‘They’re collecting their birth certificates.’
They spent the night in one of the featureless motels on the expressway, paying cash. Billy slept in his clothes, his Makarov in hand, a half-dozen photographs taped to the ceiling above him.
Sean went out at dawn and returned with Egg McMuffins and orange juice. They watched the news. There was nothing on the cases.
They parked the white van across the street from the row house. Two doors down was a pizza and hoagie shack. The aromas made Billy hungry again.
‘That’s her.’
Billy turned to look at the driver. It was his brother Sean. He turned back to see the woman in the lobby of her building, taking mail out of the bank of mailboxes. She was slender and pretty.
Red dress. Gold necklace. Short blond hair.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Positive.’
Billy looked at the photograph in his hand, the one he’d taken of the woman on the SEPTA train eight days earlier. Her face was a blank.
‘Isn’t she supposed to be at work?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. She’s supposed to be.’
They were there, at the woman’s apartment building, to do reconnaissance, to find a way in and a way out. They were not supposed to see the woman, not until later that night.
‘Let’s light her up now,’ Sean said.
‘No.’
It was the middle of the morning. There were too many people. They would be caught, and there would be hell to pay.
‘We need to know the layout.’
Sean reached for his Phillies cap, his sunglasses. He put a hand on the door.
‘Wait,’ Billy said. ‘I’ll go.’
Billy attached the suppressor to his Makarov. He pinned the photograph inside his coat and stepped out of the van.
‘Can I help you with something?’
Red dress. Gold necklace. Short blond hair.
‘I’m sorry?’ Billy asked. He wanted to reach into his coat, take out the photograph of the woman – Danielle Spencer was her name – but he couldn’t do it, not while she was in front of him. She was standing next to the door to her apartment, keys in hand.
‘I was just looking for someone who lives here.’ As he said this, he pointed over his shoulder, back down the hallway.
‘I know everyone in this building. Who are you looking for?’
Billy needed to come up with a name.
‘Emily,’ he said. ‘My friend Emily.’
The woman thought for a moment. ‘There’s no one in the building with that name. Are you sure you have the right building?’
Billy glanced at the lobby and saw it. There was a camera pointing at him.
He looked out the front door, at the man in the van. It was Sean. Sean was right. They had to do this now.
‘Maybe I do have the wrong place,’ he said. ‘What is the address here?’
He could see the suspicion growing in the woman; in her posture, the way she pulled the slightest bit away from him.
Before she could respond, the door to her apartment opened. Billy looked over her shoulder to see a man – a big man – standing there. The man wore a gray uniform and had a revolver on his hip, strapped into a gun belt.
‘Hey, baby,’ he said to the woman.
‘Hi,’ she replied.
Red dress. Gold necklace. Short blond hair
‘Who’s your friend?’ the man asked.
Billy could tell by the condescending tone, the way the man all but spat the word
friend
, that he looked on him as a lowlife. He felt the fury start to build.
‘I think I may have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘Sorry to have troubled you.’
Billy turned to walk away. He unbuttoned his coat. The man stepped fully into the hallway, put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Hang on a minute, pal.’
As the man spun him around, Billy closed his hand on the grip of the Makarov. Facing the man fully, he said, ‘Pal? Are we friends already?’
For a moment, the man was stopped by Billy’s words. Then he dropped his hand toward his service weapon. It only took a second, but a second was long enough. Billy set his weight, reeled back and slammed a shoulder into the center of the man’s chest, knocking him backward into the apartment. Before the man could recover, Billy drew the Makarov and shot him twice in the head.
An hour later, when the death song had been sung, Billy knelt in front of the woman. She was tied up in a chair in the middle of her living room. They had found her birth certificate. They had everything they needed to complete her line in the square.
AREPO
.
Red dress. Gold necklace. Short blond hair.
‘Do you know my face?’ Billy asked.
The woman didn’t move.
As Sean unfolded his razor, Billy stood, circled behind the woman. When he was done reciting the prayer, he put both hands on her shoulders, drawing in her essence, closed his eyes as…
…
the afternoon sun filters through the trees, the sound of Billy Joel’s ‘Captain Jack’ afloat on the breeze, the dark blue sedan parked on South Taney Street, doors open, the man in the black leather coat kneeling in front of the girl, her mouth a twist of fear and distress, tears streaming down her face as the man turns, a bag of M&Ms in hand
…
Billy opened his eyes.
