Rosary girls

44

The trees bordering the bridle trail that snaked its way through Pennypack Park were straining at their buds. It was a popular jogging path, and this brisk spring morning had brought runners out in droves.

While Jessica jogged, the events of the previous night ran through her mind. Patrick had left a little after three. They had taken their encounter about as far as two consenting adults could without making love, a step for which they both wordlessly agreed they were not ready.

Next time, Jessica thought, she might not be so adult about the whole thing.

She could still smell him on her body. She could still feel him on her fingertips, her lips. But these sensations were overruled by the horrors of the job.

She picked up her pace.

She knew that most serial murderers had a pattern, a cooling down period between killings. Whoever was doing this was on a rampage, the final leg of a spree, a binge that, in all likelihood, would end in his own death.

The victims couldn't have been more different physically. Tessa was thin and blond. Nicole had been a Goth girl in her jet-black hair and piercings. Bethany had been heavy.

He had to know them.

Add to that the pictures of Tessa Wells found in his apartment, and it made Brian Parkhurst a prime suspect. Had he been seeing all three girls?

Even if he was, the biggest question remained. Why was he doing it? Had these girls rebuffed his advances? Threatened to go public? No, Jessica thought. There would have been a pattern of violence somewhere in his past.

On the other hand, if she could understand a monster's mind-set, she would know why.

Still, anyone whose pathology of religious insanity ran this deep must have acted on it before. And yet none of the crime databases had yielded even a remotely similar MO in the Philadelphia area, or anywhere nearby for that matter.

Yesterday Jessica had driven up Frankford Avenue in the Northeast, near Primrose Road, and had passed St. Katherine of Siena. St. Katherine was the church that had been defaced with blood three years earlier. She made a note to look into the incident. She knew she was grasping at straws, but straws were all they had at the moment. Many a case had been made on such a tenuous connection.

If anything, their doer had uncanny luck. He had picked three girls off the streets in Philly without anyone noticing.

Okay, Jessica thought. Start at the beginning. His first victim was Nicole Taylor. If it was Brian Parkhurst, they knew where he met Nicole. At school. If it was someone else, then he must have met Nicole elsewhere. But where? And why was she targeted? They had interviewed the two people at St. Joseph's who owned a Ford Windstar. Both were women; one in her late sixties, the other a single mother of three. Neither exactly fit the profile.

Was it someone along the route Nicole took to school? The route had been thoroughly canvassed. No one had seen anyone hanging around Nicole.

Was it a friend of the family?

And if it was, how did the doer know the other two girls?

All three girls had different doctors, different dentists. None of them played sports, so coaches and physical trainers were out. They had different tastes in clothes, in music, in just about everything.

Every question brought the answer closer to one name: Brian Parkhurst.

When had Parkhurst lived in Ohio? She made a mental note to check with Ohio law enforcement to see if there were any unsolved homicides with a similar MO in that time period. Because if there were-

Jessica never finished the thought because, as she rounded a bend in the bridle trail, she tripped over a branch that had fallen from one of the trees during the previous night's storm.

She tried, but she couldn't regain her balance. She fell, face-first, and rolled onto the wet grass, onto her back.

She heard people approaching.

Welcome to Humiliation Village.

It had been a while since she had taken a spill. She found that her appreciation for being on the wet ground, in public, had not grown in the intervening years. She moved slowly, carefully, trying to determine if anything was broken or, at the very least, strained.

"Are you okay?"

Jessica looked up from her earthbound vantage. The man doing the asking approached with a pair of middle-aged women, both sporting iPods on their waist packs. They were all dressed in quality jogging clothes, the kind of matching outfits with reflective stripes and zippered closures at the hem of the pants. Jessica, in her fuzzy, pilled sweats and well-worn Pumas, felt like a slob.

"I'm fine, thanks," Jessica said. She was. Certainly nothing was broken. The soft grass had cushioned her fall. Except for a few grass stains and a contused ego, she was unharmed. "I'm the city acorn inspector. Just doing my job."

The man smiled, stepped forward, offered a hand. He was in his early thirties, blond and fair, nice looking in a collegiate way. She accepted the offer, rose to her feet, brushed herself off. The two women smiled in understanding. They had been jogging in place the whole time. When Jessica shrugged a we've all taken a header, haven't we? response, they continued on down the path.

