MONDAY, 3:00 PM

They spent the afternoon recanvassing the route that Tessa Wells had walked to get to her bus stop in the morning. While a few of the houses yielded no response to their knocks, they spoke to a dozen people who were familiar with the Catholic schoolgirls who caught the

bus on the corner. None recalled anything out of the ordinary on Friday, or any other day for that matter.

Then they caught a small break. As it often does, it came at the last stop. This time, at a ramshackle row house with olive-green awnings and a grimy brass door knocker in the shape of a moose head. The house was less than half a block from where Tessa Wells caught her school bus.

Byrne approached the door. Jessica hung back. After half a dozen knocks, they were about to move on when the door cracked an inch.

“Ain’t buying nothin’,” a man’s thin voice offered.

“Ain’t selling.” Byrne showed the man his badge.

“Whatcha want?”

“For starters, I want you to open the door more than an inch,” Byrne replied, as diplomatically as possible when one is on one’s fiftieth interview of the day.

The man closed the door, unhooked the chain, then opened it wide. He was in his seventies, dressed in plaid pajama bottoms and a garish mauve smoking jacket that may have been fashionable sometime during the Eisenhower administration. He wore unlaced broughams on his feet, no socks. His name was Charles Noone.

“We’re talking to everyone in the neighborhood, sir. Did you happen to see this girl on Friday?”

Byrne proffered a photograph of Tessa Wells, a copy of her high school portrait. The man fished a pair of off-the-rack bifocals out of his jacket pocket, then studied the photo for a few moments, adjusting his glasses up and down, back and forth. Jessica could see the price sticker still on the lower part of the right lens.

“Yeah. I seen her,” Noone said.

“Where?”

“She walked to the corner like every other day.”

“Where did you see her?”

The man pointed to the sidewalk, then swept a bony forefinger left to right. “She come up the street like always. I remember her because she always looks like she’s off somewheres.”

“Off?”

“Yeah. You know. Like off somewheres on her own planet. Eyes down, thinkin’ about stuff.”

“What else do you remember?” Byrne asked.

“Well, she stopped for a little while right in front of the window. Right about where that young lady is standing.”

Noone pointed to where Jessica stood.

“How long was she there?”

“Didn’t time her.”

Byrne took a deep breath, exhaled, his patience walking a tightrope, no net. “Approximately.”

“Dunno,” Noone said. He looked at the ceiling, eyes closed. Jessica noted that his fingers twitched. It appeared that Charles Noone was counting. If the number was more than ten, she wondered if he would be taking off his shoes. He looked back at Byrne. “Twenty seconds, maybe.”

“What did she do?”

“Do?”

“While she was in front of your house. What did she do?” “She didn’t do nothin’.”

“She just stood there?”

“Well, she was lookin’ up the street at something. No, not exactly up the street. More like at the driveway next to the house.” Charles Noone pointed to his right, at the driveway that separated his house from the tavern on the corner.

“Just looking?”

“Yeah. Like she seen something interesting. Like she seen somebody she knows. She blushed, like.You know how young girls are.”

“Not really,” Byrne said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

At this, all body language changed, affected those little shifts that tell the parties involved they have entered a new phase of the conversation. Noone stepped back half an inch and tied the sash on his smoking jacket a little tighter, his shoulders stiffening slightly. Byrne shifted his weight onto his right foot, peered past the man into the gloom of his living room.

“I’m just saying,” Noone said. “She just kinda went red for a second is all.”

Byrne held the man’s gaze until the man had to look away. Jessica had only known Kevin Byrne for a few hours, but already she had seen the cold green fire of those eyes. Byrne moved on. Charles Noone wasn’t their man. “Did she say anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Noone replied, a new measure of respect in his voice.

“Did you see anybody in that driveway?”

“No, sir,” the man said. “I don’t have no window over there. Besides, it’s none of my business.”

Yeah, right, Jessica thought. Want to come down to the Roundhouse and explain why you watch young girls walk to school every day?

Byrne gave the man a card. Charles Noone promised to call if he remembered anything.

The building next to Noone’s house was an abandoned tavern called the Five Aces, a square, one-story brick-and-mortar blot on the cityscape that offered a driveway to both Nineteenth Street and Poplar Avenue.

They knocked on the door to the Five Aces, but there was no response. The building was boarded and tagged five sentiments deep in graffiti. They checked the doors and windows, all of which were well nailed and bolted from the outside. Whatever happened to Tessa had not happened in this building.

They stood in the driveway and looked up and down the street, as well as across the street. There were two row houses with a clear view of the driveway. They canvassed both. Neither tenant recalled seeing Tessa Wells.

On the way back to the Roundhouse, Jessica assembled the puzzle of Tessa Wells’s last morning.

At approximately six fifty on Friday morning, Tessa Wells left her house, walking to the bus stop. The route she took was the one she took always—down Twentieth to Poplar, over a block, then crossing to the other side of the street. At about 7:00 am she was seen in front of a row house at Nineteenth and Poplar, where she hesitated for a short while, perhaps seeing someone she knew in the driveway to a long-shuttered tavern.

On most mornings she met her friends from Nazarene. At about five minutes after seven, the bus would pick them up and take them to school.

But Friday morning, Tessa Wells did not meet with her friends. Friday morning, Tessa simply vanished.

Approximately seventy-two hours later her body was found in an abandoned row house in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, her neck broken, her hands mutilated, her body embracing a mockery of a Roman column.