Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (27 page)

What are you doing for me?

Byrne’s solve rate was one of the highest in the unit, partially, he knew, because of the synergy he’d had with Jimmy Purify, partially due to the waking dreams he’d begun having, courtesy of four slugs from Luther White’s pistol and a trip beneath the surface of the Delaware.

The organized killer, by nature, believed himself superior to most people, but especially superior to the people tasked with finding him. It was this egotism that drove Kevin Byrne, and in this case, the Rosary Girl case, it was becoming an obsession. He knew that. He had probably known that the moment he had walked down those rotted steps on North Eighth Street and seen the brutal humiliation that had befallen Tessa Wells.

But he knew it was as much a sense of duty as it was the horror of Morris Blanchard. He had been wrong many times earlier in his career, but it had never led to the death of an innocent. Byrne wasn’t sure if the arrest and conviction of the Rosary Girl killer would expiate the guilt, or if it would square him once again with the city of Philadelphia, but he hoped it would fill an emptiness inside.

And then he could retire with his head held high.

Some detectives follow the money. Some follow the science. Some follow the motive. Kevin Byrne trusted the door at the end of his mind. No, he couldn’t predict the future, nor divine the identity of a killer just by laying hands. But sometimes it
felt
like he could, and maybe that was what made the difference. The nuance detected, the intention discovered, the path chosen, the thread followed. In the past fifteen years, ever since he had drowned, he had only been wrong once.

He needed sleep. He paid his tab, said goodbye to a few of the regulars, stepped out into the endless rain. Gray’s Ferry smelled clean.

Byrne buttoned his raincoat, assessed his driving ability, considering the five bourbons. He pronounced himself fit. More or less. When he approached his car, he knew that something didn’t look right, but the image didn’t register immediately.

Then it did.

The driver’s window was smashed in, broken glass shimmering on the front seat. He looked inside. His CD player and CD wallet were gone.

“Mother
fucker,
” he said. “This fucking
city
.”

He walked around the car a few times, a rabid dog chasing his tail in the rain. He sat down on the hood, actually considering the folly of calling this in. He knew better. You’d have as much chance of recovering a stolen radio in Gray’s Ferry as Michael Jackson had of getting a job at a day care center.

The stolen CD player didn’t bother him as much as the stolen CDs. He had a choice collection of classic blues in there. Three years in the making.

He was just about to leave when he noticed someone watching him from the vacant lot across the street. Byrne couldn’t see who it was, but there was something about the posture that told him all he needed to know.

“Hey!” Byrne yelled.

The man took off, rabbiting behind the buildings on the other side of the street.

Byrne took off after him.

T
HE GLOCK FELT HEAVY IN HIS HAND, like a deadweight.

By the time Byrne got across the street, the man was lost in the miasma of pouring rain. Byrne still-hunted through the debris-strewn lot, then up to the alley that ran behind the row houses that spanned the length of the block.

He did not see the thief.

Where the hell did he go?

Byrne holstered his Glock, sidled up to the alleyway, peered to the left.

Dead end. A Dumpster, a pile of garbage bags, broken wooden crates. He eased into the alley. Was someone standing behind the Dumpster? A crack of thunder made Byrne spin, his heart trip-hammering in his chest.

Alone.

He continued, minding every night-shadow. The machine gun of raindrops on the plastic garbage bags obscured every other sound for a moment.

Then, beneath the rain, he heard a whimper, a rustling of plastic.

Byrne looked behind the Dumpster. It was a black kid, maybe eighteen or so. In the moonlight Byrne could see the nylon cap, Flyers jersey, a gang tat on his right arm that identified him as a member of JBM: Junior Black Mafia. He had tats of prison sparrows on his left arm. He was kneeling, bound, and gagged. There were bruises on his face from a recent beating. His eyes were ablaze with fear.

What the hell is going on here?

Byrne sensed movement to his left. Before he could turn, a huge arm reached around him from behind. Byrne felt the ice of a razor-sharp knife blade at his throat.

Then, in his ear: “Don’t fuckin’ move.”

32

TUESDAY, 9:10 PM

J
ESSICA WAITED. People came and went, hurrying through the rain, hailing cabs, running to the subway stop.

None of them was Brian Parkhurst.

Jessica reached under her rain slicker, keyed her rover twice.

At the entrance to Center Square Plaza, less than fifty feet away, a disheveled man came out of the shadows.

Jessica looked at him, hands out, palms up.

Nick Palladino shrugged back. Before leaving the Northeast, Jessica had tried Byrne twice more, then called Nick on her way into the city; Nick had instantly agreed to back her play. Nick’s vast experience working undercover in Narcotics made him a natural for covert surveillance. He wore a ratty hooded sweatshirt and stained chinos. For Nick Palladino, this was the true sacrifice to the job.

John Shepherd was under the scaffolding on the side of city hall, directly across the street, binoculars in hand. A pair of uniformed officers were stationed at the Market Street subway stop, both carrying the yearbook faculty photo of Brian Parkhurst, in case he showed up via that route.

He had not showed. And it looked as if he wasn’t going to.

Jessica called the station house. The team sitting on Parkhurst’s house reported no activity.

Jessica ambled over to where Palladino stood.

“Still can’t reach Kevin?” he asked.

“No,” Jessica said.

“He’s probably crashed. He could use the rest.”

