Terry Cahill was in trouble.
"Where are you?" Jessica asked.
Silence.
"Agent Cahill," Jessica said. "What is your twenty?"
Nothing. Dead, icy silence.
Then they heard the gunshot.
"Shots fired!" Jessica yelled into her two-way radio. Instantly she and Byrne had their weapons drawn. They looked up and down the street. No sign of Cahill. The rovers had a limited range. He couldn't be far.
Within seconds an officer needs assistance call went out on the radio dispatch, and by the time Jessica and Byrne got to the corner of Twenty- third and Moore there were four sector cars already there, parked at all angles. The uniformed officers were out of their cars in a flash. They all looked to Jessica. She directed the perimeter as she and Byrne began to make their way down the alley that cut behind the stores, weapons drawn. There was no further communication from Cahill's two-way.
When did he get here? Jessica wondered. Why didn't he checked in with us?
They moved slowly down the alley. On either side of the passageway were windows, doorways, niches, alcoves. The Actor might have been in any one of them. Suddenly a window flew open. A pair of Hispanic boys, six or seven years old, probably drawn by the sound of the sirens, popped out their heads. They saw the weapons, and their expressions changed from surprise to fear to excitement.
"Please get back inside," Byrne said. They immediately shut the window, drew the curtains.
Jessica and Byrne continued down the alley, every sound drawing their attention. Jessica fingered the volume on the rover with her free hand. Up. Down. Back up. Nothing.
They turned a corner, into a short lane that led to Point Breeze Avenue. And they saw him. Terry Cahill was sitting on the ground, his back to the brick wall. He was holding his right shoulder. He had been shot. There was blood beneath his fingers, scarlet spreading onto the sleeve of his white shirt. Jessica rushed over. Byrne called in their location, kept an eye out, scanning the windows and rooftops above them. The danger had not necessarily passed. Within a few seconds, four uniformed officers arrived, Underwood and Martinez among them. Byrne directed them.
"Talk to me, Terry," Jessica said.
"I'm good," he said through gritted teeth. "It's a flesh wound." A slight amount of fresh blood tipped his fingers. The right side of Cahill's face was starting to swell.
"Did you see his face?" Byrne asked.
Cahill shook his head. He was clearly in a world of pain.
Jessica communicated the information that the suspect was still at large into her two-way. She heard at least four or five more sirens approaching. You sent out an officer needs assistance call in this department, and everyone and his mother came.
But even with twenty cops combing the area, it became clear, after five minutes or so, that their suspect had slipped away. Again.
The Actor was in the wind.
By the time Jessica and Byrne returned to the alley behind the market, Ike Buchanan and half a dozen detectives were on the scene. Paramedics were attending to Terry Cahill. One of the EMS techs found Jessica's eyes, nodded. Cahill would be okay.
"There goes my shot at the PGA tour," Cahill said as they loaded him onto a stretcher. "Want my statement now?"
"We'll get it at the hospital," Jessica said. "Don't worry about it."
Cahill nodded, winced in pain as they lifted the gurney. He looked at Jessica and Byrne. "Do me a favor, will you guys?"
"Name it, Terry," Jessica said.
"Take this fucker down," he said. "Hard."
The Detectives milled around the perimeter of the crime scene where Cahill had been shot. Although no one said it, they all felt like rookies, like a group of green recruits fresh out the academy. CSU had set up a perimeter of yellow tape and, as always, a crowd was gathering. Four CSU officers began to comb the area. Jessica and Byrne stood against the wall, lost in their thoughts.
Granted, Terry Cahill was a federal agent, and quite often there was an intense rivalry between agencies, but he was nonetheless a law enforcement officer working a case in Philadelphia. The grim faces and steely looks on all concerned spoke to the outrage. You don't shoot a cop in Philadelphia.
After a few minutes, Jocelyn Post, a veteran of CSU, held up a pair of tongs, smiling from ear to ear. Between the tips was a spent bullet.
"Oh yes," she said. "Come to Mama J."
Although they had found the discharged slug that had hit Terry Cahill in the shoulder, it was not always easy to determine the caliber and type of bullet when it had been fired, especially if the lead had struck a brick wall, which it had in this case.
Nonetheless, this was very good news. Anytime a piece of physical evidence was found-something that could be tested, analyzed, photographed, dusted, traced-it was a step forward.
"We've got the slug," Jessica said, knowing that this was a baby step in the investigation, happy to have the lead nonetheless. "It's a start."
"I think we can do better than that," Byrne said.
"What do you mean?"
"Look."
Byrne crouched down, picked up a metal rib from a broken umbrella lying in a pile of trash. He lifted the edge of plastic garbage bag. There, next to the Dumpster, partially hidden, was a small-caliber handgun. A banged-up, cheap black.25. It looked like the same weapon they had seen in the Fatal Attraction video.
This was no baby step.
They had the Actor's gun.
64
The videotape found inCap-haitien was a french film, released in 1955. The title was Les Diaboliques. In it, Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot-who portray the wife and former mistress of a thoroughly rotten man played by Paul Meurisse-murder Meurisse by drowning him in a bathtub. Like the rest of the Actor's masterpieces, this tape had a recreated murder replacing the original crime.
In this version of Les Diaboliques, a barely glimpsed man in a dark satin jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back pushes a man beneath the surface of the water in a grungy bathroom. Again, a bathroom.
Victim number four.
There was a clean print on the gun, a.25 ACP Raven manufactured by Phoenix Arms, a popular junk gun on the streets. You could pick up a Raven.25 anywhere in the city for under a hundred dollars. If the shooter was in the system, they would soon have a match.
There had been no slug recovered at the Erin Halliwell scene, so they would not know for certain if this weapon was used to kill her, even though the ME's office had presumptively concluded that her single wound was consistent with a small-caliber weapon.
Firearms had already determined that the Raven.25 was the gun used to shoot Terry Cahill.
As they had thought, the cell phone attached to the videocassette belonged to Stephanie Chandler. Although the SIM card was still active, everything else had been erased. There were no calendar entries, no address book listings, no text or e-mail messages, no logs of calls made or received. There were no fingerprints.
Cahill gave his statement while getting patched up at Jefferson. The wound was a flesh wound, and he was expected to be released within a few hours. In the ER waiting room, half a dozen FBI agents congregated, giving a visiting Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne their backs. Nobody could have prevented what happened to Cahill, but tightly knit squads never looked at it that way. According the suits, the PPD had fucked up, and one of their own was now in the hospital.
In his official statement, Cahill said that he had been in South Philly when he had received the call from Eric Chavez. He had then monitored the channel and heard that the suspect was perhaps in the area of Twenty- third and McClellan. He had begun a search of the alleyways behind the storefronts when his assailant had come up behind him, put the gun to the back of his head, and forced him to say the lines from The Godfather into the two-way radio. When the suspect reached for Cahill's weapon, Cahill knew he had to make his move. They struggled, and the assailant punched him twice-once in the small of the back, once on the right side of his face-then the suspect's gun discharged. The suspect then fled down the alley, leaving his weapon behind.