SHE IS HARD TO LOOK AT NOW. HER SKIN IS NO LONGER PERFECT, but rather torn silk. The blood pools around her head, nearly black in the dim light thrown from the trunk lid.
I look around the parking area. We are alone, just a few feet from the Schuylkill River. Water laps the dock— the eternal meter of the city.
I take the money and put it into the fold of the newspaper. I toss the newspaper onto the girl in the trunk of the car, then slam the lid.
Poor Marion.
She really was pretty. She had about her a certain freckled charm that reminded me of Tuesday Weld in
High Time.
Before we left the motel, I cleaned the room, tore up the room receipt, and flushed it down the toilet. There had been no mop, no bucket. When you shoot on a shoestring, you make do.
She stares up at me now, her eyes no longer blue. She may have been pretty, she may have been someone’s idea of perfection, but for all she was, she was no Angel.
The house lights are down, the screen flickers to life. In the next few weeks the city of Philadelphia will hear a great deal about me. It will be said that I am a psychopath, a madman, an evil force from the soul of hell. As the bodies fall and the rivers run red, I will receive some horrendous reviews.
Don’t believe a word of it.
I wouldn’t hurt a fly.
4
Six days later
SHE LOOKED COMPLETELY NORMAL. SOME MIGHT EVEN SAY friendly, in a doting, spinster-aunt sort of way. She stood five three and could not have weighed more than ninety-five pounds in her black spandex one-piece and pristine white Reeboks. She had short, brick-red hair and clear blue eyes. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails groomed and unpainted. She wore no jewelry.
To the outside world, she was a pleasant looking, physically fit woman nearing middle age.
For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne, she was a combination Lizzie Borden, Lucrezia Borgia, and Ma Barker, all wrapped up in a package resembling Mary Lou Retton.
“You can do better than that,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Byrne managed.
“The name you called me in your mind. You can do better than that.”
She
is
a witch, he thought. “What makes you think I called you a name?”
She laughed her shrill, Cruella De Vil laugh. Dogs three counties away cringed. “I’ve been at this almost twenty years, Detective,” she said. “I’ve been called every name in the book. I’ve been called names that aren’t even scheduled in the
next
book. I’ve been spat upon, swung upon, cursed in a dozen languages, including Apache. I’ve had voodoo dolls made in my likeness, novenas offered up for my painful demise. I assure you, there is no torture you could possibly conjure that has not been wished upon me.”
Byrne just stared. He had no idea he was that transparent. Some detective.
Kevin Byrne was two weeks into a twelve-week physical therapy program at HUP, the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been shot at close range in the basement of a house in Northeast Philadelphia on Easter Sunday. Although he was expected to make a full recovery, he had learned early on that phrases like
full recovery
usually involved a lot of wishful thinking.
The bullet, the one with his name on it, had lodged in his occipital lobe, approximately one centimeter from his brain stem. And even though there was no nerve involvement, and the damage was all vascular, he had endured nearly twelve hours of cranial surgery, six weeks of induced coma, and nearly two months in the hospital.
The offending slug was now encased in a small Lucite cube and sitting on his nightstand, a macabre trophy courtesy of the Homicide Unit.
The most serious damage came not from injury to his brain, but rather from the way his body had twisted on the way to the floor, an unnatural wrenching of the lower back. This move had caused damage to his sciatic nerve, the long nerve that runs from each side of the lower spine, through deep in the buttock and back of the thigh, and all the way down to the foot, connecting the spinal cord with the leg and foot muscles.
And while his laundry list of ailments was painful enough, the bullet he took to his head was a mere inconvenience compared with the pain generated by the sciatic nerve. Sometimes it felt like someone was running a carving knife up his right leg and across his lower back, stopping along the way to twist at various vertebrae.
He was free to return to duty as soon as the city doctors cleared him, and as soon as he felt ready. Until then, he was officially IOD: injured on duty. Full pay, no work, and a bottle of Early Times every week from the unit.
While his acute sciatica was about as much agony as he had ever endured, pain, as a way of life, was an old friend. He had tolerated fifteen years of savage migraine headaches, ever since the first time he had been shot and nearly drowned in the icy Delaware River.
It had taken a second bullet to rid him of the malady. Although he wouldn’t recommend getting shot in the head as a therapy for migraine sufferers, he wasn’t about to second-guess the cure. Since the day he had been shot for the second— and hopefully final— time, he hadn’t suffered a single headache.
Take two hollow points and call me in the morning.
Still, he was tired. Two decades on the force of one of the toughest cities in the country had drained his will. He had put in his time. And although he had faced some of the most violent and depraved people east of Pittsburgh, his current antagonist was a petite physical therapist named Olivia Leftwich and her bottomless bag of tortures.
Byrne was standing along one wall of the physical therapy room, against a waist-high bar, his right leg propped parallel to the floor. He held the position, stoically, despite the murder in his heart. The slightest movement lit him up like a Roman candle.
“You’re making great improvements,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
Byrne glared daggers at her. Her horns receded and she smiled. No fangs visible.
All part of the illusion, he thought.
