Rosary girls jbakb-1

by Richard Montanari

  "It was a close call for him," Palladino said. "About as close as you can get. The way I understand it, he was, well, dead for a little while."

  "Then I did hear it right,"Jessica said, incredulous. "So, what, he's like psychic or something?"

  "Oh, God no." Palladino smiled, shook his head. "Nothing like that. Don't ever even utter that word around him. In fact, it would be better if you never even brought it up."

  "Why is that?"

  "Let me put it this way. There's a bigmouthed detective over at Central who gave him some shit about it one night at Finnigan's Wake. I think the guy is still eating his dinner through a straw."

  "Gotcha," Jessica said.

  "It's just that Kevin's got a… sense about the really bad ones. Or he used to, anyway. The whole Morris Blanchard thing was pretty bad for him. He was wrong about Blanchard, and it almost destroyed him. I know he wants out, Jess. He's got his twenty in. He just can't find the door."

  The two detectives looked out over the rain-swept plaza.

  "Look," Palladino began, "this is probably not my place to say this, but Ike Buchanan went out on a limb with you.You know that, right?"

  "What do you mean?" Jessica asked, although she had a fairly good idea.

  "When he formed this task force, and gave it to Kevin, he could have moved you to the back of the pack. Hell, maybe he should have. No offense."

  "None taken."

  "Ike's a stand-up guy.You might think he's letting you stay at the front of the pack for political reasons-I don't think it will come as a shock to you that there's a few assholes in the department who think so-but he believes in you.You wouldn't be here if he didn't."

  Wow, Jessica thought. Where the hell did all this come from?

  "Well, I hope I can justify that faith," she said.

  "You'll do fine."

  "Thanks, Nick. That means a lot." She meant it, too.

  "Yeah, well, I don't even know why I told you."

  For some unknown reason, Jessica hugged him. After a few seconds they broke, smoothed their hair, coughed into their fists, got over the show of emotion.

  "So," Jessica said, a little awkwardly, "what do we do right now?"

  Nick Palladino scoured the block-city hall, over to South Broad, over to Center Square Plaza, down Market. He found John Shepherd under the canopy to the entrance to the subway. John caught his eye. The two men shrugged. The rain poured.

  "Fuck it," he said. "Let's shut it down."

  33

  TUESDAY, 9:15 PM

  Byrne didn't have to turn around to know who it was. The wet sounds coming from the man's mouth-the missing sibilance, the destroyed plosive, along with the deep nasal quality of the voice-said that it was someone who had recently had a number of upper teeth removed and his nose recently demolished.

  It was Diablo. Gideon Pratt's bodyguard.

  "Be cool," Byrne said.

  "Oh, I'm cool, cowboy," Diablo said. "I'm dry fuckin' ice."

  Then Byrne felt something much worse than the cold blade at his throat. He felt Diablo pat him down and take away his service Glock: the worst nightmare in the litany of bad dreams for a police officer.

  Diablo put the barrel of the Glock to the back of Byrne's head.

  "I'm a cop," Byrne said.

  "No shit," Diablo said. "Next time you commit aggravated assault, you should stay off TV."

  The press conference, Byrne thought. Diablo had seen the press conference, and then he had staked the Roundhouse and followed him.

  "You don't want to do this," Byrne said.

  "Shut the fuck up."

  The tied-up kid looked between them, back and forth, his eyes shifting, looking for a way out. The tattoo on Diablo's forearm told Byrne he belonged to the P-Town Posse, an odd conglomerate of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and disaffected thugs who, for one reason or another, didn't fit elsewhere.

  The P-Town Posse and the JBM were natural enemies, a hatred that ran ten years deep. Byrne now knew what was happening here.

  Diablo was setting him up.

  "Let him go," Byrne said. "We'll settle this between ourselves."

  "This won't be settled for a long time, motherfucker."

  Byrne knew he had to make a move. He swallowed hard, tasted the Vicodin at the back of his throat, felt the spark in his fingers.

  Diablo made the move for him.

