Rosary girls

3 2

Jessica waited. People came and went, hurrying through the rain, hailing cabs, running to the subway stop.

None of them was Brian Parkhurst.

Jessica reached under her rain slicker, keyed her rover twice.

At the entrance to Center Square Plaza, less than fifty feet away, a disheveled man came out of the shadows.

Jessica looked at him, hands out, palms up.

Nick Palladino shrugged back. Before leaving the Northeast, Jessica had tried Byrne twice more, then called Nick on her way into the city; Nick had instantly agreed to back her play. Nick's vast experience working undercover in Narcotics made him a natural for covert surveillance. He wore a ratty hooded sweatshirt and stained chinos. For Nick Pal- ladino, this was the true sacrifice to the job.

John Shepherd was under the scaffolding on the side of city hall, directly across the street, binoculars in hand. A pair of uniformed officers were stationed at the Market Street subway stop, both carrying the yearbook faculty photo of Brian Parkhurst, in case he showed up via that route.

He had not showed. And it looked as if he wasn't going to.

Jessica called the station house. The team sitting on Parkhurst's house reported no activity.

Jessica ambled over to where Palladino stood.

"Still can't reach Kevin?" he asked.

"No," Jessica said.

"He's probably crashed. He could use the rest."

Jessica hesitated, not knowing how to ask. She was new to this club and didn't want to step on any toes. "He seem okay to you?"

"Kevin's tough to read, Jess."

"He seems completely exhausted."

Palladino nodded, lit a cigarette. They were all tired. "He tell you about his… experience?"

"You mean about Luther White?"

From what Jessica could glean, Kevin Byrne had been involved in an arrest gone bad fifteen years earlier, a bloody confrontation with a rape suspect named Luther White. White had been killed; Byrne had nearly died himself.

It was the nearly part that confused Jessica.

"Yeah," Palladino said.

"No, he hasn't," Jessica said. "I haven't had the guts to ask him about it."

"It was a close call for him," Palladino said. "About as close as you can get. The way I understand it, he was, well, dead for a little while."

"Then I did hear it right,"Jessica said, incredulous. "So, what, he's like psychic or something?"

"Oh, God no." Palladino smiled, shook his head. "Nothing like that. Don't ever even utter that word around him. In fact, it would be better if you never even brought it up."

"Why is that?"

"Let me put it this way. There's a bigmouthed detective over at Central who gave him some shit about it one night at Finnigan's Wake. I think the guy is still eating his dinner through a straw."

"Gotcha," Jessica said.

"It's just that Kevin's got a… sense about the really bad ones. Or he used to, anyway. The whole Morris Blanchard thing was pretty bad for him. He was wrong about Blanchard, and it almost destroyed him. I know he wants out, Jess. He's got his twenty in. He just can't find the door."

The two detectives looked out over the rain-swept plaza.

"Look," Palladino began, "this is probably not my place to say this, but Ike Buchanan went out on a limb with you.You know that, right?"

"What do you mean?" Jessica asked, although she had a fairly good idea.

"When he formed this task force, and gave it to Kevin, he could have moved you to the back of the pack. Hell, maybe he should have. No offense."

"None taken."

"Ike's a stand-up guy.You might think he's letting you stay at the front of the pack for political reasons-I don't think it will come as a shock to you that there's a few assholes in the department who think so-but he believes in you.You wouldn't be here if he didn't."

Wow, Jessica thought. Where the hell did all this come from?

"Well, I hope I can justify that faith," she said.

"You'll do fine."

"Thanks, Nick. That means a lot." She meant it, too.

"Yeah, well, I don't even know why I told you."

For some unknown reason, Jessica hugged him. After a few seconds they broke, smoothed their hair, coughed into their fists, got over the show of emotion.

"So," Jessica said, a little awkwardly, "what do we do right now?"

Nick Palladino scoured the block-city hall, over to South Broad, over to Center Square Plaza, down Market. He found John Shepherd under the canopy to the entrance to the subway. John caught his eye. The two men shrugged. The rain poured.

"Fuck it," he said. "Let's shut it down."