The Killing Room (3 page)

Ten minutes into the day that would be his nineteenth birthday Terrell Hightower put the barrel of a 9mm pistol against the soft palate in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Around his neck were two dozen ribbons he had won on the tracks of southeastern Pennsylvania.

It was with these images in mind that Kevin Byrne pulled over near the corner of Third and Indiana. He knew he could be seen from any number of vantage points, had already been spotted. He wanted to be seen.

Byrne reached into the glove compartment, took out a cold Colt .38 revolver. He checked the cylinder, snapped it back, thinking:

In this city, any city, you are the hunter, or you are food.

Byrne put the weapon on the seat next to him, six words stalking the corners of his mind:

Terrell didn’t bang like they say.

THREE

As an icy draft knifes across the basement, the young man sits rigidly on a wooden chair. He is naked: Adam banished to this bleak and frigid garden. There are myriad whispers here, the last pleadings of the faithless.

He has been here one full day.

She looks at him, sees the bones beneath his skin. This is a moment for which she has waited all her days. In her fingertips now lives an ancient magic, a power that gives her dominion over the thieves, the fornicators, the usurers.

‘It is time,’ she says.

The young man begins to cry.

‘You must tell him what you said. Word for word. I want you to think carefully. It is very important.’

‘I … I don’t remember,’ he says.

She steps forward, lifts his chin, looks into his eyes. ‘Do you want me to tell you what you said?’

The young man nods. ‘Yes.’

‘You said: “I would do anything not to get AIDS. I would even sell my soul to the devil.”’

The young man does not respond to this. No response was expected. He glances at the opening into the other room. ‘I can’t look at him. When it happens, I can’t look at him.’

She removes her coat, folds it gently onto the altar cloth on the floor.

‘Your name has meaning in the Bible,’ she says. ‘Did you know that?’

He shakes his head. ‘No.’

‘Your name means “God is my judge.”’ She reaches into her bag, removes the hypodermic, prepares it. ‘According to the Word, Daniel was brought to Babylon. It is said he could interpret dreams.’

Seconds later, as the first drop of blood falls, as it did that terrible day on Calvary, she knows that the screams of the children of disobedience will soon fill the city.

All contracts are due.

The devil has returned to Philadelphia.

FOUR

Get it together, Jess. If you don’t, you’re going to die right here, right now.

Detective Jessica Balzano looked up. The mass of humanity that stood no more than ten feet away from her had the purest form of evil in its eyes she had ever seen. And she had seen a lot. In her time in the Philadelphia Police Department she had squared off with all types of miscreants, deviants, criminals and gangsters, had gone toe to toe with men almost double her weight. She had always come out on top.

How? A combination of things. Flexibility, speed, excellent peripheral vision, an innate ability to sense the next move. These things had served her well on the streets, in uniform, and in the Homicide Unit.

But not today. If she didn’t get her shit together, and get it together quickly, she was dead.

The bell rang. ‘Let’s go,’ Joe said. ‘Give me two hard minutes.’

Jessica was in the ring at the Joe Hand Boxing Gym on North Third, stepping into the third round of a three-round sparring session. She was in training for an upcoming exhibition bout for the Police Athletic League annual boxing tournament.

Her opponent this day was a young woman named Valentine Rhames, a nineteen-year-old who boxed out of the Rock Ministry Boxing Club on Kensington Avenue.

Jessica was no expert, but she figured girls named Valentine weren’t supposed to have fourteen-inch biceps and shoulders like Sasquatch. Not to mention fists the size of canned hams. The kid was built like
Ving
Rhames.

The upcoming event was for charity, and nobody was supposed to get hurt, but as the sound of the bell ringing in round three began to fade, and Valentine stormed across the ring, it appeared that the young woman had not gotten the memo.

Jessica sidestepped the onslaught with ease, and even though her headgear cut down on her peripheral vision, she was able to land a glancing right hand to the side of Valentine’s head. An illegal blow, technically speaking, but Jessica intended to worry about that at some point in the future.

