The Killing Room

FORTY-ONE

From the vestibule at St Ignatius’s Jessica and Byrne watched the crime-scene officers establish a search grid. A half-dozen technicians would spend the rest of the day and night collecting any and all potential evidence — hair, fiber, fingerprints, fluids. It was an exasperatingly slow and exacting process.

Byrne walked over to where Jessica stood.

‘If they don’t come up with something I’m going to rip this place apart with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

Before Jessica could respond her phone rang. She answered. It was Dana Westbrook.

‘What’s up, Sarge?’

‘Well, first things first,’ Westbrook said. ‘We ran the name Mara Reuben and came up empty.’

This was no surprise.

‘Where are you on the canvass?’ Westbrook continued.

‘We’re just going to start,’ Jessica said. ‘CSU is here, and I just wrapped up with the sketch artist.’

A sketch of the woman Jessica had talked to across from St Adelaide’s, the woman who called herself ‘Mara Reuben,’ would soon be circulated. Jessica had given a highly detailed description of the woman, but was now all but certain her beautiful silver hair was a wig.

‘I’m going to send some other detectives down there for the neighborhood interviews,’ Westbrook said.

‘Why?’ Jessica asked. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got DNA results back.’

‘Are you saying we have a hit?’

‘We do.’

By the time they arrived at the Roundhouse a half-dozen task-force detectives had assembled in the duty room. There was more than a little electricity in the room.

Dana Westbrook spoke first.

‘Folks, we have a serious break. We have DNA results from the first three scenes,’ she said. ‘As you know, there were hair samples found on all three sites, follicles stuck between the pages of missals. According to the lab, there was enough mitochondrial DNA present to make a match.’

Although Jessica was far from an expert on forensic hair analysis, it had come up often enough for her to have a basic understanding of what the lab could and could not do with a hair sample. If samples were matched with DNA analysis, it was better than a fingerprint.

‘All three were between pages?’ Byrne asked.

‘Yes,’ Westbrook said. ‘In Revelation. Dead solid on all three. We ran them through CODIS and every bell, whistle, and alarm went off.’

The Combined DNA Index System was a database maintained by the FBI that matched profiles of unknown perpetrators against a state’s database of convicted offenders.

‘So we have a suspect?’ Byrne asked.

Westbrook nodded. But there did not seem to be any glee in her face, or the expected — and well-earned — smug satisfaction all cops get from the gotcha phase of a homicide investigation.

‘I’m not seeing happiness here, Sarge,’ Maria Caruso said. ‘Why are we not happy?’

Westbrook handed the report to Byrne. Jessica, Josh Bontrager, and Maria Caruso crowded around.

The DNA sample found on three separate crime scenes — three separate homicide scenes — belonged to a man named Roland Hannah, a self-styled evangelist preacher who had once terrorized the city with his vigilante murders. Both Jessica and Byrne had worked a collateral case, which took investigators up the Schuylkill River.

But that wasn’t the amazing part.

The amazing part was that Roland Hannah had been an inmate in the State Correctional Facility at Graterford for the past five years.