“Yeah. The same.”
“Forget I said anything.”
Byrne saw a shadow near the door. A nurse poked her head in, smiled. Time to go. He stood, stretched, glanced at his watch. He had fifteen minutes until he had to meet Jessica in North Philly. “I’ve got to roll. We caught a case this morning.”
Jimmy frowned, making Byrne feel like shit. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. Telling Jimmy Purify there was a new case on which he would not be working was like showing a retired thoroughbred a picture of Churchill Downs.
“Details, Riff.”
Byrne wondered how much he should say. He decided to just spill. “Seventeen-year-old girl,” he said. “Found in one of the abandoned row houses near Eighth and Jefferson.”
The look on Jimmy’s face needed no translation. Part of it said how he wished he were back in harness. The other part related how much he knew that these cases got to Kevin Byrne. If you killed a young girl on his watch, there was no rock big enough to hide under.
“Druggie?”
“I don’t think so,” Byrne said.
“She was dumped?”
Byrne nodded.
“What do we have?” Jimmy asked.
We, Byrne thought. This was hurting a lot more than he’d thought it was going to. “Not much.”
“Keep me in the loop, eh?”
You got it, Clutch, Byrne thought. He grabbed Jimmy’s hand, gave it a slight squeeze. “Need anything?”
“Slab of baby back ribs would be nice. Side of scrapple.”
“And a Diet Sprite, right?”
Jimmy smiled, his lids drooping. He was tired. Byrne walked to the door, hoping he could reach the cool green sanctity of the hallway before he heard it, wishing that he was at Mercy to interview a witness, wishing that Jimmy was right behind him, smelling like Marlboros and Old Spice.
He didn’t make it.
“I’m not coming back, am I?” Jimmy asked.
Byrne closed his eyes, then opened them, hoping his face was fashioned into something resembling faith. He turned. “Sure you are, Jimmy.”
“For a cop, you’re a terrible fuckin’ liar, you know that? I’m amazed we ever made case one.”
“You just get strong. You’ll be back on the street by Memorial Day. You’ll see. We’ll fill up Finnigan’s and raise a glass to little Deirdre.”
Jimmy waved a weak, dismissive hand, then turned his head to the window. Within seconds, he was asleep.
Byrne watched him for a full minute. There was more he wanted to say, a lot more, but he would have time.
Wouldn’t he?
He would have time to tell Jimmy how much his friendship had meant over the years, and how he had learned what real police work was all about from him. He would have time to tell Jimmy that it just wasn’t the same city without him.
Kevin Byrne lingered a few more moments, then turned, stepped into the hall, and headed to the elevators.
BYRNE STOOD IN FRONT OF THE HOSPITAL, his hands shaking, his throat tight with emotion. It took him five turns of the wheel of his Zippo to light a cigarette.
He hadn’t cried in many years, but the feeling in the pit of his stomach recalled a time in his life when he had seen his old man cry for the first time. His father had been as big as a house, a Two-Streeter, a Mummer of citywide repute, an original stick fighter who could carry four twelve-inch concrete blocks up a ladder without a hod. Seeing him cry made him small in the ten-year-old Kevin’s eyes, made him into every other kid’s father. Padraig Byrne had broken down behind their Reed Street row house on the day he learned his wife needed cancer surgery. Maggie O’Connell Byrne lived another twenty-five years, but no one had known that at the time. His old man had stood by his beloved peach tree and shook like a blade of grass in a storm that day, and Kevin had sat in his bedroom window on the second floor, watching him, crying along with him.
He never forgot that image, never would.
He had not cried since.
But he wanted to now.
Jimmy.
10
MONDAY, 1:10 PM
Girl talk.
Is there any more cryptic language to the male of the species? I think not. No man who had ever been privy to the conversations of young females, for any length of time, would fail to concede that there exists no task more challenging than trying to demystify a simple tête-à-tête among a handful of American teenaged girls. By comparison, the World War II Enigma code was a breeze.
