for centuries.
    According to Stefan, the move to the convent for safekeeping had not agreed with Bénézet. Some years after the French Revolution, the nuns to whom he’d been entrusted opened the saint’s coffin, the better to revere his perfectly preserved remains. Imagine their disappointment to discover that the miracle—like the man himself—had expired, and his mortal coil had shuffled off silently, unheralded by angelic fanfare or human notice.
     
    HUMAN NOTICE: WE SEEMED TO BE ATTRACTING IT. As I leaned recklessly on the tubular steel rail of the Bénézet bridgeonce more, watching a long, slender canal boat slip beneath the outermost arch, Miranda laid her hand on my arm. “Don’t look now,” she murmured, “but someone’s stalking us.”
    “Where?” Trying to look casual and touristy, I raised my eyes, pointing to the fortress on the river’s far shore, as if calling Miranda’s attention to it.
    She looked in that direction, smiling and saying, just loudly enough for Stefan and me to hear, “Downstream about a hundred yards. Edge of the parking lot. There’s a red-and-blue sign. Guy in a floppy hat standing behind it, propping binoculars on top. Don’t look yet.”
    I swiveled slowly, with only a passing glance at the spot she’d indicated, and gazed upward at the cathedral and the papal palace, which loomed above us on the rock. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s the biggest pair of binoculars I’ve ever seen. And they’re pointing right at us.”
    “ Merde, ” Stefan muttered a moment later. “Now he has a camera. A big telephoto lens.” He raised his arm, hitched up the cuff of his sleeve, and made a show of checking his watch. “ Allons-y. Let’s go. Turn your backs and cross to the