  Without warning, without a modicum of conscience, Diablo stepped around him, leveled Byrne's Glock, and shot the kid point blank. One to the heart. Instantly, a spray of blood and tissue and flecks of bone hit the dirty brick wall, foaming deep scarlet, then washing to the ground in the heavy rain. The kid slumped.

  Byrne closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw Luther White pointing the pistol at him so many years ago. He felt icy water swirl around him, sinking deeper, deeper.

  Thunder clapped, lightning flashed.

  Time crawled.

  Stopped.

  When the pain did not come, Byrne opened his eyes and saw Diablo turn the corner, then disappear. Byrne knew what came next. Diablo would dump the weapon nearby-Dumpster, garbage can, drainpipe. Cops would find it. They always did. And Kevin Francis Byrne's life would be over.

  Who would come for him, he wondered?

  Johnny Shepherd?

  Would Ike volunteer to bring him in?

  Byrne watched the rain hitting the dead kid's body, washing his blood into the rutted concrete, unable to move.

  His thoughts scaled a tangled deadfall. He knew that, if he called this in, if he put this on the record, then all of this was just beginning. The Q amp;A, the forensic team, the detectives, the ADAs, the preliminary hearing, the press, the accusations, the Internal Affairs witch hunt, the administrative leave.

  Fear ripped through him-shiny and metallic. The smiling, mocking face of Morris Blanchard danced behind his eyes.

  The city would never forgive him for this.

  The city would never forget.

  He was standing over a dead black kid, no witnesses and no partner. He was drunk. A dead black gangbanger, killed execution style with a slug from his service Glock, a weapon that, at the moment, he could not account for. For a white cop in Philly, the nightmare couldn't get much deeper.

  There was no time to think about it.

  He squatted down, looked for a pulse. There was none. He got out his Maglite, cupping it in his hand to keep the light as hidden as possible. He looked closely at the body. From the angle, and the appearance of the entry wound, it looked like a through and through. He found the shell casing in short order, pocketed it. He searched the ground between the kid and the wall for the slug. Fast-food trash, sodden cigarette ends, a pair of pastel condoms. No bullet.

  Above his head, in one of the rooms overlooking the alley, a light flipped on. Soon there would be a siren.

  Byrne picked up the pace of his search. He tossed garbage bags, the foul stench of rotted food nearly making him gag. Sodden newspapers, wet magazines, orange peels, coffee filters, eggshells.

  Then the angels smiled on him.

  Next to the broken shards of a smashed beer bottle, was the slug. He picked it up, put it in his pocket. It was still warm. He then took out a plastic evidence bag. He always had a few in his coat. He turned it inside out and laid the bag over the entrance wound on the kid's chest, making sure that he got a thick smear of blood. He stepped away from the body and turned the Baggie right-side out, sealing it.

  He heard the siren.

  By the time he turned to run, something other than rational thought had taken over Kevin Byrne's mind, something much darker, something that had nothing to do with the academy, the manual, the job.

  Something called survival.

  He started down the alley, absolutely certain he had overlooked something. He was sure of it.

  At the mouth of the alley, he glanced both ways. Deserted. He sprinted across the vacant lot, slipped into his car, reached into his pocket, and turned on his cell phone. It rang immediately. The sound nearly
made him jump. He answered.

  "Byrne."

  It was Eric Chavez.

  "Where are you?" Chavez asked.

  He wasn't here. Couldn't be here. He wondered about cell phone tracking. If it came to it, could they track where he was when he received this call? The siren grew closer. Could Chavez hear it?

  "Old City," Byrne said. "What's up?"

  "Call just came in. Nine-one-one. Someone saw a guy carrying a body up to the Rodin Museum."

  Jesus.

  He had to go. Now. No time to think. This was how and why people got caught. But he had no choice. nil»

  Im on my way.

  Before he left, he glanced down the alley, at the dark vista on display there. In the center was a dead kid dropped into the middle of Kevin Byrne's nightmare, a kid whose own nightmare had just breached the dawn.

