The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

  Shane wondered what she was like. He wondered if she ever cheated on her husband. He wondered what she ate, drank, drove.

  He had every intention of finding out answers to all these questions.

  He had the feeling this case, this story, was going to be big. Dead babies and the Catholic Church. It didn’t get better than that. Forget the whole abortion issue, this was a murdered child. And Shane Adams was at the tip of the sword on this one.

  He opened his laptop, put in the password to open the encrypted folder, opened the database file. He started two new entries:

  Jessica Balzano

  Kevin Byrne

  NINETEEN

  Jessica and Byrne stood in silence long after the EMS van had left with the old man’s remains, long after the two DHS workers had taken Adria Rollins to the psychiatric unit at Temple.

  Whatever promise it had begun with, the day was on a downward turn now. They would not be questioning Adria Rollins, not anytime soon anyway. The real question was why Adria – who clearly had a long history of mental illness – was allowed to keep custody of her newborn baby.

  Apparently the great-grandfather had been ambulatory and lucid two months earlier, and those people tasked with the decision figured he was able to take care of both Adria and the baby.

  Regardless, whatever the explanation was, whatever the answers to these questions might be, it was for another agency, another set of investigators, not homicide.

  A quick search of the Rollins apartment yielded little. The utilities, for what they were worth, were included in the rent, so there were no electric or gas bills. There was no telephone.

  In the old man’s room they had found some news clippings from the Inquirer, stories about a much younger Duke Rollins when he had returned from World War II.

  What they wanted to find they had not located. They did not find a birth certificate for Cecilia Rollins, which would tell them who the father was and open a new conduit in the investigation.

  They already had calls in to all the appropriate agencies, but considering the speed at which these bureaucracies worked, it could be weeks before they learned anything along these lines.

  They had also knocked on every door in the apartment building. Half of their attempts yielded no answer. The other half yielded nothing fruitful.

  Jessica and Byrne had walked the alleyway behind the building. Their theory – and it was the only one to run with at the moment – was that someone had climbed the fire escape, entered Adria’s room, and taken little Cecilia out of her crib.

  Unfortunately, the building behind the apartment building was a shuttered warehouse. There were no other apartment windows facing Adria’s room, no one to question.

  They would have to return in the next few days, talk to people on the street, discover their routines, catalog them, ask if they had seen anything suspicious in that alley in the past few weeks.

  It was an exercise in futility and frustration.

  The presence of the Catholic Church in Philadelphia was as old as the city itself. Not long after William Penn founded the city, the first Catholic mass was celebrated in 1733, at Old St Joseph’s Church. In the eighteenth century, Philadelphia was one of the only cities in the English-speaking world where Catholics could practice their faith in the open.

  The residence of the Archbishop, who was the titular head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was located in the northwestern part of the city.

  Dana Westbrook had put in the request, through the DA’s office, and an appointment was made with the media relations director for the archdiocese.

  It was in the best interest of the Church to meet with investigators. The murders were all over the media. A dead man and a dead baby found in two different Catholic Churches was big news. The tabloids were already running stories about exorcisms and ritual killings. Considering all the scandals the Catholic Church had had to endure over the past decade, it made good PR sense for the archdiocese to get out in front of anything that might hurt their reputation.

  They were met at the door by a stout woman in her sixties. Although she wore street clothing Jessica knew she was a nun. Twelve years of Catholic school education clued you in to who was and who was not part of the Church.

  After a few pleasantries she led them to a study off the main entrance hall. The room in which they were to meet the spokesperson was oak-paneled, formal, lined with books. In the center was a round table, highly polished, ringed by six velvet-seated chairs.

  A few minutes later the door opened.

  Father Michael Raphael was much younger than either Jessica or Byrne expected. In his twenties, athletic looking and handsome, he carried about him an air of boyish vulnerability, as well as the outward confidence needed by the point man for such a powerful organization as the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The archdiocese covered not only Philadelphia, but Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware counties as well. Its reach, and influence, was great.

