Little did they know.
Twenty minutes later he dressed in a Zegna sport coat, Seven For All Mankind jeans, along with an inexpensive white shirt from J. Crew, locked the two deadbolts on his door, and left the building.
After stopping at the Barnes amp; Noble at Rittenhouse Square, and making his purchase, Shane entered the lobby bar at Le Meridien at just after nine. There was only one seat open at the bar. A Sixers game was on the plasma.
He saw her at her favorite banquette with her overweight work friend — older woman, mid-forties, wearing a navy blue, off-the-rack Chico’s pantsuit. Shane knew this woman to be Arlene. He had found a Christmas and birthday card from her in the trash.
Shane took up a position a few seats down from them. He slipped in a pair of earbuds, but did not start any music on his iPod. He needed to be able to hear. He opened his brand new copy of The Good Mother, began to read. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the woman look over, then look a second time a few seconds later, the way people do when they think they know someone, but they’re not sure in which world to place them. School, work, social, casual. Ever since Shane had become an on-air personality in Philly it had started. This worked in his favor, as well as against, in seemingly equal measure.
Tonight it was golden.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. As she said this, she reached over and touched his arm. He glanced at her wine glass. It was almost empty.
Perfect.
Shane looked up, made eye contact. He felt a shiver of excitement. He imagined that it was the same feeling that prosecutors get when they trap a witness in a lie, or that of a marlin fisherman when he feels that unmistakable pull on the line.
He took the earbuds out, smiled. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she said. Her full name was Danica Evelyn Dooley. Twenty-six, five-nine, 120 give or take. Mostly give lately. She’d been putting away a few bags of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies a week. She worked at Progressive Insurance, drove a Ford Focus, had two brothers named William and Thaddeus. She liked Versace Crystal Noir perfume. She was wearing it tonight. ‘I know you from somewhere.’
Shane smiled even more broadly. ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I’d certainly remember you.’
She blushed. ‘My name is Danica. This is my friend — ’
Arlene, Shane wanted to blurt out, just to keep things moving. He did not.
‘- Arlene,’ Danica said.
‘My name is Shane.’ He reached out, shook hands with both women, lingering a split second longer with Danica’s hand. The gesture was not lost on anyone. ‘Delighted to meet you both.’
Not entirely true.
Danica pointed at Shane’s book. ‘I can’t believe you’re reading that. I just finished it. It has to be one of my favorite books of all time.’
Shane put his earbuds away, committing to the conversation, then held up the new paperback. ‘Well, I’m on my third read,’ he said. ‘Had to buy a new copy. I lent mine out, never got it back.’ He had read all the amazon.com reviews of the book before leaving the house, of course, and with his nearly eidetic memory, remembered them word for word. If pressed, he could more than hold his own in a book discussion with Danica. ‘Every time I read it I find something new.’
The waiter approached the table. ‘What can I get you, sir?’
Shane looked at the wine list, even though he didn’t have to. He had this memorized, too. ‘I think I’ll have a glass of the Barolo.’
‘This is amazing,’ Danica said. ‘Barolo is my favorite.’
‘Anything else for the ladies?’ the waiter asked.
Danica and her friend made instant eye contact, the way friends do at a moment like this, and Arlene got the message. She looked at her watch.
‘Nothing for me, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get going.’
The waiter turned to Danica. She tapped the rim of her wine glass. ‘I’ll have the same.’
Perfect.
Danica and Arlene made their goodbyes. Shane politely shook the other woman’s hand. When she was gone, he took up position on the other side of the table, opposite Danica Dooley. She really was beautiful. A symmetrical face, soft features, a minimal amount of makeup and jewelry.
When the waiter left, they clinked glasses, sniffed, swirled, sipped. A few seconds later Shane found Danica staring at him, smiling. ‘Now I know who you are,’ she said. ‘You’re on the news.’
‘Yes.’
She fluffed her hair, smoothed a cheek. She seemed a little star-struck, or maybe it was the second glass of Barolo. Shane preferred star-struck.
Danica pointed to the wine and the copy of The Good Mother.
‘I can’t believe we have exactly the same tastes.’
You have no idea, Shane thought.
He left Danica’s apartment around 3 a.m. When he got home he showered again, prepared everything he needed for the morning, a day that was going to begin in just three hours.
Before crawling into bed, he opened the database, put the red X in the field next to Danica’s name, looked at the next few entries on the list. It was a list that had grown to seventy entries.
Shane fell asleep to the sound of the intermittent crackling of the police scanner he kept next to his bed. He had gone to sleep this way for many years. Although Shane might be loath to admit it to anyone outside the business, he could no longer sleep without it.
Soon he drifted off, the sound of swirling water filling his dreams, as it had every night since he was five years old, the sound of the baptismal waters engulfing him, filling his mind.
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart, came the phantasm of his mother’s voice.
On the good nights the sound of the waters lulled him to sleep.
On the bad nights he drowned.
ELEVEN
In the days following the discovery of Daniel Palumbo’s body in the basement of the North Philadelphia building that once housed St Adelaide’s, the Homicide Unit interviewed more than three dozen people who either knew Palumbo, or had been in the neighborhood at the time.
Ultimately, they learned nothing about Danny Palumbo’s movements the day he either voluntarily went, or was led, to the abandoned church where ten days later he would die.
The medical examiner performed an autopsy on the victim, and the official cause of death was ruled exsanguination, meaning Palumbo had bled to death. A toxicology report was also filed, and concluded that, in addition to small traces of heroin and Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, there was also trace of a drug called Pavulon.
Jessica had run into the drug Pavulon once before. It was a neuromuscular blocking agent, essentially a paralytic. It was used for general anesthesia during surgery as an aid to intubation or ventilation. In higher doses it would completely paralyze the muscles, though have no pain-numbing effect.
Jessica considered Danny Palumbo in that chair, unable to move, the barbed wire wrapped around his body and neck. When he finally could move, his head fell forward from fatigue, and the sharpened barb cut into his carotid.
As to the crime scene, there were enough partial prints in that building to keep the latent print division busy for months, and that was not going to happen. In a building that old, the number of people who had passed through the space, touching those surfaces most likely to retain full prints — doors and jambs, handrails, window panes — numbered in the hundreds. In time, dust and soot formed a layer on everything, reducing the viability of the surfaces to yield clean, identifiable prints.
A half-dozen partial exemplars had been run, yielding no hits. The only good prints belonged to the victim, fingerprints in blood on the back of the wooden chair in which he was bound.