Free All the Dead Fathers by David J. Walker Page B

she didn’t even go inside.
    Besides, she knew the real reason she didn’t feel like driving twenty miles north and showing Thomas Kanowski’s picture around wasn’t because she was tired. It was because she was nervous. No, make that afraid. Not of the clientele she might run into at a dingy bar and a couple of porno stores in the middle of the night, but afraid of something … some person  … entirely unrelated.
    Unless her punctured tire was random vandalism—which she didn’t believe for a minute—someone must have been tailing her all day: from home to the train station, the Art Institute, Dugan’s office, the seminary, and all the way to Rockford. And she’d never spotted him. What bothered her even more than her carelessness, though, was that now she had been careful, and knew there was no one behind her … and still she wanted to hide away in a safe place. Which is why she had to go forward, tonight.
    Because she would not allow herself to be shut down by fear. Not tonight. Not ever.

14.
    It was past midnight when Debra pulled into a motel south of Rockford. She paid cash and went to her room. By later that day, Wednesday, they might finally connect the three deaths and roll out the term “serial killer.” But there was such a difference between her and some psychotic, compulsive killer, one driven by secret voices or bizarre sexual urges.
    Debra heard no voices, and even if she did feel a deep, delicious stirring with each kill—all that blood, the torn flesh, who wouldn’t feel something?—hers was no compulsion. Hers was a free decision, made under Divine urging, to take action against evil, to even the scales for the terrible, secret suffering those priests had caused. And for Debra there was something else. Every dead priest led her closer to the bitch.
    *   *   *
    Debra knew she had God-given gifts that not many people had. Among them, she was able to distinguish between the significant and the incidental, and so knew where to keep her focus. For example, she had recently been distracted by thoughts of revenge against the one who’d so horribly slashed open her neck and face that long-ago night, but she put such thoughts aside. That one had been but an ignorant girl, acting out of mindless fear … and the damage she’d done had been repaired. Debra would maintain her priorities: dealing with the bad priests and the woman.
    Besides, God had shown again how he brought good out of evil, even out of the terrible wounds the ignorant girl had inflicted on Debra, and the disfiguring scars that followed. Deprived of medical attention, bleeding and in pain beyond measure, Debra had fled, and God had given her strength and wisdom. She made it to the compound in Sicily, where her great-uncle Umberto took her in. Umberto, her grandfather’s youngest brother. Even in his old age he was ruthless and maintained his hold on his family. Still, he was no match for Debra.
    Although secretly naming him la capra because he was a skinny, grotesque goat of a man, she’d quickly adapted to his perverse sexual desires. Umberto enjoyed her moans and gasps, no matter how artificial, reveling in her attention. She became his princess, and he made his servants cater to her. One of them, his driver, who also piloted his small plane, came to taking Debra on long drives in the country—“love drives,” they called them, filled with fierce pleasures of which there was no need to fabricate—and he even taught her how to fly the plane.
    Meanwhile la capra, filled with loathing for the greedy family that was anxiously waiting for him to die, was wildly generous to his newfound protégé, lavishing upon her large sums of money, all of which she wisely moved at once out of the country. And above all else, he helped her create her new self.
    Most of the plastic surgeons studied her snapshot and promised to restore