‘Do you have a fix on our subject?’
‘We do. He’s a block away. He’s moving east on Chancel Lane.’
‘Does anyone have a visual?’
Jessica checked with tactical. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
The red icon moved closer and closer to the green icon in the center of the screen.
‘Subject is closer,’ Jessica said. ‘A hundred yards.’
‘Still on Chancel?’
‘On Chancel.’
‘I can’t see anything.’
Onscreen the icon’s progress slowed. For a moment it appeared to be sidetracking north. Jessica again checked with tactical, both on the ground and on the rooftops. No one had yet made visual contact.
Suddenly the icon began to move. Fast. It was on a course directly to Byrne’s position.
‘Kevin, he’s on the move again. He’s heading right toward you.’
No response.
‘Kevin.’
Nothing but static.
The red icon on the screen disappeared. Jessica turned to Chris Gavin.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘He must have turned the phone off,’ Gavin said. ‘We lost him.’
65
Luther stood on the roof of a shuttered fabric store, just a block from the Priory Park Station. The only movement was the river of water rushing down Chancel Lane.
He looked at his watch. It was ten o’clock.
He had turned off the phone less than a block away, knowing that every second it was on they could see him, could track his movements.
Luther scanned the train platform at the end of the street, saw the figure standing on the upper level, a dark blue gouache against the darker backdrop of the shelter. He saw no smaller figure standing with the man.
Perhaps the girl was behind him. Perhaps she was in the stairwell leading down to the lower level of the platform. Luther wanted to believe these things, but he did not.
They had betrayed him. They believed he would not make good on his promise.
They would see who he was. If they did not know the legend of Eduard Kross by now, they would very soon.
When he reached the portal at State Road he did not bother to open the door with his keys. Instead, he pulled back and rammed his fist through the glass.
He entered the dusty space, ran down the steps into the basement. He could hear the rain pelting the roof, the drip of water through the holes in the ceiling.
He pulled the vent off the wall, and shimmied through.
Träumen Sie?
Yes, I dream.
Where are you?
I am in Tartu. Near the university. It is night.
What is the year?
It is the autumn of 1957. There are heavy rains. The streets are flooded.
Where are you going?
I am going to the home of a streetcar conductor.
Why will you do this?
I am going to visit him because he humiliated me. I did not have the full fare for a ride of just a few blocks, but instead of showing me off the streetcar, he felt the need to ridicule me. To ridicule my clothing. He called me kerjus.
A beggar.
Yes.
What will you do when you see him?
I will teach him the grace of civility.
How will this lesson be taught?
My blade is keen. I think he will understand.
Will you leave his children orphans?
No. His children will not be orphans.
And why is this?
I will also teach them a lesson.
Five minutes later Luther stood across the street from the row house. Through the downpour he saw the shadows flicker across the window shades. The conductor, it seemed, was at home. When he saw the small figures silhouetted against the window shade, he knew that the man’s children were home as well.
66
At 10:05 Byrne’s rover crackled. He took it out of his pocket.
‘Byrne.’
‘Kevin, it’s John Shepherd.’
‘What’s up, John?’
‘Who’s on channel?’ Shepherd asked.
‘Jessica, Chris Gavin, everyone at HQ.’
‘Okay,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’ve got issues.’
For a terrible moment Byrne’s mind flashed on Colleen.
‘What’s going on, John?’ Westbrook asked.
‘I’m down at the foster home now. I just talked to the woman who runs it. The little girl isn’t here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Byrne asked. ‘She has to be there.’
‘She isn’t. About ten minutes before I arrived, the woman said a detective from the PPD was here. She said the man told her the little girl might be in some danger, and he wanted to take her into custody.’
‘Did you send someone, Dana?’ Byrne asked.
‘No,’ Westbrook said. ‘It didn’t come from this office.’
‘This detective,’ Byrne said. ‘He showed her a badge?’
‘Yeah,’ Shepherd said. ‘She said she didn’t look closely at the picture ID, and he didn’t offer.’
For a few long moments there was no chatter on the line.
‘What did this detective look like?’ Westbrook asked.
‘Hang on,’ Shepherd said.
As Byrne and everyone else on the line waited, John Shepherd asked the woman who ran the foster home the question. In the background they heard the woman give her answer. Byrne felt his heart sink. He reached into his pocket for his ID wallet. It wasn’t there. He checked all his other pockets.
Gone.
By the time Shepherd got back on radio Byrne – and every other person on the channel – knew what had happened.
‘It’s Ray Torrance,’ Shepherd said.
‘It’s Ray,’ Byrne echoed. ‘You say he got there about ten minutes before you did?’
‘Yeah,’ Shepherd said. ‘I got caught in a flood on Arch. I had to go around. The whole city is inundated.’
‘We’ve got to put an APB out on Ray and Violet,’ Jessica said.
‘Do we know what he’s driving?’ Shepherd asked.
Byrne felt for his personal keys, even though he knew it was an exercise in futility. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s driving my car.’
