The Killing Room (29 page)

Jessica wasn’t finding the humor.

‘It would be like visiting Asheville and not going to Biltmore,’ Byrne added.

Against her better judgment, Jessica turned into the drive. She said a silent prayer that they would not encounter any more barking boys.

They rode the overgrown lane back over the rise, more than a half-mile, and saw what was once a home. Two buildings, flattened by time and weather, sat next to a frozen pond. Behind it a dry gully ran down the hill.

In the pond were the remnants of an old pickup truck’s fender and wheel well. As Jessica and Byrne got out, and moved closer, Jessica saw that the buildings had been burned, but, apparently, when they had fallen into the pond, the fire halted. Half-walls and a charred ridge pole stuck out of the ice. Tar-paper spread across an overgrown field. Emerging from the ground behind the house were a half-dozen crosses, simple monuments of twined-together two by fours.

‘Well, our friend Ida-Rae was right,’ Jessica said, as brightly
as possible. ‘Nothing to see here. Nope. Nary a thing. Let’s go.’

Instead of responding, Byrne walked toward the pile of charred rubble. Jessica recognized the set of her partner’s shoulders, his gait. She knew they were not going to leave any time soon.

Jessica followed, watching the ground for all manner of danger – snakes, rats, and especially old boards with big rusty nails sticking out of them. Once, when she was seven years old, she and her cousin Angela snuck onto a construction site in South Philly, and Jessica stepped on a board, putting a sixteen-penny nail through her right foot. Besides the excruciating pain, she’d had to get a tetanus shot, which was almost worse. Since then it had become a bona fide phobia. She could square off in the ring with big nineteen-year-old girls named Valentine, run after crazy men with butcher knives, but she was scared shitless of stepping on an old rusty nail sticking out of a board.

And snakes. She was not a snake person.

‘I can’t believe a whole family lived in a place this small,’ Jessica said. While the rowhouses in cities like Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were notoriously small, at least they could grow vertically. This had been a three- or four-room shack, one-story tall. Jessica looked to her right and saw an old metal bed frame grown over by weeds. She wondered how many people had slept in it.

She was just about to ask Byrne what she could do to help move this investigation along, when she heard a noise to her right. An animal sound. She turned and saw, on a ridge about fifty feet away, two black dogs.

Big
black dogs.

‘Kevin,’ Jessica whispered.

‘I see them.’

Both detectives slowly unsnapped their holsters, drew their weapons, held them at their sides. Jessica looked back at the car. It was at least thirty yards away. They would never make it, even at a dead run.

The dogs did not have their heads lowered, nor were they growling. But then again, neither Jessica nor Byrne had moved.

‘What you want to do?’ Jessica asked.

‘Just stay as still as possible. Don’t make eye contact.’

The dogs milled back and forth on the ridge, circling each other, nuzzling, sniffing the air. It looked as if they might be protecting something, but were unsure that Jessica and Byrne posed any threat. Jessica noticed they were well-fed, heavily muscled. After a few minutes they turned and loped down the other side of the hill.

Jessica and Byrne stood still for a full minute. Had the dogs left? There was no way of knowing, and Jessica would be damned if she was going to go to the top of the ridge and take a peek.

‘Partner?’ she said.

‘Yeah?’

‘I love the hell out of you, you know that, right?’

‘I do,’ Byrne said. ‘And it means the world to me.’

‘But if you don’t mind, could you do me a favor?’

‘I will surely entertain the notion.’

‘Could we maybe get the
fuck
out of here?’

‘I think we’re okay,’ Byrne said. ‘I think they left.’

Jessica wanted to believe he was right. She wasn’t so sure.

For the moment her thoughts returned to the case, and to Ida-Rae Munson’s words:

Word was she had a devil-child
.

In the context of the horrors they had seen in the desecrated churches, the words certainly took on a new meaning. She just didn’t know what that meaning might be. Either way, it was time for some old school, shoe leather police work. She just didn’t want to do it here.

‘I think we should go back to the town,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe there’s some forwarding address for this Ruby Longstreet, some attorney who handled the property. I want to see the records of this place.’

Byrne reached into his coat pocket, gave Jessica the deputy’s card. ‘Nice kid. Believe me, he’ll fall all over himself to help you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll wait here.’

Jessica looked at her partner. ‘You’re going to stay
here
.’

‘Yeah.’

‘In the middle of nowhere.’

‘Yeah,’ Byrne said. ‘You might want to fix your hair.’

Jessica did a quick comb-through with her fingers. ‘Better?’

‘Better.’

‘You sure you want to do this?’

Byrne just nodded.

Jessica backed her way to the car, listening for the sound of eight heavy paws loping up the hill. She heard nothing. She opened the driver’s door.

‘Kevin?’

Byrne looked over.

‘The dogs?’

Byrne raised a hand, waved. He’d heard her.

THIRTY-THREE

Byrne walked to the top of the hill, weapon in hand. There was a tree line about a hundred yards away. There was no sign of the dogs.

He holstered, walked back down, stood at the base of the foundation where the old shack had stood, listened to the silence. He had grown up in the city, had spent most of his life in one. The mind-numbing quiet of a place like this was profound.

His mind was not quiet for long.

Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?

Byrne crouched down near the footer, an old track-style foundation made of packed earth and stones. He picked up one of the white stones and knew where he had seen one like it before. It was in the victim’s mouth at St Regina’s. He rolled the smooth rock in his hand, felt the malign presence of this place, a history that was fearsome and dark.

Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?

