After thirty minutes of silence, the solitude of the old stone church became oppressive.
‘Talk me out of thinking this is a homicide,’ Jessica finally said.
‘I wish I could, Jess.’
‘Tell me a story about how some mother was giving her little baby girl a bath, something terrible happened to the mother, and the baby just accidentally drowned in that tub.’
Byrne said nothing.
‘Tell me it was just an accident, and the mother — let’s assume she’s some religious nut job, just for the sake of argument — took the baby, her beloved baby, down to this church and tried to baptize the child, and something went terribly wrong.’
Jessica walked the aisle, up the three steps to where the altar once was, back down, over to the steps leading to the basement.
‘I need to think this was not a deliberate act, Kevin. I need to think this is not part of some plan, and that we’re never going to see this again. Ever.’
Byrne didn’t say anything. Jessica hadn’t really expected him to.
In front of the church, on the lamppost, they found another X.
Eventually they went off duty that day, Byrne to his life, Jessica to hers. Jessica hugged her children a dozen times that night, sat up all night in the hallway between their two rooms, checking on them every ten minutes, finally falling asleep a half-hour before the alarm clock rang.
Two days later the hot rage that had burned inside became something else, a feeling she’d had only a few times as a police officer. She had taken every case she’d ever been assigned as a homicide detective seriously, and had the utmost respect for the dead, even if the victim was a despicable person. Every detective Jessica knew felt the same way. But there were cases that put you to bed, woke you up, ate with you, and walked with you. There were cases that took showers with you, went shopping with you, and sat with you in a movie theater. You never escaped their scrutiny, until they were closed.
This was one of those cases.
She knew that there was a process — not to mention a backlog — that was in place when it came to forensics. Blood typing, fingerprint identification, hair and fiber, DNA testing. These things took time.
Jessica knew all this and it still didn’t stop her from calling the lab every hour on the hour. She had not slept twenty minutes straight since leaving that church.
Those tiny fingers and toes. Every time the image crossed her mind she felt the anger and fury begin to surge.
It was far from the first dead body she had ever seen, of course. It was far from the first dead infant she had ever seen. You work homicide in a place like Philadelphia and there is no confirmation of man’s inhumanity that shocks or surprises.
It was the way they had found the baby. The flawless preservation in that frozen block of ice. It was as if the baby would remain a child eternally, forever stalled mid-breath, eyes open. Perfect, crystal blue eyes.
The media had gotten hold of the case and was running a headline constantly:
WHO IS BABY GIRL DOE?
Both the broadcast and print outlets were running a silhouette of a Gerber baby style cut-out with the standard question mark over the face.
Preliminary forensics had come in from the two crime scenes. The evidence on the lampposts in front of the two churches was not blood. It was, instead, a composite of substances including a starchy compound, soil, and tannin.
Beneath the body, frozen into the ice, was another copy of My Missal, identical to the book found at St Adelaide’s. The book was currently being processed, although the possibility of collecting forensic evidence from something that long in water was slight.
The ME’s office had told them that it would be three or four days before an autopsy could be performed on the infant, or physical evidence could be gathered from the small body. When Jessica protested, she was told that any attempt to warm the body by other means would simply destroy the evidence. The infant’s body was currently in a chilled room at the medical examiner’s office on University Avenue.
Jessica thought about Daniel Palumbo’s dying words.
He lives.
Who lives?
So far, no one had come forth to claim the baby, despite the story being splashed all over the newspapers and television. For Jessica, this was as horrifying as anything connected to the case.
Was it possible that there was a mother somewhere in the city of Philadelphia who didn’t know that her infant child was missing?
Soon the lab results would start to roll in, and they could begin to piece this all together. So Jessica watched the phone. And waited.
Byrne had the afternoon off, and by one o’clock Jessica was crawling out of her skin. She had to hit the streets and make something happen.
She went through the pamphlets and papers they had found in Danny Palumbo’s backpack, courtesy of Thomas Boyce. A few of the papers were torn from legal pads. One had a series of times of the day, along with what might have been street addresses.
She input some of the addresses onto major thoroughfares, came up with nothing. None were long enough to be phone numbers.
Were these meal times at shelters?
She got a list of shelters, and none of the addresses matched. Then it hit her. AA or NA meetings. She looked up Philadelphia AA chapters, and the locations and times matched perfectly. They could start attending these meetings, but the whole point of AA was anonymity, and even in the course of a homicide investigation, it was unlikely they would find anyone who would go on the record about one of their attendees. If, indeed, Danny had even attended these meetings. They’d do this if they had to, but it probably would be a waste of time.
On the back of that page was a series of numbers, seven lines deep. This made even less sense. Jessica filed the paper away, chalking it up to a man with a disturbed mind, sadly at the end of his life.
Jessica turned her attention to the as yet unidentified baby. She could not imagine a mother not coming forward. It either meant the woman could not do so, or was unaware that the baby was gone. But that would mean the baby was left in the care of someone else who didn’t know or care that it was missing.
Jessica moved forward with the premise that the baby’s mother was poor and/or on drugs. If that were the case, the woman probably wouldn’t have a personal physician. It meant she would have sought out prenatal and postnatal care either at emergency rooms, or free clinics.
Jessica decided to start with free clinics. There weren’t that many in Philadelphia. She would begin in North Philadelphia, then West Philadelphia. Hopefully, Byrne would be back to help her with South Philly. She printed off a list, and got on the road. Anything was better than staring at a phone.
By mid-afternoon she had visited four community clinics, spoken to a half-dozen doctors and administrators, all of whom were aware of the Baby Doe story. None of them had treated a white female infant, aged two months, in or around the timeline that surrounded the murder. More than ninety percent of the children at these North Philadelphia clinics were Hispanic or African-American.
The last North Philly free clinic was the St Julius Clinic on Lehigh near Twelfth, run by the parish. By the time Jessica walked in she was bone weary, hungry, and starting to feel that all of this was a very long shot. But it was a shot she had to take.
The St Julius Free Clinic was a three-story converted rowhouse. On one side was a second hand store, on the other was a funeral home. Jessica stepped inside. The waiting room was small and cramped, with warped vinyl tiles on the floor, posters of Philadelphia landmarks on the wall. Two young Hispanic women, very pregnant, sat next to each other. Jessica pegged them at no more than seventeen. Across from them sat a young black kid holding a blood-soaked kitchen towel to his forehead.