Jessica overheard bits of their conversation.
‘Every inch, Terry. Every fucking inch,’ Byrne said, sotto voce. ‘I’ll pay for the overtime myself.’
‘You got it.’
‘There is something in this building that is going to lead us to the next scene, and I want to find it before he gets to the next church.’
And the next body, Jessica thought.
She took out her iPhone, opened a browser. On a hunch she did a search for names of people in the Bible. Before long she was rewarded. Of all the women in the Bible, there was one named Mara, and one man named Reuben. She called Byrne and Bontrager over. ‘Look.’
The two men looked at the screen.
‘In Hebrew, Mara translates as sad, and Reuben means vision of the son,’ Jessica said. She put her phone away. ‘I think I’m going to get together with a sketch artist today.’
‘Good idea,’ Bontrager said.
Twenty minutes later, as the investigators began the process of collating the details of a new homicide, Jessica looked out the window of the chapel, saw Byrne talking to a paramedic, a woman in a blue windbreaker. Jessica soon recognized her as one of the paramedics who treated Danny Palumbo.
Jessica observed the woman’s body language and noticed that there were private signals happening between her and Byrne. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, which would have helped, but it looked like there was something between the two of them that transcended the job.
Something intimate.
FORTY
Shane watched the police activity from the coffee shop across the street. There were a half-dozen sector cars ringing the old church, a gathering of rubberneckers. Shane hadn’t gotten the details over police radio — you rarely did, you were lucky to get the nature of the complaint and an address — but he knew this had to be the discovery of another body. You didn’t call out the cavalry over some kid breaking and entering for a place to hit the pipe.
But more important than the sector cars was the Ford Taurus that had arrived, and was now parked fewer than fifty feet away from where Shane stood. A PPD detective car parked outside the crime scene tape. A car that had brought detectives Byrne and Balzano.
Their presence here told him pretty much all he needed to know.
Cyn was on assignment up in Cheltenham, some kind of water main break. That was okay. This one Shane wanted all to himself. He had become so prolific at one-man-banding a story that he would defy any field reporter, anywhere in the world, to tell the difference with an on-air piece. He could even edit on the fly on his MacBook Pro if he needed to.
This was the kind of investigative piece that would land him in Anderson Cooper’s chair.
As a pair of CSU vans arrived at the scene, and the patrol officers in the street made the gathering crowd part for them, Shane saw his opportunity. He put up the collar on his coat, exited the coffee shop.
When he got near the car he dropped his shoulder bag — ostensibly by accident, if anyone was watching — and put the small magnetic tracking device inside the right rear fender. He stood up, dusted off his pants, glanced around. No one had seen him.
Perfect.
The car was, of course, a departmental car, and didn’t belong to either Jessica Balzano or Kevin Byrne, but Shane knew that detectives tended to sign out the same cars over and over again. This allowed them to keep some of their personal gear in the trunks. The tracking unit was a little pricey, and Shane had already lost one, but the monthly fee for tracking via GPS was only $19.95. As long as his laptop could get a satellite signal, he could track the device anywhere in the world.
Shane had gotten shut out of the story featuring Byrne doing his Hulk act on that punk dealer, and it wasn’t going to happen again. True, he’d gotten the exclusive with the kid’s cell-phone footage, but he could have had crystal clear video if he’d been a little better at his surveillance technique.
He now had his DV camera with him, battery charged, with a second fully charged backup battery in the trunk.
When this story broke big — and he had the feeling that was going to happen very soon — he would be there.
FORTY-ONE
From the vestibule at St Ignatius’s Jessica and Byrne watched the crime-scene officers establish a search grid. A half-dozen technicians would spend the rest of the day and night collecting any and all potential evidence — hair, fiber, fingerprints, fluids. It was an exasperatingly slow and exacting process.
Byrne walked over to where Jessica stood.
‘If they don’t come up with something I’m going to rip this place apart with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’
Before Jessica could respond her phone rang. She answered. It was Dana Westbrook.
‘What’s up, Sarge?’
‘Well, first things first,’ Westbrook said. ‘We ran the name Mara Reuben and came up empty.’
This was no surprise.
‘Where are you on the canvass?’ Westbrook continued.
‘We’re just going to start,’ Jessica said. ‘CSU is here, and I just wrapped up with the sketch artist.’
A sketch of the woman Jessica had talked to across from St Adelaide’s, the woman who called herself ‘Mara Reuben,’ would soon be circulated. Jessica had given a highly detailed description of the woman, but was now all but certain her beautiful silver hair was a wig.
‘I’m going to send some other detectives down there for the neighborhood interviews,’ Westbrook said.
‘Why?’ Jessica asked. ‘What’s going on?’
‘We’ve got DNA results back.’
‘Are you saying we have a hit?’
‘We do.’
By the time they arrived at the Roundhouse a half-dozen task-force detectives had assembled in the duty room. There was more than a little electricity in the room.
Dana Westbrook spoke first.
‘Folks, we have a serious break. We have DNA results from the first three scenes,’ she said. ‘As you know, there were hair samples found on all three sites, follicles stuck between the pages of missals. According to the lab, there was enough mitochondrial DNA present to make a match.’
Although Jessica was far from an expert on forensic hair analysis, it had come up often enough for her to have a basic understanding of what the lab could and could not do with a hair sample. If samples were matched with DNA analysis, it was better than a fingerprint.
‘All three were between pages?’ Byrne asked.
‘Yes,’ Westbrook said. ‘In Revelation. Dead solid on all three. We ran them through CODIS and every bell, whistle, and alarm went off.’
The Combined DNA Index System was a database maintained by the FBI that matched profiles of unknown perpetrators against a state’s database of convicted offenders.
‘So we have a suspect?’ Byrne asked.
Westbrook nodded. But there did not seem to be any glee in her face, or the expected — and well-earned — smug satisfaction all cops get from the gotcha phase of a homicide investigation.
‘I’m not seeing happiness here, Sarge,’ Maria Caruso said. ‘Why are we not happy?’
Westbrook handed the report to Byrne. Jessica, Josh Bontrager, and Maria Caruso crowded around.
The DNA sample found on three separate crime scenes — three separate homicide scenes — belonged to a man named Roland Hannah, a self-styled evangelist preacher who had once terrorized the city with his vigilante murders. Both Jessica and Byrne had worked a collateral case, which took investigators up the Schuylkill River.
But that wasn’t the amazing part.