All part of the con.
* * *
ALTHOUGH CITY HALL was the official epicenter of Center City, and the historical heart and soul of Philadelphia was Independence Hall, the city’s pride was still Rittenhouse Square, located on Walnut Street between Eighteenth and Nineteenth streets. Although not as well known as Times Square in New York City, or Picadilly Circus in London, Philadelphia was rightfully proud of Rittenhouse Square, which remained one of the city’s toniest addresses. In the shadow of posh hotels, historic churches, towering office buildings, and fashionable boutiques, on a summer day, at noontime, the crowds on the square were enormous.
Byrne sat on a bench near the Barye sculpture
Lion Crushing a Serpent
in the center of the square. He had been nearly six feet tall in eighth grade, and had grown to his height of six three by the time he was a junior in high school. In his time in school and in the service, and in all of his time on the force, he had used his size and weight to his advantage, many times shutting down potential trouble before it began by merely standing up.
But now, with his cane, his ashen complexion, and the sluggish limping gait caused by the pain pills he took, he felt small, unimportant, easily swallowed by the mass of humanity on the square.
As with every time he left a physical therapy session, he vowed never to go back. What kind of therapy actually makes the pain worse? Whose idea was this? Not his. See you around, Matilda the Hun.
He distributed his weight on the bench, finding a reasonably comfortable position. After a few moments he looked up and saw a teenaged girl crossing the square, weaving her way through the bike boys, the businessmen, the vendors, the tourists. Slender and athletic, feline in her movement, her fine, nearly white-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a peach sundress and sandals. She had dazzlingly bright aquamarine eyes. Every young man under the age of twenty-one was thoroughly captivated with her, as were far too many men over twenty-one. She had about her a patrician poise that can only come from true inner grace, a cool and enchanting beauty that said to the world that this was someone special.
As she got closer, Byrne realized why he knew all this. It was Colleen. The young woman was his own daughter and, for a moment, he nearly hadn’t recognized her.
She stood in the center of the square, looking for him, hand to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the sun. Soon she found him in the crowd. She waved and smiled the slight, blushing smile that she had used to her advantage her whole life, the one that got her the Barbie Bike with the pink-and-white handlebar streamers when she was six; the one that got her into the chichi summer camp for deaf kids this year, the camp her father could barely just afford.
God, she is beautiful,
Byrne thought.
Colleen Siobhan Byrne was both blessed and cursed with her mother’s incandescent Irish skin. Cursed, because she could sunburn in minutes on a day like this. Blessed because she was the fairest of the fair, her skin nearly translucent. What was flawless splendor at the age of thirteen would surely blossom into heart-stopping beauty as a woman in her twenties and thirties.
Colleen kissed him on the cheek, and hugged him closely— but gently, fully aware of his myriad aches and pains. She thumbed the lipstick off his cheek.
When had she started wearing lipstick? Byrne wondered.
“Is it too crowded for you?” she signed.
“No,” Byrne signed back.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Byrne signed. “I love crowds.”
It was a bald-faced lie, and Colleen knew it. She smiled.
Colleen Byrne had been deaf since birth, caused by a genetic disorder that had planted far more obstacles in her father’s path than her own. Where Kevin Byrne had wasted many years lamenting what he had arrogantly considered a handicap in his daughter’s life, Colleen had simply attacked life full-on, never once slowing down to bemoan her alleged misfortune. She was an A student, a terrific athlete, highly proficient in American Sign Language, as well as being an expert lip-reader. She was even learning Norwegian Sign Language.
A lot of deaf people, Byrne had learned a long time ago, were very straightforward in their communication, not wasting their time on a great deal of pointless, inhibited conversation the way hearing people did. Many operated on what was jokingly referred to as DST— Deaf Standard Time— a reference to the notion that deaf people tend to be late, owing to their penchant for long conversations. Once they got going, it was hard to shut them up.
Sign language, although highly nuanced in its own right, was, after all, a form of shorthand. Byrne did his best to keep up. He had learned the language when Colleen was still very young, had taken to it surprisingly well, considering what a lousy student he had been in school.
Colleen found a spot on the bench, sat down. Byrne had stopped at a Cosi and picked up a pair of salads. He was pretty sure that Colleen was not going to eat— what thirteen-year-old girl actually ate lunch these days?— and he was right. She took the Diet Snapple out of the bag, worked off the plastic seal.
Byrne opened the bag, began to pick at his salad. He got her attention and signed: “Sure you’re not hungry?”
She gave him the look:
Dad.
They sat for a while, enjoying each other’s company, enjoying the warmth of the day. Byrne listened to the dissonance of summertime sounds around them: the discordant symphony of five different types of music, the laughter of children, the high spirits of a political argument coming from somewhere behind them, the endless traffic noise. As he had so many times in his life, he tried to imagine what it was like for Colleen to be in a place like this, the deep silence of her world.
Byrne put the remainder of his salad back in the bag, got Colleen’s eye.
“When do you leave for camp?” he signed.
“Monday.”
Byrne nodded. “Are you excited?”
Colleen’s face lit up. “Yes.”
