‘May I ask how you came to this position at such a young age?’ she asked.
Raphael smiled. Jessica found it disarming.
‘I’m very fortunate to have a great memory for dates and figures, as well as an insatiable appetite for world history. I did my undergraduate studies in just over two years, and entered the seminary when I was twenty.’
‘Where did you do your undergraduate work?’
‘At Bethany College.’
‘Bethany is in West Virginia?’
‘Yes. I had a double major — communications and, of course, religious studies.’
‘Were you a deacon?’
Raphael smiled again. ‘It was waived in my case.’
Michael Raphael’s ascent was impressive. If ever there was an organization where traditions moved forward at a glacial pace, it was the Catholic Church. Most of the other men doing Michael Raphael’s job were in their forties or fifties.
They made their goodbyes.
As Jessica and Byrne got into the car, both detectives absorbing what they had learned, neither having any idea how the information would help their investigations, Jessica looked up, saw Father Michael Raphael standing in the window, watching them. For a moment, the reflections of clouds made him appear diaphanous.
A consecration is a blessing, Jessica thought.
The opposite would be a curse.
TWENTY
Jessica pulled up in front Byrne’s apartment building. It was only 6 p.m., but it was already dark.
‘You hungry?’ Byrne asked.
‘I’m okay. Vince is cooking for the kids. I’ll eat later.’
‘Coffee?’
Jessica glanced at her watch. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get a lot of sleep tonight anyway.’
‘Drop me by my car,’ Byrne said. ‘I have a few boxes I want to bring up.’
Jessica took the steps to the second floor, walked down the hallway to the last apartment. Byrne’s door was ajar. She pushed it open, entered, closed the door behind her.
Byrne was in the small kitchen, making coffee. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had the last time Jessica had been there, maybe five months earlier, right down to the same magazines in the same places.
‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ she said.
‘It’s a process.’
Byrne walked into the living room with two mugs of coffee. He handed one to Jessica. She blew on it, sipped. It was good. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, gesturing at the small dining room, which had boxes stacked floor to ceiling.
‘I moved all my crap out of storage,’ Byrne said. ‘I was paying two hundred a month to keep a bunch a junk I don’t need anymore. I donated most of it. This is the stuff I couldn’t part with. I’ve got five more boxes in my car.’
On top of one of the boxes on the dining-room table was a framed eight by ten photograph, a picture of a younger Kevin Byrne standing next to a heavyset black man. They were in front of Downey’s on Front Street. Jessica picked it up.
‘Did you know Marcus Haines?’ Byrne asked.
Jessica had heard the name, but never met the man. She knew that his picture was on the wall in the lobby of the Roundhouse, the wall dedicated to fallen officers. ‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘Never had the honor.’
Byrne took the picture from her. ‘Marcus was a piece of work, Jess. A true character. Great cop, lousy at everything else. Married three times, three alimonies, always looking for an angle to make a buck. At the end of the month he was always in the hole.’
‘He was in homicide?’
‘Yeah. When my old partner Jimmy had his first heart attack, he was out for six months. I partnered with Marcus for a while. We worked a few cases, closed a few cases, knocked back a few cases of Jameson.’
‘Why do I feel a story coming on?’
Byrne smiled, sipped his coffee. ‘If you insist.’ He leaned against the wall. ‘So, one August night we get this call, a domestic gone bad. DOA was the boyfriend, and it looked like the girlfriend was good for it.
‘We get there, and the job is laid out by the numbers. It’s like there was a tag on everything. Body, killer, weapon. Everything but motive, but that wasn’t a mystery. The woman is sitting on the couch, the boyfriend is on the floor, brains on the wall. The responding officers said the gun was on the floor at the woman’s feet. Open and shut, right?’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘I take it all in, and I look a little more closely at the woman on the couch, and she is stunningly beautiful. Coffee-colored skin, amber eyes. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five. But all of that was beneath a layer of crack. It was clear she was on the pipe, and she looked all beat to shit.’
Byrne propped the photograph on the windowsill.
‘Marcus walks in, and all of a sudden it’s like he’s seen a ghost. Mumbling, walking in circles, clicking his pen. He takes me into the kitchen, lowers his voice, says, ‘Kevin. I know her, man. I know her.’ He goes on to tell me that he’s been seeing this girl, that he met her on a job a year earlier when the girl’s mother was shot in West Philly, and he walked her through it all, held her hand at the trial, and one thing led to another. He asks me what I can do for her, seeing as how I caught the case.’
Jessica considered the options. There were only a few, none of them good. ‘What could you do?’
‘Yeah, well, I had no idea. I walked back into the room, looked at her on the couch, and immediately saw the next two decades of her life, how she would look after twenty years in Muncy.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I interviewed her. She said that her boyfriend would usually come home drunk, beat on her, night after night. Went on for almost a year. She showed me her left arm where he broke it. Never healed right. She said she told him a week earlier, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever did it again she was going to get a gun and kill him. She said he laughed at her, said when he came home that night, he started to push her around, and she just pulled a.38, drew down and popped him. Single shot, center mass. One dead asshole to go.’
‘But she wasn’t assaulted that night.’
‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘There wasn’t a mark on her. She could have walked away, but she didn’t. And you know how a jury was going to see it.
‘So I look out the window, and I see CSU and the ME’s office show up. I tell Marcus to go down there and stall them. I also told him to call paramedics. When he leaves I go back over to where the girl is sitting, and I ask her to tell me what happened one more time. Very carefully.’
Jessica knew what Byrne meant. Sometimes the good people, the citizens, needed a little help remembering.
‘Right at that moment she completely shuts down, so I told her how it went down. I told her that her boyfriend came home, roaring drunk. He started pushing her around. She told him to stop. He hit her in the face, and that’s when she picked up the gun. Then he picked up a baseball bat, came at her again, and that’s when she fired.’
‘What did she say?’
‘At first she didn’t say anything. I think she was still a bit in shock. I told her that she had to decide if that’s what really happened, because any second there were going to be a dozen people in her apartment and then there would be no going back.’ Byrne picked up the photograph again. ‘After what seemed like a full minute, she looked up at me and said, “Ain’t got no bat.”
‘When I told her I would take care of that, she looked straight at me, and it all fell into place. She glanced at the body on the floor, then back at me. I knew what she meant. I crossed the room, crouched down. The dead man was wearing a ring on his right hand. I got down, pulled off the ring, put it on the same finger on my hand, walked back to where she stood. She nodded, then closed her eyes.’