The Killing Room (7 page)

‘A chant?’

Mara Reuben closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were listening to the sound, as if reliving the moment. ‘Yes. It had that rhythm, you know? Like in the old Latin mass. Are you Catholic?’

‘I was raised Roman Catholic, yes.’

‘It sounded like it might have been Latin he was speaking,’ she continued. ‘I can’t be certain, though.’

‘Are you sure he came out of that building?’

‘Well, I was until you asked me that. I couldn’t swear to it. Sorry.’

‘That’s okay. We want you to be sure. Is there anything else you can remember?’

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘Nothing I can think of right now. To be honest, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. You know better than I do that Philly has its share of characters. I just locked the locks, got in my car, and drove away.’

‘Okay. This has been very helpful. If you –’

The woman held up a finger. ‘Wait. I
do
remember something else. When I drove away I looked in the rearview mirror, and it looked like he was touching the post. I do remember that.’

‘The lamppost in front of the building?’

‘Yes.’

Jessica made a note to expedite the lab test on the substance they found on the lamppost, as well as the latent prints, if any. This woman might have seen the man painting the
X
on it.

‘And you say you’re down here every night at ten?’ Jessica asked.

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask what brought you back down here this morning?’

‘Well, like I said, I’m pretty paranoid, my mother having had two break-ins this month. I was just going to drive by, then I saw all the police cars and I freaked.’

‘That’s understandable.’ Jessica handed the woman a card. ‘If you think of anything else, no matter how trivial it might seem, please call me.’

‘I will.’

‘And if it’s any consolation,’ Jessica added, ‘your mother’s house should be okay for the next few days. There are going to be police all over the place around here for awhile.’

The woman offered a faint smile. ‘Yeah, well, I’m still going to use this to get her to move in with me.’

There was no response to this. There were good areas and bad areas of the city. Jessica had investigated homicides in penthouses and flophouses. Nowhere was safe from violence.

Ten minutes later Jessica stood on the corner, across from the crime scene. She tried to imagine the street when it was empty, as it had been at ten o’clock the previous night. She tried to imagine a man standing there, clad in a long black coat and a pointed hood, speaking aloud.

In Latin.

She glanced at the police pole camera on the corner. If they
were going to get lucky on this one – and, considering how they’d struck out completely on the neighborhood interviews, they were going to need luck – the camera would be operational, and they would have an image.

SEVEN

Byrne knew the moment he walked into the building. The feeling settled first on the surface of his skin, a damp sensation of dread that seemed to bleed from these walls, stone that had stood witness to a hundred years of secrets, and before that the history of the land from which it had been quarried. Byrne all but heard the hooves on wet sod, the fading heartbeats of the fallen.

Here, in this place where the stone had long ago been keyed and weighted, this place where murder was done, the walls protected its ghosts.

The Boy in the Red Coat.

Byrne had not thought of the boy in many months, a long time considering his history with the case. The Boy in the Red Coat was one of the more famous, and lurid, unsolved crimes in Philadelphia’s history. Byrne had gotten a call from the pastor of St Gedeon’s, the South Philadelphia church of his youth. When he arrived the church was empty save for a dead boy in the last pew, a child clad in a bright red jacket.

Byrne secured the scene, waited for the divisional detectives. That was where and when his official involvement with the case ended. In the years since, many detectives, including Byrne himself, had looked at the files, tried to track down fresh leads. The case remained open. But Byrne had never forgotten the sensation of walking into that huge, empty cathedral that day, seeing the dead child.

It was the same feeling he had walking into the dank basement on this day, seeing the young man so barbarously wired to the chair, his body bathed in scarlet.

In his time as a homicide detective Byrne had borne witness to every imaginable violence, every conceivable way for one human to cause the death of another. Since he’d had his own near-fatal experience many years earlier – an incident where he was pronounced dead, only to come back to life a full minute later – he had been both blessed and cursed with this vision, this
sight
. It wasn’t as if he could see into the future, or the past, or had any sixth sense that made him special. He felt special by no means. It was, instead, more of a sense of presence, a sense of
being
, an incarnation of the men and women who had occupied these rooms before him. Many times he walked into a crime scene, a place fresh from the murderer’s touch, and felt as if he walked in the killer’s skin for a fleeting instant. It was an ugly, sickening sensation, to feel even for a moment a soul devoid of compassion, a heart bereft of sorrow.

Many times, late into a night of bad dreams, Byrne had wished this ability would go away. Just as often he wished it would develop, becoming more clear and profound, something he could channel. It never happened. It had always
been – and, he suspected, would always be – something that came and went. Something that had its own power and agenda.

Ever since the visions began Byrne believed he would one day walk onto a scene and know that it was the beginning of the end, that he was about to engage in a great battle, a stand between good and evil.

This was that day. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew it.

It was finally happening.

In the vestibule of the old building was a narrow door to the left, slightly ajar, its hinges rusted, its jambs out of square. Byrne shouldered the door. It opened just enough for him to squeeze through.

He mounted the winding stone staircase to the bell tower. When he made it to the top he stepped inside. The bell itself was long gone; the two small windows were covered with thin slats of wood lath.

Byrne pulled a few of the slats free. The parched wood came loose with very little effort. The gray light coming through the opening gave him a better view from the landing.

He closed his eyes, felt the feeling wash over him, the knowledge that –

–
this evil has just awakened and the mother and child mother and child mother and child the
–

– mother and child.

Byrne opened his eyes, looked out the window. He saw Jessica on the street, talking to one of the CSU officers. Next to Jessica stood Maria Caruso and Josh Bontrager. Behind
them stood thirty or so people gathered to bear witness to what had happened today, many of them women –

– having given birth to a child who would one day grow to be a man who would expiate the sins of his father by becoming his own father, a man who would walk the dark corners of the night and –

– do murder.

