LONGSTREETS ROT IN HELL
Ida-Rae Munson had not been kidding. The Longstreets were not the most popular family in these parts.
But he had known that. It didn’t take an Ida-Rae, or a county zoning archive, or even God to tell him that. He knew it as soon as they turned onto the property. He felt it.
The father had the devil in him and the boy came out evil.
In his mind Byrne saw the end. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in more than two decades invited the darkness in.
Inside the darkness were two graves.
And although he could not see names on the headstones, he could see the date of death. It was less than a week away.
THIRTY-FOUR
Shane Adams couldn’t get onto the grounds at the Roundhouse unobserved, but here it was different. Here, behind the apartment building in which Kevin Byrne lived, he was shielded from the street. Unfortunately, the Dumpster in the alley behind the building was full, and looked to contain trash from six different rowhouses, and one low-rise four-suiter. He’d never be able to pick through it, find what belonged to Byrne, and spirit it away. Not in broad daylight.
He left the alley, rounded the corner onto Third Street. The street was lined with parked cars. He found the one he was looking for, stepped into an alcove, checked his notes. It was Kevin Byrne’s personal car. Shane looked up and down the street. If he approached the car, he could be seen by any one of a dozen vantage points. He took out one of his cell phones — specifically an old flip phone he’d had for years, one that was no longer connected to any service, and therefore was never in any danger of ringing at an inopportune time — and put it to his ear. He sauntered up the street, talking aloud into the phone, meandering in that aimless way people do when they’re on the phone in a public place.
He leaned against the wall across the sidewalk from Byrne’s car. He could see a few things on the dashboard. Nothing of much interest. He leaned forward, saw two large boxes in the back seat; one with a top, one without. The open box seemed to be full of papers.
Shane pretended to be on his cell phone as he leaned against the car, and covertly took as many pictures as he could of the back seat and front seat.
He then raced back to his own car, checked all the mirrors. The big cop was nowhere to be seen. Shane scrolled through the photos. Crap, except for the news clippings on top of the papers in the open box. One of the headlines read:
WHO IS THE BOY IN THE RED COAT?
By the time he got back to the station Shane found that he couldn’t get the headline out of his mind. He sat down at a computer terminal, looked up the story.
There was a ton of information. Not nearly as much as there was for Philadelphia’s most famous mystery — The Boy in the Box, a four- or five-year-old victim found in a box in the Fox Chase section of the city in 1957, still unsolved — but there was at least three months of data.
The Boy in the Red Coat case was not ruled a homicide, so the investigation went to divisional detectives at the time, who interviewed people in the neighborhood, trying to determine the boy’s identity. They spoke to hundreds of people in the neighborhood, as well as everyone in the church’s parish. The boy’s picture went out nationally and internationally, but no one came forward.
So why were the papers in the back seat of Detective Byrne’s car? Was he reopening a twenty-year-old case? Did it have something to do with the spate of murders happening in churches now?
Maybe there was something in his trash after all.
Maybe Shane would go back tonight.
THIRTY-FIVE
In the dream she can’t move. She can see, but she cannot move her arms and legs. She is in a big, drafty room. From somewhere in the distance she can hear chanting. Latin chanting. She looks up to see a tall figure standing in shadows. In his hand is a ring of barb wire. In the other is a handful of white stones. She suddenly realizes she is sitting on the rim of an old aluminum tub filled with ice. She manages to fall over, onto her side. When she looks into the tub, there is a newborn baby frozen inside.
But it isn’t Cecilia Rollins.
It is Sophie.
Jessica woke up drenched in sweat, disoriented, her heart pounding. She turned, found Vincent dead to the world, as usual. It was a good thing Philadelphia didn’t get too many hurricanes. Vincent Balzano would sleep through them and wake up on a beach in South Carolina.
Jessica had managed to stay awake on the ride back from West Virginia, mostly because Byrne chose that time to tell her about his run-in with DeRon Wilson. Byrne’s temper was formidable, but in the time she had known him he had only managed to lose it completely a handful of times. He told her that the brass were mandating that he see a psychiatrist for an assessment before meeting with the captain about whether or not there would be any problems arising from the incident.
By the time they returned to the Roundhouse Jessica found that she was completely exhausted. She found herself home, fed, bathed, and in bed by 10 p.m.
Now she was wide awake.
She got up, checked on Sophie and Carlos. Both were out like broken lamps.
Jessica opened the closet door. Staring back was a jumble of boxes and baskets, plastic storage containers, things she had promised herself she would go through one of these days, weeding out the junk. The problem was that she was a sentimental fool. When they moved back to South Philly a year ago she had thrown out ten or so Hefty bags full of things she had collected over the years, including two full legal-sized boxes of Christmas and greeting cards. She had kept one small carton of cards, an old gift box from Strawbridge’s.
Jessica walked into the kitchen and sat down. She opened the white box. Inside was her first communion rosary, a white rosary in a small leather pouch. There were also a few dozen prayer cards, mostly from St Paul’s.
The two cards in the box that meant the most to her were for her mother and brother. There had been ten years or so between their deaths, but the wounds were still fresh, still open. She stared at the cards for a while, remembering the two services. She was five when her mother was buried. The church was filled with family and friends. Half the PPD showed up, it seemed.
Her brother’s service was different. He had been killed in Kuwait in 1991, and there were members of every branch of the military at St Paul’s that day, everyone in the neighborhood who had ever served their country showed up — men, women, young, old, from WWI through Desert Storm. Some of the old boys wore their uniforms.
Jessica held onto the two cards, made herself a cup of chamomile, took it into the living room. She curled up on the one big comfy chair they had, pulled a throw over her legs. Sometimes it was good to hurt, she thought. When you stop hurting, you start to forget. And she never wanted that.
THIRTY-SIX
Michelle Calvin tried to remember the last time she had been in a church. Was it her sister’s wedding? No, she had been in a church since then, hadn’t she? But when? She couldn’t recall.
As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia she had been dragged to mass every Sunday, forced to sit in that sweltering, airless church on Margery Street. When she finally ran away at seventeen, never to return, Sunday became a day to do nothing but recover from Saturday night.
And there had been some serious Saturday nights.
She remembered. The last time she’d set foot in a church had been four years earlier, at her grandmother’s funeral. It was held at St Gregory’s, and the turnout was sparse to say the least. Her grandmother didn’t have many friends. Grandma Rita had been what people in her day called a loose woman — three husbands, more boyfriends than she could keep track of, a taste for Jack Daniel’s and a somewhat less than puritanical view when it came to backseat sex.