— cutting through skin and muscle and flesh and bone… taking a blowtorch to the wounds… dressing Kristina Jakos in that strange dress… slipping one arm into a sleeve, then the other, like you would dress a sleeping child, her cold flesh unresponsive to his touch… carrying Kristina Jakos down to the riverbank under cover of night… getting his twisted scenario just right as he- heard something. Footsteps?
Byrne's peripheral vision caught a shape, just a few feet away, a hulking black silhouette stepping from the deep shadows-
He turned toward the figure, his pulse thrumming in his ears, his hand on his weapon. There was no one there. He needed sleep. Byrne drove home to his two-room apartment in South Philly. She wanted to be a dancer.
Byrne thought of his daughter, Colleen. She had been deaf since birth, but it had never stopped her, never even slowed her down. She was a straight-A student, a terrific athlete. Byrne wondered what her dreams were. When she was small she had wanted to be a cop like him. He had talked her out of that one pronto. Then there was the obligatory ballerina stage, launched when he took her to see a hearing-impaired staging of The Nutcracker. Over the last few years she had talked quite a bit about becoming a teacher. Had that changed? Had he asked her lately? He made a mental note to do so. She would, of course, roll her eyes, flash a sign telling him he was so queer. He'd do it anyway.
He wondered if Kristina's father had ever asked his little girl about her dreams.
Byrne found a spot on the street and parked. He locked the car, entered his building, pulled himself up the steps. Either he was getting older, or the steps were getting steeper. Had to be the latter, he thought. He was still in his prime.
From the darkness of the vacant lot across the street, a man watched Byrne. He saw the light come on in the detective's second-floor window, watched his big shadow ripple across the blinds. From his perspective he witnessed a man coming home to a life that was in all ways the same as it had been the day before, and the day before that. A man who found reason and meaning and purpose in his life.
He envied Byrne as much as hated him.
The man was slight of build, with small hands and feet, thinning brown hair. He wore a dark coat, was ordinary in every manner, except for his facility for mourning, an unexpected and unwanted aptitude he never would have believed possible at this point in his life.
For Matthew Clarke the substance of grief had settled into the pit of his stomach like a dead weight. His nightmare had started the moment Anton Krotz took his wife from that booth. He would never forget his wife's hand on the back of the booth, her pale skin and painted nails. The terrifying glimmer of the knife at her throat. The hellish roar of the SWAT officer's rifle. The blood.
Matthew Clarke's world was in a tailspin. He did not know what the next day would bring, or how he would be able to go on. He did not know how he would bring himself to do the simplest of things: order breakfast, make a phone call, pay a bill, pick up the dry cleaning.
Laura had a dress at the cleaners.
Nice to see you, they would say. How is Laura?
Dead.
Murdered.
He didn't know how he would react in these inevitable situations. Who could possibly know? What was the training for this? Would he find a face brave enough to respond? It wasn't as if she had died from breast cancer, or leukemia, or a brain tumor. It wasn't as if he'd had a moment to prepare. She'd had her throat cut in a diner, the most degrading, public death possible. All under the watchful eye of the ever- vigilant Philadelphia Police Department. And now her children would live out their lives without her. Their mother was gone. His best friend was gone. How does one go about accepting all that?
Despite all these uncertainties, Matthew Clarke was sure of one thing. One fact was as apparent to him as the knowledge that rivers ran to the sea, as clear as the crystal dagger of sorrow in his heart.
Detective Kevin Francis Byrne's nightmare was just beginning.
PART TWO
11
'Rats and cats.'
'Huh?'
Roland Hannah closed his eyes for a moment. Whenever Charles said huh, it was the spoken equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. It had been this way for a long time, ever since they'd been children. Charles was his stepbrother, slow to the world, sunny in his outlook and demeanor. Roland loved the man as much as he had ever loved anyone in his life.
Charles was younger than Roland, preternaturally strong and fiercely loyal. More than once he had proven that he would lay down his life for Roland. Instead of admonishing his stepbrother for the thousandth time, Roland continued. There was no dividend to reprimand, and Charles hurt very easily. 'That's all there is,' Roland said. 'You're either a rat or a cat. There is nothing else.'
'No,' Charles said in full agreement. This was his way. 'Nothing else.'
'Remind me to make a note of that.'
Charles nodded, adrift on the concept, as if Roland had just decoded the Rosetta Stone.
They were driving south on Route 299, nearing the Millington Wildlife Management Area in Maryland. The weather in Philadelphia had been brutally cold, but here the winter was a little milder. This was good. It meant the soil would not yet be deeply frozen.
And while this was good news for the two men in the front of the van, it was probably the worst news of all for the man laying face down in the back, a man whose day had not been going all that well to begin with. ROLAND HANNAH WAS tall and lithely muscular, precise in his language, although he'd never been formally educated. He wore no jewelry, kept his hair short, his body clean, his clothes modest and well pressed. He was of Appalachian descent, the child of a Letcher County, Kentucky, mother and a father whose ancestry and criminal past could be traced to the hollows of Helvetia Mountain, no further. When Roland had been four years old his mother had left Jubal Hannah-a brutal, violent man who had on many occasions taken the strap to his wife and child-and moved her son to North Philadelphia. Specifically, to an area known derisively, but quite accurately, as the Badlands.
Within a year Artemisia Hannah married a man far worse than her first husband, a man who controlled every aspect of her life, a man who gave her two damaged children. When Walton Lee Waite was killed in a botched robbery in Northern Liberties, Artemisia-a woman of fragile mental health to begin with, a woman who looked at the world through the prism of burgeoning madness-sank into the bottle, into self-harm of all manners, into the devil's own caress. By the age of twelve Roland was fending for his family, doing odd jobs of various natures, many of them criminal, dodging the police, the welfare services, the gangs. Somehow, he survived them all.
At fifteen, through no choice of his own, Roland Hannah found a new path.
The man whom Roland and Charles had transported from Philadelphia was named Basil Spencer. He had molested a young girl.
Spencer was forty-four, grossly overweight and equally overeducated, a Bala Cynwyd estate lawyer with a client list comprising mostly elderly and wealthy Main Line widows. His taste for young girls went back many years. Roland had no idea how many times Spencer had done this profane and defiling thing, but it really didn't matter. On this day, at this time, they were meeting in the name of one particular innocent.
By nine o'clock that morning the sun had breached the tops of the trees. Spencer knelt next to a freshly dug grave, a hole perhaps four feet deep, three feet wide, six feet long. His hands were tied behind his back with strong twine. Despite the chill, his clothes were soaked with sweat.
