The Killing Room (20 page)

Bullshit
, Shane thought.
Nothing was ever enough
.

Thinking about the story, Shane got the feeling, almost sexual in nature, of where this story might lead. He knew this had all the makings of a lurid, scandalous tale, which was his lifeblood. Something that might turn into a ratings winner. Something that might get him a few on-set pieces, which were the kind of stories that vaulted you from roving beat reporter to one who got to sit next to the anchors. Not that you wanted to. He’d yet to meet an anchor who wasn’t a world class narcissistic asshole.

You had your Church involvement (in Philly, anything involving the Catholic Church had the potential to explode), you had the possibility of some sort of ritual killing, and you had a dead baby. Talk about a hat trick! He could see the graphics now: pentagrams, crosses, baby shoes.

Blood
.

He had to stop, or he’d give himself an erection.

‘Any of the other stations on this?’ Shane asked.

Cyn gestured to the monitors across the room. ‘No one’s breaking in with it.’

‘Where’s Dawn?’

Cyn looked under the news director’s desk. ‘I don’t see her at her usual lunch spot.’

Shane laughed, then started the B-roll footage Cyn had shot. In it, a man and a woman got out of a PPD detective car, and walked down the alley next to the church. Shane ran it back and forth a few times. He only saw the cops from the side momentarily, then from the back as they disappeared down the alley.

‘Do you know these detectives?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Cyn said. ‘They’ve been involved in some pretty high profile cases since I’ve been here. Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano.’

‘Are they accessible?’ Shane wanted to ask whether or not
Jessica Balzano
was accessible, but Cyn would have seen right through that.

‘As accessible as any of them,’ Cyn said.

Shane knew what she meant. It was rare that a detective, especially a homicide detective, would talk to the media about an ongoing case. Unless, of course, they needed the media’s
help in finding a suspect. Then they were all sweetness and light. It was truly a love/hate relationship, as well as symbiotic. Shane always thought of it in terms of rust needing oxygen.

‘But Kevin Byrne is a hard case,’ Cyn added.

‘How so?’

‘Well, he really plays it all pretty close to the vest. Even things he’d be allowed to talk about, he just keeps walking. If you press him he always just refers you to the media relations officer.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s never been exposed to my highly persuasive charms.’

Cyn barked a laugh. ‘Did you see how
big
this fucking guy is? Your persuasive charms might end up putting you in a bed with an IV drip.’

We’ll see about that
, Shane thought.

While Cyn went off to dump the footage and get started editing, Shane sat down at a computer terminal, got online and began to look up background on the two detectives. For any number of reasons it was always wise to learn as many of the names as you could if you wanted to work the crime beat. Detectives, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys. You never knew what you would need in the future.

What Cyn had said – that these two detectives had been involved in high profile cases – was the understatement of the year.

Shane started with Jessica Balzano and discovered that
Philadelphia Magazine
had done a profile on her a few years earlier. He learned that she was a South Philly girl, that she was married to a narcotics detective named Vincent, that they had a daughter named Sophie. He learned that her father,
Peter Giovanni, was a much-decorated officer in the PPD, retiring with the rank of lieutenant.

Kevin Byrne was a little tougher. Shane learned that he had been involved in the Rosary Killer case – Shane had been working in Zanesville at the time, and the story had gone wide enough for him to have learned about it – and that the detective had been nearly mortally wounded in that case.

Shane wrote down the names, even though he didn’t have to. He remembered every person he ever met.

He then got onto the white pages database, and tried to look them up. There was no listing for a Jessica Balzano, or Vincent Balzano. There were a few hits for Kevin Byrne, but Shane doubted any of them were the detective. This made sense, of course. Why would a detective have a listing? It was bad enough that the psychos out there knew where they worked, why let them know where they lived?

Of course, this never stopped Shane Adams from trying.

