The Big Bad City Read Online Free

church he’d attended as a boy. The initials were lettered onto a banner above Christ’s thorn-crowned head. When he asked his grandmother what they stood for, she said, “I Have Suffered.”
    Carella felt fairly certain they didn’t mean “I Have Suffered” because that was an English sentence, and what they spoke in Jerusalem was either Latin or Hebrew. So he’d asked Sister Helen, the nun who was teaching him catechism three afternoons a week in preparation for his first Holy Communion, and shesaid the letters were a monogram of our Lord’s name and that they stood for
Jesus Hominum Salvator
, which meant “Jesus, the Savior of Men.” He was only ten years old but he asked her whether Jesus didn’t save
women
, too, and she said he most certainly did and told him to go sit in the back pew of the church.
    Several weeks after that, on a rainy Saturday when only two other kids showed up for catechism, Sister Helen took him aside and told him she was a virgin consecrated to God. And as lightning crashed overhead, illuminating the tall stained-glass windows, she removed a slender gold band from the third finger of her left hand, showed him the letters IHS engraved inside, and reverently whispered that she wore the ring in memory of her betrothal to her heavenly spouse.
    Carella hadn’t known what a virgin was.
    It wasn’t until he was sixteen or seventeen and knew what virgins were and weren’t that he began wondering again about those initials IHS. This was after he’d already stopped going to church and rarely wondered about holy matters anymore, but he kept seeing the letters over Christ’s head whenever he wandered past any shop selling religious items. He hated mysteries as much back then as he did now, so he went to the library and began digging. He discovered that the
nomina sacra
—as the various names of Jesus Christ were called—were very often shortened or abbreviated and that one of the monograms was the Greek IHΣ for IHΣOΣ, usually followed by XPΣ for XPIΣTOΣ, which made about as much sense to him as had Sister Helen’s
Jesus Hominum Salvator
. So he dug a bit further and learned that the Greek spelling IHΣOΣ XPIΣTOΣ translated as Iesous Christos, or Jesus Christ, and IHΣ was IHS, or the Greek abbreviation for Jesus.
    Jesus, he had cracked the code!
    Now, almost thirty years later, he found the initials IHS engraved on the inside of a gold wedding band worn by a murdered woman, and remembered Sister Helen again and the initials inside
her
ring, and he knew without question that the woman lying beside that Grover Park bench was a nun.
    Carella’s desk copy of the current “Official Catholic Directory of the City’s Archdiocese” listed six hundred and thirty-seven nuns living in thirty-five convents and residences. There were forty-four other convents statewide and Carella chose not to count the number of sisters living in those, thank you very much.
    He called the number he had for the archdiocese and spoke to a priest there who listened to his question and said he had no way of knowing whether any of the convents had reported a missing nun. He suggested that Carella try calling each of the convents individually, but …
    “I’m sure you know, Detective … or perhaps you don’t.”
    “What’s that, Father?”
    “Well … in this day and age, not all nuns live in convents. Many of them take up residence close to their work. They’ll either rent an apartment or a small house with another nun or nuns, or else they’ll live alone.”
    “Is there another listing?” Carella asked.
    “Sorry?”
    “Of these other residences.”
    “I’m afraid not. Sisters go where they’re needed and where they’re sent. Their mother houses would know where they are at all times, but then again … if youdon’t know who the nun is, you won’t know her mother house, either, will you?”
    “Do you know which orders still wear wedding bands?” Carella asked.
    “Wedding