Faith smiled, put a hand on his leg. ‘Yes, I will.’
‘Oh, yeah? What makes you so sure?’
She leaned in, kissed him gently on the lips. ‘I’ve had much tougher cases.’
‘Have you now?’
Their eyes met, and it all came down to that second. You are connecting, or you’re not.
They did.
Byrne stood, dropped a pair of twenties on the bar. Margaret, at the other end, knocked the bar twice, smiled.
As Byrne and Faith walked down Green Street, toward their cars, Byrne couldn’t shake the feeling they were being observed. He was sure of it, but he had no idea why.
‘I like your place,’ she said.
‘I’m glad you’re not wearing your glasses.’
She looked beautiful in the soft candlelight. The first time they’d made love it had been manic — clothes everywhere, barely making it to the bed. The second time was slower, sweeter, as if they’d known each other for years.
Byrne pointed at the candle. ‘You always bring your own candles with you?’
She had reached into her bag when they arrived, taken out a large, scented pillar candle, put it on the nightstand, lighted it.
‘I’m getting into aromatherapy. This is clary sage and nectarine. Do you like it?’
‘I do.’
She turned in his bed, pulled the sheet around her, rested her head on his chest. Byrne tried to remember the last time he’d been in this position. It had been a while.
‘You know, our jobs are not all that different in a lot of ways,’ she said. ‘What I mean is, we see a lot. Does it ever get to you?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘I mean, do you ever want to just walk away from it. Say enough is enough?’
Byrne didn’t know any detective with twenty-five years in who didn’t think about retiring, sometimes on a daily basis. ‘I’ve been doing this job a long time,’ he said. ‘Longer than most. At least in homicide. I’ve learned to move on.’
‘Always?’
There was no point in lying, in trying to be the macho cop. ‘Not always. In all this time there have been a few cases that have stuck with me. So, yeah. Sometimes it gets to me.’
‘Open cases?’
‘Open cases,’ Byrne said. ‘Every so often I pull out the activity sheets, make a few notes. I read over the evidence, check the witness statements, hoping that I’ll see something that I never saw before.’ Byrne wanted to tell her more, much more, about how he sometimes picked up a piece of evidence and got a feeling about the killer. But they’d just met. He didn’t need to scare her off.
‘Do you think it’s real?’ she asked.
‘Do I think what is real?’
‘Evil.’
‘That’s a tough one. If you’re asking whether or not I think a person can be born bad, the answer is yes. I didn’t always, but I do now.’
They fell silent. Byrne drifted in and out of sleep. He’d gotten about four hours a night for the past week. Add the Bushmills, and it was no wonder he was fatigued. He felt himself floating, floating. He opened his eyes, looked at the clock. It wasn’t yet eleven. Somehow he thought it was morning. He felt the bed next to him, but Faith wasn’t there.
He looked up and saw her standing at the foot of his bed. She wore a red coat. Next to her stood a tall young man in a pointed hood. Byrne knew it was the same man who had been watching them in Finnigan’s Wake, the same man they had seen in the surveillance video across from St Adelaide’s. Byrne tried to get out of bed, but his hands and feet were tied to the bed posts.
‘You were right, detective,’ she said.
‘Right?’
‘Evil is flesh.’
Byrne woke in a sweat. He turned, sat up, his heart pounding in his chest. Faith was gone. On the pillow was a note. He flipped on the light, read it. In the note she said she was on midnight to eight. She left her phone number.
Byrne slipped on a pair of jeans, walked to the kitchen, shaking off the nightmare, still in the grip of broken sleep. He flipped on the TV, poured himself a short one. Then poured the rest of a tall one. He checked the TV screen.
It was a recap of the day’s news. He found the lead story very interesting. The caption pretty much said it all.
VIDEO OF PHILLY COP GOES VIRAL
It was a grainy hand-held video, the kind you saw showing up more and more often these days, a video of him bracing DeRon Wilson.
‘This is Shane Adams reporting.’
Byrne turned off the TV, walked over to the fridge, opened it. The feeling of dread that had been building inside him since the moment he had walked into St Adelaide’s was growing by the minute. He opened a beer, swallowed most of it.
He looked out the window, at the glow of Center City and beyond. He then sat at his small dinette table, turned on his phone. He looked at the screen. There were thirty-nine messages. He turned it off, walked back to the bedroom, smoothed the sheets and blanket, wondering if he’d get back to sleep this night. He doubted it. The room still smelled of sex, of Faith Christian, of sage and nectarine. He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the candle, blew it out.
I will come to thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick.
The words were almost shouted in his head.
*
There were no sector cars deployed at St Damian’s any longer; the yellow tape had been removed. It was no longer an active crime scene. The window pane that had been broken to gain entry had been covered over by plywood.
Byrne had anticipated this. He brought with him a large iron crow bar. The plywood square came off with ease, and within seconds he was inside.
Like St Adelaide’s, the interior was covered in black fingerprint dust which, at this hour, served to make the space even darker, seemed to absorb the beam of Byrne’s flashlight.
I will come to thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick.
He moved to a section to the right of where the altar once stood. It was an area devoted to the lighting of memorial votive candles. Although the three-tiered table was still there, the glass candleholders were boxed up beneath. Byrne pulled the boxes out. Most of the candleholders were broken. Byrne could see that a number of the glasses were imprinted with a cross. Some of the larger shards of glass had been dusted for prints, but not bagged.
Byrne snapped on a glove, aligned the glass holders on the old oaken table. They were identical. Some still had paraffin clinging to the sides. Even with the flashlight and naked eye, Byrne could see dozens of fingerprints. A glass surface — a glass surface coated with wax residue — was just about the perfect surface to leave a textbook exemplar of a fingerprint.
Byrne looked at the three dozen glasses, examined them, then saw something he had not noticed before. One of the glasses was a deep amber color, not red. He picked up the amber glass. The cross on the front was slightly different as well.
He turned it over. There, on the bottom, was a small metal plate that read:
Property of St Regina
It sounded as if he had awakened her. Entirely likely, seeing as it was 1.30 in the morning.
‘Jess. Have you ever heard of St Regina’s?’
‘St Regina’s?’
‘Yeah. The church.’
Byrne heard a liquid rustling of sheets, the flick of a lamp. ‘I hope you don’t think I have every church in Philly memorized,’ Jessica said. ‘Hang on.’
It seemed like minutes before she picked up the phone again.
‘I found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in Rhawnhurst.’
‘Get it onto radio,’ Byrne said. ‘I want everybody and his mother down there now.’
Byrne didn’t wait for a reply.
TWENTY-SIX
St Regina’s was a small neighborhood church in the Rhawnhurst section of the city, a mostly residential area in the northeast. The area was bordered by Pennypack Creek to the north, and Roosevelt Boulevard to the east.
The church, a freestanding structure set back from the street, had a central tower with a domed cupola, topped by a gilded cross. The chain that ran between two posts, blocking entrance to the parking lot at the church’s north side, had been cut to allow the investigators in. On the way up to the scene Jessica learned St Regina’s had only been closed for two years.