The stranger put his hands over his head.
‘Coat,’ the stranger said.
The word.
‘What?’
‘Coat, Billy.’
Billy touched the barrel of the Makarov to the man’s forehead. ‘How do you know my fucking
name
?’
The man looked at the floor but said nothing.
‘Don’t you move,’ Billy said.
He took a step back, eased opened the right side of his coat. He saw the man in the blue coveralls with the light blue shirt beneath.
‘Sean,’ Billy said.
The man’s name was Sean. Sean Patrick Farren. He was Billy’s twin brother. Billy’s name was Michael Anthony Farren. More accurately, that was his Christian name, the one on his birth records, the one used in sunlight.
In the shadows, where death songs knew who must live and who must die, he was Billy the Wolf.
It was time.
As Sean unfolded his straight razor, Billy knelt in front of the old man, looked at his face. It was featureless, empty. It would not remain so for long.
‘I want you to know that it
has
all meant something, sir,’ Billy said softly. ‘Don’t think it has not. I’ve been to the other side, and I know.’
He waited for a response. None was forthcoming.
‘It is – all of it, every morning, evening and afternoon, since that day in 1960 – a palindrome, the same forward as it is backwards. It is faultless. It cannot be deconstructed.’
He placed a hand on the man’s trembling shoulder, gave him a few moments to gather his final dignity.
‘I am about to see it all,’ Billy said. ‘Everything. Every single moment of your life. Do you have any regrets?’
The man nodded. ‘Many.’
‘As do we all.’ Billy took the man’s hands, closed his eyes, drew in the man’s essence, as the…
…
door swings open and a gust of wintry wind blows in, the sound of bones shattering beneath skin, frozen iron on hot flesh, the primal roar of men in the grip of madness, blood splattered on virgin snow, the taller of the two men turning, his eyes feral, rimmed with fire, a man on his knees before him, his split skull a mass of glistening white bone, the taller man running, running, his face forever stamped in red relief as
…
Billy opened his eyes.
He felt weightless, emptied, freed. He let the images in his mind feather to blackness.
‘Do you know my face?’ he asked the old man.
‘Yes.’
Billy took his Makarov in hand. ‘
I saw a stranger today
,’ he began.
He took the suppressor from his pocket and attached it to the barrel of the Makarov. The tooling was perfect, the metal cool and smooth between his fingers. He’d made it himself in the cellar. He liked the welcoming warmth of the cellar, his windowless womb.
When he reached the final line of the blessing he slid a round into the chamber.
‘
O, oft and oft and oft, goes Christ
…’
He reached out, felt the man’s heartbeat. He gently touched the tip of the suppressor to the man’s chest.
‘…
in the stranger’s guise
.’
He squeezed the trigger. The powerful Makarov bucked in his hand as the old man’s body jerked forward then back, a rag doll in the grip of a giant.
Billy stood, watched the old man’s soul escape his body, his final reckoning rising into a delicate blue light. He saw the old man as a boy, a young sailor, a father, all faces suddenly clear, rendered with a master’s hand. He watched as the life force capered once about his lifeless body, then, seeing that the living world had finished its trade, shimmered into a pearlescent curl, and was gone.
Billy knew that within minutes he would not remember the old man.
Before they left the house he took two pictures.
Snap. Snap.
Just like the other times.
Back in the SUV, with Sean at the wheel, Billy pulled down the visor.
He knew the man in the mirror, even though no face stared back. The mirror was the only self-portrait he needed. The mirror was why he had grown his hair long. To recognize himself, to remember, to know himself as a tribe of one.
His name was Michael Anthony Farren, son of Daniel and Deena, grandson to Liam and Máire Farren.
But that was only when he stepped from the shadows.
Here, in this blackened rind of night, he was Billy.
Across the street from the death house, Detective Kevin Francis Byrne sat in his car, thinking, as he had so many times before, how there was a stillness that came to a place where murder had been done, a calm that gathered and kept to itself every spoken word, every scrape of a heel, every lament of a rusted hinge.
Even in the heart of a city, in the middle of the day, the death house was quiet.
Byrne knew this silence well. He had stood in more death houses than he cared to recall, but recall them he did, every one. As a detective in the homicide unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, he had taken part in the investigation of more than a thousand murders and, given time, could relate some relevant detail about each case. It wasn’t an ability about which he was particularly boastful – he knew cops who recalled the street address of every job, even twenty years after their retirement; it was what it was.
The patrol officer standing sentry at the door was not much older than Byrne had been his rookie year. The officer – P/O Skinner – was as white as a sheet.
When Byrne was in uniform, perhaps six days on the job, he caught a last-out call about a domestic disturbance. The domestic turned out to be a homicide. Byrne had opened the bedroom door to find a woman in her forties all but dismembered on her marital bed, blood everywhere, including the spackled ceiling. He recalled the detectives arriving that night, just a few days after Thanksgiving, cold coffees in hand, road salt caked on the cuffs of their off-the-rack suit pants. In that death house had been a radio, a big North Philly blaster, talking about how crack killed Apple Jack.
