The Rosary Girls (20 page)

45

WEDNESDAY, 10:45 A M
Crime scenes always looked different in daylight. The alley looked benign and peaceful. A pair of uniforms stood at its entrance. Byrne badged the officers, slipped under the tape. When the two detectives saw him, they each gave the homicide wave—palm down, a slight dip to the ground, then straight out.
Everything’s cool.

Xavier Washington and Reggie Payne had been partnered so long, Byrne thought, they were beginning to dress alike and finish each other’s sentences, like an old married couple.

“We can all go home,” Payne said with a smile.
“What do you have?” Byrne asked.
“Just a little thinning of the gene pool.” Payne pulled back the plastic

sheet. “This is the late Marius Green.”

The body was in the precise position it had been in when Byrne left it the previous night.
“It’s a through and through.” Payne pointed to Marius’s chest.
“Thirty-eight?” Byrne asked.
“Could be. Looks more like a nine, though. Haven’t found the brass or the slug yet.”
“He’s JBM?” Byrne asked.
“Oh yeah,” Payne replied. “Marius was a very bad actor.”
Byrne glanced at the uniformed officers looking for the slug. He looked at his watch. “I have a few minutes.”
“Oh, now we can really go home,” Payne said. “The face is on the case.”
Byrne walked a few feet toward the Dumpster. The mound of plastic trash bags obscured him from view. He picked up a short piece of lumber, began poking around. When he was sure he was unobserved, he took the baggie from his pocket, opened it, turned it upside down, and dropped the bloodied slug to the ground. He continued to nose around, but not too carefully.
After a minute or so, he returned to where Payne and Washington stood.
“I’ve got my own psycho to catch,” Byrne said.
“Catch
you
at the house,” Payne replied.
“
Got
it,” one of the uniforms standing by the Dumpster bellowed.
Payne and Washington looked at each other, high-fived, walked over to where the uniform stood. They had found the slug.
Facts: Marius Green’s blood was on the slug. It had caromed off brick. End of story.
There would be no reason to look farther or dig deeper. The slug would now be bagged and tagged, taken down to ballistics, where a property receipt would be issued. Then it would be compared to other bullets recovered from crime scenes. Byrne had the distinct feeling that the Smith & Wesson he had taken off Diablo was used in other unsavory undertakings in the past.
Byrne exhaled, looked heavenward, slipped into his car. Only one more detail to address. Finding Diablo and imparting to him the wisdom of leaving Philadelphia forever.
His pager went off.
The call was from Monsignor Terry Pacek.
The hits just keep on coming.

... The Sporting Club was Center City’s biggest fitness club, located on the eighth floor at the historic Bellevue, the beautifully ornate building at Broad and Walnut Streets.

Byrne found Terry Pacek on one of the LifeCycles. The dozen or so stationary bikes were arranged in a square, facing each other. Most were occupied. Behind Byrne and Pacek, the slap and shriek of Nikes on the basketball court below offset the whir of the treadmills and hiss of the cycles, as well as the grunts and groans and grumbles of the fit, near fit, and ain’t never gonna
be
fit.

“Monsignor,” Byrne said in greeting.

Pacek didn’t break rhythm, nor seem to acknowledge Byrne in any way. He was perspiring, but he wasn’t breathing hard. A quick glance at the readout on the cycle showed that he had already put in forty minutes, and was still maintaining a ninety-rpm pace. Incredible. Byrne knew Pacek to be in his midforties, but he was in great shape, even for a man ten years younger. In here, out of his cassock and collar, dressed in stylish, Perry Ellis jogging pants and sleeveless T-shirt, he looked more like a slowly aging tight end than a priest. Actually, a slowly aging tight end is precisely what Pacek was. As Byrne understood it, Terry Pacek still held the Boston College record for receptions in a single season. They didn’t call him the Jesuit John Mackey for nothing.

Looking around the club, Byrne saw a well-known news anchor puffing away on a StairMaster, a pair of city councilmen plotting on parallel treadmills. He found himself self-consciously sucking in his stomach. He would start a cardio regimen tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.

