The Killing Room (40 page)

‘I do, Mary Elizabeth,’ Roland said. ‘You still have your mammaw’s brush?’

Mary Elizabeth
, Byrne thought. Not
Ruby
. Hannah was trying to manipulate her.

‘Yes, Preacher. Save for my boy, it’s all I have left. Ever what I’ve done, I’ve done for him.’

She began to slowly brush Roland Hannah’s hair.

‘Your hair’s gone right gray, Preacher. White, some.’

Roland Hannah smiled. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

Byrne looked at the brush, and understood. Mary Longstreet had kept it all these years. It was from this brush she’d gotten Roland Hannah’s hair, evidence she used as bookmarks in the missals. Evidence she used to get him out of prison, and into this chair.

‘It’s still pretty, Preacher. Y’all had the prettiest hair. For a boy.’

She continued to brush Roland Hannah’s hair in long, careful strokes. Byrne made eye contact with Gabriel, who seemed to be edging off his chair. Byrne saw the boy look into the darkness of the basement, toward the stairs. He was getting ready to run. When Gabriel looked back at Byrne, Byrne shook his head. It was too risky. Mary Longstreet was just a few feet away, and the knives were very sharp. He’d never make it.

Still, Gabriel got ever closer to the edge of his seat.

When Mary Longstreet finished brushing Roland Hannah’s hair, she placed the hairbrush on her chair, then drew one of the knives from her waistband, the dagger tipped with blood. One by one she extinguished the candles. When she had snuffed all but two, she positioned herself behind Gabriel.

‘Ruby?’ Byrne asked.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I want you to do something for me.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘If I can.’

Byrne glanced at Roland Hannah, then back at the woman. ‘I want you to take me instead.’

She looked at Byrne with curiosity. ‘You? The devil’s not in you.’

In that moment Byrne felt the weight of his own sins, just as he knew that it didn’t matter anymore. None of it – the job, the visions, the anguish over the city he loved, the sadness that in all that time he had not made a difference. The only person in this room who mattered was Gabriel.

‘You don’t know the things I’ve done,’ Byrne said.

The woman stared at Byrne for a long moment. She lay the dagger gently on Roland Hannah’s right shoulder. ‘Don’t you understand, detective?’

‘Understand what?’

‘The Preacher is Philadelphia,’ she said. ‘He’s the sixth church of the Apocalypse.’

Byrne saw the candlelight dance on the keened edge of the blade. He had to keep her talking. ‘I do understand. But what of the
last
church?’

Mary Longstreet’s eyes softened, and Byrne knew.
She
was the last church. When Roland Hannah was dead she would take her own life.

‘I can’t let you do this,’ Byrne said.

Whatever softness had come to Mary Longstreet was instantly replaced by a red rage.

‘
You
have no say in the matter, sir.’ In an instant she stepped behind Gabriel, put the blade to his throat. ‘Maybe the
boy
is Philadelphia. Maybe
this
is how it will be.’

‘Don’t,’ Byrne said.

She flipped the knife, reversing it in her grip. It seemed to be a long-practiced, expert move. She touched it to the boy’s forehead. ‘I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem.’

For a moment Mary Longstreet’s words echoed off the stone basement walls, unanswered. Then:

‘He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith.’

Mary Longstreet’s eyes flashed at the sound of the voice. It was Roland Hannah’s.

‘You! You don’t talk, Preacher,’ she said. ‘You don’t talk at
all
.’

‘We can be together again, Mary Elizabeth,’ Roland said. ‘Don’t you see? We can leave this wretched place.’

‘No, sir.’

‘We can found a new church. A church of our own. Together.’

Byrne saw Mary Longstreet’s eyes lose focus. For a moment it seemed she couldn’t hear or see anything, that her vacant stare was cast inward, at a place back in time.

‘You can be my eyes,’ Roland said.

Roland Hannah stood up, took a hesitating step forward, his hands stretched in front of him. Mary Longstreet didn’t move, didn’t try to stop him.

‘You’ve always been special to me, Mary Elizabeth. You know that. Ever since I set eyes on you that first time in Brandonville. Remember?’

