Indirectly, Reverend Wycliff had been Stuart Shackleton’s principal accuser. Fr. Michael Coyle had been found dead in his office at the Sisters of Mercy children’s home. He was known to have had a chronic heart condition, and a bottle of angina pills was found spilled in front of him where he had expired at his desk.
But on inspecting photos from the coroner’s autopsy report as directed by Sheriff Chester Otis, Evan had pointed out an anomalous detail, offering its interpretation along with the inference that the priest had died — not of natural causes but “at the hands of another.” Someone, presumably an attacker, had smudged an ashen cross on the forehead between and just above the eyebrows. And at the center of those marks was a wound that farm-boy Wycliff identified as burn marks from