Byrne glanced skyward. The air was cold, but the sun warmed his face. He stood, walked around the frozen pond and saw, just at the bottom of the rise, the handful of homemade crosses, a half-dozen in all. This was the family plot. He wondered if Elijah Longstreet was buried beneath his feet.

Byrne looked at the edge of the overgrown area, saw an old realtor sign, rusted and battered by time and weather. He turned it over. There, painted on the back, was a telling legend.

Ida-Rae Munson had not been kidding. The Longstreets were not the most popular family in these parts.

But he had known that. It didn’t take an Ida-Rae, or a county zoning archive, or even God to tell him that. He knew it as soon as they turned onto the property. He felt it.

The father had the devil in him and the boy came out evil.

In his mind Byrne saw the end. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in more than two decades invited the darkness in.

Inside the darkness were two graves.

And although he could not see names on the headstones, he could see the date of death. It was less than a week away.

THIRTY-FOUR

Shane Adams couldn’t get onto the grounds at the Roundhouse unobserved, but here it was different. Here, behind the apartment building in which Kevin Byrne lived, he was shielded from the street. Unfortunately, the Dumpster in the alley behind the building was full, and looked to contain trash from six different rowhouses, and one low-rise four-suiter. He’d never be able to pick through it, find what belonged to Byrne, and spirit it away. Not in broad daylight.

He left the alley, rounded the corner onto Third Street. The street was lined with parked cars. He found the one he was looking for, stepped into an alcove, checked his notes. It was Kevin Byrne’s personal car. Shane looked up and down the street. If he approached the car, he could be seen by any one of a dozen vantage points. He took out one of his cell phones – specifically an old flip phone he’d had for years, one that was no longer connected to any service, and therefore was never in any danger of ringing at an inopportune time – and put it to
his ear. He sauntered up the street, talking aloud into the phone, meandering in that aimless way people do when they’re on the phone in a public place.

He leaned against the wall across the sidewalk from Byrne’s car. He could see a few things on the dashboard. Nothing of much interest. He leaned forward, saw two large boxes in the back seat; one with a top, one without. The open box seemed to be full of papers.

Shane pretended to be on his cell phone as he leaned against the car, and covertly took as many pictures as he could of the back seat and front seat.

He then raced back to his own car, checked all the mirrors. The big cop was nowhere to be seen. Shane scrolled through the photos. Crap, except for the news clippings on top of the papers in the open box. One of the headlines read:

WHO IS THE BOY IN THE RED COAT
?

By the time he got back to the station Shane found that he couldn’t get the headline out of his mind. He sat down at a computer terminal, looked up the story.

There was a ton of information. Not nearly as much as there was for Philadelphia’s most famous mystery – The Boy in the Box, a four- or five-year-old victim found in a box in the Fox Chase section of the city in 1957, still unsolved – but there was at least three months of data.

The Boy in the Red Coat case was not ruled a homicide, so the investigation went to divisional detectives at the time, who interviewed people in the neighborhood, trying to determine the boy’s identity. They spoke to hundreds of people in the
neighborhood, as well as everyone in the church’s parish. The boy’s picture went out nationally and internationally, but no one came forward.

So why were the papers in the back seat of Detective Byrne’s car? Was he reopening a twenty-year-old case? Did it have something to do with the spate of murders happening in churches now?

Maybe there was something in his trash after all.

Maybe Shane would go back tonight.

THIRTY-FIVE

In the dream she can’t move. She can see, but she cannot move her arms and legs. She is in a big, drafty room. From somewhere in the distance she can hear chanting. Latin chanting. She looks up to see a tall figure standing in shadows. In his hand is a ring of barb wire. In the other is a handful of white stones. She suddenly realizes she is sitting on the rim of an old aluminum tub filled with ice. She manages to fall over, onto her side. When she looks into the tub, there is a newborn baby frozen inside.

But it isn’t Cecilia Rollins.

It is Sophie.

Jessica woke up drenched in sweat, disoriented, her heart pounding. She turned, found Vincent dead to the world, as usual. It was a good thing Philadelphia didn’t get too many hurricanes. Vincent Balzano would sleep through them and wake up on a beach in South Carolina.

Jessica had managed to stay awake on the ride back from
West Virginia, mostly because Byrne chose that time to tell her about his run-in with DeRon Wilson. Byrne’s temper was formidable, but in the time she had known him he had only managed to lose it completely a handful of times. He told her that the brass were mandating that he see a psychiatrist for an assessment before meeting with the captain about whether or not there would be any problems arising from the incident.

By the time they returned to the Roundhouse Jessica found that she was completely exhausted. She found herself home, fed, bathed, and in bed by 10 p.m.

Now she was wide awake.

She got up, checked on Sophie and Carlos. Both were out like broken lamps.

Jessica opened the closet door. Staring back was a jumble of boxes and baskets, plastic storage containers, things she had promised herself she would go through one of these days, weeding out the junk. The problem was that she was a sentimental fool. When they moved back to South Philly a year ago she had thrown out ten or so Hefty bags full of things she had collected over the years, including two full legal-sized boxes of Christmas and greeting cards. She had kept one small carton of cards, an old gift box from Strawbridge’s.

Jessica walked into the kitchen and sat down. She opened the white box. Inside was her first communion rosary, a white rosary in a small leather pouch. There were also a few dozen prayer cards, mostly from St Paul’s.

The two cards in the box that meant the most to her were for her mother and brother. There had been ten years or so between their deaths, but the wounds were still fresh, still
open. She stared at the cards for a while, remembering the two services. She was five when her mother was buried. The church was filled with family and friends. Half the PPD showed up, it seemed.