He did an image search on Jessica Balzano, and all of them were the accompanying photo from the
Philadelphia Magazine
piece. In it, she stood in the foreground of the Roundhouse. Her lustrous brunette hair was long, a little windswept. She had dark eyes, a smooth complexion, full lips. She was slender, but not skinny, not by any means. It mentioned in the article that she had boxed, and in this photograph she looked very toned. She was beautiful.

Shane wondered what she was like. He wondered if she ever cheated on her husband. He wondered what she ate, drank, drove.

He had every intention of finding out answers to all these questions.

He had the feeling this case, this
story
, was going to be big. Dead babies and the Catholic Church. It didn’t get better than that. Forget the whole abortion issue, this was a murdered child. And Shane Adams was at the tip of the sword on this one.

He opened his laptop, put in the password to open the encrypted folder, opened the database file. He started two new entries:

Jessica Balzano

Kevin Byrne

NINETEEN

Jessica and Byrne stood in silence long after the EMS van had left with the old man’s remains, long after the two DHS workers had taken Adria Rollins to the psychiatric unit at Temple.

Whatever promise it had begun with, the day was on a downward turn now. They would not be questioning Adria Rollins, not anytime soon anyway. The real question was why Adria – who clearly had a long history of mental illness – was allowed to keep custody of her newborn baby.

Apparently the great-grandfather had been ambulatory and lucid two months earlier, and those people tasked with the decision figured he was able to take care of both Adria and the baby.

Regardless, whatever the explanation was, whatever the answers to these questions might be, it was for another agency, another set of investigators, not homicide.

A quick search of the Rollins apartment yielded little. The
utilities, for what they were worth, were included in the rent, so there were no electric or gas bills. There was no telephone.

In the old man’s room they had found some news clippings from the
Inquirer
, stories about a much younger Duke Rollins when he had returned from World War II.

What they wanted to find they had not located. They did not find a birth certificate for Cecilia Rollins, which would tell them who the father was and open a new conduit in the investigation.

They already had calls in to all the appropriate agencies, but considering the speed at which these bureaucracies worked, it could be weeks before they learned anything along these lines.

They had also knocked on every door in the apartment building. Half of their attempts yielded no answer. The other half yielded nothing fruitful.

Jessica and Byrne had walked the alleyway behind the building. Their theory – and it was the only one to run with at the moment – was that someone had climbed the fire escape, entered Adria’s room, and taken little Cecilia out of her crib.

Unfortunately, the building behind the apartment building was a shuttered warehouse. There were no other apartment windows facing Adria’s room, no one to question.

They would have to return in the next few days, talk to people on the street, discover their routines, catalog them, ask if they had seen anything suspicious in that alley in the past few weeks.

It was an exercise in futility and frustration.

The presence of the Catholic Church in Philadelphia was as old as the city itself. Not long after William Penn founded the
city, the first Catholic mass was celebrated in 1733, at Old St Joseph’s Church. In the eighteenth century, Philadelphia was one of the only cities in the English-speaking world where Catholics could practice their faith in the open.

The residence of the Archbishop, who was the titular head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was located in the northwestern part of the city.

Dana Westbrook had put in the request, through the DA’s office, and an appointment was made with the media relations director for the archdiocese.

It was in the best interest of the Church to meet with investigators. The murders were all over the media. A dead man and a dead baby found in two different Catholic Churches was big news. The tabloids were already running stories about exorcisms and ritual killings. Considering all the scandals the Catholic Church had had to endure over the past decade, it made good PR sense for the archdiocese to get out in front of anything that might hurt their reputation.

They were met at the door by a stout woman in her sixties. Although she wore street clothing Jessica knew she was a nun. Twelve years of Catholic school education clued you in to who was and who was not part of the Church.

After a few pleasantries she led them to a study off the main entrance hall. The room in which they were to meet the spokesperson was oak-paneled, formal, lined with books. In the center was a round table, highly polished, ringed by six velvet-seated chairs.

A few minutes later the door opened.

Father Michael Raphael was much younger than either
Jessica or Byrne expected. In his twenties, athletic looking and handsome, he carried about him an air of boyish vulnerability, as well as the outward confidence needed by the point man for such a powerful organization as the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The archdiocese covered not only Philadelphia, but Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware counties as well. Its reach, and influence, was great.