Mary Longstreet’s hands began to tremble. Byrne saw the tip of the blade pierce the skin on Gabriel’s forehead. A trickle of blood ran down the boy’s face in a twisted rivulet.

Byrne knew he had to act. He stood up, slowly walked across the circle. He held out his hand. ‘Ruby?’

The woman said nothing.

‘I will kill the Preacher for you.’

‘That is a task for my son,’ she said. ‘He has waited a long
time.’ She put the blade to Gabriel’s throat. ‘I’d thank you kindly to sit down now, sir.’

As Byrne took a step back he noticed movement in the vastness of the basement, shadows growing on the candlelit walls.

Jessica and Maria Caruso were in the room, guns drawn. Byrne saw other figures in the darkness. There had to be a dozen officers.

Mary Longstreet saw them, too.

In one fluid motion Byrne spun and knocked the knife from Mary Longstreet’s hand. Just as quickly she drew the other dagger. She danced to her left with blinding speed and drew the blade across Roland Hannah’s throat. Hannah’s body jerked and thrashed, spastic in its death throes. He put his hands to his throat, but he couldn’t stanch the bleeding. As blood spurted across the circle, extinguishing one of the remaining candles, Mary Longstreet flung herself at Gabriel. Byrne dove in front of the boy. The dagger entered the right side of Byrne’s stomach, slashing clean through. The pain was white fire.

But it didn’t stop Byrne. He reached for the hand that held the weapon and tried to turn the woman around.

In the madness of the moment Byrne saw Jessica run toward them. Hands slicked with blood, Byrne lost his grip on the woman. Mary Longstreet pivoted, regained her footing, and slashed wildly at Jessica. As Byrne fell to the floor he saw the wound open in Jessica’s shoulder, above her Kevlar vest.

No, Byrne thought.

No.

Then, as blackness descended, and the last of his will fell
away, a hellish fury came to the cathedral basement. Gunfire roared. The smell of cordite and blood filled the air.

For Kevin Byrne it all faded to a distant past, a time when he was just a young boy, and these walls held more mysteries than answers.

SIXTY-ONE

Jessica couldn’t hear. The gunfire had stolen all sound. She was on her back, saw feet moving around her, heard muffled shouts and commands. She looked to her right and saw the body of Roland Hannah, his throat savaged. There could be no question. He was dead.

Jessica tried to sit up but the pain was too great. She saw Gabriel on his side, just a few feet away, his face streaked with blood. She did not know where the woman was. But right now neither of them were her priority. In the fog and confusion she found Byrne. He too was covered in blood, but not moving.

Jessica gathered all her energy and crawled across the cold stone floor.

With the last of her strength she reached Byrne, put two fingers to his neck. There was a pulse, but it was faint. She saw steam rising from his open wound, felt the life force leaving his body. She held him close.

In the distance she heard the sirens.

‘Hold on, Kevin,’ she whispered. ‘Hold on.’

Jessica closed her eyes, waiting, and in that moment heard the heartbeat of angels.

SIXTY-TWO

When Christ appeared on Patmos, an island off the coast of Greece, he sent his disciple John to visit the seven churches in Asia, and said:

‘Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamos, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.’

Seven churches. She is the last.

Ruby sits in the final pew at St Gedeon’s, the same place her boy sat so many years ago. In her hand is a birth certificate, dotted with blood and tears. Now they would know his name.

Gedeon Mark Longstreet.

He would no longer be The Boy in the Red Coat. He would no longer be a cipher. When he died that day, in that clinic in Doylestown, she had spirited his small body away, and come to Philadelphia. She brought him to this church, the namesake of his patron saint.

She sat in the dark that night, sewing together the coat made from the Preacher’s vestment, the item Carson Tatum had gotten for her, vowing to one day return. She had specifically asked for the red vestment, the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Her lifeblood spreads on her white raiment. In the gloom of this final dusk she sees the men, guns raised, slowly approaching. They will never reach her. She glances down, at the bullet wound in her chest.

It is time.

Mary Elizabeth Longstreet closes her eyes and, like her son surely had so many years earlier, feels a peace blossom within her, and thus blessed, steps into the beyond.

REVELATION

Put your trust in the light while you have it,
so that you may become sons of light.

