Rosary girls

6 0

The Philadelphia Police department labored beneath the microscope of the national media. The three networks, as well as Fox and CNN, had camera crews set up all over town and were running updates three or four times per cycle.

The local television news ran the Rosary Killer story in heavy rotation, complete with its own logo and theme music. They also featured a listing of Catholic churches offering Good Friday masses, as well as a handful that were holding prayer vigils for the victims.

Catholic families, especially those with daughters-whether they attended parochial schools or not-were proportionately terrified. Police expected a heavy increase in stranger shootings. Mail carriers, FedEx and UPS drivers were at particular risk. As were people with whom others had a grudge.

I thought he was the Rosary Killer, Your Honor.

I had to shoot him.

I've got a daughter.

The department held the news of Brian Parkhurst's death from the media as long as they could, but it eventually leaked, like it always does. The district attorney had addressed the media gathered in front of 1421 Arch Street and, when asked if there was evidence that Brian Parkhurst was the Rosary Killer, she had to tell them no. Parkhurst had been a material witness.

And so the carousel spun. The news of the fourth victim brought them all out of the woodwork. As Jessica approached the Roundhouse, she saw a few dozen people with cardboard signs milling around the sidewalk on Eighth Street, most of their sentiments proclaiming the end of the world. Jessica thought she saw the names JEZEBEL and MAGDALENE on a few of the signs.

Inside it was worse. As much as they all knew that no credible leads would come out of it, they had to take all their statements. B-movie Rasputins, the requisite Jasons and Freddys. Then there were the ersatz Hannibals, Gacys, Dahmers, and Bundys to deal with. In all, there had been more than one hundred confessions.

Up in the Homicide Unit, as Jessica began to gather her notes for the task force meeting, a rather shrill female laugh from across the room drew her attention.

What kind of lunatic is this? she wondered.

She looked up, and what she saw stopped her in her tracks. It was the blond girl in the ponytail and leather jacket. The girl she had seen with Vincent. Here. In the Roundhouse. Although now that Jessica got a good look at her, it was clear that she was not nearly as young as she had originally thought. Still, seeing her in this setting was completely surreal.

"What the hell is this?" Jessica said, loud enough for Byrne to hear. She tossed her notebooks on the assignment desk.

"What?" Byrne asked.

"You've got to be kidding me," she said. She tried, and failed, to calm herself. "This… bitch has the balls to come down here and get in my face?"

Jessica took a step forward, and her posture must have taken on a certain menace, because Byrne stepped between her and the woman.

"Whoa," Byrne said. "Hang on. What are you talking about?"

"Let me by, Kevin."

"Not until you tell me what's going on."

"That's the bitch I saw with Vincent the other day. I can't believe she-"

"Who, the blonde?"

"Yeah. She's the-"

"That's Nicci Malone."

"Who?"

"Nicolette Malone."

Jessica processed the name, came up with nothing. "This is supposed to mean something to me?"

"She's a narcotics detective. She works out of Central."

Something suddenly dislodged in Jessica's chest, an ice floe of shame and guilt that chilled her. Vincent had been on the job. The blond woman was someone he worked with.

Vincent had tried to tell her, and she wouldn't listen. Once again, she had made a Grade-A asshole out of herself.

Jealousy, thy name is Jessica. The task force prepared to meet.

The discovery of Kristi Hamilton and Wilhelm Kreuz had brought a call to the Homicide Unit from the FBI. The task force was scheduled to convene the following day with a pair of agents from the Philadelphia field office. The jurisdictional considerations of these crimes had been in question since the discovery of Tessa Wells, given the very real possibility that all of the victims were kidnapped, which made at least part of the crimes federal. The usual territorial objections were voiced, as expected, but none too vehemently. The truth was the task force needed all the help it could get. The Rosary Girl murders had escalated so rapidly, and now, with the murder of Wilhelm Kreuz, promised to expand into areas the PPD was simply not equipped to deal with.

The Crime Scene Unit had half a dozen technicians in Kreuz's Kensington Avenue apartment alone. At eleven thirty Jessica retrieved her e-mail.

In her mailbox were a few pieces of spam, along with a few pieces of e-mail from GTA knuckleheads she had put away in the Auto Squad, relaying the same invectives, the same promises to see her again one day.

Amid the same-old, same-old there was one message from sclose@thereport.com.

She had to look at the sender's address twice. She was right. Simon Close at The Report.

Jessica shook her head at the enormity of the brass on this guy. Why on earth would this piece of shit think she wanted to hear anything he had to say?