‘Okay. Do you know your license plate number?’ Jessica asked.
Christ. He didn’t. He told Jessica as much. Providing he survived the night, he would have plenty of time to beat himself up about it later. Some cop.
‘I’ll get it,’ Jessica said. ‘Hang on.’
While Byrne waited he tried to pinpoint just when it was that Ray Torrance was able to lift his ID. It had to have happened when Byrne was taking the FaceTime call from Luther. He’d had his suit coat over the back of the chair. Ray had been standing next to him.
Byrne heard Jessica hitting computer keys. He then heard her dialing yet another number. She put out an all points bulletin and a BOLO – a Be On The Lookout – for Byrne’s car. It was something Byrne thought he would never hear.
A few moments later Jessica got back on channel. ‘Okay. The alerts are out,’ she said. ‘Just to confirm, Ray is armed, right?’
Byrne recalled that Ray Torrance had gone to his storage locker the night he showed him the videotape. He’d probably had a weapon there. Maybe more than one. ‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘He is.’
‘I figured as much,’ Jessica said. ‘I put it in the alert.’
‘I don’t want him taken down hard,’ Byrne said.
‘We understand,’ Westbrook said. ‘None of us do.’
When John Shepherd clicked off, Byrne put the rover back in his pocket. He looked down Chancel Lane. The water ran down the thoroughfare in broad streams. Nothing else moved.
67
Luther stood just outside the bathroom window. The window shade was up a few inches, and he could see into the brightly lit room. Before long someone entered. It was a girl of eight or nine years old. She wore flannel pajamas in a floral print. She stood at
the sink for a few moments, making funny faces in the mirror, then reached over, picked up a toothbrush, put a small amount of toothpaste on the brush, and began cleaning her teeth.
Luther thought of Marielle, of the nights he had taken her by the hand and watched as she did just this very thing.
At 10:10 Byrne’s phone buzzed. It was a text message from Colleen. The message contained three names. The first two included middle names, followed by MD. The third entry was just a first and last name.
There were no addresses.
Byrne wiped the face of the phone. His hands were trembling in the cold. He forwarded the text messages to Jessica.
The text came across the screen at the computer lab at 10:12 p.m. Jessica saw the names.
‘I’ll take the first two,’ Jessica said to Chris Gavin.
They began to search the police database.
The first name on the list, Elijah D. Ditmar, MD, was listed to a residence on South 47th Street, near Chester Avenue, in the Squirrel Hill section of West Philadelphia.
No, Jessica thought. Too far. If Luther needed to get back to the drop-off point by eleven o’clock, or whenever he was going to set as the next deadline, he would never make it, not even if the weather was good.
And the weather was anything but. Twice in the past few minutes the lights in the lab had flickered.
‘The third name on the list is a bust,’ Gavin said. ‘The block where the house used to be was torn down three years ago. There’s a Rite Aid and a Subway there now.’
‘I have a hit on the second name. Ronald B. Lewison, MD. He lives at 3223 Ralston Street. That’s less than four blocks from the drop-off point.’
‘It has to be where he is headed,’ Gavin said. ‘If he isn’t already there.’
Jessica got on the phone to dispatch. They would send everybody and their mother to the location. She then scrolled down to the phone number listed on the screen.
She dialed the number. It went directly to voicemail.
Someone was on the line.
Luther leaned very close to the window, the image of the young girl becoming Marielle, becoming his beloved sister Kaisa, taken from him all those years ago.
He took out the old woman’s phone.
‘Jess.’
Jessica turned to Chris Gavin. He was pointing at the large LCD monitor. The map had shifted. The red icon was back on screen. But it was no longer close to the green icon, Byrne’s position. It was four blocks away.
‘It’s the Lewison house,’ Jessica said. ‘He’s there.’
Luther called the detective. In a few seconds the man answered.
‘I saw you,’ Luther said. ‘You were alone.’
‘Let’s talk about this,’ the detective said. ‘Let’s work this out.’
‘You let me down.’
‘We don’t have the girl.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Luther said. ‘I told you, in very specific detail, where to bring the girl, and when. I also told you what would be the consequences should you fail to follow my instructions. Now you will see in scarlet detail what I meant.’
‘You don’t understand —’
‘No, sir, I’m afraid it is you who does not understand. All bodies that fall tonight will be on your conscience. For —’
‘— example,’ the man said. Byrne could hardly see the man’s face in the darkness. From time to time the right side of his face was illuminated with a bright yellow light, but it was not enough to give Byrne any kind of context of place. He could have been anywhere.
Onscreen, the image began to shake. In an instant a new image appeared. At first it was so bright that it overexposed the screen. But in a few seconds, Byrne could see that he was looking in the window at a room of some sort. From time to time raindrops washed across the lens, transforming the image into a shimmering watercolor.
When the lens cleared Byrne’s heart fluttered. He was looking at a little girl brushing her teeth.
The image again shook as Luther’s face came back into focus.