— JOHN 12:36

I

In the two weeks following the bloodbath at St Gedeon’s there were eleven homicides in the city of Philadelphia, more than sixty aggravated assaults, a score of burglaries.

Philadelphia moved on.

Both the
Inquirer
and
Daily News
ran stories for six straight days, with the first Sunday edition of the
Inquirer
devoting a full page to Mary Elizabeth Longstreet’s life and murderous rampage. The story chronicled what investigators found in the woman’s small South Philly apartment, specifically the dozens of bound volumes of medical histories and transcripts, including the highlighted records of six patients who had been targeted.

One of Dr Sarah Goodwin’s patients, a thief who had been to prison twice for armed robbery, was replaced in Mary Longstreet’s mad scheme by DeRon Wilson, a crime of both necessity and opportunity, police believed.

In the woman’s closets investigators also found a long black
coat with a pointed hood — a coat they surmised Mary Longstreet herself wore in the surveillance video taken at St Adelaide’s — along with a number of full sets of clothing, outfits for a boy of ten, twelve, and fifteen. There was also one for a full grown adult. Each was a black suit, white shirt, and black tie.

None had ever been worn.

On the morning after being rushed to the hospital, Jessica underwent surgery to repair her shoulder. She was discharged five days later, despite her protestations that she was very comfortable in her room, especially with the part about having people wait on her hand and foot. Not to mention that fabulous invention called Percocet. She was released nonetheless.

The surgery, and recovery time, for Kevin Byrne was more serious. Having lost a lot of blood, Byrne was in ICU for five days, in recovery for a week. Jessica visited him every day, but on the morning of Byrne’s release she ran late and missed him, a trio of shiny Mylar balloons in hand.

Jessica later learned that Byrne went immediately from the hospital to the PPD evidence room, where he stayed until well past midnight, obsessed with the material collected from St Ignatios, the chapel in which Michelle Calvin had been found brutally murdered, her body posed on a bloodied mattress.

They say Byrne pored over the evidence for a long time, searching for a clue he was certain would be there, a pointer designed to lead investigators to the final church. He eventually found it. It was on the mattress tag:

UNDER PENALTY OF LAW THIS TAG
NOT TO BE REMOVED
EXCEPT BY CONSUMER

All but six of the letters had been carefully painted out with Michelle Calvin’s blood, leaving a single word.

GEDEON

A week later, when the crime scene was finally cleared by investigators, the demolition of St Gedeon’s began.

She found him at Holy Cross Cemetery in Lansdowne. Standing in a shaded area near Baily Road, he wore a dark suit and white shirt. As Jessica got closer she could see the bulk of the bandages that wrapped his stomach. He’d lost more than ten pounds, and his skin was pallid.

The services and funeral for the old priest, held a few days after the man’s death, had been well attended, with clergy and lay personnel coming from all over the tri-state area. The eulogy was given by the Archbishop of Philadelphia.

‘Hey, handsome.’

Byrne turned to see her. ‘Hey,’ he said softly. ‘What are you doing here?’

Jessica held up the bouquet of lilies, and offered a look that all but shouted:
Where else would I be on such a day as this?

Byrne nodded.

For the next twenty minutes or so they watched the cemetery workers set the headstone. Byrne had paid a monument
company to craft the old priest’s marker out of one of the keystones of St. Gedeon’s. The inscription read:

THOMAS ANGELO LEONE
DEO, OPTIMO, MAXIMO

When the workers left, Jessica and Byrne stood in silence for a few moments. The sun peeked out from behind the clouds and warmed their faces.

While Jessica had returned to duty, Byrne was still on medical leave. As much as he was missed, there was no pressure for him to return one minute before he was ready.

‘Don’t you have a shift?’ Byrne finally asked.

Jessica did, but she’d hoped Byrne wouldn’t notice. She was wrong, of course. She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You gonna be okay?’

Byrne hesitated, then said: ‘I’m good, Jess.’

Jessica said a brief, silent prayer, placed the flowers on the grave, then walked slowly down the path to her parking spot on Baily Road.

When she reached her car she called the office, and told her boss she would be a little late. She put her phone away, leaned against the car, studied the tall man silhouetted against the green expanse of the cemetery.