'Did you know the victim?'
'No. I heard she was a real hot number, though. Damn shame.'
The information would be easy enough to find, but probably wasn't relevant. Jessica thanked the two men, got their contact information — names, addresses, phone numbers — and gave them both a business card, along with the standard request for them to call if they thought of anything else.
'You come back anytime,' Fishing Hat said. 'We always have time to talk to pretty young girls.'
Jessica smiled. Pretty young girls. She'd come back tomorrow.
Jessica and Byrne returned to the Roundhouse, collated their witness statements, putting them in the binder. While they waited for the coroner's preliminary reports, as well as any forensic findings, they turned their attention to other matters of importance.
They each had a case on which they were working. Both cases had stalled, and there was no worse feeling for a homicide detective than the sense that an investigation was slipping away from them. While Byrne made calls to the four witnesses he needed for the grandjury probe of Eduardo Robles, just to keep the pot simmering, Jessica looked up some addresses, trying to align the witnesses in another case.
Two weeks earlier a gun had been left at the scene of a drugrelated homicide. The weapon had been traced back to a woman named Patricia Lentz, a known drug addict and prostitute.
The Lentz apartment was on North 19th Street near Cecil B. Moore. When Jessica and Byrne arrived, they found the door open, TV blasting, something burning on the stove. The first floor was a haze of vile smoke, a landfill of soiled mattresses, broken furniture, spent crack vials and empty liquor bottles.
They found Patricia Lentz passed out beneath a pile of clothing in the basement. At first Jessica did not think she was going to find a pulse. But the woman had just passed out and, once she'd been revived by paramedics, was taken into custody without incident.
Whereas the suspect was in custody, her apartment had not yet been cleared. Jessica was quite familiar with the layout of these row houses and knew there were two more rooms upstairs. While Byrne turned the barely coherent woman over to the uniformed officers for transport to the Roundhouse, Jessica continued upstairs. She cleared the first small bedroom, and the bathroom. When she walked into the second bedroom she found there was a closet. She eased open the door.
Jessica froze. There, on the floor in front of her, partially hidden by a plastic garbage bag bursting at the seams with rotting trash, was a little boy. No more than two years old. A dark-haired little boy dressed in a ragged T-shirt and diaper. It appeared that he had crawled beneath the garbage for warmth.
Reaching down into the closet, she picked up the boy. He was shivering with fear, miserable in his soiled diaper. There were rashes on his arms and legs.
'It's okay, little man,' Jessica said. 'It's okay.'
On the way out of the house, Jessica found a pile of papers on a card table near the front door. They were mostly unpaid bills, flyers for pizza and Chinese takeout, shut-off notices. Also on the table was a photograph of an infant lying on a dirty bed sheet. Jessica could not mistake those eyes. It was the little boy she had in her arms. She flipped the picture over. It read Carlos age three months.
His name was Carlos.
Jessica brought the boy back to the Roundhouse to await a representative from the Department of Human Services. She had stopped along the way and bought diapers, wipes, lotion, powder. It had been a long time since she had done these things with Sophie, but it was like riding a bike: she hadn't forgotten.
Cleaned up, shiny and combed, Carlos sat at one of the desks, on top of a pile of phone books, secured to the chair with an empty ammunition belt. Someone found a Philadelphia Eagles child's sweatshirt. It was a little too big, so they rolled up the sleeves and Scotch-taped them gently around the boy's wrists.
The boy's mother, Patricia Lentz, was booked on first-degree murder charges, and the case was a lock. They had the murder weapon, ballistics matched, and Lentz would not be coming back for a long time. Carlos would have children of his own by the time she got out.
'What's going on with Carlos?' Byrne asked, bringing Jessica back to the present and the new case at hand.
Jessica had to take a second. The last thing you wanted to do in this room, even with your partner, who knew you better than anyone in your life, was display any emotion besides anger.
'Nothing,' Jessica said. 'They still haven't been able to find Patricia Lentz's sister. Word is that she's an even bigger crackhead.'
Jessica knew it was no secret, especially to Kevin Byrne, that she and Vincent had been trying for two years to have another child. Sophie was now seven, and the longer they waited, well, all the books said you really didn't want too much of an age gap between siblings. The very notion of undertaking the monumental task of adopting Carlos was, of course, a ridiculous idea. During daylight hours, anyway. But when Jessica lay awake in the middle of the night it all seemed possible. Then the sun would come up again and she realized it would never happen.
'How is he doing?' Byrne asked.
'Good, I guess,' Jessica said. She really didn't know if that was true or not, but it was the only answer she had.
'If you want, we can stop in at the Department of Human Services and check on him.'
The sooner Jessica let go, the better it would be. Still, she knew what she was going to say. 'Sure. That would be good.'
Before they could discuss it further, Nicci Malone poked her head into the duty room. 'Kevin, you have a call.'
Byrne crossed the room, hit a button, answered. A few moments later he pulled out his notebook, wrote something in it, punched a fist through the air. It was clearly good news. Jessica needed some good news.
Byrne hung up, grabbed his coat. 'That was the ID Unit.'
The ID Unit processed latent fingerprints.
'Are we on?' Jessica asked.
'We are,' Byrne said. 'Our cleanshaven dead man has a name. Kenneth Arnold Beckman.'
Chapter 11
The Beckman house was a gaunt and peeling postwar row house on West Tioga Street, in the Nicetown area of North Philadelphia. Nicetown was a blue-collar section of the city that was slowly recovering after three decades of slow decline, a slide culminating in the Tastykake company moving out of the area in 2007. At one time it was rumored that Trump Entertainment would be building a casino on Hunting Park Avenue. It never happened. The only gambling being done in Nicetown these days was among those residents and store owners debating whether or not to hang onto their property.
Before leaving the Roundhouse, Jessica asked Josh Bontrager to run a check on Kenneth Arnold Beckman. Bontrager would call if there was anything to report.
When Jessica and Byrne pulled to a stop in front of the Beckman house, near Schuyler Street, it began to rain. The wind picked up, and when they stepped onto the porch wet leaves gathered at their feet.
Jessica rang the bell three times before noticing that there was a wire hanging out from the bottom of the rusted panel. The bell didn't work. A quick look at the crumbling porch, with its leaning support pillars and brickwork desperately in need of tuck pointing, explained why. She knocked on the door, gently at first. The second time she knocked harder. Eventually they heard the deadbolts begin to turn. There were three of them.
The woman who answered the door was a hard forty. Her platinum hair was perm-fried, her make-up looked like it had been applied with a paper towel. She wore black Capri pants and battered pink running shoes. A lighted cigarette hung from the corner of her mouth.
Looking Byrne up and down, she tossed a sideways glance at Jessica.
'Are you Mrs. Beckman?' Byrne asked.
'Well, now,' she replied. 'That would depend on two things, wouldn't it?'
'And what would those two things be?'
'Who you are and what the fuck you want.'
