Rosary girls

2 6

The black-and-white videotape was grainy, but clear enough to see the comings and goings through the parking lot at St. Joseph's Hospital. The traffic-both automotive and pedestrian-was what one would expect: ambulances, police cars, delivery vans from medical and maintenance supply houses. A majority of the personnel were hospital employees: doctors, nurses, orderlies, housekeeping. Through this entrance came a few visitors, a handful of police officers.

Jessica, Byrne, Tony Park, and Nick Palladino were jammed into the small room that doubled as a snack room and video room. At the 4:06:03 point of the tape, they saw Nicole Taylor.

Nicole walks out of the door marked SPECIAL HOSPITAL SERVICES, hesitates for a few moments, then ambles slowly toward the street. She has a small purse on a strap over her right shoulder and what looks like a bottle of juice or perhaps a Snapple in her left hand. There was no purse or bottle found at the crime scene in Bartram Gardens.

At the street, Nicole seems to notice something at the top of the frame. She covers her mouth, perhaps in surprise, then walks over to a car parked at the very left edge of the screen. It appears to be a Ford Windstar. No occupant of the car is visible.

Just as Nicole reaches the passenger side of the car, a delivery truck from Allied Medical pulls between the camera and the minivan.

"Shit," Byrne said. Come on, come on…"

The time on the tape is 4:06:55.

The driver of the Allied Medical truck gets out of the driver's side and heads into the hospital.A few minutes later he returns, enters the cab.

When the truck pulls away, the Windstar and Nicole are gone.

They let the tape run for five more minutes, then fast-forwarded. Neither Nicole nor the Windstar returned.

"Can you rewind it to the point where she walks up to the van?" Jessica asked.

"No problem," Tony Park said.

They watched the tape over and over again. Nicole leaving the building, walking beneath the canopy, approaching the Windstar, each time freezing it at the moment the truck pulls up and obscures them.

"Can you get us in closer?" Jessica asked.

"Not on this machine," Park replied. "The lab can do all kinds of tricks, though."

The AV Unit, located in the basement of the Roundhouse, was capable of all kinds of video enhancement. The tape they were watching had been dubbed from the original, due to the fact that surveillance tape is recorded at a very slow speed, rendering it impossible to play on a normal VCR.

Jessica leaned close to the small black-and-white monitor. It appeared that the Windstar's license plate was Pennsylvania issue, ending in 6. It was impossible to tell what numbers, letters, or combinations thereof preceded this. If they had the beginning numbers on the plate, it would make it a lot easier to match the plate with the make and model of the car.

"Why don't we try to cross-reference Windstars with that number?" Byrne asked. Tony Park turned to walk from the room. Byrne stopped him, wrote something on his pad, tore it off, and handed it to Park. With that, Park was out the door.

The remaining detectives continued to watch the tape as traffic came and went; as personnel walked lazily toward their jobs or spryly away. Jessica found it excruciating to know that, behind the truck obscuring her view of the Windstar, Nicole Taylor was quite likely talking to someone who would soon end her life.

They watched the tape another six times, failing to glean any new information. TONY PARK RETURNED WITH A THICK STACK of computer printouts in hand. Ike Buchanan followed.

"There are twenty-five hundred Windstars registered in Pennsylvania," Park said. "Two hundred or so end in the number six."

"Shit," Jessica said.

He then held up the printout, beaming. One of the lines was highlighted in bright yellow. "One of them is registered to Dr. Brian Allan Parkhurst of Larchwood Street."

Byrne was on his feet in an instant. He glanced at Jessica. He ran a finger over the scar on his forehead.

"It's not enough," Buchanan said.

"Why not?" Byrne asked.

"Where do you want me to start?"

"He knew both victims, and we can put him at the scene where Nicole Taylor was last seen-"

"We don't know that it was him. We don't know that she even got in that car."

"He had opportunity," Byrne plowed ahead. "Maybe even motive."

"Motive?" Buchanan asked.

"Karen Hillkirk," Byrne said.

"He didn't kill Karen Hillkirk."

