“I’m ruling this a homicide,” Weyrich said, stating the obvious. “Spinal shock due to a transected cord.” Weyrich slipped an X-ray into a light board. “The transection occurred between C5 and C6.”
His initial assessment had been correct. Tessa Wells had died from a broken neck.
“At the scene?” Byrne asked.
“At the scene,” Weyrich said.
“Any bruising?” Byrne asked.
Weyrich returned to the body and indicated the two small contusions on Tessa Wells’s neck.
“This is where he grabbed her, then snapped her head to the right.”
“Anything usable?”
Weyrich shook his head. “The doer wore latex gloves.”
“What about the cross on her forehead?” The blue, chalky material on Tessa’s forehead was faint, but still visible.
“I’ve swabbed it,” Weyrich said. “It’s at the lab.”
“Any signs of a struggle? Defensive wounds?”
“None,” Weyrich said.
Byrne considered this. “If she was alive when she was brought into that basement, why was there no sign of a fight?” he asked. “Why weren’t her legs and thighs covered with cuts?”
“We found a small quantity of midazolam in her system.”
“What is that?” Byrne asked.
“Midazolam is similar to Rohypnol. We’re starting to see it show up on the streets more and more these days because it’s still colorless and odorless.”
Jessica knew, through Vincent, that the use of Rohypnol as a date rape drug was beginning to slack off due to the fact that it was now being formulated to turn blue when dropped into liquids, thereby tipping off the unsuspecting prey. But leave it to science to replace one horror with another.
“So you’re saying our doer slipped this midazolam into a drink?”
Weyrich shook his head. He lifted the hair on the right side of Tessa Wells’s neck. There was a small puncture wound. “She was injected with it. Small-bore needle.”
Jessica and Byrne found each other’s eyes. This changed things. Putting a drug in a drink was one thing. A lunatic roaming the streets with a hypodermic needle was quite another. He wasn’t concerned with finessing his victims into his web.
“Is it particularly difficult to administer properly?” Byrne asked.
“It would take some knowledge not to hit muscle,” Weyrich said. “But it’s nothing that couldn’t be learned with a little practice. An LPN could do it without too much of a problem. On the other hand, you can make a nuclear weapon with what you can find on the Internet these days.”
“What about the drug itself?” Jessica asked.
“Ditto the Internet,” Weyrich said. “I get Canadian spam for OxyContin every ten minutes. But the presence of midazolam doesn’t explain the lack of defensive wounds. Even sedated, the natural instinct is to fight back. There wasn’t enough of the drug in her system to totally incapacitate her.”
“So what are you saying?” Jessica asked.
“I’m saying that there’s something else. I’m going to have to run more tests.”
Jessica noticed a small evidence bag on the table. “What is this?”
Weyrich held up the envelope. It contained a small picture, a reproduction of an old painting. “This was between her hands.”
He extracted the picture with rubber-tipped forceps.
“It was rolled up between her palms,” he continued. “It’s been dusted for prints. There were none.”
Jessica looked closely at the reproduction, which was about the size of a bridge playing card. “Do you know what it is?”
“CSU took a digital photograph of it and sent it to the head librarian at the fine arts department of the Free Library,” Weyrich said. “She recognized it right away. It is called Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell by William Blake.”
“Any idea what it means?” Byrne asked.
“Sorry. No idea at all.”
Byrne stared at the picture for a few moments, then put it back into the evidence bag. He turned back to Tessa Wells. “Was she sexually assaulted?”
“Yes and no,” Weyrich said.
Byrne and Jessica exchanged a glance. Tom Weyrich was not given to theatrics, so there must be a good reason he was putting off what he had to tell them.
“What do you mean?” Byrne asked.
“My preliminary findings are that she wasn’t raped and, as far as I can tell, she didn’t have intercourse in the past few days,” Weyrich said.
“Okay. That’s the no part,” Byrne said. “What’s the yes?”
Weyrich hesitated a second, then pulled the sheet down to Tessa’s thighs. The young woman’s legs were slightly spread. What Jessica saw took her breath away. “My God,” she said, before she could stop herself.
The room fell silent, its living occupants adrift on their own thoughts.
“When was this done?” Byrne finally asked.
Weyrich cleared his throat. He’d been at this a while and it appeared that, even for him, this was a new one. “At some point in the past twelve hours.”
“Premortem?”
“Premortem,” Weyrich replied.
Jessica looked back at the body, the image of this young girl’s final indignity finding, and settling, in a place in her mind where she knew it would live for a very long time.
Not only was Tessa Wells kidnapped from the street on her way to school. Not only was she drugged and taken to a place where someone broke her neck. Not only were her hands mutilated by a steel bolt, sealing them in prayer. Whoever had done these had finished the job with a final disgrace that turned Jessica’s stomach.
Tessa Wells’s vagina was sewn shut.
