Текст книги "Badlands"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

Соавторы: Richard Montanari
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

TWENTY-SIX

THE FIRST THING she noticed was that there were a lot of foreign people. Foreign people as in Asian, Middle Eastern, African. Not foreign as in folks from three counties over.

The second thing she noticed was that this was, by far, the biggest room she had ever been in. It might have even been too big to classify as a room. It was more like a cathedral. The coffered ceilings had to be fifty feet high, maybe more, offering a dozen or so enormous hanging chandeliers, ringed by the tallest windows she had ever seen. The floors were marble, the hand railings looked like they were made of brass. At one end was a huge bronze statue called the Angel of the Resurrection.

As train stations went, she thought, this was probably the Taj Mahal.

She sat on one of the long wooden benches for a while, watching the crowds come and go, listening to the announcements, to the variety of accents and languages, reading—but not really reading—one of the free newspapers. Politics, opinion, reviews, sex ads. Blah, blah, blah. Even the columns on music and movies bored the shit out of her. Which was rare.

Around two o’clock she walked the edges of the huge room a few times, passing by the shops, the ticket machines, the escalators down to the trains. She was still stunned by the scale of the place, still glancing upward every so often. She didn’t want to look like a tourist—or even worse, some hick runaway—but she couldn’t seem to help herself. The place was that amazing.

At one point she glanced over her shoulder. Three small Mennonite children, perhaps just off the train from Berks County, were looking at the ceiling, too. At least she wasn’t alone, she thought. Although, with her tight jeans, Ugg boots, and heavy eye makeup, she was just about the furthest thing from Mennonite she could imagine.

In her experience, the only other place she had ever been that compared to this train station was the King of Prussia mall, the place that had every single store you could imagine, along with a few extra. Burberry, Coach, Eddie Bauer, Louis Vuitton, Hermes. She had visited the mall once when she was about ten. Her aunt had taken her there as a birthday present, but she only came away with a pair of Gap jeans (she preferred Lucky Brand these days) and a bad stomach from something crappy they had eaten at the Ho-Lee Chow or Super Wok or Shang-High or whatever they called the fast-food Chinese restaurant. It was okay, though. Her family was far from rich. Gap was cool back then. Before they left the mall she had found a small discarded shopping bag from Versace and walked around with it at school for three weeks, carrying it like a funky purse. The haters hated, but she didn’t care.

According to the brochure she found on the train, the Thirtieth Street station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was 562,000 square feet. Located on Market Street, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth, it was one of the busiest intercity passenger facilities in the United States, the brochure went on to say, and it ranked behind only New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Union Station in its yearly volume of passengers. In the three previous years there had been 4.4 million people boarding trains in the Thirtieth Street terminal.

Millions, she thought. You’d think there’d be one cute guy. She laughed. She didn’t feel like it—there was the rough equivalent of a ball of hot barbed wire in her stomach—but she laughed anyway. The last thing she was doing here was trying to meet cute guys. She was here for something else.

SHE SAT AT ONE OF THE TABLES in the food court, beneath a bright yellow Au Bon Pain umbrella. She tapped her pocket. She was almost broke. When she left the house she’d had sixty-one dollars and change. It seemed like enough money to get through at least a few days on the road.

Knock knock. Reality calling.

She dreamed about food. An eight-slice pizza with onions, mushrooms, and red peppers. A double veggie-burger with onion rings. Her taste buds recalled a dish her aunt once made: potato gnocchi with pesto and roasted red potatoes. God, she was hungry. But out here there was a well-known equation: runaway = hungry.

It was a truth she had better get used to.

In addition to her rumbling stomach, there was something else she realized that she had better get ready to address. She was on the street, and she needed a street name. She glanced around the room, at the stalls near the doors that led to Thirtieth Street. She watched the people come and go. Every one of them had a name.

Everyone in the world was known by something, she thought. A name, a nickname, an epithet. An identity. What were you if you didn’t have a name?

Nothing.

Even worse, a number. A Social Security number. A prison number. You couldn’t sink much lower than that.

No one knew her here. That was both the good news and the bad news. The good news because she was completely anonymous. The bad news because there was no one she could rely upon, no one to call. She was on her own, a fallen pine cone in a lonely forest.

She watched the ebb and flow of humanity. It did not stop. Tall, fat, short, black, white, scary, normal. She remembered every face. She always had. When she was five years old, the doctors said she had an eidetic memory—the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects with extreme accuracy—and ever since she had never forgotten a face, or place, or photograph.

