“I’m sorry.”

Why was he doing this? He had been nice to her before. She had gotten into trouble and he had treated her with respect.

The sound of the machine grew louder.

It sounded like a drill.

“Now!” boomed the voice.

“Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” she began for what was probably the hundredth time.

The Lord is with thee, she thought, her mind beginning to fog again.

Is the Lord with me?

TUESDAY, 4:00 PM

The black-and-white videotape was grainy, but clear enough to see the comings and goings through the parking lot at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The traffic—both automotive and pedestrian—was what one would expect: ambulances, police cars, delivery vans from medical and

maintenance supply houses. A majority of the personnel were hospital employees: doctors, nurses, orderlies, housekeeping. Through this entrance came a few visitors, a handful of police officers.

Jessica, Byrne, Tony Park, and Nick Palladino were jammed into the small room that doubled as a snack room and video room.At the 4:06:03 point of the tape, they saw Nicole Taylor.

Nicole walks out of the door marked special hospital services, hesitates for a few moments, then ambles slowly toward the street. She has a small purse on a strap over her right shoulder and what looks like a bottle of juice or perhaps a Snapple in her left hand. There was no purse or bottle found at the crime scene in Bartram Gardens.

At the street, Nicole seems to notice something at the top of the frame. She covers her mouth, perhaps in surprise, then walks over to a car parked at the very left edge of the screen. It appears to be a Ford Windstar. No occupant of the car is visible.

Just as Nicole reaches the passenger side of the car, a delivery truck from Allied Medical pulls between the camera and the minivan.

“Shit,” Byrne said. Come on, come on...”

The time on the tape is 4:06:55.

The driver of the Allied Medical truck gets out of the driver’s side and heads into the hospital.A few minutes later he returns, enters the cab.

When the truck pulls away, the Windstar and Nicole are gone.

They let the tape run for five more minutes, then fast-forwarded. Neither Nicole nor the Windstar returned.

“Can you rewind it to the point where she walks up to the van?” Jessica asked.

“No problem,” Tony Park said.

They watched the tape over and over again. Nicole leaving the building, walking beneath the canopy, approaching the Windstar, each time freezing it at the moment the truck pulls up and obscures them.

“Can you get us in closer?” Jessica asked.

“Not on this machine,” Park replied. “The lab can do all kinds of tricks, though.”

The AV Unit, located in the basement of the Roundhouse, was capable of all kinds of video enhancement. The tape they were watching had been dubbed from the original, due to the fact that surveillance tape is recorded at a very slow speed, rendering it impossible to play on a normal VCR.

Jessica leaned close to the small black-and-white monitor. It appeared that the Windstar’s license plate was Pennsylvania issue, ending in 6. It was impossible to tell what numbers, letters, or combinations thereof preceded this. If they had the beginning numbers on the plate, it would make it a lot easier to match the plate with the make and model of the car.

“Why don’t we try to cross-reference Windstars with that number?” Byrne asked. Tony Park turned to walk from the room. Byrne stopped him, wrote something on his pad, tore it off, and handed it to Park. With that, Park was out the door.

The remaining detectives continued to watch the tape as traffic came and went; as personnel walked lazily toward their jobs or spryly away. Jessica found it excruciating to know that, behind the truck obscuring her view of the Windstar, Nicole Taylor was quite likely talking to someone who would soon end her life.

They watched the tape another six times, failing to glean any new information.

Tony Park returned with a thick stack of computer printouts in hand. Ike Buchanan followed.

“There are twenty-five hundred Windstars registered in Pennsylvania,” Park said. “Two hundred or so end in the number six.”

“Shit,” Jessica said.

He then held up the printout, beaming. One of the lines was highlighted in bright yellow. “One of them is registered to Dr. Brian Allan Parkhurst of Larchwood Street.”

Byrne was on his feet in an instant. He glanced at Jessica. He ran a finger over the scar on his forehead.

“It’s not enough,” Buchanan said.

“Why not?” Byrne asked.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“He knew both victims, and we can put him at the scene where Nicole Taylor was last seen—”

“We don’t know that it was him. We don’t know that she even got in that car.”

“He had opportunity,” Byrne plowed ahead. “Maybe even motive.”

“Motive?” Buchanan asked.

“Karen Hillkirk,” Byrne said.

“He didn’t kill Karen Hillkirk.”

“He didn’t have to. Tessa Wells was underage. Maybe she was going to go public with their affair.”

“What affair?”

Buchanan was, of course, right.

“Look, he’s an MD,” Byrne said, selling hard. Jessica got the sense that even Byrne was not convinced that Parkhurst was their doer. But Parkhurst knew something. “The ME’s report said both girls were subdued with midazolam and then given a paralytic drug by injection. He drives a minivan, which is also right on. He fits the profile. Let me put him back in the chair. Twenty minutes. If he doesn’t tip, we cut him loose.”

Ike Buchanan briefly considered the idea. “If Brian Parkhurst sets foot in this building again, he’s coming in with a lawyer from the archdiocese. You know it, and I know it,” Buchanan said. “Let’s do a little more legwork before we connect these dots. Let’s find out if that Windstar belongs to an employee of the hospital before we start hauling people in. Let’s see if we can account for every minute of Parkhurst’s day.”

Most police work is mind- and ass-numbingly dull. Much of the time is spent at a wobbly gray desk with sticky drawers full of paper, a phone in one hand, cold coffee in the other. Calling people. Calling people back. Waiting for people to call you back. Hitting dead ends, roaring up blind alleys, walking dejectedly out. People interviewed saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil—only to discover that they remember a key fact two weeks later. Detectives talk to funeral parlors to see if they had a procession on the street that day. They talk to newspaper deliverymen, school crossing guards, landscapers, painters, city workers, street cleaners. They talk to junkies, hookers, alkies, dealers, panhandlers, vendors, anyone who makes a habit or vocation of simply hanging around the corner in which they are interested.