She was just about to delete it when she saw that there was an attachment. She ran it by the virus program and it came back clean. Probably the only clean thing about Simon Close.

Jessica opened the attachment. It was a color photograph. At first, she had trouble recognizing the man in the photograph. She wondered why Simon Close would be sending her a picture of some guy she didn't know. Of course, if she understood the mind of a tabloid hack to begin with, she would start to worry about herself.

The man in the photograph was sitting in a chair, with duct tape wrapped around his chest. There was also duct tape around his forearms and wrists, securing him to the arms of the chair. The man had his eyes tightly closed, as if he might be anticipating a blow, or as if he were wishing very hard for something.

Jessica blew up the picture to twice its size.

And saw that the man didn't have his eyes closed at all.

"Oh, Christ," she said.

"What?" Byrne asked.

Jessica turned the monitor to face him.

The man in the chair was Simon Edward Close, star reporter for Philadelphia's leading shock tabloid, The Report. Someone had taped him to a dining room chair and sewn both of his eyes shut. When Byrne and Jessica approached the apartment on City Line, there was already a pair of homicide detectives on the scene. Bobby Lauria and Ted Campos.

When they entered the apartment, Simon Close was in precisely the same position he was in the photograph.

Bobby Lauria briefed Byrne and Jessica on what they knew.

"Who found him?" Byrne asked.

Lauria looked through his notes. "Friend of his. A guy named Chase. They were supposed to meet for breakfast at a Denny's on City Line. The victim didn't show. Chase called twice, then stopped over to see if something was wrong. Door was open, he called nine-one-one."

"Did you check the phone records from the pay phone at Denny's?"

"Didn't need to," Lauria said. "Both calls were on the vic's answering machine. The caller ID matched the phone at Denny's. He's legit."

"This is the POS you had the problem with last year, right?" Campos asked.

Byrne knew why he was asking, just like he knew what was coming. "Yeah."

The digital camera that took the picture was still on the tripod in front of Close. A CSU officer was dusting the camera and the tripod.

"Check this out," Campos said. He knelt next to the coffee table and, with his gloved hand, maneuvered the mouse attached to Close's laptop. He opened the iPhoto program. There were sixteen photographs, each of them titled, successively, KEVINBYRNEI.JPG, KEVINBYRNE2.JPG, and so forth. Except none of the photographs were comprehensible. It seemed as if each one had been run through a paint program and had been defaced with a drawing tool. A drawing tool colored red.

Both Campos and Lauria looked at Byrne. "Gotta ask, Kevin," Campos said.

"I know," Byrne said. They wanted his whereabouts for the past twenty-four. Neither of them suspected him of a thing, but they had to get it out of the way. Byrne, of course, knew the drill. "I'll lay it out in a statement back at the house."

"No problem," Lauria said.

"Got a cause yet?" Byrne asked, happy to change the subject.

Campos stood up, walked behind the victim. There was a small hole at the base of Simon Close's neck. It was probably caused by a drill bit.

As the CSU officers did their thing, it was clear that whoever had sewn Close's eyes shut-and there was little doubt as to who that was- had not gone for quality of workmanship. The thick black thread alternated from piercing the soft skin of the eyelid to an inch or so down the cheek. Thin rivulets of blood had trickled down the face, giving him a Christ-like visage.

Both skin and flesh were pulled tight, in an upward direction, dragging up the soft tissue around Close's mouth, exposing his incisors.

Close's upper lip was pulled up, but his teeth were together. From a few feet away, Byrne noticed that there was something black and shiny just behind the man's front teeth.

Byrne took out a pencil, gestured to Campos.

"Help yourself," Campos said.

Byrne took the pencil and gently leveraged Simon Close's teeth slightly apart. For a moment, his mouth appeared empty, as if what Byrne thought he saw was a reflection in the man's bubbled saliva.

Then a solitary item fell out, rolling down Close's chest, over his lap, and onto the floor.

The sound it made was slight, a thin plastic click on the hardwood.

Jessica and Byrne watched it roll to a stop.

They looked at each other, the significance of what they were seeing registering at the same moment. A second later, the rest of the missing rosary beads tumbled out of the dead man's mouth like a slot machine paying off.

Ten minutes later, they had counted the rosary beads, carefully avoiding contact with the surfaces, lest they disturb what might be a usable shred of forensic evidence, although the probability of the Rosary Killer tripping himself up at this point was low.

They counted twice, just to be sure. The significance of the number of beads that had been stuffed into Simon Close's mouth was not lost on anyone in the room.

There were fifty beads. All five decades.

And that meant that the rosary for the last girl in this madman's passion play had already been prepared.