She noticed a guy at the end of the bench, a sailor with a canvas gym bag bursting at the seams sitting next to him like a dutiful beagle. Every so often he would look over at her, then look away, a flash of hot red guilt on his face. He could not have been more than twenty—kind of cute in his buzz cut and uniform—but she was younger, still bona fide jailbait. She smiled at him anyway, just to make it worse. After that, he got up and walked over to the food court. God, what a bitch she could be.

She glanced at the doors leading to the street. There was a booth selling gifts and flowers. An older couple, perhaps in their thirties, debated over a basket intended for a funeral ceremony. It seemed that the woman wanted to spend a lot of money, seeing as how the dearly departed was her cousin or second cousin, and how they had come all the way from Rochester. The man—a fat guy, a heart attack on a stick, as her aunt used to say—wanted to forget the whole thing. It seemed he was not a big fan of the deceased.

She watched them argue for a while, her eyes roaming the florist’s wares. Mylar balloons, ceramic knickknacks, crappy vases, a nice selection of flowers. And it came to her. Just like that. All things considered, as she perused the floral displays, she might have called herself Dahlia or Fern or Iris. Maybe even Daisy.

In the end it became a no-brainer. She may have been a runaway, but now she had a name.

She decided to call herself Lilly.

TWENTY-SEVEN

KEVIN BYRNE CROUCHED in the crawlspace, his sciatica besting the Vicodin in his system. It always did. At his height, just over six-three, he felt entombed by the damp, close walls.

Jessica was directing the scene out front.

Byrne looked at the three brightly colored boxes in front of him. Red. Yellow. Blue. Used-car lot pennant colors. Happy colors. The boxes—each had a small bronze doorknob and hinges—were closed now, but he had looked inside each. He wished he hadn’t, but he’d been thinking that same thought since the first time he walked onto the scene of a violent homicide on the first night he spent in uniform. That night it was a shotgun triple in Juniata. Brains on the wall, guts on the coffee table, St. Elsewhere on the blood-splattered TV. It never got better. A little easier sometimes, but never better.

The wooden boxes were covered in a layer of dust, disturbed only, he hoped, by the gloved hands of the two police officers who had been down here. Jessica and a uniformed officer named Maria Caruso.

Byrne studied the joints, the miters, the construction of these small coffins. They were expertly crafted. There was definitely a great deal of skill at work here.

In a few moments the crime scene unit would begin their collection of evidence in situ, then the victim would be transported to the medical examiner’s office. The techs were outside the building now, drinking cold coffee and chatting, waiting for Detective Kevin Byrne’s signal.

Byrne wasn’t ready yet.

He looked at the placement of the boxes. They were not in a line, but were not placed at random either. They were precisely organized, it seemed, edges all but touching in a staggered pattern. The first box, the yellow one, was closest to the wall on the north side. Byrne made note of this. This was the direction in which the body was facing. He was experienced enough to know that you never knew what might be important, what pathology lurked in the disturbed mind of a psychopathic killer. The second box, the red one, was staggered to the left. The third box, a shade of royal blue, was in line with the first.

He examined the hardpack earth around the base of the wooden cubes. There were no obvious scrape marks indicating the boxes had been dragged. Earlier he had slipped a few gloved fingers under one corner of one of the boxes, tried to lift it. The box was not light. This meant that whoever had brought these boxes down here probably had to duckwalk them across the expanse. That took strength.

One thing was certain: This was not the primary crime scene. The victim had bled out long before she was put into these boxes and moved into this crawlspace. As far as he could tell, there was a small amount of dried blood in the boxes themselves, and none on the floor.

Before coming down, Byrne had borrowed a measuring tape from one of the techs, and measured the opening cut into the floor, then the size of the boxes. The opening was about two inches larger than the boxes in all directions.

Had the opening existed, and then the killer built the boxes to fit? Or was it the other way around? Or was it a lucky coincidence? Byrne doubted it. There were few coincidences in his line of work.

Byrne shifted his weight. His legs were killing him. He tried to straighten them, but he could not stand up more than a few inches, and he wasn’t about to kneel down on a dirt floor. This was a relatively new suit. He tried steadying himself on the yellow box and—

–senses the killer coming in from the back. He brings down the boxes one at a time. He has a truck, or a van. He did not assemble the boxes here. They are heavy, cumbersome, but he manages. He has been here before, many times, knew about the access door, knew he would not be discovered. Why?

