“What do we have this fine Philly morning?” Byrne asked with a pretty good Dublin brogue.

“Female juvenile DOA in the basement,” said the officer, a stocky black woman in her late twenties. officer j. davis.

“Who found her?” Byrne asked.

“Mr. DeJohn Withers.” She pointed to a disheveled, clearly homeless black man standing near the curb.

“When?”

“Sometime this morning. Mr. Withers is a bit unclear of the time frame.”

“He didn’t consult his Palm Pilot?”

Officer Davis just smiled.

“He touch anything?” Byrne asked.

“He says no,” Davis said. “But he was down there scrapping for copper, so who knows?”

“He called it in?”

“No,” Davis said. “He probably didn’t have change.” Another knowing smile. “He flagged us down, we called radio.”

“Hang on to him.”

Byrne glanced at the front door. It was sealed. “Which house is it?”

Officer Davis pointed to the row house on the right.

“And how do we get inside?”

Officer Davis pointed to the row house to the left. The front door was torn from its hinges. “You have to walk through.”

Byrne and Jessica walked through the row house to the north of the crime scene, a long-since abandoned and stripped property. The walls were scarred with years of graffiti, pocked with dozens of fist-sized holes in the drywall. Jessica noticed that there wasn’t a single item left that might be worth anything. Switch plates, outlet plates, outlets, fixtures, copper wire, even the baseboards were long gone.

“Serious feng shui problem here,” Byrne said.

Jessica smiled, but a bit nervously. Her main concern at the moment was not falling through the rotted joists into the basement.

They emerged in the back and negotiated through the chain-link fence to the rear of the crime scene house. The tiny backyard, which abutted an alley that ran behind the block of houses, was besieged with derelict appliances and tires, all overgrown with a few seasons of weeds and scrub. A small doghouse at the rear of the fenced-in property stood guard over nothing, its chain rusted into the earth, its plastic dish filled to the brim with filthy rainwater.

A uniformed officer met them at the back door.

“You clear the house?” Byrne asked. House was a very loose term. At least a third of the rear wall of the structure was gone.

“Yes, sir,” he said. His tag read r. van dyck. He was in his early thirties, Viking blond, pumped, and heavily muscled. His arms strained the material of his coat.

They gave their information to this officer, who was taking the crime scene log. They entered through the back door and as they descended the narrow stairs to the basement, the stench greeted them first. Years of mildew and wood rot dallied beneath the smells of human by-products— urine, feces, sweat. Beneath that there was an ugliness suggesting an open grave.

The basement was long and narrow, mirroring the layout of the row house above, perhaps fifteen by twenty-four feet, with three support columns. As Jessica ran her Maglite over the space she saw it was littered with rotting drywall, spent condoms, crack bottles, a disintegrating mattress. A forensic nightmare. In the damp grime were probably a thousand smeary footprints if there were two; none, at first glance, pristine enough for a usable impression.

In the midst of this was a beautiful dead girl.

The young woman sat on the floor in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around one of the support pillars, her legs splayed on either side. It appeared that, at some point, a previous tenant had tried to make the supporting columns into Doric-style Roman columns with a material that might have been Styrofoam. Although the pillars had a cap and a base, the only entablature was a rusted I-beam above, the only frieze, a tableau of gang tags and obscenities spray-painted along the length. On one of the walls of the basement was a long-faded mural of what was probably supposed to be the Seven Hills of Rome.

The girl was white, young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She had flyaway strawberry-blond hair cut just above her shoulders. She wore a plaid skirt, maroon knee socks, and white blouse beneath a maroon V-neck with a school logo. In the center of her forehead was a cross made of a dark, chalky material.

At first glimpse Jessica could not see an immediate cause of death, no visible gunshot or stab wounds. Although the girl’s head lolled to her right, Jessica could see most of the front of her neck, and it did not appear as if she had been strangled.

And then there were her hands.

From a few feet away, it appeared as if her hands were clasped in prayer, but there was a much darker reality. Jessica had to look twice just to be sure that her eyes were not playing tricks on her.

She glanced at Byrne. He had noticed the girl’s hands at the same moment. Their eyes met and engaged a silent knowledge that this was no ordinary rage killing, no garden-variety crime of passion. They also silently communicated that they would not speculate for the time being. The horrible certainty of what was done to this young woman’s hands could wait for the medical examiner.

The girl’s presence, in the middle of this ugliness, was so out of place, jarring to the eye, Jessica thought; a delicate rose pushed through the musty concrete. The weak daylight that struggled through the small, hopper-style windows caught the highlights in her hair and bathed her in a dim sepulchral glow.

The one thing that was clear was that this girl had been posed, which was not a good sign. In 99 percent of homicides, the killer can’t get away from the scene fast enough, which is usually good news for the investigators. The concept of blood simple—people getting stupid when they see blood, therefore leaving behind everything needed to convict them, scientifically speaking—was usually in effect. Anybody who stops to pose a dead body is making a statement, offering a silent, arrogant communication to the police who will investigate the crime.

A pair of officers from the Crime Scene Unit arrived, and Byrne greeted them at the base of the steps. A few moments later, Tom Weyrich, a longtime veteran from the medical examiner’s office, arrived with his photographer in tow. Whenever a person died under violent or mysterious circumstances, or if it was determined that there might be a need for a pathologist to testify in a court of law at some later date, photos documenting the nature and extent of the external wounds or injuries were a routine part of the examination.

The medical examiner’s office had its own staff photographer who took scene photos wherever indicated in homicides, suicides, fatal accidents. He was on call to travel anywhere in the city at any time of the day or night.