The killer stood up, too, shaking his head from the concussion of hitting the stone, but with enough presence of mind to see Jon’s gun lying in the snow about ten feet to his left. He looked back at Jon and the knife, quickly contemplating, and Jon muttered, “No, no” through lips that were even more numb now with the loss of blood from below his chin. But Roonan chose his fate and dove for the gun, barely reaching it before Jon’s own dive toward him resulted in a knife thrust into the big man’s throat. This was the only way to be sure that Roonan couldn’t use the gun on him, and though he didn’t take pleasure in the near decapitation, Jon did think it was well deserved.
He pushed himself away from the spreading pool of blood around the killer’s body, noticing the various other spots of dark red staining the off-white of the snow and cement, and leaned his ever-more-dampening back against the nearest gravestone. He felt a mixture of satisfaction at his success in the investigation, and dread that he probably wouldn’t live to celebrate it.
Unable to move anymore, with no cell phone or radio, and the cemetery not opening for hours yet, his only hope of survival would be if the victim back in the crypt woke up in time to go for help, and if the Philly police happened to come to the scene and follow the blood trail before he died. But he couldn’t even remember if he had untied the woman’s legs well enough for her to get free, and he didn’t think he had. Someone would eventually find her and she would probably survive the ordeal, but it was very unlikely that he would.
Still, this is a good way to go, was his last conscious thought.
2
When he eventually woke up in the nearby Temple University Hospital, Jon had a stretch of time alone before anyone visited him. He had no family anymore, very few people that he would call friends and no real ones. He had dated a girl a year earlier, but that didn’t end well, and since then he’d been too married to his job to make another relationship work. As his dying thoughts in the cemetery had implied, stopping crime was all that really mattered to him. He suspected that would probably change someday, but he wasn’t in a hurry. So during the early hours of his recovery, he mostly worried about losing his job, and subsequently his life dream, although he also spent some time staring at and taking some comfort from the hospital’s official motto, posted on the wall near his bed: Perseverantia Vincit, which was Latin for “Perseverance Conquers.”
All he’d ever wanted to be when growing up was a private detective like in Raymond Chandler’s books. He had been raised in a rural area by strict parents who would only let him read old books and watch old movies, because “they were made back when things were cleaner, before they started putting all that trash in.” His parents seemed to miss the fact that, back in the 1940s, Chandler was actually quite risqué himself, for the time. But he didn’t tell them that because he loved books like The Big Sleep and the old black-and-white movie made from it, and ate them up over and over again. He was especially drawn to Chandler because the fictional protagonist Philip Marlowe shared a name with him, and in the fertile mind of an only child he imagined himself as “Philip” and dreamed of being a private eye someday.
So after his parents basically disowned him as a teenager, he worked various jobs to pay for college classes and killed himself to get the best grades possible. Then he entered the local police academy upon graduation, because he knew by then that he probably couldn’t make a living as a private detective unless he first had successful experience in law enforcement. Then he killed himself again to succeed once he was on the force, setting the tone for his current obsessive lifestyle, because it was really the only one he’d ever known. But it did manage to make him a detective by the ripe young age of twenty-five, a significant accomplishment even for a small-town cop.
Jon’s first and only visitor in the hospital was the most important person he’d ever met in his life.
“My name is Anton Versa,” the casually dressed older man said, without extending a hand to Jon. “I’m the Police Commissioner of Philadelphia.”
“I know who you are, sir,” Jon responded, sitting up higher in his bed. “I follow the force here because I’d like to be on it someday.” He thought that big city experience might fast-track his real goal of becoming a successful PI.
“Well, that’s definitely not gonna happen, with the problems you’ve caused us here by muscling in the way you did.”
Jon tensed, but felt himself relax when the gray-haired man looked around for a chair and pulled one up near the bed.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Versa said softly. “You did this city a great service by ending that sick bastard’s reign of terror. But we can’t give you all the credit in the press, or even most of it, because our own people put in a lot of work on this.”
He paused and stared at Jon.
“I… uh,” Jon said after an awkward silence, “I understand, sir.”
The Commissioner shifted in the chair, then said, “You’ve put your own Chief in a tight spot, too, out there in Epherter, or whatever it’s called, because you weren’t supposed to be here.”
“Ephrata,” Jon said, nodding.
“But he told me you were very good out there… and you really outdid yourself by catching this guy.”
“Just doing my job, sir. Hopefully better than the criminals do theirs.”
“This psycho had a good thing going,” Versa continued. “And he could have kept going for a long time with that cemetery setup…. We found the other five bodies in crypts nearby.”
“Just wish I could’ve stopped him earlier,” Jon said.
“Maybe if someone had listened to you,” Versa responded, in what would be as close to an apology as Jon ever expected to get from a higher ranking officer. So he let it ride, and there were a few more moments of silence. Then Versa cleared his throat and continued.
“You know how sports stars—when they do really good, but maybe they have some problems…?” He paused and cleared his throat again. “They get traded, you know. Sometimes. When they’re really good, and they have problems.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, you’ve done really good. Damn good. But you have some problems.”
“Okay… so?” Jon asked, shifting his bandaged body in the bed.
“Rialle King is an old friend of mine…. She’s the Mayor of Manhattan, you know.”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“Well, she’s an old friend and I owe her a few favors. And she recently reached out to other cities for a detective. Someone like you.”
“What?” Jon started, and then instinctively put his hand up to the bandage below his chin as pain shot through the wound there. “You want me to go there? That place is a hellhole, isn’t it? Dark all the time…”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. Still the party capital of the world, they say.”
“Yeah, they all party a lot because they’re so miserable. Isn’t cancer through the roof up there, and mental problems? Didn’t they make it legal to sell antidepressants in all the stores there?”
“Yeah,” Versa said. “But the sun’s coming back.”
“And then it’s gonna get even worse, from what I hear,” Jon said. “It could become one of the most dangerous places in the world.”
“That’s why Mayor King needs help,” Versa said. “To keep it from goin’ there. Did you know that she’s the first female mayor in New York history? And she’s related to Martin Luther King.”