The press have been giving that description a lot of play lately, because Eddie Brewer, never anything close to a saint when we were growing up, is a priest. He’d been out jogging the night he was shot, dressed in thermals and sweats, so Fahey didn’t know his vocation, though I doubt it would have mattered much. But the press, sensing both a nostalgia for religion so close to the holidays, and a fresh spin on an old story, played his priesthood for all it was worth.

TV commentators and print editorialists have likened Eddie Brewer’s random shooting to a sign of the apocalypse, and around-the-clock vigils have been held at his parish in Lower Mills and outside the Carney. Eddie Brewer, an obscure cleric and a completely unassuming man, is heading for martyrdom, whether he lives or not.

None of this has anything to do with the nightmare that descended on my life and that of several others in this city two months ago, a nightmare that left me with wounds the doctors say have healed as well as can be expected, even though my right hand has yet to regain most of its feeling, and the scars on my face sometimes burn under the beard I’ve grown. No, a priest getting shot and the serial killer who entered my life and the latest “ethnic cleansing” being wrought in a former Soviet republic or the man who shot up an abortion clinic not far from here or another serial killer who’s killed ten in Utah and has yet to be caught—none of it is connected.

But sometimes it feels like it is, as if somewhere there’s a thread to all these events, all these random, arbitrary violences, and that if we can just figure out where that thread begins, we can pull on it, unravel everything, make sense of it.

Since Thanksgiving, I’ve grown the beard, the first one of my life, and while I keep it trimmed, it continues to surprise me in the mirror every morning, as if I spend my nights dreaming of a face that is smooth and unruptured by scars, flesh that is clean the way only a baby’s is, skin untouched by anything but sweet air and a mother’s tender caresses.

The office—Kenzie/Gennaro Investigations—is closed, gathering dust I assume, maybe the first stray cobweb in a corner behind my desk, maybe one behind Angie’s too. Angie’s been gone since the end of November, and I try not to think about her. Or Grace Cole. Or Grace’s daughter, Mae. Or anything at all.

Mass has just ended across the street, and with the unseasonably warm weather—still in the low forties, though the sun’s been down for ninety minutes—most of the parishioners mill about outside, and their voices are sharp in the night air as they wish each other good cheer and happy holidays. They remark on the strangeness of the weather, how erratic it’s been all year, how summer was cold and autumn warm and then just as suddenly bitter and icy, how no one should be surprised if Christmas morning were to bring a Santa Ana and a mercury reading in the seventies.