And the crude stitching, which was done with a thick black thread, was in the sign of the cross.
12
MONDAY, 6:00 PM
IF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK measured his life in coffee spoons, Simon Edward Close measured his in deadlines. He had less than five hours to make the deadline for the next day’s print edition of The Report. And as of the opening credits of the evening local news, he had nothing to report.
When he moved among the reporters from the so-called legitimate press he was an exile. They regarded him the way you might a Mongoloid child, with looks of spurious compassion and ersatz sympathy, but also with an expression that said: We can’t kick you out of the party, but please don’t touch the Hummels.
The half a dozen reporters lingering near the cordoned-off crime scene on Eighth Street barely gave him a glance as he arrived in his ten-year-old Honda Accord. Simon would have liked to be a little more discreet in his arrivals, but his muffler—which was attached to the manifold pipe by a recently performed Pepsi-canectomy—insisted on announcing him first. He could almost hear the smirks from half a block away.
The block was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Simon turned the car around, drove down to Jefferson, left to Ninth. Ghost town.
Simon got out, checked the batteries in his recorder. He smoothed his tie, the creases in his trousers. He had often thought that, if he didn’t spend all his money on clothes, he might be able to upgrade his car or his flat. But he always rationalized that he spent most of his time on the street so, if no one saw his car or apartment, they would think him in the chips.
After all, in this business of show, image was everything, yes?
He found the access path he needed, cut through. When he saw the uniformed officer standing, behind the crime scene house—but not a solitary reporter, not yet, anyway—he made his way back to his car, and tried a trick he had learned from a wizened old paparazzo he knew from years ago.
Ten minutes later, he approached the officer behind the house. The officer, a huge black linebacker with enormous hands, held up one of those hands stopping him.
“How ya doing?” Simon asked.
“This is a crime scene, sir.”
Simon nodded. He held up his press ID. “Simon Close with The Report.”
&n
bsp; No reaction. He could have just as well said, Captain Nemo with the Nautilus.
“You’ll have to speak to the detective in charge of the case,” the cop said.
“Of course,” Simon said. “Who would that be?”
“That would be Detective Byrne.”
Simon made a note, as if this information was new to him. “What is her first name?”
The uniform screwed up his face. “Who?”
“Detective Byrne.”
“Her first name is Kevin.”
Simon tried to look appropriately confused. Two years of high school drama, including the part of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, helped somewhat. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard a female detective was working on this case.”
“That would be Detective Jessica Balzano,” the officer said, with punctuation and a narrowing of brow that told Simon that this conversation was over.
“Thanks so much,” Simon said, heading back down the alley. He turned, snapped a quick photograph of the cop. The cop got immediately on his radio, which meant that within a minute or two the area behind the row houses would be officially sealed.
By the time Simon got back to Ninth Street, there were already two reporters lingering behind the yellow tape across the access passageway—yellow tape Simon himself put there a few minutes earlier.
When he came strolling out, he could see the look on their faces. Simon ducked under the tape, tore it from the wall, handed it to Benny Lozado, a staffer from the Inquirer.
The yellow tape read: DEL-CO ASPHALT.
“Fuck you, Close,” Lozado said.
“Dinner first, love.”
BACK IN HIS CAR, Simon rummaged his memory.
Jessica Balzano.
Where did he know that name from?
He picked up a copy of last week’s Report, thumbed through it. When he got to the meager sports page, he saw it. A small quarter-column ad for prizefights at the Blue Horizon. An all-female fight card.
At the bottom:
Jessica Balzano v. Mariella Munoz.
13
MONDAY, 7:20 PM
HE FOUND HIMSELF on the waterfront before his mind had the opportunity or the inclination to say no. How long had it been since he had been here?
Eight months, one week, two days.
The day Deirdre Pettigrew’s body was found.
He knew the answer just as clearly as he knew the reason he had come back. He was here to recharge, to once again tap into the vein of madness that pulsed just beneath the asphalt of his city.
Deuces was a protected drug house that occupied an old waterfront building beneath the Walt Whitman Bridge, near Packer Avenue, just a few feet from the banks of the Delaware River. The steel front door was covered by gang graffiti and manned by a mountainous thug named Serious. Nobody accidentally wandered into Deuces. In fact, it had been more than a decade since the public had called it Deuces. Deuces was the name of the long-shuttered bar in which a very bad man named Luther White had been sitting and drinking the night Kevin Byrne and Jimmy Purify had entered, fifteen years earlier; the night that left two of them dead.
It was on this spot that Kevin Byrne’s dark time began.
It was on this spot he began to see.
Now it was a crack house.
But Kevin Byrne wasn’t here for the drugs. While it was true that he had flirted with every substance known to mankind over the years in order to stop the visions rumbling in his head, none had ever taken control. It had been years since he had dallied with anything other than Vicodin or bourbon.
He was here to reclaim the mind-set.
