“What,” I said, “you’re a Jesuit now, Gerry? Going to wrap me up in syllogisms?”

“Answer the question, Patrick. Don’t be glib.”

Even when I’d been a kid, there’d always been something oddly ethereal about Gerry. He didn’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us. You sensed that some part of him swam in the spiritual murk that the priests told us existed just above the realm of our everyday consciousness. The place from which dreams and art and faith and divine inspiration were sprung.

I went behind the bar for another beer, and he watched me with those calm, kind eyes. I dug around the cooler, found another Harpoon, and came back to the table.

“We could sit here and debate it all night, Gerry, and maybe in an ideal world, it wouldn’t be true, but in this one, yeah, some lives are worth a lot more than others.” I shrugged at his cocked eyebrow. “Might make me a facist but I’d say Mother Teresa’s life is worth more than Michael Millken’s. I’d say Martin Luther King’s was worth a lot more than Hitler’s.”

“Interesting.” His voice was almost a whisper. “So if you are able to judge the worth of another human life, you are yourself, by infeRenee, superior to that life.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Are you better than Hitler?”

“Absolutely.”

“Stalin?”

“Yes.”

“Pol Pot?”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“You?”

He nodded.

“You’re not a killer, Gerry.”

He shrugged. “Is that how you judge? You’re better than someone who kills or orders others to kill?”

“If those killings are done to victims who pose no real physical threat to the killer or the person who orders the killing, then yes, I am better than them.”

“So you’re superior to Alexander, Caesar, several U.S. presidents, a few popes.”

I laughed. He’d set me up and I’d felt it coming, but I hadn’t seen where it would come from.

“Like I said, Gerry, I think you’re half Jesuit.”

He smiled and rubbed his bristled scalp. “I’ll admit, they taught me well.” His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the table. “I just hate this idea that some people have more of a right to take a life than others. It’s an inherently corrupt concept. You kill, you should be punished.”

“Like Alec Hardiman?”

He blinked. “You’re part pit bull, aren’t you, Patrick?”

“What my clients pay me for, Ger.” I reached across and refilled his shot glass for him. “Tell me about Alec Hardiman and Cal Morrison and Jamal Cooper.”

“Maybe Alec killed Cal Morrison and Cooper, too, I don’t know for sure. Whoever killed those boys was making some kind of statement, that’s for sure. Crucified Morrison below the Edward Everett statue, shoved an ice pick through his larynx so he couldn’t scream, cut off pieces of him that were never found.”

“What pieces?”

Gerry’s fingers drummed the tabletop for a moment, his lips pursed as he decided how much to tell me. “His testicles, a kneecap, both big toes. It fit with some other victims we knew about.”