Byrne remembered the lead homicide detective at that time – a scuffed lifer named Nicky Rocks – nodding to him upon entry, touching a finger to his right ear, as if to say:
Good job, kid. Now turn that fucking shit off
.
Byrne looked in his side mirror. A clear night, a plum-colored sky. Occasional headlights cut the gloom on Morris Street.
With his seniority, Byrne could work any shift he wanted, of course, or not work at all. Most of the homicide detectives he had known throughout his career had already retired by the time they’d reached his age. Byrne was already looking at full pension.
The older he got, the more he realized that night was his time. Insomnia came with the job, but that wasn’t it. He saw more in the dark, heard more,
felt
more.
If he retired, what would he do? Go private? Work security? Bodyguard to the rich and famous? He’d had offers, mostly from other retired cops who’d started their own firms.
Some nights he felt every moment of his age. But he knew that after a hot shower, a few hours’ sleep and his first coffee of the day, he would be that young badge again.
A month earlier he had gotten a new assignment. He was still on the line squad, the unit that handled fresh homicides, but now led a team of rapid-response detectives. As the head of this unit Byrne could request any detective on any shift, even detectives from other divisions, in order to hit the ground running on any job for which he saw the need.
As a result, he found himself at crime scenes almost every day.
Byrne knew what he was going to see in this death house, but still had to prepare himself for it. He’d had a brief summary from his supervisor, who’d received the initial report from the two officers who had responded to a 911 call.
A man named Edwin Channing lived at this address. He was eighty-six years old, lived alone. Channing had subscribed to Med-Alert, a medical emergency alert service. At just after 1.20 this morning, the service received a signal from Channing’s address and, getting no response from the man, called police dispatch.
According to P/O Raab, Skinner’s partner, the back door had been unlocked. He’d entered the premises and found the victim in the living room. He had not immediately found the device that summoned the Med-Alert dispatcher. It was not in plain sight, and according to protocol, a patrol officer was not permitted to touch the body.
Byrne knew what he was going to encounter was bad, but the bigger picture was worse. As soon as he heard the circumstances, he knew. If you spent as much time in a homicide division as he had, you could all but draw a sketch of the scene in your mind after just hearing the summary. Most commercial-robbery homicides looked similar, as did most domestic homicides.
This was the second incident of similar if not identical MO in as many days. Both as a result of a home invasion, or what was supposed to
look
like a home invasion.
There were now four dead.
The first scene was on a quiet street in the Melrose Park section of the city. The Rousseau family: Angelo, Laura and Mark. Angelo, the father, had been forty years old. He owned and operated a gift shop in Old City. His wife Laura, thirty-nine, was a home-maker. Their son Mark was seventeen. Mark Rousseau was a track star.
The timeline, as investigators understood it, was as follows:
This past Friday evening, Mark Rousseau was dropped off at approximately 6.20 p.m. by a school friend, Carl Fiore. The two had finished track practice earlier, and had stopped for a burger on Montgomery Avenue.
Carl Fiore said he did not recall if Angelo Rousseau’s car, a 2012 Ford Focus, had been parked in the drive at the time.
At some time between 8 p.m. on Friday, and 7.30 a.m. on Saturday, a person or persons entered the Rousseau home – it appeared that they were granted entry, or had a key; there was no sign of forced entry – and proceeded to ransack the entire dwelling. There was not a drawer, cupboard, closet or storage box that had not been rummaged through. Investigators were currently interviewing extended family and co-workers, as well as the Rousseau family’s insurance agents, in an attempt to determine what, if anything, had been stolen.
But even though the house had been turned upside down, even though the most personal items belonging to Angelo, Laura and Mark Rousseau were strewn around the living space, this was no burglary.
When Angelo’s sister Anne-Marie came by at 7.30 on Saturday to take her sister-in-law to the Italian market, what she found was horrifying beyond words.
The Rousseau family were discovered, bound and gagged on dining room chairs in a small circle in the center of the living room. They had each been shot, once, through the heart. The crime-scene unit had collected three slugs, all presumptively 9 mm, all most likely fired from the same weapon.
But as brutal as these cold-blooded killings were, the killer was not yet done with Laura Rousseau’s body.
Detective John Shepherd, the lead investigator on the case, spent the night at the scene carefully logging the documents and papers that were strewn about the house. Near the top of his summary was a curious finding.
Although a number of official documents were found, Laura Rousseau’s birth certificate was not one of them. The birth certificates of both Angelo and Mark Rousseau were found on the floor of the small office on the first floor.
A call to the Rousseaus’ bank confirmed that they did not rent a safe deposit box.
