Or maybe it was a shot.
This was Gray's Ferry, after all.
He looked at his watch. An hour. He had been asleep an hour. Some surveillance expert. More like Inspector Clouseau.
The last thing he remembered, before being startled awake, was Kevin Byrne disappearing into a rough Gray's Ferry bar called Shotz, the kind of place where, when you walk in, you go down two steps. Physically and socially. A ramshackle Irish bar full of House of Pain types.
Simon had parked on a side street, partly to keep out of Byrne's line of sight, partly because there wasn't a space in front of the bar. His intention was to wait for Byrne to emerge from the bar, follow him, see if he pulled over on some dark street and lit up a crack pipe. If all went well, Simon would have snuck up on the car and snapped a picture of the legendary detective Kevin Francis Byrne with a five-inch glass shooter between his lips.
Then he would own him.
Simon had gotten out his small, collapsible umbrella, opened the car door, spread the umbrella, and sidled up to the corner of the building. He peered around. Byrne's car was still parked there. It looked as if someone had broken the driver's window in. Oh Lord, Simon thought. I pity the fool who picked the wrong car on the wrong night.
The bar was still packed. He could hear the dulcet strains of an old Thin Lizzy tune rattling the windows.
He was just about to head back to his car when a shadow caught his attention, a shadow darting across the vacant lot directly across from Shotz. Even in the dim light thrown by the bar's neon, Simon could recognize Byrne's huge silhouette.
What the hell was he doing over there?
Simon raised the camera, focused, snapped a few pictures. He wasn't sure why, but when you shadowed someone with a camera and tried to assemble the collage of images the next day, every image helped in establishing a time line.
Besides, digital images were erasable. It wasn't like the old days when every snap of a thirty-five millimeter camera cost money.
Back in the car, he had checked the images on the camera's small LCD screen. Not bad. A little dark, of course, but it was clearly Kevin Byrne coming out of that alley and across the lot. Two of the photographs had been against the side of a light-colored van, and there was no mistaking the man's hulking profile. Simon made sure that the image was imprinted with date and time.
Done.
Then his police band scanner-a Uniden BC250D, a handheld model that had more than once gotten him to a crime scene ahead of the detectives-crackled to life. He couldn't make out the details, but a few seconds later, when Kevin Byrne took off, Simon knew that whatever it was he belonged on the scene.
Simon turned the ignition key, hoping that the job he had done securing his muffler would hold. It did. He wouldn't be sounding like a Cessna aircraft while trying to shadow one of the city's savviest detectives.
Life was good.
He put the car in gear. And followed.
35
TUESDAY, 9:45 PM
Jessica sat in her driveway, exhaustion beginning to take its toll. Rain hammered the roof of the Cherokee. She thought about what Nick had said. It had crossed her mind that she not had gotten The Talk after the task force was formed, the sit-down that would've started: Look, Jessica, this has nothing to do with your abilities as a detective…
That talk never happened.
She turned off the engine.
What had Brian Parkhurst wanted to tell her? He hadn't said that he wanted to tell her what he'd done, but rather that there were things about these girls that she needed to know.
Like what?
And where was he?
If I see anyone else there, I'm leaving.
Had Parkhurst made Nick Palladino and John Shepherd as cops?
Not likely.
Jessica got out, locked the Jeep, and ran to the back door, splashing in puddles along the way. She was soaked. It seemed as if she had been soaked forever. The light over the back porch had burned out a few weeks earlier, and as she fumbled for her house key she chided herself for the hundredth time for not replacing the bulb. Above her, the branches of the dying maple creaked. It really needed to get trimmed before those branches smashed into the house. These things had generally been Vincent's job, but Vincent wasn't around, was he?
Get it together, Jess. You are mom and dad for the time being, as well as cook, repairman, landscaper, chauffeur, and tutor.
She got her house key in hand and was just about to open the back door when she heard a noise above her, the scrape of aluminum twisting, shearing, moaning under an enormous weight. She also heard leather- soled shoes scrape across the floor, saw a hand reach for her.
Draw your weapon Jess-
The Glock was in her purse. Rule number one never keep your weapon in your purse-
The shadow formed a body. A man's body.
A priest.
He closed his hand around her arm.
And pulled her into the darkness.
36
TUESDAY, 9:50 PM
The scene around the Rodin Museum was a madhouse. Simon hung at the back of the gathering crowd, rubbernecking with the unwashed. What was it that drew ordinary citizens to scenes of misery and chaos like flies to a pile of dung, he wondered.
I should talk, he thought with a smile.
Still, in his own defense, he felt that, in spite of his penchant for the dreadful and predilection for the morbid, he still hung on to a scrap of dignity, still guarded closely that morsel of grandeur regarding the work he did, and the public's right to know. Like it or not, he was a journalist.
He worked his way toward the front of the crowd. He pulled his collar up, slipped on his tortoiseshell glasses, brushed his hair over his forehead.
Death was here.
So was Simon Close.
Bread and jam.
37
TUESDAY, 9:50 PM
