Kelly pointed McCabe to one of the folding chairs. ‘Just dump those files on the pile over there.’ He slipped behind the desk and sat down and looked at McCabe. His eyes, even behind the glasses, were hard to ignore. They were even bluer and more intense than they’d seemed in the photo. They radiated energy. From what I hear he’s a hell of a charismatic guy, Maggie’d told him, a real charmer. His crooked nose looked like it’d been broken more than once. McCabe guessed a scrapper. Sort of like Cleary.

‘Ever do any boxing?’

‘Amateur. As a teenager back in Pittsburgh.’

‘Any good?’

‘Not really. As you can see from the nose, guys tended to hit me more than I hit them.’

‘So what made you do it?’

‘I like defending myself. When I was young, people picked on me. One in particular. I wanted him to leave me alone.’

‘So you hit him?’

‘Just once. That’s all it took. He stopped.’

‘Picking on you?’

‘Yeah. Picking on me.’

‘Do I call you Father Jack?’

‘No. Just John. Or Jack, if you prefer. I’m not a priest anymore. Haven’t been for a long time.’

‘But you’re still a believer?’

‘Yes, but it’s different now. God sets the course by which I guide my life. The pope no longer does.’

‘Do most of your kids dress like the girl on the porch? The one who went to find you?’

‘What were you expecting? The Brady Bunch?’

‘She’s what? Fifteen years old?’

‘Tara’s sixteen.’

‘Sixteen, then. Any reason you let her hang out on the porch sucking on butts and looking like a Times Square hooker?’ Not the best way to start off with Kelly, but screw it. The girl was just a couple of years older than Casey. McCabe needed to get it off his chest.

‘Look, McCabe, if that’s where this conversation is going, why don’t you pick yourself up and go on back to Middle Street. My kids aren’t angels, and as a former street cop you ought to know that. A lot of them are vengeful, dirty, unrepentant sinners. All of them are wounded. I can’t change that in a day or a week or even a month. They tend to wear whatever they arrived in plus whatever appeals to them in the donation bags we get from the churches around town. Which, frankly, isn’t much.’

McCabe knew he had pressed the wrong button. He also knew it was dumb. If he was going to get any more out of Kelly, he’d have to back off. Let the anger subside. At the moment Kelly was on a roll, and McCabe figured he was better off letting him finish.

‘If Tara looks like a hooker,’ said Kelly, ‘hey, guess what? You’re right. That’s how she survived for the last year or so, and I’ll bet if you asked, she’d tell you fucking strangers for money was better any day than fucking her father for nothing. Which is what he forced her to do most of her life. At least when he wasn’t beating her silly and telling her she was a worthless piece of shit. The good news is she’s stopped hooking. She’s starting to put her life together. She just hasn’t changed her clothes yet.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I shot my mouth off, and it wasn’t called for. So I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’ Deep breath. Pause. ‘Apology accepted.’ Another deep breath. Another pause. ‘McCabe, you’ve got to understand our first job here is to get Tara and others like her off the streets and convince them their lives are worth saving, worth caring about. Fashion makeovers and smoking cessation, as important as they may be to you, are well down the line as far as I’m concerned.’

‘You’re pretty passionate about all this.’

‘You noticed.’

‘Any truth to the rumor you were abused yourself as a kid?’

‘It’s not a rumor, and yeah, there’s truth to it. It’s not something I try to hide. I was fourteen, and I was raped by my parish priest. The first time it happened I told my old man, and all he did was beat the crap out of me for blaspheming the Holy Mother Church. So I figured I’d have to defend myself. Remember I told you how somebody picked on me? Well, the second time it happened I beat the crap out of the priest. He was bigger and older than me, but I gave him two black eyes and a bloody nose.’

McCabe suppressed a smile. ‘What happened to you for that?’

‘Nothing. He couldn’t tell anyone what he’d done to deserve it. So he just told everyone, including the cops, that he’d been mugged on the street. Told them a couple of big black guys did it.’

‘Naturally. Doesn’t everyone?’

‘I suppose – but y’know what angered me then and still makes me angry now? Knocking the good father silly didn’t really change anything. He just kept on doing the same thing to other kids.’

‘Whatever possessed you to become a priest yourself?’

‘You mean aside from the fact that I felt I had a calling?’

‘Yeah. Aside from that.’

‘Like a lot of others, I had this cockamamie idea I could reform the institution from the inside. Didn’t take long to realize that idea was delusional. In those days, the institution wasn’t interested in reform. It was only interested in avoiding scandal, which it did for decades. It wasn’t until the Boston Globe turned the whole thing into national news that the Church really did anything to change. And by that time Sanctuary House was already up and running, and I was gone from the priesthood.’

McCabe remembered the Globe series well. In January 2002, a team of investigative reporters from the paper broke the story of pedophile priests wide open, detailing the sins of hundreds of priests, the victimization of thousands of children. The country was shocked. McCabe wasn’t. He’d learned about priestly abuse decades earlier because he knew a kid who was one of its victims. He hadn’t thought about Edward Mullaney in a long time. Fourteen years old. Shy and serious. An altar boy. A pious believer, utterly powerless to resist the God-like figure in a turned-around collar who liked taking him on ‘outings.’ McCabe had often wondered what had become of Edward. He’d found out last year. That’s when he learned Mullaney had been convicted of raping an eight-year-old girl.

‘How many kids do you have living here?’

‘Depends. Anywhere from thirty, which is our legal capacity, up to sixty, which is about all we can stuff in. Kids who sleep on the street in the summer sleep here in January. Right now we’ve got them three and four to a room.’

‘They come and go?’

‘It’s not a prison. Kids are always welcome here. Any kid. If they leave, we don’t usually try to hunt them down. Although I have done that with a few I thought were a danger to themselves or to others. Even called you guys for help a few times.’

‘How long’s the average stay?’

‘Some come for one night and then disappear. Others are here for weeks or months, which gives us a chance to work with them. We don’t turn anyone away, and we don’t kick anybody out unless they break our rules.’

‘Which are?’ asked McCabe.

‘We only have three, and, like I said, they don’t include a smoking ban. Number one’s no violence. Against yourself or anyone else. Number two’s no booze or drugs. Here or anywhere else. Number three, everyone has to show everyone else respect. Break a rule once and I’ll usually give you a second chance. Break it twice and you’re out. In return the kids get a place to sleep, food to eat, and an obligation to do some work to help keep this place running. Cooking. Cleaning. Shoveling snow. Plus an obligation to work with one of our counselors to develop a program to turn their lives around. We try to help them get jobs in town. Find permanent housing. Send them to school or tutor them for the GEDs. Thanks to our volunteers we can offer therapy to those who need it. Counseling for the others.’

‘Permanent staff?’

‘Me and three counselors. One’s a young friar who’s been with me a couple of years. The other two are USM grad students studying social work. They’ll rotate out at the end of the semester and be replaced by others. We also have a number of volunteers.’