Free Faustus Resurrectus by Thomas Morrissey Page A

sites. Gray carpet lined the walls as it had in the entry hall.
    Fullam turned from the monitors and extended his hand as they entered. “Mister Graham. Glad you could make it.”
    “Sergeant. Call me Donovan.” Donovan noted that, instead of his black priest attire, Father Carroll wore a dark blue chamois shirt and dark blue slacks, but no collar. “Working undercover, I see.” The priest smiled tightly and also shook his hand. Donovan looked at Fullam. “We’re it?”
    “My partner couldn’t make it tonight so, yeah, just us four. You’ve been capable so far. Can you handle it?”
    Donovan glanced at Joann. “Yeah, I can.”
    “Good.” Fullam gestured to a map of the aquarium on one wall. “Without manpower we can’t watch every access point into the aquarium, so you, Maurice and I will be staked out at various points inside the grounds, the most likely sites for the murder. Joann will be Big Sister in here, keeping an overview. We, the curator and the cleaning crew are the only ones who are on the grounds right now. Once they’re gone, we wait.”
    Donovan looked at the office wall, at a list of hazardous fish and the immediate medical treatment for each. “He’s got a hell of a choice, but why here? Why tonight?”
    “We don’t have many options.” Fullam eyed him. “I mean, you could be right. He could just stab someone with a plastic fish in the toy department of Macy’s, or in a back alley somewhere.”
    “Suffering seems to be a key in these murders, as does a certain sense of the theatrical,” the priest added. “Stabbing someone with a toy lacks the dramatic flair of, say, attacking piranha.”
    “Not perfect circumstances,” Joann said, her eyes going hopefully to the monitor screens, “but at least straws to grasp.”

    ***

    The curator, Dick Katz, left first, and the cleaning crew finished at nine o’clock. Donovan and Father Carroll stayed out of sight in the aquarium entrance hall while Fullam escorted everyone out.
    “You seem pretty calm,” Donovan observed, idly tapping on the glass of a tank. “Don’t you think anything’s going to happen?”
    “It may or may not. The Lord has a plan which we don’t always understand.”
    “So if a murder happens tonight, it’s God’s will?” Donovan frowned. “God sanctions murder? That sounds kind of harsh.”
    “Allow me to re-phrase: I think people act in ways that don’t honor God, but may be necessary to His plan. Since we can’t know all the designs of that plan, all we can do is follow our faith and believe we are doing right.”
    “Hmm. Sounds like a bit of a cop-out.”
    “Cop-out assumes there is a knowable answer. There is not, not in this lifetime.” Father Carroll smiled. “We do the best we can. The rest is in God’s hands. Once you accept that, life loses much of its anxiety.”
    “If you say so. I’d rather keep things in my hands, and not bother Him.”
    Fullam appeared and motioned them to follow him. “There are pretty much three places to commit the Pisces murder in here,” he said. “The Shark Tank, Alien Stingers , and the blue-ringed octopus. If we focus our efforts there, maybe we can let him in, but not out.”
    He led them through the plaza, past the penguins and the sea otters, and descended stone steps that led into the “underwater viewing” section of the Sea Cliffs. Inside, the exhibit wound beneath and behind the outside cliffs in a high, wide tunnel. To their right the walls were dominated by thick slabs of glass that served as viewing windows into enclosures of the penguins, sea otters, fur seals, sea lions and walruses.
    Cute, Donovan thought, watching small furry animals swim and frolic.
    The left side had dozens of pictures of animals, fish and seabirds as well as maps and a few interactive exhibits. A life-size replica of a walrus sat in the middle of one section—Donovan was surprised how big it was—while another section had a model of a killer whale’s head rising from the