daughter.'
'You have a little girl?'
Maria Caruso beamed. 'Carmen. She's twenty-two months. And counting.'
Jessica smiled. Twenty-two months. Spoken like a young mother trying to hang on to a child's infancy. Jessica had done the same thing. 'Well, thanks again for the good work.'
'You're welcome.' Officer Caruso stuck out her hand. They shook hands, a little clumsily.
A few seconds later Jessica turned, walked a few feet up the cracked and baking sidewalk. She took out her notebook, glanced at her watch, noted the time, snapped the rubber band. Another old habit.
As she crossed the threshold, she turned, saw Maria Caruso getting into her own car, a ten-year-old Honda Accord. There was rust along the rocker panels, a missing hubcap, a cracked taillight held together with masking tape.
I want to work homicides, of course. Just like everybody else. Just like you.
You might want to think about that a little longer, Maria.
Jessica logged into the crime scene, walked into the building. Although she had been there just a day earlier, the interior looked completely different. It was almost presentable. At least to someone thinking about renovating the place. There were still basketball-sized holes in the drywall, still an inch of grease and mold on everything, but a lot of the trash had been removed, and with it seemed to have gone ninety percent of the flies.
Jessica moved down the hallway, then the narrow wooden stairs, into the partial basement, which was now brightly lit with police lights. The floor was not poured concrete, as she might have originally guessed, but rather an old wood planking. It had at one time been painted a deep claret enamel. Before that, as the chipped-away sections told her, something that appeared to be ash gray. The walls were bare concrete block, the ceiling unfinished, just open joists, criss-crossed with one-by-three bridging, dense with cobwebs.
Jessica immediately saw what she was there to see. There was a hole cut into the center of the floor. Next to it lay a plywood square, probably the access door. There was a finger hole drilled near the center. Neither were precisely square.
The rolled-up rug was against the wall.
For the moment, there was only one other person in the basement. An experienced uniformed officer named Stan Keegan. He stood next to the access hole, hands clasped in front of him. He nodded to Jessica. 'Afternoon, Detective.'
'Hey, Stanley,' she said. 'You look good. You losing weight?'
'Twenty-eight ounces in the past twelve days. That's nearly two pounds.'
'Awesome,' Jessica said. 'What's your secret?'
'Fat-free croutons,' Keegan said. 'You'd be amazed how regular croutons pile on the calories.'
'I'll make a note.'
Keegan shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. 'Where's the big man?'
Jessica pulled her hair back, grabbed a rubber band off her wrist, ponytailed her hair. She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. 'Detective Byrne has the afternoon off.'
'Sweet,' Keegan mugged. 'Must be nice to have seniority.'
Jessica laughed. 'What are you talking about? You've been here longer than anyone, Stan. It's you who should be eating Milk Duds at the movies.'
It was true. No one really knew how long Stan Keegan had been a Philadelphia police officer. White-haired, potbellied, bowlegged, a face like a just-boiled scampi, he seemed to have come with the city itself. Like an accessory. Keegan often told people he was on William Penn's original security detail.
'Last good movie I saw was The Quiet Man,' Keegan said.
'What was that, 1950?'
'Won two Oscars. 1952. John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald. Directed by John Ford. Greatest film ever made.'
Stan Keegan said fill-um. Jessica was going to ask him if he knew which Oscars the movie had won, but she figured he did. She stepped closer, glanced into the square hole. She couldn't see much. She wasn't looking forward to this. 'Have you been down there?'
Keegan shook his head. 'That's above my pay grade, Detective. Plus, I have this unnaturally low tolerance for the sight of dead bodies. Always have.'
Jessica recalled her days in uniform, days when she'd had to secure a crime scene. It was always a relief when the detectives showed up. 'I understand.'
'Does that make me a homophobe?' Keegan asked. 'Only if the dead person is gay, Stan.' 'Ah.'
Jessica knelt on the floor. There was no ladder, but that didn't seem to be a problem. The crawlspace looked to be only about forty inches deep or so. 'You sure I can't promote you, just for the afternoon?' she asked.
Jessica saw the right corner of Stan Keegan's mouth rise a millimeter. For Officer Keegan, this was the equivalent of laughing hysterically. 'No thanks.'
'All right.' Jessica took a few deep breaths. 'The sooner I get down there, right?'
'Dia duit, Detective.'
As far as Jessica knew, this was a Gaelic phrase meaning 'God to you.' The long tradition of the Irish in law enforcement in most major cities in America infused a lot of Gaelic traditions and language into the department, even if the closest you came to being Irish was drinking Irish coffees. She'd heard many black and Hispanic officers spouting Irish proverbs in the past, albeit usually around last call. 'Thanks, Stan.'
Jessica swung her legs over the edge, sat on the floor for a moment. Beneath her, the temporary police lights in the crawlspace cast a yellow, ghostlike glow along the hard pack floor. Long shadows filtered across her field of vision.
Shadows of what? Jessica wondered. She looked a little more closely and saw the vague outline of three boxes, their silhouettes elongated by the bright lights.
Three boxes in a crawlspace. One female DOA.
Jessica said a silent prayer, and lowered herself into the ground.
TWENTY-TWO
Byrne stood on the corner of Twentieth and Market Streets.
As the lunchtime crowd flowed around him, he glanced at his phone. He had turned it off. He wasn't supposed to do this, but he had half a day off, and he was going to take it. He could still think, even when he was off duty, couldn't he? On the other hand, he couldn't recall ever feeling completely off duty, not in the past fifteen years. He once took a week in the Poconos, and found himself mulling over his caseload while sitting in a creaky Adirondack chair, sipping Old Forester out of a jelly jar. Such was the life.
His mind drifted from Caitlin O'Riordan to Laura Somerville to Eve Galvez.
Eve.
Somehow he had always known what happened to her. He hadn't imagined such a gruesome fate, but he had known it was bad. He had always hoped that he was wrong. He knew that they were He felt a hand on his arm.
Byrne spun, his heart in his throat. It was his daughter, Colleen.
'Hey, Dad,' she signed.
'Hey.'
His daughter hugged him, and the world broke out in roses.
They walked down Market Street, toward the Schuylkill. The sun was high and hot. The lunchtime crowd streamed by.
'You look so good,' she signed. 'Like, really good.'
Colleen Siobhan Byrne had been deaf since birth, proficient at American Sign Language since the age of seven. These days she taught it part-time at an inner-city school. Her father was pretty good at it too.
'I'm getting there,' Byrne said. It had been a slow climb back since he had been shot three years earlier. He had realized this past spring, on a damp morning when everything, including his eyebrows and ankles and tongue