I am sitting in a Starbucks on Sixteenth and Walnut, a cooling latte on the table in front of me. At the next table are three teenaged girls. Between bites of their biscotti and sips of their white chocolate mochas pours forth a stream of machine-gun gossip and innuendo and observation so serpentine, so unstructured, that it is all I can do to keep up.
Sex, music, school, movies, sex, cars, money, sex, clothes.
I am exhausted just listening.
When I was younger, there were four clearly defined “bases” as it related to sex. Now, it seems, if I hear correctly, there are pit stops in between. Between second and third, I gather, there is now “sloppy” second, which, if I am not mistaken, involves one’s tongue on a girl’s breast. Then there is “sloppy” third, which means oral sex. None of the above, thanks to the 1990s, is considered sex at all, but rather “hooking up.”
Fascinating.
The girl sitting closest to me is a redhead, perhaps fifteen or so. Her clean, shiny hair is pulled back into a ponytail and secured with a black velvet band. She wears a tight pink T-shirt and beige hip-hugger jeans. She is sitting with her back to me and I can see that her jeans are cut low and, in the posture she is in—leaning forward to make a point to her two friends—reveal an area of downy white skin beneath the top of her black leather belt and the bottom of her shirt. She is so close to me—inches away, really—that I can see the small dimples of gooseflesh caused by the draft of the air-conditioning, the ridges of the base of her spine.
Close enough, in fact, for me to touch.
She prattles on about something to do with her job, about someone named Corinne always being late and leaving the cleaning up to her, about how the boss is such a jerk and has really bad breath and, like, thinks he’s really hot but in reality looks like that fat guy on The Sopranos who takes care of Tony’s uncle, or father, or whoever he is.
I do so love this age. No detail is so small or insignificant that it will escape their scrutiny. They know enough to use their sexuality to get what they want, but have no idea that what they wield is so powerful, so devastatingly halting to the male psyche that, if they only knew what to ask for, it would be theirs on a platter. The irony is that, for most of them, when that understanding dawns, they will no longer possess the looks to achieve their goals.
As if scripted, they all manage to look at their watches at the same time. They gather their trash and make their way to the door.
I will not follow.
Not these girls. Not today.
Today belongs to Bethany.
The crown sits in the bag at my feet, and although I am not a fan of irony—irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves, according to Karl Kraus—it is no small mockery that the bag is from Bailey Banks & Biddle.
Cassiodorus believed the crown of thorns was placed upon Jesus’s head in order that all the thorns of the world might be gathered together and broken, but I don’t believe that to be true. The crown for Bethany is anything but broken.
Bethany Price gets out of school at two twenty. Some days she stops at a Dunkin’ Donuts for a hot chocolate and a cruller, sitting in a booth, reading a book by Pat Ballard or Lynne Murray, novelists who specialize in romances featuring larger women.
Bethany is heavier than the other girls, you see, and terribly self-conscious about it. She buys her Zaftique and Junonia brand items on the Internet, still uncomfortable shopping in the plus-size departments at Macy’s and Nordstrom, lest she be seen by her classmates. Unlike some of her thinner
friends, she does not try to shorten the hem of her school uniform skirt.
It has been said that vanity blossoms but bears no fruit. Perhaps, but my girls sit at the school of Mary and therefore, despite their sins, will receive abundant grace.
Bethany does not know it, but she is perfect just the way she is.
Perfect.
Except for one thing.
And I will correct that.
11
MONDAY, 3:00 PM
THEY SPENT THE AFTERNOON recanvassing the route that Tessa Wells had walked to get to her bus stop in the morning. While a few of the houses yielded no response to their knocks, they spoke to a dozen people who were familiar with the Catholic schoolgirls who caught the bus on the corner. None recalled anything out of the ordinary on Friday, or any other day for that matter.
Then they caught a small break. As it often does, it came at the last stop. This time, at a ramshackle row house with olive-green awnings and a grimy brass door knocker in the shape of a moose head. The house was less than half a block from where Tessa Wells caught her school bus.