  34

  TUESDAY, 9:20 PM

  He had fallen asleep. Ever since he had been a child in the Lake District, where the sound of rain on the roof was a lullaby, Simon had been soothed by the clatter of a storm. It was the car backfiring that awakened him.

  Or maybe it was a shot.

  This was Gray's Ferry, after all.

  He looked at his watch. An hour. He had been asleep an hour. Some surveillance expert. More like Inspector Clouseau.

  The last thing he remembered, before being startled awake, was Kevin Byrne disappearing into a rough Gray's Ferry bar called Shotz, the kind of place where, when you walk in, you go down two steps. Physically and socially. A ramshackle Irish bar full of House of Pain types.

  Simon had parked on a side street, partly to keep out of Byrne's line of sight, partly because there wasn't a space in front of the bar. His intention was to wait for Byrne to emerge from the bar, follow him, see if he pulled over on some dark street and lit up a crack pipe. If all went well, Simon would have snuck up on the car and snapped a picture of the legendary detective Kevin Francis Byrne with a five-inch glass shooter between his lips.

  Then he would own him.

  Simon had gotten out his small, collapsible umbrella, opened the car door, spread the umbrella, and sidled up to the corner of the building. He peered around. Byrne's car was still parked there. It looked as if someone had broken the driver's window in. Oh Lord, Simon thought. I pity the fool who picked the wrong car on the wrong night.

  The bar was still packed. He could hear the dulcet strains of an old Thin Lizzy tune rattling the windows.

  He was just about to head back to his car when a shadow caught his attention, a shadow darting across the vacant lot directly across from Shotz. Even in the dim light thrown by the bar's neon, Simon could recognize Byrne's huge silhouette.

  What the hell was he doing over there?

  Simon raised the camera, focused, snapped a few pictures. He wasn't sure why, but when you shadowed someone with a camera and tried to assemble the collage of images the next day, every image helped in establishing a time line.

  Besides, digital images were erasable. It wasn't like the old days when every snap of a thirty-five millimeter camera cost money.

  Back in the car, he had checked the images on the camera's small LCD screen. Not bad. A little dark, of course, but it was clearly Kevin Byrne coming out of that alley and across the lot. Two of the photographs had been against the side of a light-colored van, and there was no mistaking the man's hulking profile. Simon made sure that the image was imprinted with date and time.

  Done.

  Then his police band scanner-a Uniden BC250D, a handheld model that had more than once gotten him to a crime scene ahead of the detectives-crackled to life. He couldn't make out the details, but a few seconds later, when Kevin Byrne took off, Simon knew that whatever it was he belonged on the scene.

  Simon turned the ignition key, hoping that the job he had done securing his muffler would hold. It did. He wouldn't be sounding like a Cessna aircraft while trying to shadow one of the city's savviest detectives.

  Life was good.

  He put the car in gear. And followed.

  35

  TUESDAY, 9:45 PM

  Jessica sat in her driveway, exhaustion beginning to take its toll. Rain hammered the roof of the Cherokee. She thought about what Nick had said. It had crossed her mind that she not had gotten The Talk after the task force was formed, the sit-down that would've started: Look, Jessica, this has nothing to do with your abilities as a detective…

  That talk never happened.

  She turned off the engine.

  What had Brian Parkhurst wanted to tell her? He hadn't said that he wanted to tell her what he'd done, but rather that there were things about these girls that she needed to know.

  Like what?

  And where was he?

  If I see anyone else there, I'm leaving.

  Had Parkhurst made Nick Palladino and John Shepherd as cops?

  Not likely.

  Jessica got out, locked the Jeep, and ran to the back door, splashing in puddles along the way. She was soaked. It seemed as if she had been soaked forever. The light over the back porch had burned out a few weeks earlier, and as she fumbled for her house key she chided herself for the hundredth time for not replacing the bulb. Above her, the branches of the dying maple creaked. It really needed to get trimmed before those branches smashed into the house. These things had generally been Vincent's job, but Vincent wasn't around, was he?

  Get it together, Jess. You are mom and dad for the time being, as well as cook, repairman, landscaper, chauffeur, and tutor.