He brings the girl down in pieces, no middle, the middle is empty, no heart, heartless. He arranges the boxes, meticulous and precise in this dank and confined tomb. She is a runaway, his first? Second? Tenth? He has done this before, has collected a child of the night, long fingers, a man’s clever hands on a box of bones, the smoke of a funeral pyre, light my fire…

Byrne rocked back on his heels, sat down hard. His head throbbed.

The headaches were returning.

WHEN BYRNE EMERGED from the building he pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in a trash can. He saw Jessica across the street, leaning against her car, arms crossed. She tapped a finger on her bicep. She looked wired, manic. She wore a pair of amber Serengeti sunglasses.

Before coming out of the crawlspace, Byrne had dry-swallowed a pair of Vicodin, his last two. He’d have to make a call.

The outside air was a mélange of acrid exhaust fumes and the rich tang of barbecue.

Still no rain.

“What do you think?” Jessica asked.

Byrne shrugged, stalling. His head seemed ready to implode. “Did you talk to the officer who discovered the victim?”

“I did.”

“Do you think she contaminated the scene in any way?”

Jessica shook her head. “No. She’s sharp. She’s young, but she knows what she’s doing.”

Byrne glanced back at the building. “So, why this place? Why here?”

“Good question.”

They were being led around North Philadelphia. There was no doubt about that, and few things made detectives angrier. Except, perhaps, having a murderer go underground and never get caught.

Who would do such a thing? After the killer’s rage had died, after the fire went out, why not dispose of the remains in plastic bags, or dump them in the river? Hell, Philadelphia had two very usable rivers for such purposes. Not to mention Wissahickon Creek. The PPD fished bodies, and parts of bodies, out of the rivers all the time.

Byrne had run into dismemberment a few times when the victim was killed by one of the various mobs in Philly—the Italians, the Colombians, the Mexicans, the Jamaicans. When it came to hyper-violent gangland homicide, all styles were served in the City of Brotherly Love.

But this had nothing to do with the mob.

Two runaways. One drowned, one dismembered.

Was there enough to tie this to the murder of Caitlin O’Riordan? They were a long way from getting any forensic details—hair, fibers, blood evidence, fingerprints—but the phone call to the CIU hotline and the cryptic clue in the Bible could not be ignored.

“This is one killer.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Byrne said, playing devil’s advocate.

Jessica uncrossed her arms, recrossed them. Now she tapped both forefingers on both biceps. “Yeah, well. I know we’re in the Badlands, partner, but this is beyond the pale. Way beyond.” She took off her sunglasses, tossed them into the car. “That was Monica Renzi’s heart. You know it and I know it. The DNA’s going to match. It’s going to hit the papers, and then hell will break its subterranean bonds.”

Byrne just nodded. She was probably right.

“Want to know what happened?” she continued. “I’ll tell you what happened. This sick bastard killed Monica, cut her up, stuck her in boxes, then put her heart in a jar and put it in that refrigerator. Then he put his psycho clue in that Bible, hoping we would figure out the Jeremiah Crosley ruse and we would come here to find his little treasure. We did. Now he’s out there having a good laugh at how clever he is.”

Byrne bought into the entire theory.

“He’s targeting runaways, Kevin. Lost kids. First this girl, then Caitlin. He just hid Monica Renzi a little too well. When no one found her, he had to ratchet up the game. He’s still out there and he’s going to do it again. Fuck him, fuck this job, and fuck this place.”

Byrne knew that his partner sometimes ran on emotion—she was Italian, it came with the genes—but he rarely saw her get this worked up at a scene. Stress eventually got to everyone. He put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Top of the world, Ma.”

“Look. We’re going to get this freak. Let’s get the lab work back on this one. There are a million ways to fuck up with a crime like this. This guy may be evil, but he’s no genius. They never are.”

Jessica stared at the ground for a few moments, simmering, then reached into the car, pulled out a folder. She opened it, retrieved a sheet. “Look at this.”

She handed Byrne the paper. It was a photocopy of the activity log for the O’Riordan case.

“What am I looking for?”

She tapped the page. “These three names.” She pointed to a trio of names on the log. They were first names, nicknames at that, no last names. Three people who were interviewed on the day after Caitlin O’Riordan’s body was found. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

“What about them?” Byrne asked.

“They were interviewed back in May. Nothing was typed up, and the notes are missing.”

Byrne saw that all the interviews were conducted by Detective Freddy Roarke. The late Freddy Roarke. “You checked the binder?” he asked. “There’s no notes?”