He had to find Diablo first.
“Thanks for meeting with me,” Pacek said.
“Not a problem,” Byrne said.
“I know you’re a busy man,” Pacek added. “I won’t keep you too

long.”

Byrne knew that
I won’t keep you long
was code for
Get comfortable, you’re gonna be here a while
. He just nodded, waited for a moment. The moment played out empty. Then: “What can I do for you?”

The question was as rhetorical as it was rote. Pacek hit the cool down button on the cycle, rode it out. He slipped off the seat, threw a towel around his neck. And although Terry Pacek was far more toned than Byrne, he was at least four inches shorter. Byrne found cheap solace in this.

“I’m a man who likes to cut through the layers of bureaucracy when possible,” Pacek said.
“What makes you think it’s possible in this instance?” Byrne asked.
Pacek stared at Byrne for a few, uncomfortable seconds too long. Then he smiled. “Walk with me.”
Pacek led the way to the elevator, which they took to the third floor mezzanine and its jogging track. Byrne found himself hoping that
Walk with me
meant precisely that. Walking. They got out on the carpeted track, which ringed the fitness room below.
“How is the investigation going?” Pacek asked as they began their way around at a reasonable pace.
“You didn’t call me here for a status report.”
“You’re right,” Pacek replied. “I understand that there was another girl found last night.”
This was no secret, Byrne thought. It was even on CNN, which meant that no doubt people in Borneo knew. Great publicity for Philly’s tourism board. “Yes,” Byrne said.
“And I understand that your interest in Brian Parkhurst remains high.”
An understatement. “We’d like to talk to him, yes.”
“It is in everyone’s interest—especially the heartbroken families of these young girls—that this madman be caught. And that justice is done. I know Dr. Parkhurst, Detective. I find it hard to believe that he has had anything to do with these crimes, but that is not for me to decide.”
“Why am I here, Monsignor?” Byrne was in no mood for palace politics.
After two full circuits of the jogging track, they were back at the door. Pacek wiped the sweat from his head, and said: “Meet me downstairs in twenty minutes.”

Zanzibar Blue was a chic jazz club and restaurant in the basement of the Bellevue, just beneath the lobby of the Park Hyatt, nine floors beneath the Sporting Club. Byrne ordered a coffee at the bar.

Pacek entered, bright-eyed, flushed with his workout.
“Vodka rocks,” he said to the bartender.

He leaned against the bar next to Byrne. Without a word, he reached into his pocket. He handed Byrne a slip of paper. On it was an address in West Philly.

“Brian Parkhurst owns a building on Sixty-first Street, near Market. He’s renovating it,” Pacek said. “He’s there now.”
Byrne knew that nothing was free in this life. He pondered Pacek’s angle. “Why are you telling me this?”
“It’s the right thing to do, Detective.”
“But your bureaucracy is no different from mine.”
“I have done judgment and justice: leave me not to mine oppressors,”
Pacek said with a wink. “Psalms, One Hundred and Ten.”
Byrne took the piece of paper. “I appreciate this.”
Pacek sipped his vodka. “I wasn’t here.”
“I understand.”
“How are you going to explain obtaining this information?”
“Leave it to me,” Byrne said. He would have one of his CIs make a call to the Roundhouse, logging it in about twenty minutes.
I seen him . . . that guy youse are lookin’ for . . . I seen him up around Cobbs Creek.
“We all fight the good fight,” Pacek said. “We choose our weapons early in life.You chose a gun and a badge. I chose the cross.”
Byrne knew this wasn’t easy for Pacek. If Parkhurst turned out to be their doer, Pacek would be the one to take the flak for the Archdiocese having hired him in the first place—a man who’d had an affair with a teenaged girl being put in proximity to, perhaps, a few thousand more.
On the other hand, the sooner the Rosary Killer was caught—not only for the sake of the Catholic girls in Philadelphia, but also for the church itself—the better.
Byrne slid off the stool, towering over the priest. He dropped a ten on the bar.
“Go with God,” Pacek said.
“Thanks.”
Pacek nodded.
“And, Monsignor?” Byrne added, slipping on his coat.
“Yes?”
“It’s Psalms One Nineteen.”