Two minutes later the bell rang again. Jessica was drenched in sweat, hurting all over. Her opponent bounced across the ring, fresh as a daisy, put her arms around Jessica. Valentine Rhames stepped back, and delivered the knockout blow.

‘Thanks for the workout, ma’am.’

Ma’am.

Jessica wanted to drop the kid like a cheap prom dress, but remembered she’d just had the opportunity to do so and failed miserably.

*

Jessica and Vincent Balzano spent the first eight years of their marriage with one child, and for a long time Jessica had all but believed that this single blessing would be their only one.

For three years they tried mightily to conceive, consulting with their family physician many times, reading just about every book on the subject, stopping just short of visiting a fertility specialist.

Then, last year, a miracle happened. A two-year-old boy named Carlos came into their lives. They adopted him and life began anew.

To Jessica’s amazement, having a second child did not double the responsibility of being a mother. Somehow that responsibility increased fourfold. Somehow it was four times more work, took four times the planning, attention, caution. Jessica still thought about having another baby, but the past year had made her second guess herself in this area. She had grown up in a small family – by South Philly Italian Catholic standards anyway – with just herself and her brother Michael, so a boy and a girl, a few years apart, was just fine.

Still, she wanted to have another child.

A year earlier they moved from Lexington Park, in the northeast section of the city, back to South Philadelphia, just a few blocks from where Jessica was raised. The advantages were many – they were just a block from Sophie’s school, Sacred Heart of Jesus, and not far from the Italian Market. There was bread from Sarcone’s,
sfogliatelle
and cannoli from Termini’s, cheese from DiBruno’s.

This morning, as Jessica put the cereal bowls on the table, her husband Vincent came breezing through the kitchen. In a flash he had his coffee poured into his travel mug, a power bar
in hand, his coat on. He gave Jessica a kiss on the cheek, said ‘Love you, babe’, and was out the door.

Jessica sipped her coffee, looked out the window. As she watched her husband cross the street, and get into his prized, restored TransAm, she considered just how much buckshot was loaded in that
love you
,
babe
. On the surface, it meant he loved her, and she could never hear those words enough. But the rest of the load meant: for this little show of affection
you
get to make breakfast, dress both kids, make their lunches, close up the house, get them to school and pre-school, then get to work on time, doing a job that is at least as hard – the case could be made that it was harder – as mine.

Love you, babe.

Vincent Balzano was good.
Really
good. It was one of the reasons he was one of the most feared and respected detectives working out of the Narcotics Field Unit North. Vincent could turn a witness into a suspect without the person ever knowing they were giving it up. Jessica knew all his tricks, and Vincent mostly got over with his Italian charm and swarthy good looks because she let him.

With breakfast more or less eaten, Jessica did a tornado cleanup of the kitchen, piling everything in the sink for later, wiping down the countertops. Sophie and Carlos sat at the table. They had a few minutes before they had to leave.

‘Okay,’ Sophie said to her little brother. ‘Do you remember how to play?’

Carlos nodded. At three years old he was just learning to comb and part his hair, a vanity he fiercely guarded. Today, though, the part in his hair made the Schuylkill River look straight by comparison.

‘Okay.’ Sophie made a fist with her right hand, held it in front of her. ‘This is the rock.’

Carlos mimicked his sister, clenching a small fist. ‘Rock.’

Sophie flattened her hand, palm down. ‘This is paper.’

‘Paper.’ Carlos put his hand out palm up, then corrected himself, turning it palm down.

Sophie made a
V
with her index and middle finger. ‘And this is scissors.’

Again, Carlos followed the instructions. ‘Scissors.’

‘Okay. Do you remember what beats what?’

Carlos nodded.

‘Ready?’ Sophie asked.

‘Ready.’

Sophie put her hand behind her back. Carlos followed suit. Sophie said, ‘One, two,
three
.’

As Sophie pulled her fist from behind her back, and said ‘rock,’ Carlos threw out his hand – index finger and thumb extended – and yelled, ‘Gun!’