  Jessica didn’t know that much about the priesthood, but she did know that for Michael Raphael to have been ordained at this young age, he’d had to have entered the seminary with a bachelor’s degree. His age and position were surprising on many levels. Priests fresh out of the seminary were usually assigned to smaller parishes, or to menial tasks in the larger ones. This duty, being the public relations officer for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was a plum position.

  And while his good looks were beguiling, it was his eyes that held you – dark, penetrating eyes that seemed to look right through you.

  ‘I’m Michael Raphael,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Father,’ Jessica said. It seemed odd for her to be calling someone around ten years her junior ‘Father,’ but old habits died hard. Especially those drilled into you by a Catholic school education.

  They all shook hands.

  Raphael gestured to two chairs at the table. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Make yourselves comfortable.’ He then indicated a beautiful antique serving cart near the tall windows. ‘May I offer you tea or coffee?’

  Both Jessica and Byrne declined. Raphael poured himself a black coffee, took a seat opposite them. They exchanged small talk about the long, brutal winter, the plight of the Sixers and Flyers.

  ‘I have to say that we were expecting someone older,’ Byrne finally said.

  Raphael smiled. ‘I get that a lot. Alas, this will stop a lot sooner than I would like.’

  ‘I don’t hear much eastern Pennsylvania in your voice,’ Byrne said. ‘You’re not a Philly boy?’

  ‘Very astute, detective. As much as I would like to claim the City of Brotherly Love as my hometown, I cannot. I’m from Ohio. Southeastern Ohio to be more precise, just across the West Virginia border.’

  ‘I thought so,’ Byrne said. ‘Browns or Bengals?’

  ‘Browns, I’m afraid. We Franciscans are a long-suffering order.’

  Small talk finished, Byrne got down to business. ‘Have you been briefed at all about why we’re here?’

  Both Jessica and Byrne took this as a given. They’d had to put together a bullet list of things they wanted to discuss before being granted a meeting.

  Raphael nodded, sipped his coffee. ‘I have,’ he said. ‘As you might expect, the archdiocese is quite concerned. We’re here to assist in any way we can.’

  ‘We appreciate it,’ Byrne said. He continued, giving the priest basic details and timelines regarding the murders of Daniel Palumbo and Cecilia Rollins.

  Raphael listened, expressionless.

  ‘While the buildings were vacant, it is likely that whoever is doing this is committing these crimes in a Catholic church for a reason,’ Byrne said.

  The unspoken part of what he was saying was that there might be a connection between the killer and the Church itself. Whenever a church closed, there were bound to be disgruntled parishioners, not to mention priests, nuns, lay workers.

  At one time, in a small section of North Philly, there had been a Catholic church ever
y few blocks, churches with primarily parishioners of the same ethnicity – Italian, Polish, German, Lithuanian, and ‘general’ parishes, as they were known. In Philadelphia the Irish parishes were called ‘general’ parishes because, at one time, if you were Catholic and spoke English, and you lived in Philadelphia, you were probably Irish.

  Byrne picked up his notebook, flipped a few pages. ‘Can you tell us, briefly, the process by which the archdiocese closes a church?’

  Raphael thought for a moment. ‘This is not something undertaken lightly, of course. It’s a process that can take many months, sometimes years, often accompanied by a great deal of heated discussion and debate. A neighborhood parish is, for many people, the center of their community. It is where babies are baptized, the young are confirmed, marriages begun, lives honored at funerals.’

  When Raphael said the word ‘babies’ Jessica’s mind flashed on the image of little Cecilia frozen into the old washtub. She felt the rage rise within her. She battled it back.

  ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, there have been many church closings over the past fifteen to twenty years,’ Raphael said. ‘When enrollment in the parochial schools drops, the revenue begins to dwindle. The sad truth, at least for the city parishes, is that most Catholics have moved into the suburbs. The exodus really began after the Second World War, but accelerated in the seventies, eighties and nineties.’