46

WEDNESDAY, 11:15 A M

Jessica was in her father’s kitchen, washing dishes, when the “talk” came. Like all Italian American families, anything of any importance was discussed, dissected, resected, and solved in only one room of the house. The kitchen.

This day would be no different.
Instinctively, Peter picked up a dish towel and stationed himself next to his daughter. “You having a good time?” he asked, the real conversation he wanted to have hiding just beneath his policeman’s tongue.
“Always,” Jessica said. “Aunt Carmella’s cacciatore brings me back.” She said this, lost, for the moment, in a pastel nostalgia of her childhood in this house, in memories of those carefree years at family functions with her brother; of Christmas shopping at the May Company, of Eagles games at a frigid Veterans Stadium, of seeing Michael in his uniform for the first time: so proud, so fearful.
God, she missed him.
“. . . the
sopressata
?”
Her father’s question yanked her back to the present. “I’m sorry. What did you say, Dad?”
“Did you try the
sopressata
?”
“No.”
“Out of this world. From Chickie’s. I’ll make you a plate.”
Jessica had never once left a party at her father’s house without a plate. Nor had anyone else for that matter.
“You want to tell me what’s wrong, Jess?”
“Nothing.”
The word fluttered around the room for a while, then took a nosedive, as it always did when she tried it with her father. He always knew.
“Right, sweetie,” Peter said. “Tell me.”
“It’s nothing,” Jessica said. “Just, you know, the usual. Work.”
Peter took a plate, dried it. “You nervous about the case?”
“Nah.”
“Good.”
“
Way
beyond nervous,” Jessica said, handing her father another dinner plate. “Scared to death is more like it.”
Peter laughed. “You’ll catch him.”
“You seem to be overlooking the fact that I’ve never worked a homicide in my life.”
“You’ll do fine.”
Jessica didn’t believe it, but, somehow, when her father said it, it sounded like the truth. “I know.” Jessica hesitated, then asked, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“And I want you to be completely honest with me.”
“Of course, honey. I’m a policeman. I always tell the truth.”
Jessica glared at him over the top of her glasses.
“Okay. Point taken,” Peter said. “What’s up?”
“Did you have anything to do with me getting into Homicide?”
“Not a thing, Jess.”
“Because, if you did...”
“What?”
“Well, you might think you’re helping me, but you’re not. There’s a very good chance I’m gonna fall flat on my face here.”
Peter smiled, reached over with a squeaky-clean hand, and grabbed Jessica’s cheek, the way he had since she was a baby. “Not this face,” he said. “This is an angel’s face.”
Jessica blushed and smiled. “Pa.Yo. I’m pushing thirty here. A little too old for the
visa bella
routine.”
“Never,” Peter said.
They fell silent for a little while. Then, as dreaded, Peter asked: “You getting everything you need from the labs?”
“Well, so far, I guess,” Jessica said.
“Want me to make a call?”
“No!”
Jessica replied, a little more forcefully than she wanted. “I mean, not yet. I mean, I’d like to, you know...”
“You’d like to do it on your own.”
“Yeah.”
“What, we just met over here?”
Jessica blushed again. She could never fool her father. “I’ll be okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll leave it up to you then. Somebody drags their feet, you call me.”
“I will.”
Peter smiled, gave Jessica a sloppy kiss on the top of her head, just as Sophie came tearing into the room with her second cousin Nanette, both little girls wild-eyed with all the sugar. Peter beamed. “All my girls under one roof,” he said. “Who’s got it better than me?”

WEDNESDAY, 11:25 A M

The little girl giggles as she chases the puppy around and around the small, crowded park on Catharine Street, weaving through the forest of legs. We adults watch her, hovering nearby, ever vigilant. We are shields against the evils of the world. If you think about all the tragedy that could befall such a

little one, the mind staggers.