“Nope. Not for these three people. Everything else is there. These notes are gone.”

As a rule, when a detective conducted a neighborhood survey, or an interview in the field, he or she made handwritten notes in their official notebook, which was called their work product. Most detectives also carried a personal notebook, which was not included in the file. The work product, when filled, was put in the binder, which was the official and only file on a homicide case. If a detective wrote notes for two or three different jobs, the pages would be torn out and placed in the corresponding file. If the interviews became important, they were typed up. If not, the notes became the only record of the interview.

“What about Freddy’s partner?” Jessica asked. “What was his name?”

“Pistone,” Byrne said. “Butchie Pistone.”

“Butchie. Jesus. You know him well?”

“Not well,” Byrne said. “He was kind of a hard-ass. He was a hotshot when I was coming up, but it all went to shit after he was involved in a questionable shoot. He was comatose near the end. Drinking on the job, chewing Altoids by the case.”

“Is he still around?”

“Yeah,” Byrne said. “He owns a bar on Lehigh.”

Jessica glanced at her watch, at the entrance to 4514 Shiloh Street. CSU was just getting started. “Let’s go talk to him.”

As they pulled away, a pair of news teams arrived on scene. This was going to make the evening news.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ROCCO “BUTCHIE” PISTONE had been a Philadelphia police officer for thirty years. In his time he had worked as a patrol officer in the Fifth District, as well as a detective in West Division before coming to homicide. When he retired, two months ago, he bought into the Aragon Bar on Lehigh Avenue, a tavern owned by his brother Ralph, also a retired cop. It was a halfway popular cop stop for the officers in the Twenty-sixth District.

Now in his sixties, Butchie lived above the tavern and, rumor had it, held court in the club a few nights per week, running a medium-stakes poker game in the basement.

Jessica and Byrne parked the car, walked the half block to the bar. The entrance to the apartment on the second floor was a doorway about twenty feet west of the entrance to the tavern.

As they approached, beefy white guys in their twenties—knit watch caps, sleeveless T-shirts, fingerless gloves. Two drank from brown paper bags. The smell of pot smoke was thick in the air. Real House of Pain types. A boom box on the sidewalk played some kind of budget white-boy rap. As Jessica and Byrne got closer—and it became clear that they were heading for the doorway—the three guys went a little chesty, like this was their piece of geography, their inch of Google Earth, that needed to be defended.

“Yo. Excuse me. Somethin’ I can help you with?” one asked. He was the smallest of the trio, but clearly the alpha male in this pack. Built like a Hummer. Jessica noted that he had a crucifix tattooed on the right side of his neck, just below the ear. The cross was a switchblade with a drop of blood on its tip. Charming.

“Yo?” Byrne said. “Who are you, Frank Stallone?”

The kid smirked. “Funny stuff.”

“It’s a living.”

The kid cracked his knuckles, one at a time. “I repeat. Somethin’ I can help you with?”

“I don’t believe there is,” Byrne said. “But thanks for asking.”

The biggest of the three, the one wearing a bright orange ski vest in eighty-degree weather, stepped into the doorway, blocking their access. “It wasn’t really a question.”

“And yet I answered,” Byrne said. “Must be my upbringing. Now, if you’ll step aside, we’ll go about our business, and you can go about yours.”

The big guy laughed. It was apparent that this was going to continue. He pushed a stiff finger into Byrne’s chest. “I don’t think you’re hearing me, Mick.”

Bad idea, Jessica thought. Very, very bad idea. She unbuttoned the front of her blazer, took a few steps back, flanking the other two.

In a flash, Byrne had the big goon by the right wrist. He brought the arm down, twisted it under, turned the young man around, jammed the arm skyward and slammed him face-first into the brick wall. Hard. The other two went on alert, but didn’t make a move. Not yet. Byrne hauled out the kid’s wallet, tearing a pants seam in the process. He tossed the billfold to Jessica. She opened it.

One of the other two thugs took a step toward Jessica. She flipped back the hem of her jacket without looking up. The butt of her Glock was exposed, along with the badge clipped to her belt. The punk backed off, hands out to his sides.

“What are you gonna do? Fuckin’ shoot me?”

“Just the once,” Jessica said. “They have us buying our own bullets now. It’s a cutback thing.” Jessica tossed the wallet back to Byrne. “This gentleman is one Flavio E. Pistone.”