After he carefully placed the handkerchief, Sean paced the small living room. He hit the vial twice in rapid succession. Billy wondered if Sean had slept at all in the past two days.
Sean stopped pacing, reached into Billy’s coat, unpinned his photograph. He handed it to Billy.
‘I need you to hold this in your hand. You
have
to keep my picture in your hand. We’re almost done. We can’t have any mistakes.’
‘Okay,’ Billy said, but his voice sounded far away.
‘We’re going to get the last of the money. Then we’ll draw the final line in the square.’
To Billy, it didn’t seem possible. The feeling filled him with something he had never felt before, something buoyant.
He imagined it was what other people called hope.
The message on Byrne’s voicemail was from an old friend from his academy days, Ron Cimaglio. Ron was a captain in the 17th District. He had seen the alert posted for Michael and Sean Farren, and the names triggered a recent memory.
Michael Farren had crossed Captain Cimaglio’s radar just a few days earlier.
Emily Carson was a willowy, pretty woman in her late twenties. She wore a lemon-yellow dress and a delicate gold sweater pendant in the shape of a rose.
Before leaving the Roundhouse, Byrne read the summary written by the two officers who had spoken to Emily Carson on the day in question. The officers underlined the entry that Emily was legally blind.
Byrne met the woman in a small study cubicle off the main room of the Queen Memorial Library. He made notes as Emily told him how she had met Michael Farren, and how Michael had come to the library on an almost weekly basis for many months.
‘He always brought me roses,’ she said. ‘Every time.’
As she said this, her fingers played over the gold pendant.
‘Did he say where he bought them?’ Byrne asked.
‘It never occurred to me to ask.’
‘I understand,’ Byrne said. ‘Do you recall your conversation with the police officers? About why they wanted to talk to you?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Alex said Michael had a gun. It was Alex who called the police.’
‘Did you have any reason to doubt what Mr Kiraly was saying?’
‘I had
many
reasons to doubt what he said,’ she said. ‘I guess I just didn’t want to believe it. I mean, I don’t know Alex that well, but I don’t know him to be a liar or a teller of tall tales. I didn’t know
what
to think.’
‘And that’s the last time you spoke to Michael Farren?’
‘Yes. It was after we went for a walk on my lunch break.’
Byrne flipped through his notes. ‘You told the officers that you and Michael went to a store a few blocks from here. Is that right?’
Emily nodded. ‘Yes. It was some kind of electronics store.’
‘Do you recall where it was?’
Emily gave him walking directions.
‘Do you remember anything Michael said at the time that might have sounded strange, or out of the ordinary?’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘Did he seem agitated, or different from usual?’
Emily remained silent for a few moments. ‘I’m sorry, detective. I just can’t think straight.’
‘It’s okay,’ Byrne said. ‘Take your time. I know this must be a difficult conversation for you to have.’
Emily took a deep breath, slowly released it. ‘No. I don’t remember anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Did Michael tell you what he bought at the store?’
‘Yes. He told me he bought a motion detector.’
‘A motion detector,’ Byrne said. ‘Did he say why he needed it?’
Emily shook her head. ‘No. I made a little joke about it at the time. It seems so long ago now.’
‘Did he say where he was going when you parted company that day?’
‘No.’
Byrne could see that he was losing her. She was clearly on the verge of crying.
‘It can’t possibly be true,’ she said. ‘What they’re saying Michael has done. All those people. It has to be a mistake.’
Byrne didn’t know what to say. He had been to the crime scenes, had seen what the Farren brothers had wrought. He knew very well how people presented different faces to the world, but he was having a difficult time reconciling the horrors of what he had seen with the gentle soul being described to him by this young woman.
‘We just need to talk to him,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea where he might be right now?’
‘I would tell you if I knew, Detective Byrne. For Michael’s sake. He never told me where he lived.’ She gestured to the main room of the library, to the location in general. ‘This is the only world I shared with him.’
It was a long shot, but Byrne decided to go for it. He took out his cell phone.
‘I need to ask you a favor.’
Emily looked surprised. ‘Of course.’
‘Would you be willing to help us bring Michael in?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him.’
Byrne considered what he was asking. ‘I’d like us to go over to the side of the room where the magazines are. Would that be all right?’
