Gonsalves leaned in, wiped the blood from the man’s face, put his ear to the man’s mouth. The victim mumbled something. Gonsalves leaned back. While Christian readied fresh gauze pads, Gonsalves began to pump the man’s chest.
‘Come on, man,’ he said. ‘Don’t you fucking code on me.’
Gonsalves hooked the victim to the EKG machine, stared at the reading. They were losing him. They had to get him to the nearest trauma center.
‘Breathe man, breathe,’ Gonsalves said. ‘I lose nobody today. It’s my birthday today, man. I lose nobody on my birthday.’
As blood spread into a large pool on the dirty cement floor, the two paramedics worked feverishly to stabilize the patient. A full minute later Christian took a pulse reading. Her eyes went distant. She looked up, directly at Jessica, and shook her head.
The man was dead.
‘Motherfucker,’ Gonsalves yelled. ‘God damn it.’ He stood up, turned full circle, then crouched back down, trying again to resuscitate the victim. Everyone knew it was futile, especially Gonsalves, but no one tried to stop him.
When Gonsalves was spent, he knelt for a few moments more, perhaps in prayer, then got up and walked to the corner of the small, cramped basement. The air was redolent with the smell of blood and feces.
It was over.
Gonsalves looked at Jessica, tears limning his eyes. He wiped them away, tried to compose himself. ‘My birthday.’
Jessica knew that these paramedics and firefighters were witnesses to far more of these moments than homicide detectives. They were the ones who did God’s work. For the most part Jessica’s job began long after this moment, sometimes months or years later. The frontline against violence and its aftermath were the patrol officers, the firefighters, the paramedics. Jessica was glad she was long out of uniform. She had nothing but admiration and sympathy for the first responders in her city. She couldn’t imagine a harder job. Even trauma surgeons had it easier. They got to work in sterile environments with state-of-the-art equipment, not to mention the certainty that whoever had committed the atrocity before them was not lurking around the corner, gun or knife or bludgeon in hand.
Jessica looked at the victim. His arms were straight out to his sides, his feet together, almost Christ-like. Then she noticed the small white book on the floor to the right of the victim.
Had it been in his hands?
Jessica knelt down, shone her light on the book. It was covered in blood, both fresh and dried. Through the blood she could read the title.
MY MISSAL
Later she would think about this instant — kneeling in a frigid basement in Kensington, a destroyed human being on the cold stone floor in front of her — as the moment it all began.
Gonsalves snapped out of it, looked for something to kick, but soon realized he was in the middle of a crime scene, most likely a homicide scene. He ran up the stairs, out onto the street. Jessica could hear his plaints from the basement. She imagined most of Kensington could hear him as well.
Forty minutes later, after Tom Weyrich, an investigator from the medical examiner’s office, made the official pronouncement at the scene, the Crime Scene Unit took their photographs and videos, and Jessica and Byrne began to search the basement in earnest. CSU had set up their field lighting, running in an electrical line from a generator on the first floor. If the room had looked daunting in the beam of the Maglites, it looked worse in the pitiless glare of the halogens.
The room was about twenty-five by thirty-five feet, mirroring the layout of the room above, with three poles holding up support beams. Hanging from the ceiling were rusted straps and clamps which at one time secured copper water lines that had long ago been scavenged for cash. Anything and everything of value had been stolen — furnace, water heater, sheet metal ductwork, even the silver-coated insulation used to wrap the pipes and plenum.
In one corner was a stained and water-damaged bathroom vanity. Its fixtures and sink were missing, but the unit itself was still bolted to the concrete wall and cement floor, but not for a lack of effort in attempting to dislodge it. Looking at the dented and chipped wood where the fixture met the wall, Jessica was sure someone had tried mightily to pry it from its place, without success. She slipped on a fresh latex glove and gently opened one of the doors under the sink. The cabinet was empty.
With the help of bottled water and a hundred paper towels, Jessica managed to get most of the victim’s blood from her arms and hands. She had discreetly washed up in the back of the PFD truck on scene, disinfected as many exposed areas of her body as she could, and slipped on a fresh sweater and jacket she always kept in a gym bag in the trunk of the departmental sedan. She felt one percent better.
Jessica noticed Gonsalves standing across the street, leaning against a half-wall, smoking a cigarette. As she approached him she noticed two things. One, that he was wearing a crucifix on a chain around his neck. She had not noticed it earlier. The other thing she noticed was that his hands were shaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said, immediately recognizing how inadequate it sounded. Gonsalves nodded a thank you. ‘What’s your first name?’ she asked.
The man looked up. His eyes were wet and bloodshot and, at the moment, looked much older than his years. ‘Ernesto,’ he said. ‘Ernie.’
‘You did what you could in there, Ernie.’
Gonsalves shook his head. ‘Not enough.’
A few moments passed. Jessica knew that this man had seen at least as much carnage as she had, that he was going to bounce back from this, but for some reason she couldn’t just walk away. Gonsalves finally broke the silence.
‘He talked.’
Jessica looked at the man. ‘Who talked? The victim?’
‘Just before he coded. He said something to me.’
Jessica wondered why Ernesto Gonsalves had waited to tell her this. She didn’t press him on it. Instead, she waited for him to gather his thoughts.
‘I hear a lot, you know?’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ve heard a lot of last words from people. I once had a guy tell me to erase the hard drives on his home computer. Gave me the keys to his house and everything. His keys, man. Said he would go to hell if I didn’t do it. Two bullets in his gut and he’s worried about his hard drive. You believe that shit?’
Jessica just listened.
‘There was this other guy this one time. Up in Chestnut Hill, right? Big guy, maybe six-two, two-fifty. Well-dressed, though. Tailored. Valentino suit. I check the labels sometimes.’ Gonsalves gave her a sheepish look. Jessica returned a smile.
‘This guy, he confessed to embezzling a shitload of money from the bank he worked in, told me where it was at, told me to give it to charity.’ Gonsalves shook his head. ‘Cash, man. He trusted me to do the right thing with his cash. Never met me, didn’t know me from Adam, right?’ Gonsalves flicked away ash. ‘They teach you how to carry a bed board up the steps, how to do a tracheotomy, how to use a defibrillator, all of that. But they don’t tell you what to do with all these words in your head. People look at me like I’m a priest, you know? Shit, man. I mean, who knows what it looks like in those last few seconds? Maybe everybody looks like a priest.’
Gonsalves hit his cigarette hard, continued.
‘But this guy …’
Jessica waited a few seconds. She was losing him. She prodded. ‘What did he say?’