Byrne patted the kid down, spun him back around. Flavio’s nose gushed blood. It might have been broken. Byrne stuffed the wallet into Flavio’s vest pocket, looked him in the eye. Inches away now. “I’m a police officer. You put your hands on me. That’s assault. That’s three to five. You don’t go home tonight.”

The kid tried to maintain eye contact, but he couldn’t hold on to Byrne’s gaze. Jessica had never seen anyone actually do it.

“My uncle’s an ex-cop,” Flavio said. The word cop came out gop. His nose was broken.

“He has my condolences,” Byrne said. “Now, Flavio, I can cuff you right here on the street, in front of your little Eminem social club, haul your ass down to the Roundhouse, or you can step aside.” Byrne stepped back, squared off. It was almost as if he wanted the kid to make a move. “Out of respect for your uncle, I’m willing to forget about this. But it’s your call. Anything else?”

Flavio smirked, but it didn’t play. He was clearly in a world of hurt, but doing his macho best not to show it. He shook his head.

“Good,” Byrne said. “It was nice meeting you. A true delight. Now get the fuck out of my way.”

Byrne stepped forward. The three thugs nervously shuffled to the side. Byrne opened the door, held it for Jessica. They entered the building, crossed the small lobby and headed up the stairs.

August, Jessica thought. It brings out the best in everybody. “Not bad for a guy with sciatica.”

“Yeah, well,” Byrne said. “We do what we can.”

BUTCHIE PISTONE WAS A SHORT squat man; thick arms and bull neck, navy tats on both forearms. He had a stubbly head and a boozer’s eyes, ringed with crimson. Liver spots dotted his hands.

They met in his small living room overlooking Lehigh Avenue. Butchie’s chair was right in front of the window. Jessica imagined him looking out onto the street all day, in his retirement, a street he used to patrol, watching the neighborhood go through its throes of change. Cops never strayed too far from the curb.

The room was stacked with cartons of liquor, napkins, swizzle sticks, Beer Nuts, sundry bar supplies. Jessica noticed that the man’s coffee table was actually two cases of Johnny Walker Black spanned with a piece of varnished plywood. The place smelled of cigarettes, citrus Glade, frozen dinners. The sounds of the bar drifted up from the floorboards—jukebox, inebriated laughter, ringtones, pool balls clacking.

Byrne introduced Jessica, and the three of them kicked the small talk around for a few minutes.

“Sorry about my nephew,” Butchie said. “Got his mother’s temper. Rest in peace.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Byrne said.

“She was Irish. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“And his two cousins down there, eh? Talk about the shallow end of the gene pool.”

“They seem like nice young men,” Byrne deadpanned.

Butchie laughed, coughed. The sound was a raspy backfire. “They been called a lot of things. Never that.” He crossed his legs, wincing with the effort. He was clearly in some discomfort, but the half empty bottle of Bushmills and small forest of amber pill vials on the table next to his chair spoke to the fact that he was working on it. Jessica noticed a cell phone, a cordless phone, a half dozen remotes and a SIG P220 in a leather holster on the table, as well. From his leather La-Z-Boy throne it appeared that Butchie Pistone was ready for just about anything.

“Ike still your boss over there?” Butchie asked.

Byrne nodded.

“Ike Buchanan’s a good man. We worked the Fifth when he was on the way up. Give him my regards.”

“I sure will,” Byrne said. “I appreciate you seeing us.”

“No problem at all.”

Butchie looked at Jessica, then back, his small talk exhausted. “So, what can I do for you, Detective?”

“I just have a few questions,” Byrne said.

“Whatever you need.”

Byrne put the picture of Caitlin O’Riordan on the coffee table. It was her missing-person photo, the one in which she was wearing her backpack. “Remember her?” Byrne asked.

Butchie shook a Kool out of a near-empty pack. He lit it. Jessica could see a slight shake in the flame. A tell.

“I remember.”

“Back in May Freddy did some interviews.” Byrne put the activity log on the table. Pistone barely glanced at it. “He talked to some street kids.”

Butchie shrugged. “What about it?”

“The interviews are noted, but nothing was typed up, and the notes are gone.”

Another shrug. Another cloud of Kool smoke.

“Any thoughts?” Byrne asked.

“You check the binder? Maybe they got moved around.”

“We checked,” Byrne said. “We didn’t find them.”

Butchie waved a hand at his surroundings. “You may have noticed, I’m not on the job anymore.”

“Do you remember these interviews?”

“No.”

The answer came a little too quickly, Jessica thought. Butchie remembered.

“You continued to work the case for another month,” Byrne said.