‘Okay,’ Emily said. ‘May I ask why?’
Byrne stood, took her hand in his and said, ‘The light is better.’
Twenty minutes later, Byrne walked to the electronics store about which Emily had spoken, an old-school emporium called Circuit World. He showed Michael Farren’s picture to the two clerks. Neither recognized him.
The owner went through receipts for items purchased around the day and time Byrne specified. There was a record of the purchase of a motion detector at the right time, but no credit card transaction and therefore no billing address.
As Byrne had expected, Michael Farren had paid cash.
Byrne stood in front of the huge whiteboard, the crime-scene photographs of the victims arrayed at the top. Robert Kilgore, the Rousseau family, Edwin Channing.
There was a wire, a direct line that connected all of them. Were these retribution killings? Had these people had dealings with Danny Farren or his sons?
It didn’t seem likely, but if Byrne had learned anything in his time on the job, it was that there were very few coincidences, and nothing was beyond the pale.
Before he could call his contacts at South, checking on the status of Sean and Michael’s known associates, his phone rang. It was Jessica.
‘What’s up?’
‘Turns out Michael Farren was in a coma for almost two years after that accident in 1988. Did you know about this?’
‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘I never followed up.’
‘Well, when he came out of it, he had numerous physical problems, but also another problem. A neurological disorder.’
‘What was it?’
‘I found the doctor who treated him. He’s expecting us.’
Dr Bruce Sheldon was in his late-fifties. He was now in private practice, but had worked for the county mental health system for fifteen years after graduation from Penn State.
They met at his small, comfortable office on Chestnut Street, near Fifth.
As they settled in, Jessica scanned the walls. Sheldon was board-certified in psychiatry, child psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine.
They got the small talk out of the way in short order.
Byrne produced a photograph of Michael Farren. He’d blown up the mug shot and cropped it to look more like a portrait. The effect was less than convincing, particularly to a psychiatrist who had dealt with criminals for thirty years.
‘It’s our understanding that you treated Michael Farren.’
‘Yes,’ said Sheldon. ‘He was remanded to juvenile detention at the time. He spent a little over a year there.’
‘What was he in for?’
‘He was convicted of an assault against a county employee.’
‘Did it involve a weapon?’
‘No,’ Sheldon said. ‘But the assault was severe enough to send the victim to the hospital.’
‘How did Farren come to be on your radar?’ Byrne asked.
‘He was considered to be uncooperative. Didn’t accept authority. Of course, that’s not exactly a rarity in the juvenile detention system. It’s one of the reasons they enter the system in the first place.’
‘Were there any violent incidents when he was inside?’ Byrne asked.
Sheldon glanced at the file in front of him. ‘Minor scuffles with other boys. Nothing too violent. After a while the others found out about his family and gave him a wider berth.’
‘They knew his father was Danny Farren?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘A lot of these kids – most of them, in my experience – are acting out. Not really bad kids, but acting out to get attention. Someone like Michael Farren was seen as a legacy kid, a third-generation criminal.’
‘You said uncooperative. How so?’
‘Well for one thing, he insisted he was not Michael Farren. He said his name was Billy.’
‘He called himself Billy?’
‘Yes,’ Sheldon said. ‘Billy the Wolf. It’s from a song by —’
‘The Stark,’ Byrne said.
‘You’ve heard of it?’
Byrne just nodded.
‘Another of his behaviors included seeing the same corrections officers and facility personnel every day but claiming he didn’t know who they were. At first it was thought that this was part of the con. You’d be amazed at some of the things these kids come up with.’
‘Can you tell us what your initial findings were?’
‘Because Michael had suffered a severe head trauma, and indeed was in a coma for a long time, it was somewhat difficult to diagnose his condition. I think we went through three months straight of tests. In the end, among other findings, we discovered that he suffered from a somewhat rare neurological disorder called prosopagnosia.’
‘What is that?’
‘It is a cognitive disorder of face perception, sometimes called face blindness, where the ability to recognize faces is impaired. Other traits of visual processing – for instance, object discrimination and intellectual functioning, such as decision-making – often remain intact. Sometimes these functions are enhanced. People with prosopagnosia can be quite brilliant. Oliver Sacks, for one.’
‘The doctor?’
‘Yes,’ said Sheldon. ‘The term wasn’t even coined until 1944 or so. Men with post-traumatic stress disorder and severe head trauma were returning from the war and not being able to recognize their own wives and families.’