Byrne approached the door. Jessica hung back. After half a dozen knocks, they were about to move on when the door cracked an inch.
“Ain’t buying nothin’,” a man’s thin voice offered.
“Ain’t selling.” Byrne showed the man his badge.
“Whatcha want?”
“For starters, I want you to open the door more than an inch,” Byrne replied, as diplomatically as possible when one is on one’s fiftieth interview of the day.
The man closed the door, unhooked the chain, then opened it wide. He was in his seventies, dressed in plaid pajama bottoms and a garish mauve smoking jacket that may have been fashionable sometime during the Eisenhower administration. He wore unlaced broughams on his feet, no socks. His name was Charles Noone.
“We’re talking to everyone in the neighborhood, sir. Did you happen to see this girl on Friday?”
Byrne proffered a photograph of Tessa Wells, a copy of her high school portrait. The man fished a pair of off-the-rack bifocals out of his jacket pocket, then studied the photo for a few moments, adjusting his glasses up and down, back and forth. Jessica could see the price sticker still on the lower part of the right lens.
“Yeah. I seen her,” Noone said.
“Where?”
“She walked to the corner like every other day.”
“Where did you see her?”
The man pointed to the sidewalk, then swept a bony forefinger left to right. “She come up the street like always. I remember her because she always looks like she’s off somewheres.”
“Off?”
“Yeah. You know. Like off somewheres on her own planet. Eyes down, thinkin’ about stuff.”
“What else do you remember?” Byrne asked.
“Well, she stopped for a little while right in front of the window. Right about where that young lady is standing.”
Noone pointed to where Jessica stood.
“How long was she there?”
“Didn’t time her.”
Byrne took a deep breath, exhaled, his patience walking a tightrope, no net. “Approximately.”
“Dunno,” Noone said. He looked at the ceiling, eyes closed. Jessica noted that his fingers twitched. It appeared that Charles Noone was counting. If the number was more than ten, she wondered if he would be taking off his shoes. He looked back at Byrne. “Twenty seconds, maybe.”
“What did she do?”
“Do?”
“While she was in front of your house. What did she do?”
“She didn’t do nothin’.”
“She just stood there?”
“Well, she was lookin’ up the street at something. No, not exactly up the street. More like at the driveway next to the house.” Charles Noone pointed to his right, at the driveway that separated his house from the tavern on the corner.
“Just looking?”
“Yeah. Like she seen something interesting. Like she seen somebody she knows. She blushed, like. You know how young girls are.”
“Not really,” Byrne said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
At this, all body language changed, affected those little shifts that tell the parties involved they have entered a new phase of the conversation. Noone stepped back half an inch and tied the sash on his smoking jacket a little tighter, his shoulders stiffening slightly. Byrne shifted his weight onto his right foot, peered past the man into the gloom of his living room.
“I’m just saying,” Noone said. “She just kinda went red for a second is all.”
Byrne held the man’s gaze until the man had to look away. Jessica had only known Kevin Byrne for a few hours, but already she had seen the cold green fire of those eyes. Byrne moved on. Charles Noone wasn’t their man. “Did she say anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Noone replied, a new measure of respect in his voice.
“Did you see anybody in that driveway?”
“No, sir,” the man said. “I don’t have no window over there. Besides, it’s none of my business.”
Yeah, right, Jessica thought. Want to come down to the Roundhouse and explain why you watch young girls walk to school every day?
Byrne gave the man a card. Charles Noone promised to call if he remembered anything.
The building next to Noone’s house was an abandoned tavern called the Five Aces, a square, one-story brick-and-mortar blot on the cityscape that offered a driveway to both Nineteenth Street and Poplar Avenue.
They knocked on the door to the Five Aces, but there was no response. The building was boarded and tagged five sentiments deep in graffiti. They checked the doors and windows, all of which were well nailed and bolted from the outside. Whatever happened to Tessa had not happened in this building.