"I just took a nasty fall myself the other day," the man said. "Down by the band shell. Tripped over a child's little plastic pail. Thought I'd fractured my right arm for sure."

"Embarrassing, isn't it?"

"Not at all,"he said. "It gave me a chance to be one with nature."

Jessica smiled.

"I got a smile!" the man said. "I'm usually far more inept with pretty women. Usually takes months to get a smile."

Now, there's a line, Jessica thought. Still, he looked harmless.

"Mind if I jog along with you?" he asked.

"I'm just about done," Jessica said, although this wasn't true. She had the feeling that this guy was the chatty type and, in addition to the fact that she didn't like to talk while she ran, she had enough on her mind to think about.

"No problem," the man said. His face said otherwise. It looked as if she had slapped him.

Now she felt bad. He had stopped to lend a hand, and she shut him down rather unceremoniously. "I've got about a mile left in me," she said. "What kind of pace do you keep?"

"I like to keep the meter just under myocardial infarction."

Jessica smiled again. "I don't know CPR," she said. "If you grab your chest, I'm afraid you'll be on your own."

"Not to worry. I've got Blue Cross,"he said.

And with that, they took off down the path at a leisurely pace, artfully dodging road apples, the warm, dappled sunlight blinking through the trees. The rain had stopped for a while, and the sunshine dried the earth.

"Do you celebrate Easter?" the man asked.

If he could see her kitchen, with its half a dozen egg-coloring kits, its bags of Easter grass, the jelly beans, cream eggs, chocolate bunnies, and little yellow Marshmallow Peeps, he would never ask that question. "I sure do."

"Personally, it's my favorite holiday of the year."

"Why is that?"

"Don't get me wrong. I like Christmastime. It's just that Easter is a time of… rebirth, I suppose. Of growth."

"That's a nice way of looking at it," Jessica said.

"Ah, who am I kidding?" he said. "I'm just addicted to Cadbury chocolate eggs."

Jessica laughed. "Join the club."

They jogged in silence for about a quarter mile, then rounded a soft curve, and headed into a long straightaway.

"Can I ask you a question?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Why do you think he's picking Catholic girls?"

The words were a sledgehammer to Jessica's chest.

In one fluid move she had her Glock out of her holster. She pivoted, lashed out with her right foot, and swept the man's legs out from under him. In a split second she had him on his face, in the dirt, the weapon to the back of his head.

"Don't fucking move."

"I just-"

"Shut up."

A few other joggers caught up to them. The expressions on their faces wrote the whole story.

"I'm a police officer," Jessica said. "Back up, please."

Joggers became sprinters. They all looked at Jessica's gun and took off as fast as they could down the path.

"If you just let me-"

"Did I stutter? I told you to shut up."

Jessica tried to catch her breath. When she did, she asked: "Who are you?"

There was no reason to wait for an answer. Besides, the fact that her knee was on the back of his head and his face was smashed into the turf probably precluded a response.

Jessica unzipped the back pocket of the man's jogging pants, pulled out a nylon wallet. She flipped it open. She saw the press card and wanted to pull the trigger even more.

Simon Edward Close. The Report.

She kneeled on the back of his head a little longer, a little harder. It was at times like these that she wished she weighed in at about 210.

"You know where the Roundhouse is?" she asked.

"Yes, of course. I-"

"Good," Jessica said. "Here's the deal. If you want to talk to me, you go through the press office there. If that's too much trouble, then stay the fuck out of my face."

Jessica eased the pressure on his head by a few ounces.

"Now, I'm going to get up and go to my car. Then I'm going to leave the park.You are going to remain in this position until I am gone. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Simon replied.

She put all her weight on his head. "I mean it. If you move, if you even lift your head, I'm going to take you in for questioning on the Rosary Killings. I can lock you up for seventy-two hours without having to explain myself to anyone. Capeesh?"

"Ga-beetch," Simon said, the fact that he had a pound of wet sod in his mouth inhibiting his attempt at speaking Italian.

A little while later, when Jessica started her car and headed for the park exit, she glanced back at the trail. Simon was still there, facedown.

God, what an asshole.