Jessica followed her flashlight’s beam down the stairs, looking for broken or missing boards. On one tread was a child’s plastic toy — a duck with one foot missing, a dirty string wrapped around its head. Two steps below was a ball of dry, shredded newspaper, probably once home to a family of mice.
A few seconds later Jessica made it to the second last step. She ran her Maglite around the room. The ceiling was low, dense with cobwebs and spider webs. The smell of mold and urine was overpowering.
Down the stairs, hard right, under the steps.
Jessica heard the voice coming from beneath the staircase, although voice was not entirely accurate. What she heard did not sound human. It was a depleted sound that seemed to crawl along the damp floor.
Byrne put a hand on Jessica’s left shoulder, silently telling her that he would flank left when they got to the bottom of the stairs.
Jessica crouched down, swept her flashlight across the floor. Scattered food trash, dried chicken and rib bones, picked clean. In one corner were the remnants of a rusted bicycle, the chain, wheels and pedals gone. Another corner held a collection of old fluorescent tube lights.
Whole lotta blood.
Jessica reached the bottom step. She held up a hand, then pointed to the right. With a silent count of three, she stepped onto the cold cement floor, rolled to the right, leveled her weapon in an attack stance, finger along the trigger guard of her Glock.
A man was sitting under the steps. Or what was left of a man. He was seated in a wooden chair, hands behind his back, his head and chest awash with fresh blood. At his feet were a pair of rats that stood up to the beam of the flashlight, staring back with tiny, defiant black eyes.
The man was nude, his chest crisscrossed with barbed wire. Some of the barbs were rusted and cut deep welts into his flesh from his neck to his waist. Steam emanated from his wounds as the warm blood met the frigid February air.
But while the barbs cut into his chest and arms, it was the wire wrapped around the man’s neck that was doing the mortal damage. Jessica could see one razor sharp polished point, bright silver in color, digging into the skin near the carotid artery.
The man was still alive. The patrol officer should have checked his vitals, but Jessica could understand why the young woman did not want to.
Byrne moved to Jessica’s left, keeping his flashlight and weapon trained on the man. Jessica turned, scanned the rest of the room. There were no other doors, no niches or alcoves large enough to hold another person. The basement was clear.
Except for the all but destroyed human in front of them.
Jessica stepped away for a moment, took out her two-way, and in a low voice contacted dispatch, requesting an EMS unit. The man was still alive, but not for long.
Jessica kept her weapon angled low, moved to the right. She could now see that the man’s hands were bound with wire behind his back. The wire was connected to the loop around his neck. If the man’s head dropped forward, he would sever his jugular vein.
They had to keep him awake and alert.
‘Sir,’ Jessica began. ‘My name is Jessica Balzano. I’m with the Philadelphia Police Department. We’re going to get you out of here. Medical assistance is on the way.’
The man tried to speak. ‘He …’
‘He what?’ Jessica asked softly. ‘Who are you talking about?’ Perhaps the man was trying to tell them who did this to him. Jessica noticed that with each labored breath the man took the barbed wire tightened further around his chest and abdomen, rusted tines digging deeper into his flesh.
The man did not answer. Instead, he began to cry.
‘Sir,’ Jessica said, holstering her weapon, holding her hands out to the sides, showing no threat. ‘I want you to know that we have paramedics on the way. We have people coming who are going to get you free. People who will treat your wounds. You’re going to be fine.’
The man started to violently shake his head. Blood flicked across the room. Both Jessica and Byrne stepped back. When the man stopped moving Jessica could see that the one polished barb had now cut into his neck.
‘Stop!’ Jessica yelled. ‘Please do not move, sir!’
The man’s head slumped forward, his eyes closed. Jessica looked at her watch. She listened for the siren of the EMS unit. She heard nothing. This man was going to bleed out right in front of them and there was nothing they could do about it. Jessica wanted to keep him talking, to keep him from going into shock, but the sound of his voice and the amount of blood he generated with each word frightened her.
