Rosary girls

13

He found himself on the waterfront before his mind had the opportunity or the inclination to say no. How long had it been since he had been here?

Eight months, one week, two days.

The day Deirdre Pettigrew's body was found.

He knew the answer just as clearly as he knew the reason he had come back. He was here to recharge, to once again tap into the vein of madness that pulsed just beneath the asphalt of his city.

Deuces was a protected drug house that occupied an old waterfront building beneath the Walt Whitman Bridge, near Packer Avenue, just a few feet from the banks of the Delaware River. The steel front door was covered by gang graffiti and manned by a mountainous thug named Serious. Nobody accidentally wandered into Deuces. In fact, it had been more than a decade since the public had called it Deuces. Deuces was the name of the long-shuttered bar in which a very bad man named Luther White had been sitting and drinking the night Kevin Byrne and Jimmy Purify had entered, fifteen years earlier; the night that left two of them dead.

It was on this spot that Kevin Byrne's dark time began.

It was on this spot he began to see.

Now it was a crack house.

But Kevin Byrne wasn't here for the drugs. While it was true that he had flirted with every substance known to mankind over the years in order to stop the visions rumbling in his head, none had ever taken control. It had been years since he had dallied with anything other than Vicodin or bourbon.

He was here to reclaim the mind-set.

He broke the seal on a bottle of Old Forester, considered his day.

On the day his divorce had become final, nearly a year earlier, he and Donna had vowed that they would have dinner, as a family, one night every week. Despite the many obstacles both their jobs tossed in the way, they had not missed a week in a year.

This night they had muddled and mumbled their way through another dinner, his wife an uncluttered horizon, the dining room chatter a parallel monologue of perfunctory questions and stock answers.

For the past five years Donna Sullivan Byrne had been the white-hot agent for one of the largest and most prestigious Realtors in Philadelphia, and the money had rolled in. They weren't living in a row house in Fitler Square because Kevin Byrne was such a great cop. On his pay grade, they would have lived in Fishtown.

Back in the day, in the summer of their marriage, they would meet for lunch in Center City two or three times a week, and Donna would tell him of her triumphs, her infrequent failures, her clever maneuvering through the jungles of escrow, closing costs, amortization, arrears, and appurtenances. Byrne had always glazed over at the terms-he couldn't tell a basis point from a balloon payment-just as he had always marveled at her energy, her zeal. She had come to her career well into her thirties, and she was happy.

But just about eighteen months earlier, Donna had simply shut down communication channels with her husband. The money still came in, and Donna was still an incredible mother to Colleen, still active in the community, but when it came to talking to him, sharing anything resembling a feeling, a thought, an opinion, she was gone. Walls up, turrets armed.

No note. No explanation. No rationale.

But Byrne knew why. When they had gotten married, he had promised her that he had ambitions within the department, that he was on a steady track to lieutenant, perhaps captain. Beyond that, politics? He had ruled it out within, but never without. Donna had always been skeptical. She knew enough cops to know that homicide detectives were lifers, and that you rode the unit right until the end.

And then Morris Blanchard was found swinging from the end of a towrope. Donna looked at Byrne that night and, without asking a single question, knew that he would never give up the chase to get back on top. He was Homicide, and that's all he would ever be.

A few days later, she filed.

After a long, tearful talk with Colleen, Byrne decided not to fight it. They had been watering a dead plant for a long time anyway. As long as Donna didn't poison his daughter against him, and as long as he got to see her when he wanted, it was okay.

This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed dinner, lost in a book by Nora Roberts. Sometimes Byrne envied Colleen her inner silence, her cottony refuge from her childhood, such as it was.

Donna had been two months' pregnant with Colleen when she and Byrne had gotten married in a civil ceremony. When Donna had given birth, a few days after Christmas that year, and Byrne had seen Colleen for the first time, so pink and shriveled and helpless, he suddenly could not recall a single second of his life before that moment. In that instant, everything else was prelude, a blurry overture to the duty he felt at that moment, and he knew-knew as if it had been branded onto his heart- that no one would ever come between himself and that little girl. Not his wife, not his fellow officers, and God help the first droopy-pantsed, sideways-hat-wearing, disrespectful little shit that came by for her first date.

