Free Lethal Lineage by Charlotte Hinger Page B

it yet.”
    “I haven’t. And I haven’t actually washed the chalice. I’m supposed to wipe it with a special cloth. But the KBI is barking up the wrong tree.”
    “Maybe so, but they want to cover all the bases.”
    “OK, but believe me, no one could possibly have put anything in the wine during the service. I’ll explain this to you when I get back home.”
    “Keith says he’s looked all over your house and nothing is there from the service.”
    “It’s still in my car. The chalice, the linens, the carpet. Everything.”
    “OK. Terrific. Turn around and take everything to Topeka. I’ll let them know you are coming.”
    “But what about the chain of custody?”
    “They’ll just state that they received it from you. None of us suspected any of that stuff might contain clues to a murder.”
    “I’m on my way.” I hung up and turned around at the nearest gas station. Even though everyone apparently assumed that something happened during the service, I knew it wasn’t possible. Our church has a common chalice. The Bishop is the first person to partake of the Body and the Blood. The second person is the priest, and then the choir members and lay readers, followed by the congregation. Even though we had no choir and Mary had doubled as a lay reader, none of the communicants had keeled over. No one could do a bait and switch with everyone in the church looking on.
    The stark fact was that Mary’s poisoning occurred after she fled from the sanctuary. I had been nearly back to my seat when I heard her scream. She was fine until some stranger played bloody hell with the service.
    Edna had said the precise words were “I know who you are and I know what you’ve done.”
    I knew who Mary Farnsworth was too, and I knew what she’d done. She was an unselfish brown wren of a woman who built nests and nourished little birds. She found homes for babies, the abused, orphans, or children who would be better off as orphans rather than remain with their parents.
    There wasn’t a mean bone in her body and no signs of a double life. No reason on God’s green earth why anyone would want to kill her. I winked back tears. Keith worried about my job because he didn’t want me to come to any harm. He wanted to take care of me. I thought I loved my job because of the dose of real world existence. But today I hated it too. I hadn’t signed up for murders.
    ***
    I went through layers of security before I could hand over the collection of items, and then I had to write out a formal statement. Despite exhaustion and coming down from a coffee high, it wasn’t hard to organize my thoughts.
    I covered every detail I could think of. I included Edna’s account of the missing communicant and suggested someone question her. Perhaps someone skilled in hypnotic techniques would pull more information from her. As for myself, I had not been aware of this man as I was too upset by the vicious sermon.
    The agent in charge, Frank Dimon read my entire statement. “If you don’t mind, Miss Albright, we have a few more questions. Especially about church procedure.”
    “This wasn’t typical,” I said. “I don’t want you to think this was the way things are usually done.”
    “What do you mean?”
    I explained that an established church would have a formal Altar Guild who understood the importance of their work. “Yesterday, I found rules for Altar Guilds on-line. I was woefully ignorant of the proper procedures. There’s even a special way to launder the linen. Even the purificater used to wipe the chalice has to be rinsed before laundering and the water poured into a special sink called a piscina with a pipe draining directly into the earth.”
    To the officer’s credit, he did not smile or indicate disrespect, but I thought it sounded crazy. Like we were some kind of fanatical cult instead of members of one of the first denominations on the American shores. Many of the founding fathers had been Church of England, and the Episcopal