“Well, suffice it to say the root word here is scrap, okay?”
“Point taken, Detective.” With this she sopped the last of the syrup with the last square inch of French toast, topping it with the last dollop of scrapple, then made a dramatic flourish of placing it in her mouth, chewing it with delirious delight. Byrne shook his head and went back to his wheat toast.
A few minutes later Jessica finished her coffee, grabbed the check, and asked, “Where do you want to start?”
“We never did get to recanvass Eighth Street.”
Jessica slipped out of the booth. “Let’s roll.”
THEY SPENT THE ENTIRE MORNING canvassing near the Eighth Street crime scene, learning nothing new. Not much was expected. They spent the afternoon walking every inch of the building in which Caitlin O’Riordan’s body was found.
AT 7:00 PM Byrne walked to the block of row houses across the street. The second and third floors of this building were still occupied. The aromas of frying meats and boiling vegetables reminded Byrne they had not stopped for dinner.
At the top of the stairwell he looked across the street at the corner building. The beam of Jessica’s flashlight in the gathering gloom cut across the empty space, strobing in the blackness.
Byrne scanned the street, the block. He considered the scenario when Caitlin had been brought to this terrible place. Her killer had chosen this spot well in advance. This was a special place. For some reason. It meant something to him. Most likely he had come in the middle of the night.
A few streets away a sector car’s siren suddenly burst to life. Byrne started at the noise. He hadn’t realized the street had gone so quiet, hadn’t realized the only sound was the beating of his heart.
Time to call it a night.
Byrne reached up to close the window, and the vision all but exploded in his mind. As his fingertips touched the cracked and puttied surface of the sash he knew—knew in a way with which he had been both cursed and blessed since an incident many years earlier, an attack by a homicide suspect that had left him dead for a full minute, a void in his memory that imbued him with a vague second sight—that Caitlin O’Riordan’s killer had stood in this very spot.
In Kevin Byrne’s mind he knew—
—a man standing at the bottom of the stairs… the city street quiet above him… the bright white cuff of a dress shirt… the sound of a silken cloth snapping in the still air… the image of the dead girl framed in the glass display case, the glisten of water leaking from her lips… the picture of an old man watching, applauding, his gnarled and feeble hands meeting in a noiseless clash—
—the unclean taste of a murderer’s thoughts inside him. Byrne took a few steps back, his head reeling. He exhaled. The air was foul and bitter in his mouth. He spit on the floor.
He took a moment to collect himself. The vision had visited him with a brutal clarity. It had been a while since the last one. Each time it happened he believed it would be the last time.
Kevin Byrne was a man who could sometimes see things. Things he did not want to see.
Years earlier he had been shot by a homicide suspect on the western bank of the Delaware River, in the shadow of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Although the bullet wound to his forehead was not life threatening, the impact forced him backwards, into the frigid water, where he had drifted downward, nearly unconscious, locked in a death battle with the suspect, who had just taken fire from Byrne’s partner, the late Jimmy Purify. When they pulled Byrne from the river, he had to be resuscitated. According the report he read almost a year later, he had been dead for nearly one full minute. Like Caitlin, he had drowned. For years after, he found that he sometimes had the ability to “read” a crime scene. Not in any psychic sense. He could not lay hands on a weapon or a victim and get a crystal-clear snapshot of the doer.
When he was shot a second time, this time far more seriously, the ability seemed to have disappeared, which was just fine with Kevin Byrne.
Just over a year ago, it returned with a vengeance.
Byrne never shared what he “saw” as investigative findings. To his bosses, to his fellow detectives, he couched his feelings as a hunch, an investigator’s gut instinct.
It’s not about the victim, it’s about the presentation.
Byrne took time to regroup. In the old days he took the visions in stride. He was no longer the man he had been in those days. Too much blood had flowed through his city.
He was just about to head down the stairs when a movement caught his eye, the motion of a silhouette next to the corner building across the street. Byrne stepped back, into the lengthening shadows of the hallway. He peered around the window casing and looked again.
The man was standing in the vacant lot next to the crime-scene house, looking up at him, dressed in dark clothing, hands in pockets. Byrne recognized the man’s posture, his bearing. He had seen it many times before.
For a few long moments the two men stood looking at each other, acknowledging each other’s role in this agonizing play, deferring, for the time being, to the cover of dusk.
Minutes later, purposely taking his time, Byrne walked down the stairs, stepped out of the building, and crossed the street.
Caitlin’s father, Robert O’Riordan, was gone.
THIRTEEN
THEY SAT IN the parking lot at the roundhouse, engine idling, windows up, AC maxed out to Burger King meat locker. The city was paying for the air conditioning, and they were going to use it.
Kevin Byrne glanced over at his partner. Jessica had her eyes closed, her head back on the seat. It had been a long day for both, but as tired as Byrne was, he felt it was probably worse for Jessica than for him. All Byrne had to do was drive home, drag himself up two flights of stairs, open a bottle of Yuengling, flop onto the couch, and order a pizza.
Jessica had to drive to the Northeast, pick up her daughter, make dinner for her family, put her daughter to bed, take a shower and then maybe, maybe, sleep would find her, just a few hours before she had to get up and start it all over again.
Byrne didn’t know how she did it. If she was a dental hygienist or paralegal it would be hard enough. Add the stresses and dangers of this job, and the demands had to be off the charts.
Byrne checked the dashboard clock. It was just after 9:00 PM. He had lost track of how long they had been sitting there in the parking lot, not saying a word. His partner finally broke the silence.
“I hate this part,” Jessica said.
“Me too.”
They were in the doldrums between clue and fact, between suspicion and reality, between idea and truth. Byrne was just about to further lament this fact aloud when his cell phone rang.
Jessica turned to look at him, opened one eye. If she had opened two it would have been overtime. It was that late in the day. “Don’t you ever turn that friggin’ thing off?”
“I thought I did.”
Byrne pulled out his phone, glanced at the caller ID, frowned, flipped it open. It was their boss. Jessica looked over again, both eyes open now. Byrne pointed a finger upward, at the windows of the Roundhouse, telling her all she needed to know. She closed her eyes again.
“Hey, Sarge,” Byrne said. “How are you?”
“Like Rosie O’Donnell in a cold bubble bath.”
“Okay,” Byrne said, not having the slightest idea what his boss meant. But he was fine with that. The visual image was enough to prevent any further inquiries. “What’s up?”
A rhetorical question. In this job, if you were on day work, your boss didn’t call you after nine o’clock unless it was bad news.
“We’ve got a body. Fairmount Park.”
“We’re up on the wheel?” Byrne asked. The “wheel” was the roster of detectives. Whenever you got a new case, you went to the bottom, and steadily moved up the list until it was your turn again. Clearing all your cases before you got a new one was every detective’s dream. It never happened in Philly.