Byrne thought of Jessica, of her daughter and newly adopted son. He thought of his ex-wife Donna and their daughter Colleen. He thought of Colleen, who would one day soon find love and have a child of her own. He thought about Tanya Wilkins and her sons Gabriel and Terrell. He thought of all the women who hoped for the best for their sons and daughters. He thought of that day long ago when he walked into a church and saw the small figure in the back pew, that blood red coat, the smell of death, a scent he would forever carry in his soul.

Mother and child
, Kevin Byrne thought.

Mother and child.

EIGHT

By the time they returned to the Roundhouse the victim had been transported to the morgue. There he would be fingerprinted, which was protocol for a John Doe. Prints were rarely, if ever, lifted at the scene. Once the prints were taken they would be sent to the latent print section, where they would be run through IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a program run and maintained by the FBI. If the victim had ever been arrested, or worked for a government agency, his prints would be on file.

While Jessica waited she did the initial paperwork, including filling out the body chart, the standard Police Department form that had four outlines of the human body drawn on it, front and back, left and right side. It also had space for the fundamental details of the crime scene. Whenever someone came onto an existing case, this was the first document they consulted.

But this body chart was a bit more difficult than usual. It was
not easy to diagram the wounds on the body. The fatal wound – the laceration that had probably been responsible for the victim bleeding out – was the one barb that looked to have been specifically sharpened for that purpose. They would know a lot more about that when the victim was autopsied the next morning.

While all this was pending Jessica called a friend of hers at L & I. The Licenses and Inspections Department was the agency dedicated to, among other things, enforcement and regulation of the city’s code requirements regarding public safety, including building, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, fire, property maintenance, business, and zoning regulations.

After being on hold for more than five minutes she hung up, deciding to just go there and get what she needed. She crossed the duty room to where Byrne sat at a terminal, running the names of some of the witnesses they had spoken to.

‘I’m going to run over to L & I and get a history on that building,’ Jessica said.

In a city like Philadelphia, with a 300-year history, there was always a battle being fought between progress and preservation. The crime-scene building from that morning had easily been more than a hundred years old. There was nothing particularly interesting or attractive about it, and it clearly had been used for a number of purposes over the years. A visit to the zoning archives would give them a handle on who, if anyone, owned the building now, and what it had been used for in the past.

Jessica slipped on her coat, looked at her watch. ‘Who’s on at the morgue today?’

Byrne picked up the phone, made a call to the ID unit. During day work – the shift that was on duty between 8 a.m.

and 4 p.m. – the print unit kept a technician at the morgue to take prints from unidentified victims. It was the least glamorous duty in the unit – if indeed there
was
a glamorous section to the latent print unit – and sometimes there was a backlog. Every homicide detective wanted their John or Jane Doe prints yesterday, but sometimes the bodies had to go into the refrigeration rooms pending the process, which made a lousy job even worse.

Byrne hung up the phone. ‘Judy’s on.’

Jessica smiled. ‘Lucky us.’

Judy Brannon was in her late thirties, single, and looking. She was also fearless. Jessica had once visited the morgue on a high-profile case, with the intention of walking the prints through the system. She watched Judy Brannon trying to get prints from a cold corpse when all of a sudden, in the middle of the process, the dead man’s hand contracted, closing around Judy’s wrist. Jessica had jumped a foot when it happened – not to mention enduring two sleepless nights as a result – but Judy had remained completely calm throughout.

In addition to her valiant work, and rather Rubenesque figure, Judy Brannon had a mad crush on Kevin Byrne.

‘Bring me back something sweet,’ Jessica said to Byrne as he walked out the door, heading to the morgue.

‘Besides myself?’ he asked.

‘Not that sweet.’

The zoning records for the city of Philadelphia were located at the concourse level of the Licenses and Inspections offices at 15th and JFK. The area dedicated to studying the archives was a warren of drab gray cubicles.

While she waited, Jessica considered that, because this was part of a homicide investigation, she could have had her commissioner call the commissioner of L & I, thereby greasing the wheels. She decided that sometimes it was easier to save the chit, and wait in line. She flashed her badge and a smile, and before too long an L & I employee led her over to a terminal, and showed her how to access the information she wanted.

The process was a little confusing at first, but Jessica soon found the data on the crime-scene building. She began to read the history of the address, which went back more than 150 years.

Working front to back, she waded through documents such as zoning and use permits, prerequisite approvals, limited cooking permits (the building had once been used to house a restaurant it seemed), plot plans, electrical permits, and other documents. Although she found out that the property was abandoned, due to non-payment of taxes, she decided to check records all the way back to the building’s original owners.

After twenty minutes or so of dry, municipal data, one name popped out, and changed everything.

‘You’ve gotta be freakin’
kidding
me,’ she said, loud enough to draw attention from the handful of people at the other terminals. She looked up, offered a silent
sorry
to all of them.

Jessica printed off her findings, grabbed her coat, and all but ran back to her car.

When Jessica returned to the Roundhouse, Byrne was waiting for her. She didn’t even have to ask. He proffered a white bakery bag – always a good sign.

God
, she was going to become a cow. She decided she would
put these empty calories into the bank of time she owed the treadmill, as opposed to the other bank she owed the elliptical trainer. She figured she was up to somewhere around four and a half months straight on the treadmill, at a four-mile-per-hour pace. If she ran all the way to Baltimore, and halfway back, she’d be paid up.

She finished the Danish, took the computer printout from her portfolio.

‘You ready for this?’ Jessica asked.