“I won’t do that.”
“Walk away.”
“No. You are my partner. Would you do that to me?”
She had come close with that, but she hadn’t reached him. Byrne didn’t look up, didn’t take his eyes of the monk’s head. “You don’t understand.”
“Oh, I do. I swear to
God,
I do.” Seven feet. “You can’t—” she began. Wrong word.
Wrong word.
“You . . .
don’t
want to go out like this.”
Byrne finally looked at her. She had never seen a man so committed to an action. His jaw was set, his brow narrowed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does. Of
course
it does.”
“I’ve seen more than you have, Jess. A lot more.”
She took another step closer. “I’ve seen my share.”
“I know. It’s just that you still have a chance. You can get out before it takes you down. Walk away.”
One more step. She was five feet away now. “Just hear me out. Hear me out, and if you still want me to walk, I will. Okay?”
Byrne’s eyes shifted toward her, back. “Okay.”
“You put the gun away, no one has to know,” she said. “Me? Hell, I didn’t see a thing. In fact, when I walked in the room here, you were putting him in cuffs.” She reached behind her, dangled a pair of cuffs on an index finger. Byrne didn’t respond. She tossed the cuffs onto the floor at his feet. “Let’s bring him in.”
“No.” The figure in the monk’s robe began to shake.
Here it comes. You’ve lost him.
She reached. “Your daughter loves you, Kevin.”
A flicker. She’d gotten to him. She stepped closer. Three feet, now. “I was there with her every day when you were in the hospital,” she said. “Every day. You are loved. Don’t throw it away.”
Byrne hesitated, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “I . . .”
“Your daughter’s
watching.
” Outside, Jessica heard sirens, the roar of big engines, the screech of tires. It was the SWAT team. They’d heard the gunfire after all. “SWAT’s here, partner. You know what that means. Ponderosa time.”
Another step forward. Arm’s length. She heard footsteps approach the building. She was losing him. It was going to be too late.
“Kevin. You have something to do.”
Byrne’s face was laced with sweat. It looked like tears. “What? What do I have to do?”
“You have a picture to take. At the Eden Roc.”
Byrne half-smiled, and there was a world of heartache in it.
Jessica glanced at his weapon. Something was wrong. There was no magazine.
It wasn’t loaded.
She then saw movement in the corner of the room. She looked at Colleen. Her eyes. Terrified. Angelika’s eyes. Eyes that were trying to tell her something.
But what?
Then she looked at the girl’s hands.
And
knew
as—
— time jogged, slowed, crawled, as—
Jessica spun, weapon raised, two hands. Another monk in a blood-red robe was nearly upon her, his steel weapon high, pointed at her face. She heard the click of the hammer. Saw the turn of the cylinder.
No time to bargain. No time to deal. Just the shiny black mask in that tornado of red silk.
I haven’t seen a friendly face in weeks . . .
Detective Jessica Balzano fired.
And fired.
93
THERE IS A MOMENT, AFTER THE TAKING OF A LIFE, A TIME WHEN the human soul weeps, when the heart takes harsh inventory.
The smell of cordite hung thick in the air.
The coppery scent of fresh blood filled the world.
Jessica looked at Byrne. They would be forever linked by this moment, by the events that had occurred in this dank and ugly place.
Jessica found that she was still holding her weapon out, a two-handed death grip. Smoke seeped from the barrel. She felt the tears dam up behind her eyes. She fought them, lost. Time passed. Minutes? Seconds?
Kevin Byrne gently took her hands in his, and eased the gun out.
94
BYRNE KNEW THAT JESSICA HAD SAVED HIM. HE WOULD NEVER forget. He would never be able to pay her in full.
No one has to know . . .
Byrne had held his gun to the back of Ian Whitestone’s head, mistakenly believing he was the Actor. When he had shot the lights out, there had been noises in the darkness. Crashes. Stumbling. Byrne had been disoriented. He couldn’t risk firing again. When he lashed out with the butt of the pistol he had connected with flesh and bone. When he turned the overhead light on, the monk was on the floor in the center of the room.