He broke the seal on a bottle of Old Forester, considered his day.
On the day his divorce had become final, nearly a year earlier, he and Donna had vowed that they would have dinner, as a family, one night every week. Despite the many obstacles both their jobs tossed in the way, they had not missed a week in a year.
This night they had muddled and mumbled their way through another dinner, his wife an uncluttered horizon, the dining room chatter a parallel monologue of perfunctory questions and stock answers.
For the past five years Donna Sullivan Byrne had been the white-hot agent for one of the largest and most prestigious Realtors in Philadelphia, and the money had rolled in. They weren’t living in a row house in Fitler Square because Kevin Byrne was such a great cop. On his pay grade, they would have lived in Fishtown.
Back in the day, in the summer of their marriage, they would meet for lunch in Center City two or three times a week, and Donna would tell him of her triumphs, her infrequent failures, her clever maneuvering through the jungles of escrow, closing costs, amortization, arrears, and appurtenances. Byrne had always glazed over at the terms—he couldn’t tell a basis point from a balloon payment—just as he had always marveled at her energy, her zeal. She had come to her career well into her thirties, and she was happy.
But just about eighteen months earlier, Donna had simply shut down communication channels with her husband. The money still came in, and Donna was still an incredible mother to Colleen, still active in the community, but when it came to talking to him, sharing anything resembling a feeling, a thought, an opinion, she was gone. Walls up, turrets armed.
No note. No explanation. No rationale.
But Byrne knew why. When they had gotten married, he had promised her that he had ambitions within the department, that he was on a steady track to lieutenant, perhaps captain. Beyond that, politics? He had ruled it out within, but never without. Donna had always been skeptical. She knew enough cops to know that homicide detectives were lifers, and that you rode the unit right until the end.
And then Morris Blanchard was found swinging from the end of a towrope. Donna looked at Byrne that night and, without asking a single question, knew that he would never give up the chase to get back on top. He was Homicide, and that’s all he would ever be.
A few days later, she filed.
After a long, tearful talk with Colleen, Byrne decided not to fight it. They had been watering a dead plant for a long time anyway. As long as Donna didn’t poison his daughter against him, and as long as he got to see her when he wanted, it was okay.
This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed dinner, lost in a book by Nora Roberts. Sometimes Byrne envied Colleen her inner silence, her cottony refuge from her childhood, such as it was.
Donna had been two months’ pregnant with Colleen when she and Byrne had gotten married in a civil ceremony. When Donna had given birth, a few days after Christmas that year, and Byrne had seen Colleen for the first time, so pink and shriveled and helpless, he suddenly could not recall a single second of his life before that moment. In that instant, everything else was prelude, a blurry overture to the duty he felt at that moment, and he knew—knew as if it had been branded onto his heart—that no one would ever come between himself and that little girl. Not his wife, not his fellow officers, and God help the first droopy-pantsed, sideways-hat-wearing, disrespectful little shit that came by for her first date.
He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen’s first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped three-room apartment at the time. The eleven o’clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen’s room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.
The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.
As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn’t react. She didn’t wake up. When Donna arrived in the doorway, and took in the situation, she began to cry. Byrne held her, feeling at that moment that the road in front of them
had just been repaved with trial, and that the fear he faced on the streets every day was nothing by comparison.
But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter’s world of inner calm. She would never know the silver hush of her parents’ marriage, ever oblivious to Kevin and Donna Byrne—once so passionate that they could not keep their hands off each other—saying “excuse me” as they passed in the narrow hallway of the home, like strangers on a bus.
He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Donna, with her mysterious ability to clog a lie in his throat with just a glance, her perfect social pitch. She knew how to reap wisdom from disaster. She had taught him the grace of humility.
Deuces was quiet at this hour. Byrne sat in an empty room on the second floor. Most drug houses were filthy places, littered with empty crack bottles, fast-food trash, thousands of spent kitchen matches, quite often vomit, sometimes excrement. Pipeheads didn’t subscribe to Architectural Digest as a rule. The customers who frequented Deuces—a shadowy consortium of cops, civil servants, city officials who couldn’t be seen cruising the corners—paid a little extra for the ambience.
He positioned himself cross-legged on the floor near the window, his back to the river. He sipped the bourbon. The sensation wrapped him in a warm amber embrace, easing the impending migraine.
Tessa Wells.
She had left her house Friday morning, a contract with the world in hand, a promise that she would be safe, that she would go to school, hang out with her friends, laugh at some silly jokes, cry at some silly love song. The world had broken that treaty. She was just a teenager, and she had already lived out her life.
Colleen had just become a teenager. Byrne knew that, psychologically speaking, he was probably way behind the curve, that the “teenaged years” began somewhere around eleven these days. He was also fully aware that he had long ago decided to resist that particular piece of Madison Avenue sexual propaganda.
He looked around the room.
Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Page 10