“I don’t understand,” Byrne said. “Why is that relevant?”

Father Corrio said: “The Feast of the Scapular is celebrated on July 16th.”

The scapular found on Bethany Price was indeed a brown scapular, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Byrne phoned the lab and asked if they had opened the clear plastic case. They had not.

Byrne and Jessica headed back to the Roundhouse.

“You know, the possibility exists that we might not catch this guy,” Byrne said. “He might get to his fifth victim, then crawl back into the slime forever.”

The notion had crossed Jessica’s mind. She had been trying not to think about it. “You think that might happen?”

“I hope not,” Byrne said. “But I’ve been at this a while. I just want you to be prepared for the possibility.”

The possibility did not sit well with her. If this man was not caught, she knew that, for the rest of her career in the Homicide Unit, for the rest of her time in law enforcement, she would judge every case by what she would consider a failure.

Before Jessica could respond, Byrne’s cell phone rang. He answered. Within seconds, he closed the phone, reached into the backseat for the deck strobe light. He put it on the dash and lighted it.

“What’s up?” Jessica asked.

“They opened the scapular and dusted the inside,” he said. He slammed the gas pedal to the floor. “We’ve got a print.”

They waited on a bench outside the print lab.

There are all kinds of waiting in police work. There’s the stakeout variety, the verdict variety. There’s the type of waiting when you show up in a municipal courtroom to testify in some bullshit DUI case at nine in the morning, only to get on the stand for two minutes at three in the afternoon, just in time to start your tour at four.

But waiting for a print to come up was the best and the worst waiting.You had evidence, but the longer it took, the more likely it was that you would not get a usable match.

Byrne and Jessica tried to get comfortable. There were a number of other things they could be doing in the meantime, but they were bound and determined to do none of them. Their main objective, at the moment, was to keep both blood pressure and pulse rate down.

“Can I ask you something?” Jessica asked.

“Sure.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I totally understand.” Byrne looked at her, his green eyes nearly black. She had never seen a

man look quite so exhausted.

“You want to know about Luther White,” he said.

“Well.Yeah,” Jessica said. Was she that transparent? “Kinda.” Jessica had asked around. Detectives were protective of their own.

The bits and pieces she had heard added up to a pretty crazy story. She figured she’d just ask.

“What do you want to know?” Byrne asked.

Every last detail. “Whatever you want to tell me.”

Byrne slid down on the bench a little, arranged his weight. “I had been on the job about five years or so, in plain clothes for about two. There had been a series of rapes in West Philly. The doer’s MO was to hang out in the parking lots of places like motels, hospitals, office buildings. He’d strike in the middle of the night, usually between three and four in the morning.”

Jessica vaguely remembered. She was in ninth grade, and the story scared the hell out of her and her friends.

“The doer wore a nylon stocking over his face, rubber gloves, and he always wore a condom. Never left a hair, a fiber. Not a drop of fluid. We had nothing. Eight women over a three-month period and we had zero. The only description we had, other than the guy was white and somewhere between thirty and fifty, was that he had a tattoo on the front of his neck. An elaborate tattoo of an eagle that went all the way up to the base of his jaw. We interviewed every tat parlor between Pittsburgh and Atlantic City. Nothing.

“So one night I’m out with Jimmy. We had just taken down a suspect in Old City and were still suited up. We stopped for a quick one at this place called Deuces, out by Pier Eighty-four. We were just getting ready to leave when I see that a guy at one of the tables by the door is wearing a white turtleneck, pulled high. I don’t think anything of it right away, but as I walk out the door I turn around for some reason, and I see it. The tip of a tattoo peeking out over the top of the turtleneck. An eagle’s beak. Couldn’t have been more than a half-inch, right? It was him.”

“Did he see you?”

“Oh yeah,” Byrne said. “So me and Jimmy just leave. We huddle outside, right by this low stone wall that’s right next to the river, figuring we’d call it in, seeing as we just had a few and we didn’t want anything to get in the way of us putting this fucker away. This is before cell phones, so Jimmy heads to the car to call for backup. I decide I’m going to go stand next to the door, figuring, if this guy tries to leave, I’ll get the drop on him. But as soon as I turn around, there he is. And he’s got this twentytwo pointed right at my heart.”

“How did he make you?”

“No idea. But without a word, without hesitation, he unloads. Fired three shots, rapid succession. I took them all in the vest, but they knocked the wind out of me. His fourth shot grazed my forehead.” At this, Byrne fingered the scar over his right eye. “I went back, over the wall, into the river. I couldn’t breathe. The slugs had cracked two ribs, so I couldn’t even try to swim. I just started to sink to the bottom, like I was paralyzed. The water was cold as hell.”

“What happened to White?”

“Jimmy took him down. Two to the chest.”

Jessica tried to wrap her mind around the images, the nightmare every cop has of facing down a two-time loser with a weapon.

“As I was sinking, I saw White hit the surface above me. I swear, before I went unconscious, we had a moment when were face-to-face under the water. Inches apart. It was dark, and it was freezing, but we locked eyes. We were both dying, and we knew it.”

“What happened next?”

“They fished me out, did CPR, the whole routine.”

“I heard that you...” For some reason Jessica found it hard to say the word.

“Drowned?”

“Well, yeah. That. Did you?”

“So they tell me.”

“Wow. How long were you, um...”

Byrne laughed. “Dead?”

“Sorry,” Jessica said. “I can safely say that I’ve never asked that question before.”

“Sixty seconds,” Byrne replied.

“Wow.”

Byrne looked over at Jessica. Her face was a press conference of questions.