"He didn't have to. Tessa Wells was underage. Maybe she was going to go public with their affair."

"What affair?"

Buchanan was, of course, right.

"Look, he's an MD," Byrne said, selling hard. Jessica got the sense that even Byrne was not convinced that Parkhurst was their doer. But Park- hurst knew something. "The ME's report said both girls were subdued with midazolam and then given a paralytic drug by injection. He drives a minivan, which is also right on. He fits the profile. Let me put him back in the chair. Twenty minutes. If he doesn't tip, we cut him loose."

Ike Buchanan briefly considered the idea. "If Brian Parkhurst sets foot in this building again, he's coming in with a lawyer from the archdiocese. You know it, and I know it," Buchanan said. "Let's do a little more leg- work before we connect these dots. Let's find out if that Windstar belongs to an employee of the hospital before we start hauling people in. Let's see if we can account for every minute of Parkhurst's day."

Most police work is mind- and ass-numbingly dull. Much of the time is spent at a wobbly gray desk with sticky drawers full of paper, a phone in one hand, cold coffee in the other. Calling people. Calling people back. Waiting for people to call you back. Hitting dead ends, roaring up blind alleys, walking dejectedly out. People interviewed saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil-only to discover that they remember a key fact two weeks later. Detectives talk to funeral parlors to see if they had a procession on the street that day. They talk to newspaper delivery- men, school crossing guards, landscapers, painters, city workers, street cleaners. They talk to junkies, hookers, alkies, dealers, panhandlers, vendors, anyone who makes a habit or vocation of simply hanging around the corner in which they are interested.

And then, after all the phone calls prove worthless, the detectives get to drive around the city, asking the same questions to the same people in person.

By midafternoon, the investigation had settled into a lethargic drone, like the seventh-inning dugout of a team down 5-0. Pencils tapped, phones stood mute, eye contact was avoided. The task force, with the help of a handful of uniformed officers, had managed to contact all but a handful of the Windstar owners. Two of them worked at St. Joseph's, one of them in housekeeping.

At five o'clock they held a press conference behind the Roundhouse. The police commissioner and the district attorney were front and center. All the expected questions were asked. All the expected answers were given. Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano were on camera and identified to the media as leading the task force. Jessica was hoping she wouldn't have to speak on camera. She didn't.

By five twenty they were back at their desks. They flipped through the local channels until they found a replay of the press conference. Brief applause, hoots, and hollers greeted the close-up of Kevin Byrne. A local anchor's voiceover accompanied the footage of Brian Parkhurst's exit from the Roundhouse earlier in the day. Parkhurst's name was plastered on the screen beneath the slow-motion image of him getting into his car.

Nazarene Academy had called back with the information that Brian Parkhurst had left early the previous Thursday and Friday, and that he had arrived at the school no earlier than 8:15 AM on Monday. He would have had ample time to abduct both girls, dump both bodies, and still maintain his schedule.

At five thirty, just after Jessica received a call back from the Denver Board of Education, effectively eliminating Tessa's old boyfriend Sean Brennan from the suspect pool, she and John Shepherd drove down to the forensic lab, the new state-of-the-art facility just a few blocks from the Roundhouse at Eighth and Poplar. There was new information. The bone found in Nicole Taylor's hands was a section cut from a leg of lamb. It appeared to have been cut with a serrated blade and sharpened on an oilstone.

So far their victims had been found holding a sheep bone and a reproduction of a William Blake painting. The information, although helpful, shed no light into any corner of the investigation.

"We've also got matching carpet fibers from both victims," Tracy McGovern said. Tracy was the deputy director of the lab.

All across the room, fists clenched, pumping the air. They had evidence. Synthetic fibers could be traced.

"Both girls had the same nylon fibers along the hem of their skirts," Tracy said. "Tessa Wells had more than a dozen. Nicole Taylor's skirt yielded only a few, due to the fact that she had been out in the rain, but they were there."

"Is it residential? Commercial? Automotive?" Jessica asked.