Pistone coughed again. “I clocked in, did my job. Just like you.”

“Not like me,” Byrne said. “You mean to tell me that you opened this file another dozen times, and you didn’t notice anything missing?”

Pistone stared out the window. He took a long drag on his cigarette, hotboxing it. “I was a cop for thirty fuckin’ years in this town. You have any idea the shit I’ve seen?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Byrne said.

“That kid was my last case. I was drinking at seven in the morning. I don’t remember a thing.” He took a sip of his straight Bushmills. “I did her family a favor by pulling the pin. I did the city a favor.”

“We may have a compulsive out there. We found a second body today. Young girl. It looks like the same guy.”

Butchie’s face drained of all color. He hit the Bushmills again.

“Nothing to say?” Byrne asked.

Butchie just stared out the window.

“It’s not like we can ask Freddy, can we?”

Butchie’s face darkened. “Don’t go there, Detective,” he said. “Don’t even fuckin’ go there.”

“This is going to go where it goes, Butchie. If you misplaced these notes, or even worse, you lost them, and you didn’t make a note about it, it could get bad. Especially if another girl dies. Nothing I can do about it now.”

“Sure there is.” Pistone put down his cigarette and his drink. He struggled to his feet. Byrne stood up, too. He towered over the man. “You can turn around and walk out that door.”

The two men stared at each other. The only sound was the click of the old wind-up alarm clock on Butchie’s table, the cacophony of muffled shouts and laughter coming from the bar below. Jessica wanted to say something, but it occurred to her that both of these men may have forgotten that she was even in the room. This was real High Noon stuff.

Finally, Byrne reached out, shook the man’s hand. Just like that. “Thanks for seeing us, Butchie.”

“No problem,” Butchie replied, a little surprised.

Byrne was really good at these things, Jessica thought. His philosophy was, always shake a man’s hand. That way, when the whip comes down, they never see it coming.

“Any time,” Butchie added.

Except this lifetime, Jessica thought.

“I’ll pass along your regards to Sergeant Buchanan,” Byrne said as they headed to the door, twisting the blade.

“Yeah,” Butchie Pistone said. “You do that.”

THEY RODE IN RELATIVE SILENCE for a few blocks. When they made a right on Sixth Street, Byrne broke the quiet. It wasn’t anything Jessica expected him to say.

“I’d see her sometimes.”

“What do you mean?” Jessica asked. “See who?”

“Eve.”

Jessica waited for him to continue. A block later, he did.

“After we stopped seeing each other, I’d see her out on the town. Usually all by herself. Different bars, different restaurants. Mostly bars. You know how this job is. We all end up going to the same places. As soon as you find a place where cops don’t go, somebody finds out about it and it becomes a cop bar.”

Jessica nodded. It was true.

“I always thought about approaching her, seeing if we could just be friends, just have a drink and walk away. I never did.”

“How come?”

Byrne shrugged. “I don’t know. On the other hand, I never just turned around and walked out, either. I just seemed to sit there and watch her. I loved to look at her. Every man who saw her did, but I had this notion that I had reached her somehow. Maybe I did for just a second.”

“Did she ever see you?”

Byrne shook his head. “Not once. If she did, she never let on. Eve had this way of shutting out the world.”

They turned onto Callowhill, then onto Eighth Street.

“And here’s the crazy part,” Byrne said. “Do you know what she was doing most of the time?”

“What?”

“Reading.”

It was the last thing Jessica expected him to say. Calf-roping and macramé would have come first. “Reading?”

“Yeah. I’d see her in some pretty rough places—Grays Ferry, Point Breeze, Kensington—and she would just be sitting there, sipping her drinks, and reading a paperback. Usually a novel.”

Jessica conjured the image of this beautiful, tough as nails woman, dressed up, sitting in a bar by herself, reading a book. This woman was something.

“What did she drink?” Jessica asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What was her cocktail of choice?”

“Wild Turkey, rocks,” Byrne said. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

BYRNE PUT THE CAR IN PARK, cut the engine. The car clicked and clacked and shuddered. It eventually fell silent.

“What’s in those missing notes, partner?” Jessica asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“You think they were just misfiled?”

“It’s possible,” Byrne said. “I’ll go rooting around a little tomorrow.”

While it was possible the notebook pages were placed into another binder by mistake, it was unlikely. They might never know what was in them.

The activity log did not give full names for these interviewees. Just street names. Byrne felt weary just thinking about the effort needed to try and track down three people without last names, pictures, or Social Security numbers.