They stood in the driveway and looked up and down the street, as well as across the street. There were two row houses with a clear view of the driveway. They canvassed both. Neither tenant recalled seeing Tessa Wells.
On the way back to the Roundhouse, Jessica assembled the puzzle of Tessa Wells’s last morning.
At approximately six fifty on Friday morning, Tessa Wells left her house, walking to the bus stop. The route she took was the one she took always—down Twentieth to Poplar, over a block, then crossing to the other side of the street. At about 7:00 AM she was seen in front of a row house at Nineteenth and Poplar, where she hesitated for a short while, perhaps seeing someone she knew in the driveway to a long-shuttered tavern.
On most mornings she met her friends from Nazarene. At about five minutes after seven, the bus would pick them up and take them to school.
But Friday morning, Tessa Wells did not meet with her friends. Friday morning, Tessa simply vanished.
Approximately seventy-two hours later her body was found in an abandoned row house in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, her neck broken, her hands mutilated, her body embracing a mockery of a Roman column.
Who had been in that driveway?
BACK AT THE ROUNDHOUSE, Byrne ran an NCIC and PCIC check on everyone they had encountered. Everyone of interest, that is. Frank Wells, DeJohn Withers, Brian Parkhurst, Charles Noone, Sean Brennan. The National Crime Information Center is a computerized index of criminal justice information available to federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies. The Philadelphia Crime Information Center was the local version.
Only Dr. Brian Parkhurst yielded results.
At the end of their tour they met with Ike Buchanan to give him a status report.
“Guess who has a sheet?” Byrne asked.
For some reason, Jessica didn’t have to give it too much thought. “Dr. Cologne?” she replied.
“You got it,” Byrne said. “Brian Allan Parkhurst,” he began, reading from the computer printout. “Thirty-five years old, single, currently residing on Larchwood Street in the Garden Court area. Got his BS at John Carroll University in Ohio, his MD at Penn.”
&nbs
p; “What are the priors?” Buchanan asked. “Jaywalking?”
“You ready for this? Eight years ago he was charged with kidnapping. But it was no-billed.”
“Kidnapping?” Buchanan asked, a little incredulous.
“He was a counselor at a high school and it turns out he was having an affair with one of the seniors. They went away for a weekend without telling the girl’s parents, the parents called the police, and Dr. Parkhurst was picked up.”
“Why was it no-billed?”
“Lucky for the good doctor, the girl turned eighteen the day before they left, and claimed that she went along willingly. The DA had to drop all charges.”
“And where did this happen?” Buchanan asked.
“In Ohio. The Beaumont School.”
“What is the Beaumont School?”
“A Catholic girls school.”
Buchanan looked at Jessica, then at Byrne. He knew what they both were thinking.
“Let’s tread lightly on this,” Buchanan said. “Dating young girls is a long way from what was done to Tessa Wells. This is going to be a high-profile case, and I don’t want Monsignor Brass Balls up my ass for harassment.”
Buchanan was referring to Monsignor Terry Pacek, the very vocal, very telegenic, some would say militant spokesman for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Pacek oversaw all media relations concerning Philadelphia’s Catholic churches and schools. He had butted heads with the department many times during the Catholic priest sex scandal in 2002, usually coming out on top in the public relations battles. You didn’t want to go to war with Terry Pacek unless you had a full quiver.
Before Byrne could press the issue of shadowing Brian Parkhurst, his phone rang. It was Tom Weyrich.
“What’s up?” Byrne asked.
Weyrich said: “There’s something you better see.”
THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE was a gray monolith on University Avenue. Of the six thousand or so cases of death that were reported in Philadelphia every year, nearly half required a postmortem, and all were performed in this building.
Byrne and Jessica entered the main autopsy theater at just after six o’clock. Tom Weyrich wore his apron and a look of deep concern. Tessa Wells was laid out on one of the stainless steel tables, her skin a pallid gray, the powder blue sheet pulled up to her shoulders.
Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Page 9