Byrne smiled, asked: “You want to know if there were bright white lights and angels and golden trumpets and Roma Downey floating overhead, right?”

Jessica laughed. “I guess I do.”

“Well, there was no Roma Downey. But there was a long hallway with a door at the end. I just knew that I shouldn’t open the door. If I opened the door, I was never coming back.”

“You just knew?”

“I just knew.And for a long time, after I got back, whenever I got to a crime scene, especially the scene of a homicide, I got a... feeling. The day after we found Deirdre Pettigrew’s body, I went back to Fairmount Park. I touched the bench in front of the bushes where she was found. I saw Pratt. I didn’t know his name, I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was him. I saw how she saw him.”

“You saw him?”

“Not in the visual sense. I just...knew.” It was clear that none of this was easy for him. “It happened a lot for a long time,” he said. “There was no explaining it. No predicting it. In fact, I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have to try and get it to stop.”

“How long were you IOD?”

“I was out for almost five months. Lots of rehab. That’s where I met my wife.”

“She was a physical therapist?”

“No, no. She was recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. I had actually met her years earlier in the old neighborhood, but we got reacquainted in the hospital. We hobbled up and down the hallways together. I’d say it was love at first Vicodin if it wasn’t such a bad joke.”

Jessica laughed anyway. “Did you ever get any kind of professional psychiatric help?”

“Oh, yeah. I did two years with the department shrink, on and off. Went through dream analysis. Even went to a few IANDS meetings.”

“IANDS?”

“International Association for Near Death Studies. Wasn’t for me.” Jessica tried to take all this in. It was a lot. “So what’s it like now?” “It doesn’t happen all that often these days. Kind of like a faraway TV

signal. Morris Blanchard is proof that I can’t be sure anymore.”

Jessica could see that there was more to the story, but she felt as if she had pushed him enough.

“And, to answer your next question,” Byrne continued. “I can’t read minds, I can’t tell fortunes, I can’t see the future. No Dead Zone here. If I could see the future, believe me, I’d be at Philadelphia Park right now.”

Jessica laughed again. She was glad she had asked, but she was still a little spooked by it all. She had always been a little spooked by stories of clairvoyance and the like. When she read The Shining she slept with the lights on for a week.

She was just about to try one of her clumsy segues to another topic when Ike Buchanan came blasting out of the door to the print lab. His face was flushed, the veins on his neck pulsed. For the moment, his limp was gone.

“Got him,” Buchanan said, waving a computer readout.

Byrne and Jessica shot to their feet, fell into step beside him.

“Who is he?” Byrne asked.

“His name is Wilhelm Kreuz,” Buchanan said.

58

THURSDAY, 11:25 A M

According to DMV records, Wilhelm Kreuz lived on Kensington Avenue. He worked as a parking lot attendant in North Philly. The strike force headed to the location in two vehicles. Four members of the SWAT team rode in a black van. Four of the six detectives on the task

force followed in a department car: Byrne, Jessica, John Shepherd, and Eric Chavez.

A few blocks from the location, a cell phone rang in the Taurus. All four detectives checked their mobiles. It was John Shepherd’s. “Yeah... how long...okay... thanks.” He slid the antenna, folded the phone. “Kreuz hasn’t been in to work for the past two days. No one at the lot has seen him or talked to him.”

The detectives assimilated this, remained silent. There is a ritual that attends hitting the door, any door; a private interior monologue that is different for every law enforcement officer. Some fill the time with prayer. Some, with blank silence. All of it intended to cool the rage, calm the nerves.

They had learned more about their subject. Wilhelm Kreuz clearly fit the profile. He was forty-two years old, a loner, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.

And although he had a long sheet, there was nothing close to the level of violence or the depth of depravity of the Rosary Girl murders. Still, he was far from a model citizen. Kreuz was a registered Level Two sex offender, meaning he was considered a moderate risk to re-offend. He had done a six-year stint in Chester, registering with authorities in Philadelphia upon his release in September 2002. He had a history of contact with minor females between the ages of ten and fourteen. His victims were both known and unknown to him.

The detectives agreed that, although the victims of the Rosary Killer were older than the profile of Kreuz’s previous victims, there was no logical explanation as to why his fingerprint would be found on a personal item belonging to Bethany Price. They had contacted Bethany Price’s mother and asked if she knew Wilhelm Kreuz.

She did not.

Kreuz lived in a second-floor, three-room apartment in a dilapidated building near Somerset. The street entrance was beside the door to a long-shuttered dry cleaner. According to building department plans, there were four apartments on the second floor.According to the housing authority, only two were occupied. Legally, that is. The back door to the building emptied into an alley that ran the length of the block.

The target apartment was in the front, its two windows overlooking Kensington Avenue. A SWAT sharpshooter took a position across the street, on the roof of a three-story building. A second SWAT officer covered the rear of the building, deployed on the ground.

The remaining two SWAT officers would take down the door with a Thunderbolt CQB battering ram, the heavy cylindrical ram they used whenever a high-risk, dynamic entry was required. Once the door was breached, Jessica and Byrne would enter, with John Shepherd covering the rear flank. Eric Chavez was deployed at the end of the hall, next to the stairs.

They drilled the lock on the street door and gained entry in short order.As they filed across the small lobby, Byrne checked the row of four mailboxes. None was apparently in use. They had long ago been pried open, and never fixed. The floor was littered with scores of handbills, menus, and catalogs.

Above the mailboxes was a moldy corkboard.A few local enterprises barked their wares in fading dot matrix print, printed on curling, hot neon stock. The specials were dated nearly a year earlier. It seemed the people who hawked flyers in this neighborhood had long ago given up on this place. The lobby walls were scarred with gang tags and obscenities in at least four languages.

The stairwell up to the second floor was stacked with trash bags, ripped and scattered by a menagerie of urban animals, two- and fourlegged alike. The stench of rotting food and urine was pervasive.

The second floor was worse. The heavy pall of sour pot smoke lounged beneath the smell of excrement. The second-floor corridor was a long, narrow walkway of exposed metal lath and dangling electrical wire. Peeling plaster and chipped enamel paint hung from the ceiling in damp stalactites.