'A hard day's work makes a soft bed,' my grandfather used to say.
I get out of the car, lock it. I breathe deeply the midsummer night air. The city smells clean and fresh, charged with promise.
Weapon in hand, I begin to make my way to the house.
56
Atjust after midnight, they saw their man. Bruno Steele was walking across the vacant lot behind the target house.
'I've got a visual,' came the radio.
'I see him,' Jessica said.
Steele hesitated near the door, looking both ways up and down the street. Jessica and Nicci slid slowly down in the seat, just in case another car rolled up the street and silhouetted them in the headlights.
Jessica picked up her two-way radio, keyed it, whispered: 'Are we good?'
'Yeah,' Palladino said. 'We are good.'
'Uniforms ready?'
'Ready.'
We've got him, Jessica thought.
We've fucking got him.
Jessica and Nicci drew their weapons, slipped quietly out of the car. As they neared their subject, Jessica made eye contact with Nicci. It was a moment for which all police officers live. The excitement of an arrest, tempered by the fear of the unknown. If Bruno Steele was the Actor, he had brutally killed two women that they knew of, both in cold blood. If he was their unsub, he was capable of anything.
They closed the distance in shadow. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty. Jessica was just about to draw down on the subject when she stopped.
Something was wrong.
In that moment, reality came crashing down around her. It was one of those times-unsettling enough in life in general, potentially fatal on the job-when you realize that what you thought you had in front of you, what you assumed to be one thing, was not only something else, but something wholly other.
The man in the doorway was not Bruno Steele.
The man was Kevin Byrne.
57
They stepped across the street, into the shadows. Jessica didn't ask Byrne what he was doing there. That would come later. She was just about to head back to the surveillance vehicle when Eric Chavez raised her on channel. 'Jess.'
'Yeah.'
'There's music coming from the house.'
Bruno Steele was already inside.
Byrne watched the team prepare to take the house. Jessica had quickly briefed him on the events of the day. With each word she said, Byrne saw his life and career spiral. It all fell into place. Julian Matisse was the Actor. Byrne had been so close, he had not seen it. The system was now going to do to what it did best. And Kevin Byrne was right under its wheels.
A few minutes, Byrne thought. If he had gotten there a few minutes before the strike team, this would have been over. Now, when they found Matisse tied up in that chair, bloodied and beaten, they would trace it all back to him. Regardless what Matisse had done to Victoria, Byrne had kidnapped and tortured the man.
Conrad Sanchez would find cause for a police brutality charge at the very least, maybe even federal charges. There was a very real possibility that Byrne might be sharing a holding cell, right next to Julian Matisse, this very night. Nlck Palladino and Eric Chavez took the lead into the row house; Jessica and Nicci, the rear. The four detectives searched the first and second floors. They were clear.
They began to make their way down the narrow stairs.
It was a damp, vile heat that permeated the house, redolent of sewage and human salt. Beneath it, something primal. Palladino reached the bottom tread first. Jessica followed. They ran their Maglites over the cramped room.
And saw the very heart of evil.
It was a slaughter. Blood and viscera everywhere. Flesh clung to the walls. At first, the source of the blood was not apparent. But soon it dawned on them what they were looking at, that the thing draped over the metal rod was once a human being.
Although it would be more than three hours before fingerprint tests would confirm it, at that moment what the detectives knew for certain was that the man known to adult-film aficionados as Bruno Steele-but better known to the police and the courts and the penal system, and to his mother, Edwina, as Julian Matisse-had been cut in half.
The bloody chain saw at his feet was still warm.
58
They sat in a booth at the back of a small bar on Vine Street. The image of what was found in the cellar of the row house in North Philly pulsed between them, unyielding in its profanity. They had both seen a lot in their time on the force. They had rarely seen the brutality of what was done in that room.
CSU was processing the scene. It was going to take all night and most of the next day. Somehow, the media was already all over the story. Three television stations were camped across the street.
While they waited, Byrne told Jessica his story, starting from the moment he had received the call from Paul DiCarlo and ending at the moment she had surprised him outside the row house in North Philly. Jessica had the feeling he had not told her everything.
When he exhausted his tale, there were a few moments of silence. The silence spoke volumes about them- about who they were as police officers, as people, but especially as partners.
'You okay?' Byrne finally asked.
'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'It's you I'm worried about. I mean, two days back, and all of this.'
Byrne waved her concern away. His eyes told another story. He downed his shot, called for another. When the barmaid brought his drink and left, he settled back. The booze softened his posture, eased the tension in his shoulders. It appeared to Jessica that he wanted to tell her something. She was right.
'What is it?' she prodded.
'I was just thinking about something. About Easter Sunday.'
'What about it?' She had never talked to him in any kind of depth about his ordeal getting shot. She had wanted to ask, but she figured he would tell her when he was ready. Maybe now was that time.
'When it all happened,' he began, 'there was this split second, right when the bullet hit me, when I saw it all happening. Like it was happening to someone else.'
'You saw it?'
'Not exactly. I don't mean in any New Age out-of-body way. I mean I saw it in my mind. I watched myself fall to the floor. Blood everywhere. My blood. And the only thing that kept running through my head, was this… this picture.'
'What picture?'