The man’s head fell further forward. The blood had begun to pool at his feet. The two rats had now become five.
‘Detectives?’
The voice came from the top of the stairs. Jessica had never been happier to hear another human voice in her life. The ambulance unit had arrived. ‘Down here!’ She yelled. ‘Hurry!’
The first paramedic came down the steps, rounded the corner, saw the victim. He was in his early thirties, short but powerfully built. His nametag read E. GONSALVES.
‘Madre de Dios,’ he said softly. ‘Santa Maria.’ He made the sign of the cross, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, snapped them on, just as his partner made it to the bottom of the steps. She was a tall, lanky white woman in her mid-thirties. Her tag IDed her as F. CHRISTIAN.
‘Do you have anything to cut the wires off with?’ Jessica asked.
‘No,’ Gonsalves said. He got on his portable unit and called for a PFD ladder truck. Jessica wondered if they could respond in time.
Christian ran up the stairs. A full minute later she came down with a portable EKG unit, followed by a pair of PFD firefighters.
One of the firefighters had in his hand a large pair of bolt cutters.
Jessica and Byrne both put on gloves. They stepped in to hold the victim steady. Within seconds their hands were slicked with the man’s blood. The firefighter cut one side, then the other, freeing the man’s wrists. Together Jessica and Byrne gently eased the victim’s head back. Although the pressure of the wire around his neck had lessened, there was still a barb slicing ever more deeply into the area at the man’s carotid. Despite their efforts, within seconds it cut deeply into the artery. Blood jetted across the room.
‘Shit!’ Jessica yelled.
Gonsalves made the call. At this moment it was his scene. He peeled the wire from the victim’s neck, and the three of them eased the man back onto the Reeves. The Reeves spine board was for patients with spine and neck injuries, designed to minimize movement during transport.
Gonsalves opened a large gauze pad and pressed it to the now-spouting wound.
‘Give us room,’ he said.
Jessica and Byrne, along with the two PFD, backed away as Christian took a hypodermic needle from the bag, filled it.
In seconds the first gauze pad was soaked. Gonsalves ripped open a second and third, put pressure on the wound. ‘Come on, man,’ he said softly.
The techs were veteran paramedics. Like Jessica and Byrne they had seen a few things. They had treated gunshot wounds, knife wounds, beatings with weapons ranging from fists to claw hammers to Louisville Sluggers. If there was a way for one human being to damage another, they had likely seen it. But there was a feeling in this room that they had all entered special waters, a place reserved for a mind devoid of passion, or even anger.
While Gonsalves tried to stanch the bleeding, his partner started a pair of IV drips, then gently worked the bolt cutters under the wire that wrapped the man’s chest. Christian carefully snipped the steel. The man’s torso instantly expanded, sucking in air, which immediately burst out through his nose and mouth, bringing blood and saliva with it.
Gonsalves leaned in, wiped the blood from the man’s face, put his ear to the man’s mouth. The victim mumbled something. Gonsalves leaned back. While Christian readied fresh gauze pads, Gonsalves began to pump the man’s chest.
‘Come on, man,’ he said. ‘Don’t you fucking code on me.’
Gonsalves h
ooked the victim to the EKG machine, stared at the reading. They were losing him. They had to get him to the nearest trauma center.
‘Breathe man, breathe,’ Gonsalves said. ‘I lose nobody today. It’s my birthday today, man. I lose nobody on my birthday.’
As blood spread into a large pool on the dirty cement floor, the two paramedics worked feverishly to stabilize the patient. A full minute later Christian took a pulse reading. Her eyes went distant. She looked up, directly at Jessica, and shook her head.
The man was dead.
‘Motherfucker,’ Gonsalves yelled. ‘God damn it.’ He stood up, turned full circle, then crouched back down, trying again to resuscitate the victim. Everyone knew it was futile, especially Gonsalves, but no one tried to stop him.
When Gonsalves was spent, he knelt for a few moments more, perhaps in prayer, then got up and walked to the corner of the small, cramped basement. The air was redolent with the smell of blood and feces.