She stops for a moment, reaches to the ground, retrieving some little-girl treasure. She examines it closely. Her interest is pure and untainted by greed or possession or self-indulgence.

What did Laura Elizabeth Richards say about purity?

“The lovely light of holy innocence shines like a halo ’round her bended head.”
The clouds threaten rain but, for the moment, a blanket of golden sunlight covers South Philadelphia.
The puppy runs past the little girl, turns, nips at her heels, perhaps wondering why the game had stopped.The little girl doesn’t run or cry. She has her mother’s toughness. And yet there is something inside of her that is vulnerable and sweet, something that speaks of Mary.
She sits on a bench, primly arranges the hem of her dress, pats her knees. The puppy leaps onto her lap, licks her face.
Sophie laughs. It is a marvelous sound.
But what if one day soon her little voice was silenced?
Surely all the animals in her stuffed menagerie would weep.

WEDNESDAY, 11:45 A M

Before she left her father’s house, Jessica had slipped into his small office in the basement, sat down at his computer, accessed the Internet, and navigated to Google. She found what she was looking for in short order, then printed it out.

While her father and aunts watched Sophie at the small park next to the Fleisher Art Memorial, Jessica walked down the street to a cozy café on Sixth Street called Dessert. It was much quieter than a park full of sugar-amped toddlers and Chianti-primed adults. Besides, Vincent had shown up and she really didn’t need the fresh hell.

Over a Sacher torte and coffee she perused her findings.

Her first Google search had been the lines from the poem she found in Tessa’s diary.
Jessica had her answer instantly.
Sylvia Plath. The poem was called “Elm.”
Of course, Jessica thought. Sylvia Plath was the patron saint of all melancholy teenaged girls, the poet who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty.

I’m back. Just call me Sylvia.

What had Tessa meant by that?
The second search she performed was about the incident regarding the blood that had been thrown on the door of St. Katherine on that crazy Christmas Eve three years earlier. There wasn’t much about it in the archives of either the
Inquirer
or
The Daily News
. Not surprisingly,
The Report
had done the longest piece on it. Written by none other than her favorite muckraker, Simon Close.
It turned out that the blood had not been thrown on the door at all, but rather painted on with a brush. And it had been done while the congregation had been inside celebrating midnight mass.
The picture that accompanied the article was of the double doors leading into the church, but it was not clear. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the doors represented anything or nothing. The article didn’t say.
According to the item, police investigated the incident, but when Jessica searched further, she found no follow-up.
She made a call and found out that the detective who looked into the incident was a man named Eddie Kasalonis.