Jessica didn’t know that much about the priesthood, but she did know that for Michael Raphael to have been ordained at this young age, he’d had to have entered the seminary with a bachelor’s degree. His age and position were surprising on many levels. Priests fresh out of the seminary were usually assigned to smaller parishes, or to menial tasks in the larger ones. This duty, being the public relations officer for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was a plum position.

And while his good looks were beguiling, it was his eyes that held you – dark, penetrating eyes that seemed to look right through you.

‘I’m Michael Raphael,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’

‘Nice to meet you, Father,’ Jessica said. It seemed odd for her to be calling someone around ten years her junior ‘Father,’ but old habits died hard. Especially those drilled into you by a Catholic school education.

They all shook hands.

Raphael gestured to two chairs at the table. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Make yourselves comfortable.’ He then indicated a beautiful antique serving cart near the tall windows. ‘May I offer you tea or coffee?’

Both Jessica and Byrne declined. Raphael poured himself a black coffee, took a seat opposite them. They exchanged small
talk about the long, brutal winter, the plight of the Sixers and Flyers.

‘I have to say that we were expecting someone older,’ Byrne finally said.

Raphael smiled. ‘I get that a lot. Alas, this will stop a lot sooner than I would like.’

‘I don’t hear much eastern Pennsylvania in your voice,’ Byrne said. ‘You’re not a Philly boy?’

‘Very astute, detective. As much as I would like to claim the City of Brotherly Love as my hometown, I cannot. I’m from Ohio. Southeastern Ohio to be more precise, just across the West Virginia border.’

‘I thought so,’ Byrne said. ‘Browns or Bengals?’

‘Browns, I’m afraid. We Franciscans are a long-suffering order.’

Small talk finished, Byrne got down to business. ‘Have you been briefed at all about why we’re here?’

Both Jessica and Byrne took this as a given. They’d had to put together a bullet list of things they wanted to discuss before being granted a meeting.

Raphael nodded, sipped his coffee. ‘I have,’ he said. ‘As you might expect, the archdiocese is quite concerned. We’re here to assist in any way we can.’

‘We appreciate it,’ Byrne said. He continued, giving the priest basic details and timelines regarding the murders of Daniel Palumbo and Cecilia Rollins.

Raphael listened, expressionless.

‘While the buildings were vacant, it is likely that whoever is doing this is committing these crimes in a Catholic church for a reason,’ Byrne said.

The unspoken part of what he was saying was that there might be a connection between the killer and the Church itself. Whenever a church closed, there were bound to be disgruntled parishioners, not to mention priests, nuns, lay workers.

At one time, in a small section of North Philly, there had been a Catholic church every few blocks, churches with primarily parishioners of the same ethnicity – Italian, Polish, German, Lithuanian, and ‘general’ parishes, as they were known. In Philadelphia the Irish parishes were called ‘general’ parishes because, at one time, if you were Catholic and spoke English, and you lived in Philadelphia, you were probably Irish.

Byrne picked up his notebook, flipped a few pages. ‘Can you tell us, briefly, the process by which the archdiocese closes a church?’

Raphael thought for a moment. ‘This is not something undertaken lightly, of course. It’s a process that can take many months, sometimes years, often accompanied by a great deal of heated discussion and debate. A neighborhood parish is, for many people, the center of their community. It is where babies are baptized, the young are confirmed, marriages begun, lives honored at funerals.’

When Raphael said the word ‘babies’ Jessica’s mind flashed on the image of little Cecilia frozen into the old washtub. She felt the rage rise within her. She battled it back.

‘As I’m sure you’re aware, there have been many church closings over the past fifteen to twenty years,’ Raphael said. ‘When enrollment in the parochial schools drops, the revenue begins to dwindle. The sad truth, at least for the city parishes,
is that most Catholics have moved into the suburbs. The exodus really began after the Second World War, but accelerated in the seventies, eighties and nineties.’