Back in his car, Simon rummaged his memory.

Jessica Balzano.

Where did he know that name from?

He picked up a copy of last week’s Report, thumbed through it. When

he got to the meager sports page, he saw it. A small quarter-column ad for prizefights at the Blue Horizon. An all-female fight card. At the bottom:

Jessica Balzano v. Mariella Munoz.

13

MONDAY, 7:20 PM

He found himself on the waterfront before his mind had the opportunity or the inclination to say no. How long had it been since he had been here?

Eight months, one week, two days.

The day Deirdre Pettigrew’s body was found.

He knew the answer just as clearly as he knew the reason he had

come back. He was here to recharge, to once again tap into the vein of madness that pulsed just beneath the asphalt of his city.

Deuces was a protected drug house that occupied an old waterfront building beneath the Walt Whitman Bridge, near Packer Avenue, just a few feet from the banks of the Delaware River. The steel front door was covered by gang graffiti and manned by a mountainous thug named Serious. Nobody accidentally wandered into Deuces. In fact, it had been more than a decade since the public had called it Deuces. Deuces was the name of the long-shuttered bar in which a very bad man named Luther White had been sitting and drinking the night Kevin Byrne and Jimmy Purify had entered, fifteen years earlier; the night that left two of them dead. It was on this spot that Kevin Byrne’s dark time began. It was on this spot he began to see.

Now it was a crack house.

But Kevin Byrne wasn’t here for the drugs. While it was true that he

had flirted with every substance known to mankind over the years in order to stop the visions rumbling in his head, none had ever taken control. It had been years since he had dallied with anything other than Vicodin or bourbon.

He was here to reclaim the mind-set.

He broke the seal on a bottle of Old Forester, considered his day. On the day his divorce had become final, nearly a year earlier, he and

Donna had vowed that they would have dinner, as a family, one night every week. Despite the many obstacles both their jobs tossed in the way, they had not missed a week in a year.

This night they had muddled and mumbled their way through another dinner, his wife an uncluttered horizon, the dining room chatter a parallel monologue of perfunctory questions and stock answers.

For the past five years Donna Sullivan Byrne had been the white-hot agent for one of the largest and most prestigious Realtors in Philadelphia, and the money had rolled in. They weren’t living in a row house in Fitler Square because Kevin Byrne was such a great cop. On his pay grade, they would have lived in Fishtown.

Back in the day, in the summer of their marriage, they would meet for lunch in Center City two or three times a week, and Donna would tell him of her triumphs, her infrequent failures, her clever maneuvering through the jungles of escrow, closing costs, amortization, arrears, and appurtenances. Byrne had always glazed over at the terms—he couldn’t tell a basis point from a balloon payment—just as he had always marveled at her energy, her zeal. She had come to her career well into her thirties, and she was happy.

But just about eighteen months earlier, Donna had simply shut down communication channels with her husband. The money still came in, and Donna was still an incredible mother to Colleen, still active in the community, but when it came to talking to him, sharing anything resembling a feeling, a thought, an opinion, she was gone. Walls up, turrets armed.

No note. No explanation. No rationale.

But Byrne knew why. When they had gotten married, he had promised her that he had ambitions within the department, that he was on a steady track to lieutenant, perhaps captain. Beyond that, politics? He had ruled it out within, but never without. Donna had always been skeptical. She knew enough cops to know that homicide detectives were lifers, and that you rode the unit right until the end.

And then Morris Blanchard was found swinging from the end of a towrope. Donna looked at Byrne that night and, without asking a single question, knew that he would never give up the chase to get back on top. He was Homicide, and that’s all he would ever be.

A few days later, she filed.

After a long, tearful talk with Colleen, Byrne decided not to fight it. They had been watering a dead plant for a long time anyway. As long as Donna didn’t poison his daughter against him, and as long as he got to see her when he wanted, it was okay.

This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed dinner, lost in a book by Nora Roberts. Sometimes Byrne envied Colleen her inner silence, her cottony refuge from her childhood, such as it was.

Donna had been two months’ pregnant with Colleen when she and Byrne had gotten married in a civil ceremony. When Donna had given birth, a few days after Christmas that year, and Byrne had seen Colleen for the first time, so pink and shriveled and helpless, he suddenly could not recall a single second of his life before that moment. In that instant, everything else was prelude, a blurry overture to the duty he felt at that moment, and he knew—knew as if it had been branded onto his heart— that no one would ever come between himself and that little girl. Not his wife, not his fellow officers, and God help the first droopy-pantsed, sideways-hat-wearing, disrespectful little shit that came by for her first date.

He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen’s first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped threeroom apartment at the time. The eleven o’clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen’s room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.

The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.

As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn’t react. She didn’t wake up. When Donna arrived in the doorway, and took in the situation, she began to cry. Byrne held her, feeling at that moment that the road in front of them had just been repaved with trial, and that the fear he faced on the streets every day was nothing by comparison.

But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter’s world of inner calm. She would never know the silver hush of her parents’ marriage, ever oblivious to Kevin and Donna Byrne—once so passionate that they could not keep their hands off each other—saying “excuse me” as they passed in the narrow hallway of the home, like strangers on a bus.

He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Donna, with her mysterious ability to clog a lie in his throat with just a glance, her perfect social pitch. She knew how to reap wisdom from disaster. She had taught him the grace of humility.