‘The little girl – the little girl who is mine – I want her to be this girl’s age one day.’
Byrne’s TracFone buzzed. He scrambled to get it out of his pocket and silenced before Luther could hear.
‘I want you to make a promise, Detective,’ Luther said.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ Byrne replied, not having any idea what was coming. He had to keep the man talking. He wiped the TracFone on his coat. He glanced down. He’d made it worse.
‘I want you to make a promise,’ Luther repeated. ‘Not to me, or even to yourself, but rather to the people in this house. I want you to promise them that no harm will come to them, that you will do everything in your power to give me what I want, what is rightfully mine.’
‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘I can make that promise.’
‘I want you to say it aloud.’
Byrne got the TracFone clean, saw the message: We have sub fixed. Cars en rte. Keep hm talking.
Luther waited for the detective to respond.
‘I just heard from the commander of my unit,’ the detective said. ‘We know where the girl is. We have her.’
‘Where is she?’
‘There was a mix-up,’ the detective said. ‘The officer who was supposed to pick up the little girl and bring her down here went to the wrong place. He’s on his way here right now.’
Liar, Luther thought.
‘The streetcar conductor showed me the same incivility,’ Luther said. ‘He thought there would be no consequence. For him it was merely a moment that came and went. But I remember. I remember it all.’
‘Wait,’ the detective said. ‘What you’re talking about – the conductor and his family – that didn’t happen to you. It happened to someone else. These are not your memories.’
The detective’s words were obscured by the staccato rhythms of the rain on the roof of the row house gutters overhead.
Luther once again turned the cell phone camera to the window. The girl was now standing in front of the window, drying her hands on a towel. This time she was making funny faces in the night-blackened window.
‘Can you see, Detective?’
‘Don’t,’ came the faraway voice from the phone’s speaker.
Luther was now face to face with the little girl, inches away. Through the window he heard a phone ring. It was an older phone, a land line.
‘I’ll get it!’ the little girl yelled. She put the towel back on the rack beneath the window, and turned toward the bathroom door.
Before she could take a step, Eduard Kross punched his fist through the glass, grabbed the girl by her hair, and pulled her into the storm.
68
Rachel sat with the tape recorder in her lap. She had found it under the bed. Bean’s bed.
She had listened to her mother’s voice reading a fairy tale three times through. She knew that her mother had recorded it for her and Bean one afternoon when she was sober, knowing that by nine or ten o’clock, on any given night, she would be too drunk to do it.
Rachel hated her mother for drinking, for dying in a car crash, but she loved her for doing this.
She stood up, put the recorder on the bed, looked again at the room. She now knew what had happened. It all came flooding back, all the nights the raggedy man had come to their house, their room. He had been watching years later when her mother threw out everything in Bean’s room. Her mother had put everything on the tree lawn and the raggedy man had come in the night and taken it, making a room for Bean in these catacombs.
Rachel walked to the door, grabbed the knob. As expected, it was locked. She glanced above the door, at the web cam in the steel mesh cage. She looked around the room, searching for options.
She walked over to the hope chest, opened it. It was too much to have asked for the contents to still be inside. It was empty. The same was true with the small drawer in the desk.
There were no windows in this room, just the one door, and the cold-air return
in the wall to the left of the door, near the floor.
Rachel glanced again at the web cam. There was no red or green light on the camera, so she had no idea if she was being watched. But she soon realized that there was something she could do about it.
The light switch next to the door had no on-off switch; it was just a blank face plate. Rachel walked back to the desk, opened the top. There was a half-mortise lock built into desk, but the key was long gone, probably before Rachel’s mother and father even bought it. But Rachel recalled how every time she let the hinged top of the desk fall – scaring Bean half out of her wits – the escutcheon would fall off.
Rachel closed her eyes, hoped against hope.
She let the top fall, and sure enough the thin metal escutcheon fell to the floor. She stole another glance at the web cam, then kicked the metal strip toward the door.
Two minutes later she had the two screws in the blank switch plate out, and the wires separated.
The room went dark.
While the switch plate had come off with relative ease, the screws holding the cold-air return were a different story. They had been painted over so many times that finding the slot in the screws, in the dark, had proven to be all but impossible. For a few terrifying seconds Rachel thought the worst, that the screws were Phillips head, which would have put an end to her plan.
But, slowly, she had managed to find the slots in the screws, and gently turn them to the left. Before long she had them all out. She ran the escutcheon along the top and the sides of the grill, digging out years of dry paint. Every so often she tried to pull the grate from the wall, without success.
Finally, using the thin metal strip as a lever, she began to pull the grill from the wall. When she thought it was out far enough, she worked her fingernails behind it on both sides, and pulled with all her strength.
The grate came free.
She put her ear to the wall, listened. She heard nothing.
Rachel looked through the opening into the next room, hoping that the heat ducts had long ago been removed, and there would be passage. There was. The room on the other side was dark, but she had to take the chance.
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