'Sure.'
He took the folder from her, extracted a body chart, clipped it to a clipboard. The body chart was a standard police-department form that had four outlines of the human body drawn on it, front and back, left and right side, as well as space for the rudimentary details of the crime scene. It was the first and most referred-to form in the binder that would be dedicated to the case.
The two detectives stepped inside. Jessica spoke while Josh Bontrager wrote.
'We have a Caucasian male, aged thirty to forty-five years. There is a single laceration across the forehead, what appears to be a puncture wound above the right eye. The victim's right ear is mutilated. A portion of the ear lobe is missing. There is a ligature mark across the base of the neck.'
Bontrager went over the form, marking these areas on the figure.
'The victim is nude. The body looks to have been recently shaved from head to toe. He is barefoot. There are bruises on the wrists and ankles, which indicate the victim may have been restrained.'
Jessica continued to describe the scene, her path now forever crossed with that of this dead man, a dead man with no name.
Twenty minutes later, with Josh Bontrager back at the Roundhouse, and Dennis Stansfield still on canvass, Jessica paused at the top of the stairs. She turned 360 degrees, scanning the landscape. Directly behind the store was a double vacant lot, a parcel where a pair of buildings had recently been razed. There were still piles of concrete, bricks, lumber. There was no fence. To the right was a block of row houses. To the left was the rear of some sort of commercial building, with no windows overlooking the alley. If someone were to have seen anyone entering the rear of the crime scene, they would have had to have been in a back room of one of the row houses, or in the vacant lot. The view from across the street was partially obscured by the large piles of debris.
Jessica approached the responding officer, who stood at the mouth of the alley with the crime-scene log. One of his duties was to sign everyone in and out.
'Who found the body?' Jessica asked him.
'It was an anonymous tip,' the officer said. 'Came into 911 around six o'clock this morning.'
Anonymous, Jessica thought. A million and a half people in her city, and they were all anonymous. Until it was one of their own.
Chapter 7
He awoke, dreambound, still in the hypnotic thrall of troubled sleep. This morning, in his final reverie, as the light of day filtered through the blinds, Kevin Byrne stood in the defendant's well of a cavernous courtroom that was lit by a sea of votive candles. He could not see the members of the jury but he knew who they were. They were the silent victims. And there were more than twelve. There were thousands, each holding one light.
Byrne got out of bed, staggered to the kitchen, splashed cold water on his face. He'd gotten four hours of sleep; three the night before. Over the past few months his insomnia had become acute, a routine part of his life so ingrained that he could not imagine living any other way. Nevertheless, he had an appointment — doctor's orders and against his will — with a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania Sleep Clinic.
He took a long hot shower, rinsing off the previous night. He toweled, dressed, pulling a fresh shirt out of the dry-cleaning bag. He put on a new suit, his favorite tie, then sat at his small dinette table, sipped his coffee. He glanced at the Sleep Clinic questionnaire. All one hundred sixty probing questions.
Question 87: Do you snore?
If I could get someone to sleep with me, I might be able to answer that, he thought.
Then Byrne remembered his little experiment. The night before, at around two a.m., when he'd found that he couldn't drift off, he'd dug out his small Sony digital recorder.
He got back in bed, took two Ambien, turned on the recorder, flipped off the light, and closed his eyes. Four hours later he awoke.
And now he had the results of his experiment. He poured more coffee, played the recording from the beginning. At first he heard some rustling, the settling of the unit on the nightstand. Then he heard himself turn off the lamp, a little more rustling, then a bump of the table, which was so loud that it made him jump. He turned down the volume. Then, for the next five minutes or so, he heard nothing but white noise, the occasional car passing by his apartment.
Byrne listened to this rhythmic breathing awhile, which seemed to get slower and slower. Then he heard the first snort. It sounded like a backfire. Or maybe a pissed-off Rottweiler.
Great, he thought. So he did snore. Not constantly, but about fifteen minutes into the recording he began to snore again, loudly for a few minutes, then not at all, then loudly again. He stared at the recorder, thinking:
What the fuck am I doing?
The answer? Sitting in his small dining room, barely awake, listening to a recording of himself sleeping. Did it get dumber than this?
Man, he had to get a life.
He pressed the fast-forward button, and every time he came across a sound he stopped, rewound for a few seconds, played it back.
Byrne was just about to give up on the experiment when he heard something that sounded different. He hit Stop, then Play.
'You know? came his voice from the recorder.
What?
Rewind.
'You know.'
He let it run. Soon there was another noise, the sound of the lamp clicking on, and his voice saying, clear as a bell:
'2:52.'
Then there was the snap of the lamp being turned off, more rustling, then silence for the rest of the recording. Although he had no memory of it, he must have awakened, turned on the light, looked at the clock, spoken the time aloud, and gone back to sleep.
Except there was no clock in his bedroom. And his watch and cellphone were always on the dresser.
So how did he know what time it was?
Byrne played it all back, one last time, just to be certain that he was not imagining all of it. He was not.
2:52.
You know.
As Byrne waited in the park, he thought about another moment in this place, a time when his heart had been intact. His daughter Colleen had been four years old, and was trying desperately to get a kite in the air. She ran in circles, back and forth, her blonde hair trailing, arms raised high, repeatedly getting tangled in the string. She stamped her feet, shook a fist at the sky, untangled herself, tried again and again. But she never asked him for help. Not once.
It seemed as if it were just a few weeks ago. But it was not. It was a long time ago. Somehow, Colleen, who had been deaf since birth, the result of a condition called Mondini Dysplasia, was going to Gallaudet University, the country's first and most preeminent college for deaf and hard-of-hearing undergraduate students.
Today she was off on an overnighter to the Gallaudet campus in Washington D.C. with her friend Lauren, ostensibly to scope out the campus and the possibilities for living quarters, but quite possibly to scope out the nightlife and the young men. Byrne knew the tuition fees were steep, but he had been saving and investing for a long time, and Colleen had a partial scholarship.
Byrne had wanted Colleen to stay nearer to Philadelphia, but it had been ages since he had been able to talk her out of anything once she set her mind to it.
He had never met Lauren, but Colleen had good taste in friends. He hoped Lauren was sensible too, and that he wouldn't be getting a phone call from the D.C. police telling him that the two of them had been picked up at