  She got her house key in hand and was just about to open the back door when she heard a noise above her, the scrape of aluminum twisting, shearing, moaning under an enormous weight. She also heard leather- soled shoes scrape across the floor, saw a hand reach for her.

  Draw your weapon Jess-

  The Glock was in her purse. Rule number one never keep your weapon in your purse-

  The shadow formed a body. A man's body.

  A priest.

  He closed his hand around her arm.

  And pulled her into the darkness.

  36

  TUESDAY, 9:50 PM

  The scene around the Rodin Museum was a madhouse. Simon hung at the back of the gathering crowd, rubbernecking with the unwashed. What was it that drew ordinary citizens to scenes of misery and chaos like flies to a pile of dung, he wondered.

  I should talk, he thought with a smile.

  Still, in his own defense, he felt that, in spite of his penchant for the dreadful and predilection for the morbid, he still hung on to a scrap of dignity, still guarded closely that morsel of grandeur regarding the work he did, and the public's right to know. Like it or not, he was a journalist.

  He worked his way toward the front of the crowd. He pulled his collar up, slipped on his tortoiseshell glasses, brushed his hair over his forehead.

  Death was here.

  So was Simon Close.

  Bread and jam.

  37

  TUESDAY, 9:50 PM

  It was Father Corrio.

  Father Mark Corrio was the pastor of St. Paul's when Jessica was growing up. He was newly installed as pastor when Jessica was around nine, and she remembered how all the women swooned over his dark good looks at the time, how they all commented on what a waste it was that he had entered the priesthood. The dark hair had gone ice gray, but he was still a good-looking man.

  On her porch, in the dark, in the rain, however, he was Freddie Krueger.

  What happened was, one of the gutters over the porch was perched precariously overhead, about to break off under the weight of a waterlogged branch that had fallen from a nearby tree. Father Corrio had grabbed Jessica to get her out of harm's way. A few seconds later, the gutter had ripped free of the gutter board and crashed to the ground.

  Divine intervention? Perhaps. But that didn't prevent Jessica from being scared shitless for a few seconds.

  "I'm sorry if I frightened you," he said.

  Jessica almost said, I'm sorry I almost punched yo
ur freakin' lights out, Padre.

  "Come on inside," she offered instead.

  Dried off, coffee made, they sat in the living room and got the pleasantries out of the way. Jessica called Paula and told her she'd be there shortly.

  "How is your father?" the priest asked.

  "He's great, thanks."

  "I haven't seen him at St. Paul's lately."

  "He's kind of short," Jessica said. "He might be in the back."

  Father Corrio smiled. "How do you like living in the Northeast?"

  When Father Corrio said it, it sounded like this part of Philadelphia was a foreign country. On the other hand, Jessica thought, to the cloistered world of South Philly, it probably was. "Can't get any good bread," she said.

  Father Corrio laughed. "I wish I had known. I would have stopped at Sarcone's."

  Jessica remembered eating warm Sarcone's bread as a little girl. Cheese from DiBruno's, pastries from Isgro's. These thoughts, along with the proximity of Father Corrio, filled her with a deep sadness.

  What the hell was she doing in the 'burbs?

  More important, what was her old parish priest doing up here?

  "I saw you on television yesterday," he said.

  For a moment, Jessica almost told him that he must be mistaken. She was a police officer. Then, of course, she remembered. The press conference.

  Jessica wasn't sure what to say. Somehow she knew Father Corrio had stopped by because of the murders. She just wasn't sure if she was ready for a homily.

  "Is that young man a suspect?" he asked.

  He was referring to the circus surrounding Brian Parkhurst's departure from the Roundhouse. He had walked out with Monsignor Pacek, and-perhaps as an opening salvo in the PR wars to come-Pacek had deliberately and dramatically declined comment. Jessica had seen the constant replay of the scene at Eighth and Race. The media managed to get Parkhurst's name and plaster it all over the screen.

  "Not exactly," Jessica lied. To her priest, yet. "We'd sure like to talk to him again, though."