The images he had gotten were from Whitestone’s own blackened life— what he had done to Angelika Butler, what he had done to all the women on the tapes they had found in Seth Goldman’s hotel room. Whitestone had been bound and gagged beneath his mask and robe. He had tried to tell Byrne who he was. Byrne’s gun had been empty, but a full magazine was in his pocket. If Jessica had not come through that door . . .
He would never know.
At that moment a battering ram crashed through the painted picture window. Dazzlingly bright daylight flooded the room. Within seconds a dozen very nervous detectives spilled in after, weapons drawn, adrenaline raging.
“Clear!” Jessica yelled, holding her badge high. “We’re
clear
!”
Eric Chavez and Nick Palladino stormed through the opening, got between Jessica and the mass of divisional detectives and FBI agents who looked a little too eager to cowboy up this detail. The two men held up their hands, stood protectively on either side of Byrne and Jessica and the now prostrate, sobbing Ian Whitestone.
The blue womb. They were sheltered. No harm could come to them now.
It really was over.
* * *
TEN MINUTES LATER, as the machine that was a crime scene investigation began to rev up around them, as the yellow tape unspooled and the CSU officers began their solemn ritual, Byrne caught Jessica’s eye, the one question he needed to ask on his lips. They huddled in a corner, at the foot of the bed. “How did you know Butler was behind you?”
Jessica glanced around the room. Now, in the bright sunlight, it was obvious. The interior was covered in a silken dust, the walls patchworked with cheaply framed photographs of a long-faded past. Half a dozen padded stools lay on their sides. And then there were the signs. WATER ICE. FOUNTAIN DRINKS. ICE CREAM. CANDY.
“It isn’t Butler,” Jessica said.
The seed had been planted in her mind when she read the report of the break-in at Edwina Matisse’s house, when she had seen the name of the responding officers. She hadn’t wanted to believe it. She had all but known the moment she had talked to the old woman next to the former candy store. Mrs. V. Talman.
Van!
the old woman had yelled. It wasn’t her husband she was yelling for. It was her grandson.
Van. Short for Vandemark.
I came close once.
He had taken the battery from her two-way radio. The dead body in the other room was Nigel Butler.
Jessica walked over, peeled back the mask on the dead man in the monk’s robe. Although they would wait for the ME’s ruling, there was no doubt in Jessica’s mind, or anyone else’s for that matter.
Officer Mark Underwood was dead.
95
BYRNE HELD HIS DAUGHTER. SOMEONE HAD MERCIFULLY CUT the rope from her hands and feet and put a suit coat over her shoulders. She shivered in his arms. Byrne thought of the time she had defied him when they had gone to Atlantic City one unseasonably warm April. She had been about six or seven. He had told her that, just because the air temperature was seventy-five, it didn’t mean the water was warm. She had run into the ocean anyway.
When she’d come out, just a few minutes later, she had been a pastel blue. She had quivered and quaked in his embrace for almost an hour, teeth chattering, signing
I’m sorry, Dad,
over and over again. He had held her then. He vowed to never stop.
Jessica knelt down next to them.
Colleen and Jessica had become close after Byrne had been shot that spring. They had spent many an afternoon waiting out his coma. Colleen had taught Jessica a number of handshapes, including the basic alphabet.
Byrne looked between them, and sensed their secret.
Jessica raised her hands, spelled the words in three clumsy handshapes:
He’s behind you.
With tears in his eyes, Byrne thought about Gracie Devlin. He thought about her life force. He thought about her breath still inside him. He glanced at the body of the man who had brought this latest evil to his city. He glimpsed his own future.
Kevin Byrne knew he was ready.
He exhaled.
He drew his daughter even closer. And it was in this way they comforted each other, and would for a long time to come.
In silence.
Like the language of film.
96