Hi . . . this is Steph . . . please leave your message at the beep and I’ll get back to you.
Jessica clicked off. The call had established two things. Stephanie Chandler’s cell phone was still active, and it wasn’t located in her bedroom. Jessica called the number again, got the same result.
I’ll get back to you.
Jessica thought about how, when Stephanie made that cheerful greeting, she’d had no idea what was coming her way.
Jessica put everything back where she had found it, padded back down the hallway, stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet, ran the water in the sink for a few moments. She descended the stairs.
“. . . all her friends,” Faith said.
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Stephanie?” Byrne asked. “Someone who may have had a grudge against her?”
Faith just shook her head. “She didn’t have enemies. She was a good person.”
Jessica met Byrne’s eyes again. Faith was hiding something, but now was not the moment to press her. Jessica nodded slightly. They would take a run at her later.
“Again, we’re terribly sorry for your loss,” Byrne said.
Faith Chandler fixed them in a blank stare. “Why . . . why would someone do something like this?”
There were no answers. None that would suffice, or even begin to salve this woman’s grief. “I’m afraid we can’t answer that,” Jessica said. “But I can promise you that we’ll do everything we can to find who did this to your daughter.”
Like her offer of condolences, this seemed to ring hollow in Jessica’s mind. She hoped it sounded sincere to the grief-stricken woman sitting in the chair by the window.
* * *
THEY STOOD ON the corner. They looked in two directions, but were of one mind. “I’ve got to get back and brief the boss,” Jessica finally said.
Byrne nodded. “I’m officially off for the next forty-eight, you know.”
Jessica heard the sadness in that statement. “I know.”
“Ike is going to tell you to keep me out of the loop.”
“I know.”
“Call me if you hear anything.”
Jessica knew she couldn’t do that. “Okay.”
25
FAITH CHANDLER SAT ON HER DEAD DAUGHTER’S BED. WHERE had she been when Stephanie had smoothed the bedspread for the last time, creasing it beneath the pillow in her precise and dutiful way? What had she been doing when Stephanie had placed her menagerie of plush animals in a perfect row against the headboard?
She had been at work, as always, dogging the end of another shift, her daughter a constant, a given, an absolute.
Can you think of anyone who might have wanted hurt Stephanie?
She had known the moment she opened the door. The pretty young woman and the tall, confident-looking man in the dark suit. They had a look about them that said they did this often. Brought heartache to the door like carryout.
It was the young woman who told her. She had known it would be. Woman-to-woman. Eye-to-eye. It was the young woman who had cut her in two.
Faith Chandler glanced at the corkboard on her daughter’s bedroom wall. Clear plastic pushpins prismed rainbows in the sun. Business cards, travel brochures, newspaper clippings. It was the calendar that hurt the most. Birthdays in blue. Anniversaries in red. Future past.
She had thought about slamming the door in their faces. Maybe that would have kept the pain from entering. Maybe that would have kept the heartache out there with the people in the papers, the people on the news, the people in the movies.
Police learned today that . . .
This just in . . .
An arrest has been made . . .
Always in the background as she made dinner. Always someone else. Flashing lights, white-sheeted gurneys, grim-faced spokesmen. Over at six thirty.
Oh, Stephie love.
She drained her glass, the whiskey in search of the sorrow within. She picked up the phone, waited.
They wanted her to come down to the morgue and identify the body. Would she know her own daughter in death? Wasn’t it
life
that made her Stephanie?
Outside, the summer sun dazzled the sky. The flowers would never be brighter or more fragrant; the children, never happier. All the time in the world for hopscotch and grape drink and rubber pools.
She slipped the photograph out of the frame on the dresser, turned it over in her hands, the two girls in it forever frozen at life’s threshold. What had been a secret all these years now demanded to be free.
She replaced the phone. She poured another drink.
There would be time, she thought. God willing.
There would be time.
26
PHIL KESSLER LOOKED LIKE A SKELETON. IN ALL THE TIME Byrne had known him, Kessler had been a hard drinker, a two-fisted glutton, at least twenty-five pounds overweight. Now his hands and face were gaunt and pallid, his body a brittle husk.
Despite the flowers and bright get-well cards scattered around the man’s hospital room, despite the brisk activity of the crisply clad staff, a team dedicated to preserving and prolonging life, the room smelled like sadness.
While a nurse took Kessler’s blood pressure, Byrne thought about Victoria. He didn’t know if this was the beginning of something real, if he and Victoria would ever be intimate again, but waking up in her apartment made him feel as if something had been reborn within him, as if something long dormant had poked through the soil of his heart.
