“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 hurt like hell, that he had to do something. He’d had a man-in-the-mirror talk with himself. He knew that if he didn’t make a move, at this age, he never would. He was even considering a yoga class, although he would never tell anyone. Even his daughter. He’d even gone so far as to pick up a yoga DVD, and had tried a few of the breathing exercises. He had also been working with weights twice a week, too. Anything to stay out of physical therapy.

“Have you been working out?” she asked.

“A little,” Byrne signed.

“A little?” She grabbed his upper left arm, squeezed. “Don’t get too buff on me, Dad,” she signed. “All my girlfriends think you’re pretty cute as it is.”

Byrne blushed. No one could get to him like his daughter.

Colleen looped her arm through his.

At Twenty-first, a pair of spike-haired boys approached them, boys around seventeen, both wearing torn jeans, black T-shirts bearing some death message. They both leered at Colleen in her white sundress, at Byrne’s signing, then back to Colleen. They nudged each other, as if to say that the fact that this hot blond was deaf made her even hotter. The boys smiled at his daughter. Byrne wanted to drop them where they stood. He resisted.

When they stopped, waiting for the light on Twenty-second Street, Byrne knew it was time to ask. He got his daughter’s attention.

“So,” he began. “What’s this all about?”

Two days earlier, Donna Sullivan Byrne, Kevin Byrne’s ex-wife, Colleen’s mother, had called out of the blue. She said she wanted to see him, to have lunch. Just like that. Lunch. It was nearly an alien construct for the two of them.

They hadn’t really had lunch since they were courting. Their divorce had been reasonably amicable—if you considered the Crimean War amicable—but they had tolerated seeing each other over the years for Colleen. The other day, on the phone, Donna had seemed kind of like the old Donna. Flirtatious and happy. Happy to talk to him. It didn’t take the world’s greatest detective to know that something was up. Byrne just didn’t have a clue what it could be.

Of course, he hadn’t slept more than two hours in a row thinking about this.

“I swear I don’t know,” Colleen signed on the tail of a mysterious smile.

She stopped at a metal box of newspapers, one of a half dozen, and picked up a copy of The Report, the sleaziest free weekly in Philly, which was saying something. Even for free it was grossly overpriced. Byrne winced. Colleen laughed. She knew her father’s history with the paper. As they walked on, Colleen flipped to page three, halved it, like she knew where she was going. She did. She pointed to the picture of Caitlin O’Riordan.