The crime-scene unit spent twenty-four hours at the scene collecting forensic evidence: hair, fibers, blood, fingerprints. To date, the only fingerprints found belonged to the Rousseau family. The firearms identification unit was currently investigating the slugs, in hopes of matching them to a weapon used in another crime.
The fact that no fingerprints were found on the duct tape suggested that the killer, or killers, wore gloves.
And now they had struck again.
Byrne would have to wait for FIU to submit a report on the discharged bullet from this scene, if recovered, but he was certain it was the same animal.
He could smell him.
Byrne flipped on the light in Edwin Channing’s small kitchen. With gloved hands he opened a wall cabinet next to the stove. Inside he found geometrically arranged dry goods. Boxes of pasta, boxes of rice, boxes of flapjack mix. Another cupboard held neatly stacked cans of soup, cranberry sauce, sweetcorn. All store brands.
He opened one of the drawers. Inside he found cutlery for two. Two knives, two forks, two soup spoons, two teaspoons. By all the evidence, this man lived alone. The pictures on the mantelpiece suggested he had been married, and for quite some time. The oldest photograph showed the victim in his naval whites, his arm around the waist of a petite woman with dark hair and sparkling eyes. The most recent photographs showed the older man and older woman sitting on a bench in the park. It looked to be fifteen or twenty years earlier.
Byrne closed the drawer thinking that the victim could not bring himself to dispose of, or put in storage, the second set of cutlery.
He put on fresh gloves, went upstairs, careful not to put his hands on the railing. There were two bedrooms on the second floor, along with a bathroom. One bedroom was used as storage.
Before stepping into Edwin Channing’s room, he closed his eyes for a moment, took in the scant night sounds, the smells. Potpourri carpet deodorizer, liniment, the faint odor of a cigarette. He hadn’t smelled it downstairs, nor were there any ashtrays on the tables.
Does the killer smoke?
Does the killer frequent a place where people smoke
?
When Byrne had been a young detective, he’d always carried a pack of Marlboros and a pack of Newports. One regular. One menthol. He had never been much of a smoker, but the people he talked to – witnesses and suspects alike – invariably were. It was amazing what you could learn for the cost of a much-needed and well-timed cigarette.
He stepped into the bedroom, flipped on the light. A pair of table lamps came to life, one on either side of the double bed. The bed was made, military tight, with a beige brocade duvet.
But that was the only tidy thing in the room.
As with the Rousseau house, every drawer was open, their contents strewn about the room. A jewelry box lay upside down on the floor. A metal box, perhaps used as a strongbox, was open and empty at his feet. Two suitcases, probably taken from the top shelf of the lone closet, were open and empty on the left side of the bed. The nightstand drawers were on the floor, upside down. Next to them sprawled a variety of generic ointments and cold tablets.
While CSU processed the first floor, Byrne went down to the basement, flipped on the light. Two bare bulbs in porcelain sockets hung from an unfinished ceiling. The cellar was mostly empty, well kept. There was a seventies-vintage Maytag washer and dryer on the far wall, beneath the glass block that bordered the sidewalk. To the left was an even older utility tub. A towel bar had been affixed to the face; a pair of powder-blue hand towels hung neatly. Furnace, hot-water heater, humidifier.
To the right was a small workbench. There was a utility lamp hanging from the low ceiling over it. Byrne pulled the chain. On the wall was a small pegboard with basic tools. Four or five screwdrivers, a claw hammer, a pair of crescent wrenches, a pair of needle-nose pliers.
None of the tools were out of place. If the killers had visited this cellar, it appeared that they had not disturbed anything, or had returned everything to its proper place. Byrne picked at a long-dried daub of carpenter’s glue on the bench, trying to make some kind of sense of these crimes.
‘Detective?’
The voice came from the top of the stairs. It sounded like P/O Skinner.
‘Yeah.’
‘The ME is here. They’re going to start to process. Is there anything you want to do first?’
Byrne took a few moments to gather his thoughts. He retrieved his phone from his pocket, tapped the camera icon. ‘I’m on my way up.’
He turned off the utility light and walked up the narrow stairs.
Although his photographs would not be entered into evidence – indeed, they would be kept as far away as possible from the official photos and video taken by both the crime-scene unit and the ME’s office – he’d known he was going to take them from the moment he got the call.
He stood in the middle of the living room, carefully avoiding the small yellow markers that indicated possible blood evidence on the rug.
Somehow, when he looked at the screen on his phone, framing the victim’s body, it seemed as if he had seen this before. He had, of course, witnessed the same horror at the Rousseau scene, but reduced this way, on a four-inch screen, it was all put into some kind of dark and primordial perspective.
After Edwin Channing was shot through the heart – as with Laura Rousseau, but not her husband and son – the killer had taken a very sharp instrument and carefully removed his face.