After a short while, she walked a few treads back down, peering into the basement. Kevin Byrne stood over the young girl’s body, head down, eyes closed. He fingered the scar over his right eye, then dropped his hands to his waist, knit his fingers.

After a few moments, he opened his eyes, made the sign of the cross, and started toward the steps.

On the street more people had gathered, rubbernecking, drawn to the strobing police lights like moths to flame. Crime came often to this part of North Philly, but it never ceased to beguile and fascinate its residents.

Emerging from the crime scene house, Byrne and Jessica approached the witness who had found the body. Although the day was overcast, Jessica gulped the daylight like a starving woman, grateful to be out of that clammy tomb.

DeJohn Withers might have been forty or sixty; it was impossible to tell. He had no lower teeth, and only a few up top. He wore five or six flannel shirts and a pair of filthy cargo pants, each pocket bulging with some mysterious urban swag.

“How long I gotta stay here?” Withers asked.

“Got some pressing engagements, do you?” Byrne replied. “I ain’t gotta talk to you. I did the right thing by doing my civic duty

and now I get treated like some criminal.”

“Is this your house, sir?” Byrne asked, pointing to the crime scene

house.

“No,” Withers said. “It is not.”

“Then you are guilty of breaking and entering.”

“I didn’t break nothin’.”

“But you entered.”

Withers tried to wrap his mind around the concept, as if breaking

and entering, like country and western, were somehow inseparable. He

remained silent.

“Now, I’m willing to overlook this serious crime if you answer a few

questions for me,” Byrne said.

Withers looked at his shoes, defeated. Jessica noted that he had a

ripped black high-top on his left foot and an Air Nike on his right. “When did you find her?” Byrne asked.

Withers screwed up his face. He pushed up the sleeves of his multitude of shirts, revealing thin, scabby arms. “It look like I got a watch?” “Was it light out, or was it dark out?” Byrne asked.

“Light.”

“Did you touch her?”

“What?” Withers barked with true outrage. “I ain’t no goddamn

pervert.”

“Just answer the question, Mr. Withers.”

Withers crossed his arms, waited a moment. “No. I didn’t.” “Was anyone with you when you found her?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone else around here?”

Withers laughed, and Jessica caught a full blast of his breath. If you

blended rotten mayonnaise and week-old egg salad, then tossed it with

lighter fluid vinaigrette, it would have smelled a little bit better. “Who

comes down here?”

It was a good question.

“Where do you live?” Byrne asked.

“I’m currently at The Four Seasons,” Withers replied.

Byrne suppressed a smile. He kept his pen an inch over the pad. “I stay at My Brother’s House,” Withers added. “When they got room.” “We may need to talk to you again.”

“I know, I know. Don’t leave town.”

“We’d appreciate it.”

“There a reward?”

“Only in heaven,” Byrne said.

“I ain’t goin’ to heaven,” Withers said.

“Look into a transfer when you get to Purgatory,” Byrne said. Withers scowled.

“When you bring him in to get his statement, I want him tossed and

all of his things logged,” Byrne said to Davis. Interviews and witness

statements were taken at the Roundhouse. Interviews of homeless folks

were generally brief, due to the lice factor and the shoe-box proportions

of the interview rooms.

Accordingly, Officer J. Davis looked Withers up and down. The

frown on her face fairly screamed: I have to touch this bag of disease? “Get the shoes, too,” Byrne added.

Withers was just about to object when Byrne raised a hand, stopping

him. “We’ll get you a new pair, Mr. Withers.”

“They better be good ones,” Withers said. “I do a lot of walkin’. I just

got these broke in.”

Byrne turned to Jessica. “We can extend the canvass, but I’d say

there’s a fairly good chance she didn’t live in the neighborhood,” he said,

rhetorically. It was hard to believe anyone lived in these houses anymore,

let alone a white family with a kid in a parochial school.

“She went to the Nazarene Academy,” Jessica said.

“How do you know?”

“The uniform.”

“What about it?”

“I still have mine in my closet,” Jessica said. “Nazarene is my alma

mater.”

6

MONDAY, 10:55 A M

The Nazarene Academy was the largest Catholic girls school in Philadelphia, with more than a thousand students in grades nine through twelve. Situated on a thirty-acre campus in Northeast Philadelphia, it was opened in 1928 and, since that time, had graduated a

number of city luminaries—among them industry leaders, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and artists. The administration offices for five other diocesan schools were located at Nazarene.

When Jessica had attended the school, it was number one in the city, academically speaking, winning every citywide scholastic challenge it entered: those locally televised knockoffs of College Bowl where a group of orthodontically challenged fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds sit at buntingdraped tables and rattle off the differences between Etruscan and Greek vases, or delineate the time line of the Crimean War.

On the other hand, Nazarene had also come in dead last in every citywide athletic challenge it ever entered. An unbroken record, and one not likely to ever be shattered. Thus they were known, among young Philadelphians, to this very day, as the Spazarenes.

As Byrne and Jessica entered the main doors, the dark-varnished walls and crown molding, combined with the sweet, doughy aroma of institutional food, dragged Jessica back to ninth grade. Although she had always been a good student, and had rarely been in trouble—despite her cousin Angela’s many larcenous attempts—the rarefied air of the academic setting and the proximity to the principal’s office still filled Jessica with a vague, formless dread. She had a nine-millimeter pistol on her hip, she was nearly thirty years old, and she was scared to death. She imagined she always would be when she entered this formidable building.