It was over.
Gonsalves looked at Jessica, tears limning his eyes. He wiped them away, tried to compose himself. ‘My birthday.’
Jessica knew that these paramedics and firefighters were witnesses to far more of these moments than homicide detectives. They were the ones who did God’s work. For the most part Jessica’s job began long after this moment, sometimes months or years later. The frontline against violence and its aftermath were the patrol officers, the firefighters, the paramedics. Jessica was glad she was long out of uniform. She had nothing but admiration and sympathy for the first responders in her city. She couldn’t imagine a harder job. Even trauma surgeons had it easier. They got to work in sterile environments with state-of-the-art equipment, not to mention the certainty that whoever had committed the atrocity before them was not lurking around the corner, gun or knife or bludgeon in hand.
Jessica looked at the victim. His arms were straight out to his sides, his feet together, almost Christ-like. Then she noticed the small white book on the floor to the right of the victim.
Had it been in his hands?
Jessica knelt down, shone her light on the book. It was covered in blood, both fresh and dried. Through the blood she could read the title.
MY MISSAL
Later she would think about this instant — kneeling in a frigid basement in Kensington, a destroyed human being on the cold stone floor in front of her — as the moment it all began.
Gonsalves snapped out of it, looked for something to kick, but soon realized he was in the middle of a crime scene, most likely a homicide scene. He ran up the stairs, out onto the street. Jessica could hear his plaints from the basement. She imagined most of Kensington could hear him as well.
Forty minutes later, after Tom Weyrich, an investigator from the medical examiner’s office, made the official pronouncement at the scene, the Crime Scene Unit took their photographs and videos, and Jessica and Byrne began to search the basement in earnest. CSU had set up their field lighting, running in an electrical line from a generator on the first floor. If the room had looked daunting in the beam of the Maglites, it looked worse in the pitiless glare of the halogens.
The room was about twenty-five by thirty-five feet, mirroring the layout of the room above, with three poles holding up support beams. Hanging from the ceiling were rusted straps and clamps which at one time secured copper water lines that had long ago been scavenged for cash. Anything and everything of value had been stolen — furnace, water heater, sheet metal ductwork, even the silver-coated insulation used to wrap the pipes and plenum.
In one corner was a stained and water-damaged bathroom vanity. Its fixtures and sink were missing, but the unit itself was still bolted to the concrete wall and cement floor, but not for a lack of effort in attempting to dislodge it. Looking at the dented and chipped wood where the fixture met the wall, Jessica was sure someone had tried mightily to pry it from its place, without success. She slipped on a fresh latex glove and gently opened one of the doors under the sink. The cabinet was empty.
With the help of bottled water and a hundred paper towels, Jessica managed to get most of the victim’s blood from her arms and hands. She had discreetly washed up in the back of the PFD truck on scene, disinfected as many exposed areas of her body as she could, and slipped on a fresh sweater and jacket she always kept in a gym bag in the trunk of the departmental sedan. She felt one percent better.
Jessica noticed Gonsalves standing across the street, leaning against a half-wall, smoking a cigarette. As she approached him she noticed two things. One, that he was wearing a crucifix on a chain around his neck. She had not noticed it earlier. The other thing she noticed was that his hands were shaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jessica said, immediately recognizing how inadequate it sounded. Gonsalves nodded a thank you. ‘What’s your first name?’ she asked.
The man looked up. His eyes were wet and bloodshot and, at the moment, looked much older than his years. ‘Ernesto,’ he said. ‘Ernie.’
‘You did what you could in there, Ernie.’
Gonsalves shook his head. ‘Not enough.’
A few moments passed. Jessica knew that this man had seen at least as much carnage as she had, that he was going to bounce back from this, but for some reason she couldn’t just walk away. Gonsalves finally broke the silence.
‘He talked.’
Jessica looked at the man. ‘Who talked? The victim?’
‘Just before he coded. He said something to me.’