WEDNESDAY, 12:10 PM

Except for the pain in his right shoulder and the grass stains on his new jogging suit, it had been a very productive morning.
Simon Close sat on his couch, contemplating his next move.
Although he hadn’t expected the warmest greeting when he had revealed himself as a reporter to Jessica Balzano, he had to admit he was a little surprised by her violent reaction.
Surprised and, he also had to admit, extremely aroused. He had done his best Eastern Pennsylvania accent and she hadn’t suspected a thing. Until he hit her with the bombshell question.
He fished the tiny digital voice recorder out of his pocket.
“Good . . . if you want to talk to me, you go through the press office there. If that’s too much trouble, then stay the fuck out of my face.”
He opened his laptop, checked his e-mail—more spam for Vicodin, penis enlargement, great mortgage rates, and hair restoration, along with the usual fan mail from readers (“rot in hell you fukin hack”).
A lot of writers resist technology. Simon knew quite a few who still wrote on yellow legal pads with a ballpoint pen.A few others who worked on ancient Remington manual typewriters. Pretentious, prehistoric nonsense. Try as he might, Simon Close could not understand this. Perhaps they thought it would put them in touch with their inner Hemingway, the Charles Dickens fighting to get out. Simon was all digital, all the time. From his Apple PowerBook, to his DSL connection, to his Nokia GSM phone, he was on top of the tech world.
Go ahead,
he thought,
write on your slate tablets with a sharpened rock for all I care. I’m going to be there first.
Because Simon believed in the two basic tenets of tabloid journalism: It’s easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. It’s better to be first than it is to be accurate.
That’s what corrections are for.
He flipped on the TV, cruised the channels. Soaps, game shows, shout shows, sports. Yawn. Even the esteemed BBC America had some idiot, third-generation clone of
Trading Spaces
on. Maybe there was an old movie on AMC. He looked it up in the listings.
Criss Cross
with Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo. A goodie, but he’d seen it. Besides, it was half over.
He cruised the dial one more time, and was just about to flip it off when a breaking news flash came on a local channel. Murder in Philly. What a shock.
But it wasn’t another victim of the Rosary Killer.
The on-the-scene camera was showing something else altogether, something that made Simon’s heart beat a little faster. Okay, a
lot
faster. It was the alley in Gray’s Ferry.
The alley out of which Kevin Byrne had stumbled the night before. Simon hit the record button on his VCR. A few minutes later, he rewound and freeze-framed a shot of the mouth of the alley, and compared it, side by side, to the photo of Byrne on his laptop.
Identical.
Kevin Byrne had been in that same alley the night before, the night that a black kid had been shot dead. So it
hadn’t
been a backfire. This was so deliriously delicious, so much better than the possibility of catching Byrne at a crack house. Simon paced back and forth across his small living room a few dozen times, trying to figure the best way to play this.
Had Byrne committed a cold-blooded execution?
Was Byrne in the throes of a cover-up?
Was this a drug deal gone wrong?

the Rosary girls 243
Simon opened his e-mail program, calmed himself, somewhat, organized his thoughts and began to type:
Dear Detective Byrne:

Long time no see! Well, that’s not entirely true. As you can see by the attached photo, I saw you yesterday. Here’s my offer. I get to ride along with you and your scrumptious partner until you catch this very bad boy who has been killing Catholic schoolgirls. Once you do catch him, I want an exclusive.

For this, I will destroy these photographs.
If not, look for the pictures (yes, I have many) on the front page of the very next issue of
The Report
Have a great day!

As Simon looked it over—he always cooled off a bit before sending his most inflammatory e-mails—Enid meowed and leapt onto his lap from her perch on top of the file cabinet.

“What’s up, dolly-doll?”
Enid seemed to peruse the text of Simon’s mail to Kevin Byrne. “Too strident?” he asked the cat.
Enid purred a response.
“You’re right, kitty-kitty. Not
possible
.”
Still, Simon decided he would read it over a few more times before

sending it. Maybe he’d wait a day, just to see how big the story of the dead black kid in the alley would get. He could afford twenty-four more hours if it meant he could get a thug like Kevin Byrne under his thumb.

Or maybe he should send the e-mail to Jessica.
Brilliant,
he thought.
Or maybe he should just copy the photos to a CD and head down to

the paper. Just publish them and see how Byrne liked it.

Either way, he should probably make a backup copy of the photos, just to be safe.
He thought about the headline, huge type over a photo of Byrne walking out of that alley in Gray’s Ferry.
vigilante cop? would read the headline.
detective in death alley on night of murder! would read the deck.
God,
he was good.
Simon walked over to the hall closet and fished out a clean CD-R.
When he closed the door and turned back to the room, something was different. Maybe not so much different as off-center. It was like the feeling you get when you have an inner-ear infection and your balance is just that little bit tipsy. He stood in the archway leading to his tiny living room, trying to pin down the feeling.
Everything seemed to be as he had left it. His PowerBook on the coffee table, his empty demitasse cup next to it. Enid purring on the throw rug near the heat register.
Maybe he was mistaken.
He looked at the floor.
He saw the shadow first, a shadow that mirrored his own. He knew enough about key lighting to know that you need two light sources to cast two shadows.
Behind him, there was only the small ceiling fixture.
Then he felt the hot breath on his neck, smelled the faint scent of peppermint.
He turned, his heart suddenly in his throat.
And stared straight into the eyes of the devil.