"Probably not automotive. I'd say midrange residential carpeting. Dark blue. But the pattern of the fibers was spread out along the very bottom of the hem. It wasn't anywhere else on their clothing."

"So they weren't lying down on the carpet?" Byrne asked. "Or sitting on it?"

"No,"Tracy said. "For this kind of pattern, I'd say they were-"

"Kneeling," Jessica said.

"Kneeling," Tracy echoed.

At six o'clock Jessica sat at a desk, spinning a cup of cold coffee, thumbing through her books on Christian art. There were some promising leads, but nothing that duplicated the postures of the victims at the crime scenes.

Eric Chavez had a dinner date. He stood in front of the small two-way mirror in Interview Room A, tying and retying his tie, searching for the perfect double Windsor. Nick Palladino was finishing up the calls to the remaining few Windstar owners.

Kevin Byrne stared at the wall of photographs like Easter Island statuary. He seemed rapt, consumed by the minutiae, replaying the time line over and over in his mind. Images of Tessa Wells, images of Nicole Taylor, snapshots of the death house on Eighth Street, pictures of the daffodil garden at Bartram. Hands, feet, eyes, arms, legs. Pictures with rulers to provide scale. Pictures with grids to provide context.

The answers to all Byrne's questions were directly in front of him, and to Jessica he looked like a man in a catatonic state. She would have given a month's salary to be privy to Kevin Byrne's private thoughts at that moment.

Late afternoon slogged toward evening. And yet Kevin Byrne stood motionless, scanning the board, left to right, top to bottom.

Suddenly he removed a close-up photograph of Nicole Taylor's left palm. He took it over to the window and held it up to the graying light. He looked at Jessica, but it appeared he was looking right through her. She was just an object in the path of his thousand-yard stare. He removed a magnifying glass from a desk and turned back to the photo.

"Christ," he finally said, drawing the attention of the handful of detectives in the room. "I can't believe we didn't see it."

"See what?" Jessica asked. She was glad Byrne was finally talking. She had been beginning to worry about him.

Byrne pointed to the indentations in the fleshy part of the palm, the marks that Tom Weyrich said were caused by pressure from Nicole's fingernails.

"These marks." He picked up the ME's report on Nicole Taylor. "Look," he continued. "There was trace evidence of burgundy fingernail polish in the grooves on her left hand."

"What about it?" Buchanan asked.

"The polish was green on her left hand," Byrne said.

Byrne pointed to the close-up of the fingernails on Nicole Taylor's left hand. The color was a forest green. He held up a photograph of her right hand.

"The polish on her right hand was burgundy."

The remaining three detectives looked at each other, shrugged.

"Don't you see it? She didn't make those grooves by clenching her left fist. She made them with her opposite hand."

Jessica tried to see something in the photograph, as if examining the positive and negative elements in an M. C. Escher print. She saw nothing. "I don't understand," she said.

Byrne grabbed his coat and headed for the door. "You will."

Byrne and Jessica stood in the small digital imaging room in the crime lab.

The imaging specialist was working on enhancing the photographs of Nicole Taylor's left hand. Most crime scene photographs were still taken on thirty-five-millimeter film and then transferred to digital format, after which they could then be enhanced, enlarged, and, if needed, prepared for trial. The area of interest in this photograph was the small, crescent-shaped indentations in the lower left portion of Nicole's palm. The technician enlarged and clarified the area, and when the image became clear, there was a collective gasp in the small room.

Nicole Taylor had sent them a message.

The slight cuts were not random at all.

"Oh my God," Jessica said, her first adrenaline rush as a homicide detective beginning to hum in her ears.

Before she died, Nicole Taylor had used the fingernails on her right hand to begin spelling a word on her left palm, a dying girl's plea in the final, desperate moments of her life. There could be no debate. The cuts spelled P A R.

Byrne flipped open his cell phone, called Ike Buchanan. Within twenty minutes, an affidavit of probable cause would be typed and submitted to the chief of the Homicide Unit at the district attorney's office. Within an hour, with any luck, they'd have a search warrant for the premises of Brian Allan Parkhurst.