Jessica hesitated, not knowing how to ask. She was new to this club and didn’t want to step on any toes. “He seem okay to you?”

“Kevin’s tough to read, Jess.”

“He seems completely exhausted.”

Palladino nodded, lit a cigarette. They were
all
tired. “He tell you about his . . . experience?”

“You mean about Luther White?”

From what Jessica could glean, Kevin Byrne had been involved in an arrest gone bad fifteen years earlier, a bloody confrontation with a rape suspect named Luther White. White had been killed; Byrne had nearly died himself.

It was the
nearly
part that confused Jessica.

“Yeah,” Palladino said.

“No, he hasn’t,” Jessica said. “I haven’t had the guts to ask him about it.”

“It was a close call for him,” Palladino said. “About as close as you can get. The way I understand it, he was, well,
dead
for a little while.”

“Then I did hear it right,” Jessica said, incredulous. “So, what, he’s like psychic or something?”

“Oh,
God
no.” Palladino smiled, shook his head. “Nothing like that. Don’t ever even utter that
word
around him. In fact, it would be better if you never even brought it up.”

“Why is that?”

“Let me put it this way. There’s a bigmouthed detective over at Central who gave him some shit about it one night at Finnigan’s Wake. I think the guy is still eating his dinner through a straw.”

“Gotcha,” Jessica said.

“It’s just that Kevin’s got a . . . sense about the really bad ones. Or he used to, anyway. The whole Morris Blanchard thing was pretty bad for him. He was wrong about Blanchard, and it almost destroyed him. I know he wants out, Jess. He’s got his twenty in. He just can’t find the door.”

The two detectives looked out over the rain-swept plaza.

“Look,” Palladino began, “this is probably not my place to say this, but Ike Buchanan went out on a limb with you. You know that, right?”

“What do you mean?” Jessica asked, although she had a fairly good idea.

“When he formed this task force, and gave it to Kevin, he could have moved you to the back of the pack. Hell, maybe he should have. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Ike’s a stand-up guy. You might think he’s letting you stay at the front of the pack for political reasons—I don’t think it will come as a shock to you that there’s a few assholes in the department who think so—but he believes in you. You wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.”

Wow,
Jessica thought.
Where the hell did all this come from?

“Well, I hope I can justify that faith,” she said.

“You’ll do fine.”

“Thanks, Nick. That means a lot.” She meant it, too.

“Yeah, well, I don’t even know why I told you.”

For some unknown reason, Jessica hugged him. After a few seconds they broke, smoothed their hair, coughed into their fists, got over the show of emotion.

“So,” Jessica said, a little awkwardly, “what do we do right now?”

Nick Palladino scoured the block—city hall, over to South Broad, over to Center Square Plaza, down Market. He found John Shepherd under the canopy to the entrance to the subway. John caught his eye. The two men shrugged. The rain poured.

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s shut it down.”

33

TUESDAY, 9:15 PM

B
YRNE DIDN’T HAVE TO TURN AROUND to know who it was. The wet sounds coming from the man’s mouth—the missing sibilance, the destroyed plosive, along with the deep nasal quality of the voice—said that it was someone who had recently had a number of upper teeth removed and his nose recently demolished.

It was Diablo. Gideon Pratt’s bodyguard.

“Be cool,” Byrne said.

“Oh, I’m cool, cowboy,” Diablo said. “I’m dry fuckin’ ice.”

Then Byrne felt something much worse than the cold blade at his throat. He felt Diablo pat him down and take away his service Glock: the worst nightmare in the litany of bad dreams for a police officer.

Diablo put the barrel of the Glock to the back of Byrne’s head.

“I’m a cop,” Byrne said.

“No shit,” Diablo said. “Next time you commit aggravated assault, you should stay off TV.”

The press conference,
Byrne thought. Diablo had seen the press conference, and then he had staked the Roundhouse and followed him.

“You don’t want to do this,” Byrne said.

“Shut the fuck up.”

The tied-up kid looked between them, back and forth, his eyes shifting, looking for a way out. The tattoo on Diablo’s forearm told Byrne he belonged to the P-Town Posse, an odd conglomerate of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and disaffected thugs who, for one reason or another, didn’t fit elsewhere.

The P-Town Posse and the JBM were natural enemies, a hatred that ran ten years deep. Byrne now knew what was happening here.

Diablo was setting him up.

“Let him go,” Byrne said. “We’ll settle this between ourselves.”

“This won’t be settled for a long time, motherfucker.”

Byrne knew he had to make a move. He swallowed hard, tasted the Vicodin at the back of his throat, felt the spark in his fingers.

Diablo made the move for him.

Without warning, without a modicum of conscience, Diablo stepped around him, leveled Byrne’s Glock, and shot the kid point blank. One to the heart. Instantly, a spray of blood and tissue and flecks of bone hit the dirty brick wall, foaming deep scarlet, then washing to the ground in the heavy rain. The kid slumped.

Byrne closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw Luther White pointing the pistol at him so many years ago. He felt icy water swirl around him, sinking deeper, deeper.

Thunder clapped, lightning flashed.

Time crawled.

Stopped.

When the pain did not come, Byrne opened his eyes and saw Diablo turn the corner, then disappear. Byrne knew what came next. Diablo would dump the weapon nearby—Dumpster, garbage can, drainpipe. Cops would find it. They always did. And Kevin Francis Byrne’s life would be over.