Jessica wondered why Ernesto Gonsalves had waited to tell her this. She didn’t press him on it. Instead, she waited for him to gather his thoughts.
‘I hear a lot, you know?’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ve heard a lot of last words from people. I once had a guy tell me to erase the hard drives on his home computer. Gave me the keys to his house and everything. His keys, man. Said he would go to hell if I didn’t do it. Two bullets in his gut and he’s worried about his hard drive. You believe that shit?’
Jessica just listened.
‘There was this other guy this one time. Up in Chestnut Hill, right? Big guy, maybe six-two, two-fifty. Well-dressed, though. Tailored. Valentino suit. I check the labels sometimes.’ Gonsalves gave her a sheepish look. Jessica returned a smile.
‘This guy, he confessed to embezzling a shitload of money from the bank he worked in, told me where it was at, told me to give it to charity.’ Gonsalves shook his head. ‘Cash, man. He trusted me to do the right thing with his cash. Never met me, didn’t know me from Adam, right?’ Gonsalves flicked away ash. ‘They teach you how to carry a bed board up the steps, how to do a tracheotomy, how to use a defibrillator, all of that. But they don’t tell you what to do with all these words in your head. People look at me like I’m a priest, you know? Shit, man. I mean, who knows what it looks like in those last few seconds? Maybe everybody looks like a priest.’
Gonsalves hit his cigarette hard, continued.
‘But this guy …’
Jessica waited a few seconds. She was losing him. She prodded. ‘What did he say?’
Ernesto Gonsalves tossed his cigarette into the gutter. His hand then went to the chain around his neck. He found the crucifix, began to run his fingers over it. Jessica, who had been wearing the same fourteen-carat gold crucifix around her neck since she was thirteen, a present from her father, often did the same thing. It sometimes eased the more difficult things she had to say in her life.
‘Two words, detective. Two words.’ Gonsalves wiped at his eyes. ‘He didn’t say tell my wife I love her, or give my babies a hug from their daddy. Nothing like that. He lived all that time, and his life came down to two words.’
‘What two words?’
Gonsalves looked at Jessica, the pain of all the city’s dead in his eyes, and said:
‘He lives.’
SIX
By noon a second team of homicide detectives were on the scene. They would help with the neighborhood interviews.
The past year had brought a number of retirements in the Homicid
e Unit, plus a few detectives had moved into other squads. In all there were eight new detectives in the unit, including two more women. Jessica was grateful for this in more ways than one. Although she loved her job, and her partner, the presence of another two women in the duty room was a nice counterbalance to the heightened levels of testosterone that seemed to drive the unit. An added bonus was that it kept a lot of the male detectives on their toes. With one female detective it was easier to tell the sexist joke, or make the derogatory remark. With three in the room, it was easy to get flanked. Add to this the fact that the day watch commander was also a woman, and the place was getting downright dainty.
Could lace curtains in the duty room be far behind?
The second team was comprised of Detective Joshua Bontrager, who had grown up Amish in rural Berks County, and Maria Caruso. Maria was in her late twenties — young for homicide, but Jessica wasn’t much older when she joined the unit. Maria was very attractive, with dark chocolate eyes and a clear olive complexion. She was a good officer, had worked with Jessica and Byrne a few years earlier on a case involving a mad magician and his murderous plan for the city of Philadelphia. Time would tell if she was right for homicide.
As Bontrager walked across Amber Street, Jessica watched him. His progress through the PPD had been nothing short of amazing. The first time she had seen him, when he was brought up from the Traffic Unit to work a case, he had been a fish out of water, a country boy suddenly thrust into one of the toughest jobs, in one of the toughest areas, in the city. Now he walked with an old school homicide detective’s swagger. Recently Jessica caught a whiff of some pretty expensive cologne when Josh passed her in the office. The joke around the squad for the next few days had something to do with Josh wearing Eau de Cowlogne.
Josh took it like a good sport.
Jessica briefed detectives Bontrager and Caruso on the case. She took out her iPhone, showed them some of the photographs she had taken of the scene, and the victim.
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