man's neck. He held him from behind.
Roland Hannah set upon the man. Screams rose high into the night.
Philadelphia slept.
21
Jessica lay in bed, her eyes wide open. Vincent was enjoying the sleep of the dead, as usual. She'd never known anybody who slept more deeply than her husband. For someone who saw just about every depravity a city had to offer, every night around midnight, he reconciled himself with the world, and drifted right off to sleep.
Jessica had never been able to do that.
She couldn't sleep, and knew why. Actually, there were two reasons. One, the image in the story Father Greg had told her kept galloping around her mind: a man being torn in half by the Sun Maiden and the sorceress. Thanks for that one, Father Greg.
The competing image was of Kristina Jakos, sitting on the riverbank like a battered doll on a little girl's shelf.
Twenty minutes later Jessica was at the dining room table, a mug of cocoa in front of her. She knew that chocolate contained caffeine, and that it would probably keep her up a few more hours. She also knew that chocolate contained chocolate.
She spread the Kristina Jakos crime-scene photographs on the table, put them in order, top to bottom: photographs of the road, the driveway, the front of the building, the abandoned cars, the back of the building, the slope to the riverbank, then poor Kristina herself. Looking at them top to bottom Jessica approximated the view of the scene as seen by the killer. She retraced his steps.
Had it been dark when he posed the body? It must have been. Seeing as the man who had taken Kristina's life did not commit suicide at the crime scene, or turn himself in, he had wanted to get away with his twisted crime.
SUV? Truck? Van? A van would certainly make things easier for him.
But why Kristina? Why the odd clothing and mutilation? Why the 'moon' on her stomach?
Jessica looked out the window at the ink-black night.
What kind of life is this? she wondered. She sat not fifteen feet from where her sweet little girl was sleeping, from where her beloved husband was sleeping, and she was looking at pictures of a dead woman in the middle of the night.
Still, for all the danger and ugliness Jessica encountered, she couldn't imagine doing anything else. From the moment she'd entered the academy, all she had ever wanted to do was work homicides. And now she was. But the job began to eat you alive the moment you stepped onto the first floor of the Roundhouse.
In Philadelphia, you got a job on Monday. You worked it, chasing down witnesses, interviewing suspects, compiling forensics. Just when you started to make progress, it was Thursday and you were up on the wheel again and another body fell. You had to move on it, because if you didn't make an arrest within forty-eight hours, there was a good chance you might never make an arrest. Or so the theory went. So you dropped what you were doing- while still keeping an ear to all the calls you had out-and worked the new case. The next thing you knew it was next Tuesday, and another bloody corpse landed at your feet.
If you made your living as an investigator-any kind of investigator- you lived for the gotcha. For Jessica, as well as every detective she knew, the sun rose and set on gotcha. At times, gotcha was your hot meal, your good night's sleep, your long passionate kiss. No one understood the need but a fellow investigator. If junkies could be detectives for one second, they would toss away that needle forever. There was no high like gotcha.
Jessica wrapped her hand around her cup. The cocoa was cold. She looked back at the photographs.
Was the gotcha in one of these pictures?
22
Walt Brigham pulled onto the shoulder on Lincoln Drive, cut the engine, the headlights, still reeling from his farewell party at Finnigan's Wake, still a bit overwhelmed at the big turnout.
This section of Fairmount Park was dark at this hour. Traffic was sparse. He rolled down his window, the frigid air somewhat reviving him. He could hear the water of the Wissahickon Creek flowing nearby.
Brigham had mailed the envelope before he had gotten on the road. He felt underhanded; almost criminal, sending it anonymously. He'd had no choice. It had taken him weeks to make the decision, and now he had. All of it-thirty-eight years as a cop-was behind him now. He was someone else.
He thought about the Annemarie DiCillo case. It seemed like only yesterday when he had gotten the call. He remembered pulling up to the stormy scene-right at this spot-getting out his umbrella, walking into the forest…
Within hours they had rounded up the usual suspects, the peepers, the pedophiles, the men who had recently been released from prison after having served time for violence against children, especially against young girls. No one stood out from the crowd. No one cracked, or rolled over on another suspect. Given their nature, their heightened fear of prison life, pedophiles were notoriously easy to turn. No one did.
A particularly vile miscreant named Joseph Barber had looked good for a while, but he had an alibi-albeit a shaky alibi-for the day of the murders in Fairmount Park. When Barber himself was murdered- stabbed to death with thirteen steak knives-Brigham had figured it was the story of a man being visited by his sins.
But something nagged Walt Brigham about the circumstances of Barber's demise. Over the next five years, Brigham had tracked a number of suspected pedophiles, both in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Six of those men had been murdered, all with extreme prejudice, none of their cases solved. Granted, no one in any homicide unit anywhere really busted his hump trying to close a murder case when the victim was a scumbag who hurt children, but still the forensic data was collected and analyzed, the witness statements taken, the fingerprints run, the reports filed. Not a single suspect materialized.
Lavender, he thought. What was it about lavender?
In all, Walt Brigham found sixteen men murdered, all of them mo- lesters, all of them questioned and released-or at least suspected-in a case involving a young girl.
It was crazy, but possible.
Someone was killing the suspects.
His theory never really gained any traction in the unit, so Walt Brigham had dropped it. Officially speaking. He had made highly detailed notes about it anyway. As little as he might have cared about these men, there was something about the job, the nature of being a homicide detective that compelled him to do so. Murder was murder. It was up to God to judge the victims, not Walter J. Brigham.
He turned his thoughts to Annemarie and Charlotte. They had stopped running through his dreams just a short time ago, but that didn't mean the images didn't haunt him. These days, when the calendar flipped from March to April, when he saw young girls in their springtime dresses, it all came back to him in a brutish, sensory overload-the smell of the woods, the sound of the rain, the way it looked like those two little girls were sleeping. Eyes closed, heads bowed. And then the nest.
The sick son of a bitch who did it had built a nest around them.
Walt Brigham felt the anger wrench inside him, a barbwire fist in his chest. He was getting close. He could feel it. Off the record, he had already been to Odense, a small town in Berks County. He'd gone several times. He had made inquiries, taken pictures, spoken to people. The trail to Annemarie and Charlotte's killer led to Odense, Pennsylvania. Brigham had tasted the evil the moment he crossed into the village, like a bitter potion on his tongue.
Brigham got out of the car, walked across Lincoln Drive, continued through the barren trees until he reached the Wissahickon. The cold wind howled. He flipped up his collar, bunched his wool scarf.
This was where they had been found.
