Where you from?
Did you buy or rent?
Do you have any children?
He had thought, briefly, of plunking down a chunk for one of the recently rehabbed homes at Jefferson Square, a newly gentrified area nearby, but he wasn't sure that his heart, unlike his mind, was still in Philadelphia. For the first time in his life, he was a man untethered. He had a few dollars put away-over and above Colleen's college fund-and he could go and do whatever he pleased.
But could he leave the force? Could he turn in his service weapon and badge, turn in his papers, take his retirement ID, and simply walk away?
He honestly did not know.
He sat on the love seat, ran through the cable channels. He thought about pouring himself a tumblerful of bourbon and just riding the bottle until nightfall. No. He wasn't a very good drunk these days. These days, he was one of those morbid, ugly drunks you see with four empty stools on either side of him in a crowded tavern.
His cell phone beeped. He pulled it out of his pocket, stared at it. It was a new camera phone that Colleen had gotten him for his birthday, and he wasn't quite familiar with all the settings yet. He saw the flashing icon and realized that a text message had come in. He had just gotten a handle on sign language, now there was a whole new vernacular to learn. He looked at the LCD screen. It was a text message from Colleen. Text messaging was the hottest thing among teenagers these days, but especially for deaf teenagers.
This was an easy one. It read:
TY 4 LUNCH:)
Byrne smiled. Thank You For Lunch. He was the luckiest man in the world. He typed:
YW LUL
The message meant: You're Welcome Love You Lots. Colleen messaged back:
LUL 2
Then, as always, she signed off by typing:
CBOAO
The message stood for Colleen Byrne Over And Out.
Byrne closed the phone, his heart full.
The air conditioner finally began to cool off the room. Byrne considered what to do with himself. Maybe he'd take a ride down to the Roundhouse, hang around the unit. He was just about to talk himself out of that idea when he saw that there was a message on his answering machine.
What was it, five steps away? Seven? At the moment, it looked like the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his cane, braved the pain.
The message was from Paul DiCarlo, a star ADA in the district attorney's office. Over the past five years or so, DiCarlo and Byrne had made a number of cases together. If you were a criminal on trial, you didn't want to look up one day and see Paul DiCarlo enter the courtroom. He was a pit bull in Perry Ellis. If he got you in his jaws, you were fucked. Nobody had sent more killers to death row than Paul DiCarlo.
But the message Paul had for Byrne this day was not good. One of his quarry, it seemed, had loosed itself: Julian Matisse was back on the street.
The news was impossible, but it was true.
It was no secret that Kevin Byrne took a special interest in cases involving the murders of young women. He had felt this way ever since the day Colleen was born. In his mind and heart, every young woman was forever somebody's daughter, somebody's baby girl. Every young woman, at one time, had been that little girl who learned to hold a cup with two hands, had learned to stand up, sea-legged, five tiny fingers on the coffee table.
Girls like Gracie. Two years earlier, Julian Matisse had raped and murdered a young woman named Marygrace Devlin.
Gracie Devlin was nineteen years old the day she was killed. She had curly brown hair that fell in soft ringlets to her shoulders, a light dusting of freckles. She was a slight young woman, a freshman at Villanova. She favored peasant skirts and Indian jewelry and nocturnes by Chopin. She died on a frigid January night in a filthy, abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia.
And now, by some profane twist of justice, the man who took her dignity and her life was out of prison. Julian Matisse had been sentenced to twenty-five years to life and he was being released after two years.
Two years.
The grass had only grown fully on Gracie's grave this past spring.
Matisse was a small-time pimp, a sadist of the first order. Before Gra- cie Devlin, he had spent three and a half years in prison for cutting a woman who had refused his advances. Using a box cutter, he had slashed her face so savagely that she had required ten hours of surgery to repair the muscle damage, and nearly four hundred stitches.
Following the box cutter attack, when Matisse was released from Curran-Fromhold prison-after serving only forty months of a ten-year sentence-it didn't take long for him to graduate to homicide. Byrne and his partner Jimmy Purify had liked Matisse for the murder of a Center City waitress named Janine Tillman, but they were never able to find any physical evidence tying him to the crime. Her body was found in Harrow- gate Park, stabbed and mutilated. She had been abducted from an underground parking lot on Broad Street. She had been sexually assaulted both pre- and postmortem.
An eyewitness from the parking lot came forward and picked Matisse out of a photo lineup. The witness was an elderly woman named Mar- jorie Samms. Before they could find Matisse, Marjorie Samms disappeared. A week later they found her floating in the Delaware River.
Supposedly Matisse had been staying with his mother after his release from Curran-Fromhold. Detectives staked out Matisse's mother's apartment, but he never showed. The case went cold.
Byrne knew that he would see Matisse again one day.
Then, two years ago, on a freezing January night, a 911 call came in that a young woman was being attacked in an alleyway behind an abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia. Byrne and Jimmy were eating dinner a block away and took the call. By the time they reached the scene, the alley was empty, but a blood trail led them inside.
When Byrne and Jimmy entered the theater, they found Gracie on the stage, alone. She had been brutally beaten. Byrne would never forget the tableau-Gracie's limp form on the stage in that frigid theater, steam rising from her body, her life force departing. While the EMS rescue was on the way, Byrne frantically tried to give her CPR. She had breathed once, a slight exhalation of air that had gone into his lungs, the existence leaving her body, entering his. Then, with a slight shudder, she died in his arms. Marygrace Devlin lived nineteen years, two months, and three days.
The Crime Scene Unit found a fingerprint on the scene. It belonged to Julian Matisse. With a dozen detectives on the case, and more than a little intimidation of the low-life crowd with whom Julian Matisse consorted, they found Matisse huddling in a closet in a burned-out row house on Jefferson Street, where they also found a glove covered in Gracie Devlin's blood. Byrne had to be restrained.
Matisse was tried and convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in the state penitentiary at Greene County.
After Gracie's murder, Byrne walked around for many months with the belief that Gracie's breath was still inside him, that her strength impelled him to do his job. For a long time, he felt as if it were the only clean part of him, the only piece of him that had not been sullied by the city.
Now Matisse was out, walking the streets, his face to the sun. The thought made Kevin Byrne sick. He dialed Paul DiCarlo's number.
"DiCarlo."
"Tell me I heard your message wrong."
"Wish I could, Kevin."
"What happened?"
"You know about Phil Kessler?"
Phil Kessler had been a homicide detective for twenty-two years, a divisional detective ten years before that, a loose cannon who more than once had put a fellow detective in jeopardy with his inattention to detail or ignorance of procedure or general lack of nerve.
There were always a few guys in the Homicide Unit who were not very good around dead bodies, and they usually would do whatever they had to do to avoid going out to a crime scene. They made themselves available to go get warrants, round up and transport witnesses, work stakeouts. Kessler was just this sort of detective. He liked the idea of being a homicide detective, but the actual homicide itself freaked him out.