Sophie rolled her eyes, looked at her mother, back at her brother. ‘There
is
no gun, Carlos.’

‘No?’

‘No. The game is called
rock, paper, scissors
.’

Carlos giggled. ‘Okay.’

Sophie looked again at Jessica. Jessica just shrugged.

‘Boys,’ Sophie said.

The Roundhouse, the police administration building at the corner of Eighth and Race Streets, was humming when Jessica walked in at just after 8 a.m. Thank God the humming in her ears had stopped. It would begin again, she imagined, when
she next stepped into the ring, sometime in the next few days. She didn’t want to admit it, but she just didn’t bounce back like she did in her twenties.

Still, she had stood her ground with a buff nineteen-year-old, and came out of it with just a bruise or two. And sore hands. And, if truth be told, it kind of hurt on the right side when she took a deep breath. Other than that …

Maybe she
was
getting too old for this.

The Homicide Unit was ninety detectives strong, working three tours. Although the murder rate in Philadelphia had dropped in the past few years, the violence had not. New trauma centers in urban areas had eased the number of fatalities, and victims who may have died in the past were now reaching emergency care more quickly. But, as the old saying went: a homicide is just an aggravated assault gone wrong.

Somehow, with the three cases Jessica and Byrne had pending, St Michael – the patron saint of police – had smiled upon them, and they had three suspects in custody, with preliminary hearings spread out over the next two weeks.

For this one glorious moment, their plate was clean.

In most professions, that was a good thing. An empty outbox makes for a clear conscience on payday. In homicide work it meant that you were back up on the wheel. It meant that any minute someone in the City of Brotherly Love was going to pick up a gun or a knife or a bludgeon and visit violence on another human being, and it would then become your job to sort it all out, making sure the guilty party was apprehended and brought to justice, and that the loved ones of the victim were notified, their grief assuaged, their anger and rage corralled.

With this in mind Jessica sat at a computer terminal. One of her cases was a double homicide in Juniata Park, and witness statements put a second man at the scene, gun in hand, although ballistics could only ID one weapon. With only a rough description of the second suspect, Jessica decided to begin with known associates of the man they had in custody. She scrolled through mug shots, six at a time. No one looked promising.

After a few fruitless minutes the phone on the desk rang. Jessica looked longingly at her Spinach Florentine breakfast wrap from Così, the one she probably shouldn’t be eating, but somehow couldn’t resist. She hadn’t even got in a single bite.

If this call was a new case, it would be hers. She picked up the phone, punched the button.

‘Homicide. Balzano.’

At first it sounded like white noise, albeit white noise at the lower end of the spectrum, like the setting on sound conditioning machines that simulate rainstorms.

Jessica waited. And waited. Nothing.

‘This is Homicide, Detective Balzano.’

‘One God,’ the caller said.

The words were spoken in a soft whisper. The volume was so low that it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman speaking.

‘Excuse me?’ Jessica asked. ‘Could you speak up a bit?’

‘Seven churches.’

It sounded like the caller said
seven churches
. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand. Are you calling about a case?’

For a few seconds the caller said nothing. Jessica was just about to hang up when she heard:

‘You will find the first of the dead at Amber and Cumberland.’

Dead.
First
of the dead. This got Jessica’s attention.

She took out her notebook, started writing. ‘Amber and Cumberland, you say?’ Technically, this meant
East
Cumberland Street, but hardly anybody called it that. This told Jessica she was probably talking to a native Philadelphian. But not necessarily.

‘Beneath the dove,’ the caller whispered.

‘Okay. The dove. Got it. We’ll check it out. In the meantime, why don’t I –’

‘We will not speak again.’

The line went dead.

Jessica held the phone for a few seconds, trying to digest what she’d just heard. Crank call? Maybe yes, maybe no. The nutcases usually called 911. This was on a direct line.

First of the dead
.

Jessica put the phone back in its cradle, her day suddenly changed.