He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen's first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped three- room apartment at the time. The eleven o'clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen's room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.

The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.

As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn't react. She didn't wake up. When Donna arrived in the doorway, and took in the situation, she began to cry. Byrne held her, feeling at that moment that the road in front of them had just been repaved with trial, and that the fear he faced on the streets every day was nothing by comparison.

But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter's world of inner calm. She would never know the silver hush of her parents' marriage, ever oblivious to Kevin and Donna Byrne-once so passionate that they could not keep their hands off each other-saying "excuse me" as they passed in the narrow hallway of the home, like strangers on a bus.

He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Donna, with her mysterious ability to clog a lie in his throat with just a glance, her perfect social pitch. She knew how to reap wisdom from disaster. She had taught him the grace of humility.

Deuces was quiet at this hour. Byrne sat in an empty room on the second floor. Most drug houses were filthy places, littered with empty crack bottles, fast-food trash, thousands of spent kitchen matches, quite often vomit, sometimes excrement. Pipeheads didn't subscribe to Architectural Digest as a rule. The customers who frequented Deuces-a shadowy consortium of cops, civil servants, city officials who couldn't be seen cruising the corners-paid a little extra for the ambience.

He positioned himself cross-legged on the floor near the window, his back to the river. He sipped the bourbon. The sensation wrapped him in a warm amber embrace, easing the impending migraine.

Tessa Wells.

She had left her house Friday morning, a contract with the world in hand, a promise that she would be safe, that she would go to school, hang out with her friends, laugh at some silly jokes, cry at some silly love song. The world had broken that treaty. She was just a teenager, and she had already lived out her life.

Colleen had just become a teenager. Byrne knew that, psychologically speaking, he was probably way behind the curve, that the "teenaged years" began somewhere around eleven these days. He was also fully aware that he had long ago decided to resist that particular piece of Madison Avenue sexual propaganda.

He looked around the room.

Why was he here?

Again, the question.

Twenty years on the streets of one of the most violent cities in the world put him on the block. He didn't know a single detective who didn't drink, hadn't rehabbed, didn't gamble, didn't frequent the whores, didn't raise a hand to his children, his wife. With this job came excess, and if you didn't balance the excess of horror with an excess of passion for something-even domestic violence-the valves creaked and moaned until you imploded one day and put the barrel against your palate.

In his time as a homicide detective he had stood in dozens of parlors, hundreds of driveways, a thousand vacant lots, the voiceless dead waiting for him like a gouache of rainy watercolor in the near distance. Such bleak beauty. He could sleep with distance. It was detail that sullied his dreams.

He recalled every detail of that sweltering August morning he had been called to Fairmount Park: the thick buzz of flies overhead, the way Deirdre Pettigrew's skinny legs emerged from the bushes, her bloodied white panties bunched around one ankle, the bandage on her right knee.

He knew then, as he had known every single time he had seen a murdered child, that he had to step up, regardless how eroded his soul, how diminished his instincts. He had to brave the morning, no matter what demons tracked him through the night.

In the first half of his career it had been about the power, the inertia of justice, the rush of the capture. It was about him. But somewhere along the way, it became bigger. It became about all the dead girls.

And now, Tessa Wells.

He closed his eyes, again felt the frigid waters of the Delaware River eddy around him, the breath being wrenched from his chest.

Below him, the gang gunships cruised. The sound of the hip-hop bass chords shook the floor, the windows, the walls, rising from the city streets like steel steam.

The deviant's hour was coming. Soon he would walk among them.

The monsters were sliding out of their lairs.

And as he sat in a place where men traded their self-respect for a few moments of numbed silence, a place where animals walk erect, Kevin Francis Byrne knew that a new monster had stirred in Philadelphia, a dark seraph of death that would lead him to an uncharted dominion, summoning him to a depth to which men like Gideon Pratt only aspired.