Rosary girls

17

Death had come here unbidden, and, for its penance, the block mourned in silence. The rain had diminished to a thin mist, whispering off the rivers, slicking the pavement. Night had buried its day in a glass- ine shroud.

Byrne sat in his car across the street from the Tessa Wells crime scene, his exhaustion now a living thing within. Through the fog he could see a faint orange glow coming from the basement window of the row house. The CSU team would be there all night, and probably most of the next day.

He slipped a blues CD into the player. Soon, Robert Johnson scratched and crackled from the speakers, talking about that hellhound on his trail.

I hear you, Byrne thought.

He considered the short block of dilapidated row houses. The once graceful facades swooned beneath the yoke of weather and time and neglect. For all the drama that had unfolded behind these walls over the years, both petty and grand, it was the perfume of death that would remain. Long after the footers were plowed back into the earth, madness would dwell here.

Byrne saw movement in the field to the right of the crime scene. A slum dog regarded him from the cover of a small pile of discarded tires, his only worry his next bite of spoiled meat, his next tongueful of rainwater.

Lucky dog.

Byrne shut off the CD, closed his eyes, absorbed the silence.

There had been no fresh footprints through the weed-thick field behind the death house, no recently snapped branches on the low scrub. Whoever killed Tessa Wells had probably not parked on Ninth Street.

He felt the breath catch in his chest, the way it had the night he had plunged into the icy river, locked in death's caress with Luther White-

The images slammed into the back of his skull-brutal and vile and base.

He saw Tessa's final moments.

The approach comes from the front…

The killer turns off his headlights, decelerates, rolls slowly, cautiously, to a stop. Cuts the engine. He exits the vehicle, sniffs the air. He finds this place ripe for his insanity. A bird of prey is most vulnerable when it eats, mantling its catch, exposed to attack from above. He knows he is about to put himself at momentary risk. He has chosen his quarry with care. Tessa Wells is that thing that is missing within him; the very idea of beauty that he must destroy.

He carries her across the street, into the empty row house on the left. Nothing with a soul stirs here. It is dark inside, borrowing no moonlight. The rotted floor is a danger, but he does not risk a flashlight. Not yet. She is light in his arms. He is full of a terrible power.

He exits the rear of the house.

(But why? Why not dump her in the first house?)

He is sexually aroused, but he does not act on it.

(Again, why?)

He enters the death house. He takes Tessa Wells down the stairs into the dank and putrid cellar.

(Has he been here before?)

Rats scurry, frightened off their meager carrion. He is in no hurry. Time does not come here anymore.

He is in complete control at this moment.

He is…

He is-

Byrne tried, but he could not see the killer's face.

Not yet.

The pain flashed with a bright, savage intensity.

It was getting worse.

Byrne lit a cigarette, smoked it down to the filter without the curse of a single thought, or the blessing of a single idea. The rain began again in earnest.

Why Tessa Wells? he wondered, turning her photograph over and over in his hands.

Why not the next shy young girl? What did Tessa do to deserve this? Did she refuse the advances of some teenaged Lothario? No. As crazy as every new crop of young men seemed to be, tagging each successive generation with some hyperbolic level of larceny and violence, this was far beyond the pale of some jilted teenager.

Was she chosen at random?

If that was the case, Byrne knew it was unlikely that this was going to stop.

What was so special about this place?

What was he failing to see?

Byrne felt the rage build. The pain tangoed at his temples. He split a Vicodin, swallowed it dry.

He hadn't slept more than three or four hours in the past forty-eight, but who needed sleep? There was work to be done.

The wind kicked up, fluttering the bright yellow crime scene tape- grand-opening pennants at Death Mart.

He looked into the rearview mirror; saw the scar over his right eye and the way it glistened in the moonlight. He ran his finger over it. He thought about Luther White and the way his.22 had glimmered in the moonlight on the night they both died, the way the barrel exploded and painted the world red, then white, then black; the full palette of lunacy, the way the river had embraced them both.

Where are you, Luther?

I could do with a little help.

He got out of the car, locked it. He knew he should go home, but somehow, this place filled him with the sense of purpose he needed at the moment, the peace he used to feel when he was sitting in the living room on some crisp fall day, watching an Eagles game, Donna on the couch next to him, reading a book, Colleen in her room, studying.

Maybe he should go home.

But go home to what? His empty two-room apartment?

He would drink another pint of bourbon, watch the talk shows, probably a movie. At three o'clock he would slip into bed, waiting for a sleep that would not come. At six he would concede to the pre-alarm dawn, and get up.

He glanced at the glow of light from the basement window, saw the shadows moving purposefully about, felt the pull.

These were his brothers, his sisters, his family.

He crossed the street to the death house.

This was his home.