sharp.
His doctor came to see him yesterday.
There was only one Sorrowful Mystery left, Jessica thought as she descended the steps.
Where would they go next? Into which neighborhood would they come with their guns and their battering rams? Northern Liberties? Glenwood? Tioga?
Into whose face would they peer, sullen and lost for words?
If they were late again, there was no doubt in any of their minds.
The last girl would be crucified. Five of the six detectives gathered upstairs in the Lincoln Room at Finnigan's Wake. The room was theirs, closed off for the time being from the public. Downstairs, the juke played the Corrs.
'So, what, we're dealing with a fucking vampire now?' Nick Palladino asked. He stood at the tall windows overlooking Spring Garden Street. The Ben Franklin Bridge hummed in the distance. Palladino was a man who thought best on his feet, rocking on his heels, hands in pockets, jingling change.
'I mean, gimme a gangbanger,' Nick went on. 'Gimme a homeboy and his Mac-Ten, lighting up some other asshole over turf, over a short bag, over honor, code, whatever. I understand that shit. This?'
Everyone knew what he meant. It was so much easier when the motives hung on the exterior of the crime like a shingle. Greed was the easiest. Follow the green footprints.
Palladino was on a roll. 'Payne and Washington got the squeal on that JBM banger in Gray's Ferry the other night, right?' he continued. 'Now I hear they found the shooter dead over on Erie. That's the way I like it, nice and neat.'
Byrne shut his eyes for a second, opened them to a brand-new day.
John Shepherd came up the stairs. Byrne motioned to the waitress, Margaret. She brought John a Jim Beam, neat.
'The blood was all Kreuz's,' Shepherd said. 'The girl died from a broken neck. Just like the others.'
'And the blood in the cup?' Tony Park asked.
'That belonged to Kreuz. The ME thinks that, before he bled out, he was fed the blood through the straw.'
'He was fed his own blood,' Chavez said on the tail of a full body- shiver. It wasn't a question; merely the stating of something too hard to comprehend.
'Yeah,' Shepherd replied.
'It's official,' Chavez said. 'I've seen it all.'
The six detectives absorbed this. The attendant horrors of the Rosary Killer case were growing exponentially.
'Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,' Jessica said.
Five sets of eyebrows raised. Everyone turned their head toward Jessica.
'I've been doing a lot of reading,' she said. 'Holy Thursday was known as Maundy Thursday. This is the day of the Last Supper.'
'So this Kreuz was our doer's Peter?' Palladino asked.
Jessica could only shrug. She had thought about it. The rest of the night would probably be spent tearing apart Wilhelm Kreuz's life, looking for any connection that might turn into a lead.
'Did she have anything in her hands?' Byrne asked.
Shepherd nodded. He held up a photocopy of a digital photograph. The detectives gathered around the table. They took their turns examining the photo.
'What is it, a lottery ticket?' Jessica asked.
'Yeah,' Shepherd said.
'Oh, that's fucking great,' Palladino said. He walked back to the window, hands in pocket.
'Prints?' Byrne asked.
Shepherd shook his head.
'Can we find out where this ticket was purchased?' Jessica asked.
'Got a call into the commission already,' Shepherd said. 'We should hear from them anytime now.'
Jessica stared at the photo. Their killer had placed a Big 4 ticket into the hands of his most recent victim. Chances were good that it was not simply a taunt. Like the other objects, it was a clue as to where the next victim would be found.
The lottery number itself was obscured by blood.
Did this mean he was going to dump the body at a lottery agent's location? There had to be hundreds. There was no way they could stake them all out.
'This guy's luck is unbelievable,' Byrne said. 'Four girls off the streets and not a single eyewitness. He's smoke.'
'Do you think it's luck, or that we just live in a city where no one gives a shit anymore?' Palladino asked.
'If I believed that, I'd take my twenty today and head to Miami Beach,' Tony Park said.
The other five detectives nodded.
At the Roundhouse, the task force had plotted out the abductions and the dump sites on a huge map. There was no clear pattern, no way to anticipate or discern the killer's next move. They had already regressed to the basics-serial murderers start close to home. Their killer lived or worked in North Philly.
Square one. Byrne walked Jessica to her car.
They stood around for a short while, each rummaging for words. It was at times like these that Jessica wished she smoked. Her trainer at Fra- zier's Gym would kill her for the very thought, but it didn't stop her envying Byrne for the comfort he seemed to find in a Marlboro Light.
A barge lazily cruised up the river. Traffic moved in fits and starts. Philly lived, despite this madness, despite the grief and horror that had befallen these families.
'You know, no matter how this ends, it's going to be ugly,' Byrne said.
Jessica knew this. She also knew that, before it was over, she would probably learn a large new truth about herself. She would probably uncover a dark recess of fear and rage and anguish that she would just as soon leave undiscovered. As much as she wanted to disbelieve it, she was going to emerge from the end of this passage a different person. She hadn't planned on this when she agreed to take the job but, like a runaway train, she found herself speeding toward the chasm, and there was no way to stop.
PART FOUR
59
GOOD FRIDAY, 10:00 AM
The drug nearly took off the top of her head.
The rush slammed into the back of her skull, ricocheted around for a while, in time to the music, then sawed at her neck in jagged up and down triangles, the way you might cut the lid off a pumpkin at Halloween.
'Righteous,' Lauren said.
Lauren Semanski was failing two of her six classes at Nazarene. If threatened with a gun, even after two years of algebra, she couldn't tell you what the quadratic equation was. She wasn't even sure the quadratic equation was algebra. Maybe it was geometry. And even though her family was Polish, she couldn't point to Poland on a map. She tried once, landing her glitter-polished nail somewhere south of Lebanon. She had gotten five tickets in the past three months, both the digital clock and the VCR in her bedroom had been flashing 12:00 for nearly two years, and the one time she tried to bake a birthday cake for her little sister Caitlin, she had nearly burned down the house.
At sixteen, Lauren Semanski-and she might be the first to admit this-didn't know a whole lot about a whole lot of things.