It felt good.
Victoria had made him breakfast that morning. She had scrambled two eggs, made him rye toast, and served it to him in bed. She had put a carnation on his tray and a lipstick kiss on his folded napkin. Just the presence of that flower and that kiss told Byrne how much was missing from his life. Victoria had kissed him at the door and told him that she had a group meeting with the runaways she counseled later that evening. She said the group would be over by eight o’clock and that she would meet him at the Silk City Diner on Spring Garden at eight fifteen. She said she had a good feeling. Byrne shared it. She believed they would find Julian Matisse this night.
Now, sitting in a hospital room next to Phil Kessler, the good feeling was gone. Byrne and Kessler had gotten whatever pleasantries they had available to them out of the way, and had fallen into an uncomfortable silence. Both men knew why Byrne was there.
Byrne decided to get it over with. For any number of reasons he did not want to be in the same room with this man.
“Why, Phil?”
Kessler thought about his answer. Byrne didn’t know if the long lag time between question and answer was pain medication or conscience.
“Because it’s the right thing to do, Kevin.”
“Right thing for who?”
“Right thing for me.”
“But what about Jimmy? He can’t even defend himself.”
This seemed to reach Kessler. He may not have been much of a cop in his day, but he understood the process of due process. Every man had the right to face his accuser.
“The day we took Matisse down. You remember it?” Kessler asked.
Like yesterday,
Byrne thought. There were so many cops on Jefferson Street that day, it looked like an FOP convention.
“I went into that building knowing that what I was doing was wrong,” Kessler said. “I’ve lived with it ever since. Now I can’t live with it anymore. I’m sure as hell not going to die with it.”
“You’re saying that Jimmy planted the evidence?”
Kessler nodded. “It was his idea.”
“I don’t fucking believe it.”
“Why? You think Jimmy Purify was some kind of saint?”
“Jimmy was a great cop, Phil. Jimmy was stand-up. He wouldn’t do it.”
Kessler stared at him for a few moments, his eyes seeming to focus on a middle distance. He reached for his water glass, struggling to get the plastic cup off the tray and up to his mouth. Byrne’s heart went out to the man at that moment. But he didn’t help. After a while, Kessler got the cup back onto the tray.
“Where did you get the gloves, Phil?”
Nothing. Kessler just stared at him with those cold, light-fading eyes. “How many years you got left, Kevin?”
“What?”
“Time,” he said. “How much time you got?”
“I have no idea.” Byrne knew where this was going. He let it play.
“No, you don’t. But I do, see? I got a month. Less, probably. I ain’t gonna see the first leaf fall this year. No snow. I ain’t gonna see the Phillies fuck up in the play-offs. By the time Labor Day rolls around I’m gonna be dealing with it.”
“Dealing with it?”
“My life,” Kessler said. “Defending my life.”
Byrne got up. This was going nowhere, and even if it was, he couldn’t bring himself to badger the man any longer. The bottom line was that Byrne could not believe it of Jimmy. Jimmy had been like his brother. He had never known a man to be more in tune with the right and wrong of a situation than Jimmy Purify. Jimmy was the cop who went back the next day and paid for the hoagies they got on the cuff. Jimmy Purify paid his fucking
parking
tickets.
“I was there, Kevin. I’m sorry. I know Jimmy was your partner. But this is the way it went down. I ain’t saying Matisse didn’t do it, but the way we got him was wrong.”
“You know Matisse is on the street, right?”
Kessler didn’t respond. He closed his eyes for a few moments. Byrne wasn’t sure if he had fallen asleep or not. Soon he opened his eyes. They were wet with tears. “We didn’t do right by that girl, Kevin.”
“What girl? Gracie?”
Kessler shook his head. “No.” He held up a thin, bony hand, offering it up like evidence. “My penance,” he said. “How are
you
going to pay?”
Kessler turned his head, looked out the window again. The sunlight revealed the skull beneath the skin. Beneath that, the soul of a dying man.
As Byrne stood in the doorway he knew, the way he had known so many things over the years, that there was something else to this, something other than a man’s reparation in the last moments of his life. Phil Kessler was hiding something.
We didn’t do right by that girl.
BYRNE TOOK HIS hunch to the next level. On the promise of discretion, he called an old friend in the homicide division of the DA’s office. He had trained Linda Kelly, and since that time she had risen steadily through the ranks. Discretion was certainly in her purview.
Linda ran Phil Kessler’s financials, and one red flag flew high. Two weeks ago— the day Julian Matisse was released from prison— Kessler had made a ten-thousand-dollar deposit in a new account in an out-of-state bank.
27