‘How does this manifest in the real world?’ Byrne asked.
‘Well, if you suffer from this syndrome, even in its mildest form, you could meet someone, spend a good deal of time with them, then a day later not know them from Adam.’
‘So is it possible that you might use clothing as a recognition strategy?’
‘Absolutely. The color, texture and style of clothing can be a very powerful tool. Prosopagnosics sometimes use a fractional strategy that involves clues such as clothing, body shape and hair color.’
The changing of clothes, Jessica thought. This was why Farren was making them put on other clothes. He needed the clothing as a marker.
‘Might the person use a photograph as a reference point?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Sheldon. ‘Would you like to see some of the tests we use as diagnostic tools?’
Jessica looked at Byrne, back. ‘Sure.’
Sheldon got up, crossed the room to a table against the wall. On it was a 27-inch iMac. He hit a few keys. The screen defaulted to a screen saver depicting Robert Indiana’s
LOVE
sculpture. He turned back to his guests.
‘This is a pure test of facial recognition,’ he said. ‘Shall we begin?’
‘Okay,’ Jessica said.
Dr Sheldon tapped a key. On the new screen were six ovals: three across, two down. In each oval was a different face. Just a face, from cheek to cheek, hairline to the bottom of the chin. No hair, no ears, nothing below the chin. Four of the faces were white; two were black.
Sheldon then handed Jessica and Byrne each a blank piece of paper with six empty ovals.
‘Without consulting each other, I want you to fill in the name of each of the people on the screen, if you recognize them. If you don’t, just leave it blank.’
To Jessica – and she was certain Byrne – this didn’t seem too difficult. She wrote down six names; Byrne followed suit.
Dr Sheldon tapped a key. The faces disappeared. The screen went blank.
‘How did we do?’ he asked.
Both Jessica and Byrne handed in their sheets. Jessica saw that they had identical responses: Carroll O’Connor, Andy Reid, James Earl Jones, Ringo Starr, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Gleason.
‘You both get an A,’ Sheldon said. ‘Now I’m going to show you six more faces. I want you to tell me if you recognize any of them.’ He handed them blank sheets. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready,’ Jessica and Byrne said in unison.
He tapped a key.
What seemed to be another simple test was anything but, Jessica found. The faces were all upside down.
‘You probably want to tilt your head to the side, but don’t,’ Sheldon said.
He was right. It was Jessica’s first instinct. And it was maddening. She couldn’t identify any of the faces.
‘I don’t know any of these people,’ she said.
Sheldon looked at Byrne. ‘Detective?’
‘I think I know one,’ Byrne said. He wrote on his sheet.
‘Ready to see who these strangers are?’
Sheldon tapped a key. A moment later, all six pictures flipped, right side up. It was astonishing. Jessica recognized them all. B. B. King. Goldie Hawn. Richard Gere. Harry Dean Stanton. Anthony Hopkins. Donna Summer.
Byrne turned his paper over. He’d written
B. B. King
.
‘Awesome,’ Jessica said.
‘I’m a blues fan,’ Byrne said. ‘What can I say?’
‘Not as easy as you might think, right?’ Sheldon asked.
‘I would have bet against this,’ Byrne said. ‘I would have bet I could recognize them all.’
‘Most people would. All the parts are there – eyes, nose, mouth, eyebrows, chin – but there is no whole. No connection. We’ve run tests where the subject’s child or parent were in the mix, the right-side-up mix, and there was no recognition whatsoever.’
‘And you’re saying that this is what the world looks like to Michael Farren?’
Sheldon took a moment. ‘You know how sometimes you see footage on TV and people will be pixelated out?’
‘Sure.’
‘Some people with prosopagnosia describe it that way. They’ll fixate on a feature – hairstyle, perhaps – and use that as a marker.’
‘What about context?’ Byrne asked.
‘Very important.’
‘So if someone with this disorder is in a place with which they are very familiar, it might aid them in recognizing people they expect to be there.’
‘Absolutely,’ Sheldon said. ‘Place, time of day, even smells can be used as markers.’
‘This affects recognition of family members?’
‘Yes. Mothers, fathers, sisters brothers,’ he said. ‘I’ve read case histories of women who left their children at playgrounds because they could not recognize them.’