'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?'