  Raphael turned his cup in its saucer, continued. ‘When a parish shrinks it is usually stuck with a hundred-year-old building, which is a monster to keep up, and there simply aren’t enough people to sustain it. So the building is closed or consolidated with another parish.’

  ‘What happens to the churches themselves?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Some are torn down. Some are sold to other denominations. Not often, but it happens. A classic example was St Stephen’s on North Broad Street. It was sold to the Baptists, and they are having a hard time keeping it up.’

  ‘So, you hold the final mass at a church, then what?’

  ‘Well, the first thing we do is remove all the objects that are either sacred or valuable. The stained glass, the marble railings, the tabernacle. There are a few repositories for sacred items, the largest being in Corpus Christi, Texas.’ Raphael smiled. ‘We don’t want to have things ending up as curios in karaoke bars.’

  Jessica had once gone to a friend’s wedding reception in upstate New York, held at a large meeting hall. At her table were candlesticks with IHS on them, a Christogram widely used to depict the first Greek letters of Jesus’s name.

  ‘Secondly – and this happens with a lot of the older churches – we have to deal with the fact that the founding pastors were buried beneath them. Of course, they have to be moved. Keep in mind that, once a parish is canonically founded, anywhere in the world, they must receive permission from Rome to close. It is mostly pro forma, but still required.’

  ‘Is there a ceremony?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘A ceremony?’

  ‘When a church closes. Is there some sort of ceremony? A taking back of the blessing?’

  ‘You mean deconsecration?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing formal, at least that I know of. Although something like that is a bit outside my wheelhouse. A consecration is a blessing. The opposite would be a curse.’

  Byrne said nothing.

  ‘Every rite is to bring the Lord’s blessing to something, detective,’ Raphael added. ‘Not take it away.’

  Raphael rose, poured himself more coffee, looked out the window, toward the skyline. The question about deconsecration seemed to have rattled him.

  ‘Can you get us a list of churches that have been closed?’ Byrne asked.

  Raphael turned back to them. The expression that crossed his face at that moment was one of sadness and concern. It was obvious why the Philadelphia Police Department wanted a detailed list. These churches – these closed churches – were seen as potential killing grounds.

  ‘Of course,’ Raphael said. ‘I can have these collated and sent over by tomorrow morning.’

  As they prepared to leave, Jessica looked around, at the majesty and grandeur of the office. She then studied Father Raphael for a few moments.

  ‘May I ask how you came to this position at such a young age?’ she asked.

  Raphael smiled. Jessica found it disarming.

  ‘I’m very fortunate to have a great memory for dates and figures, as well as an insatiable appetite for world history. I did my undergraduate studies in just over two years, and entered the seminary when I was twenty.’

  ‘Where did you do your undergraduate work?’

  ‘At Bethany College.’

  ‘Bethany is in West Virginia?’

  ‘Yes. I had a double major – communications and, of course, religious studies.’

  ‘Were you a deacon?’

  Raphael smiled again. ‘It was waived in my case.’

  Michael Raphael’s ascent was impressive. If ever there was an organization where traditions moved forward at a glacial pace, it was the Catholic Church. Most of the other men doing Michael Raphael’s job were in their forties or fifties.

  They made their goodbyes.

  As Jessica and Byrne got into the car, both detectives absorbing what they had learned, neither having any idea how the information would help their investigations, Jessica looked up, saw Father Michael Raphael standing in the window, watching them. For a moment, the reflections of clouds made him appear diaphanous.

  A consecration is a blessing, Jessica thought.

  The opposite would be a curse.

  TWENTY

  Jessica pulled up in front Byrne’s apartment building. It was only 6 p.m., but it was already dark.

  ‘You hungry?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘I’m okay. Vince is cooking for the kids. I’ll eat later.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  Jessica glanced at her watch. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get a lot of sleep tonight anyway.’

  ‘Drop me by my car,’ Byrne said. ‘I have a few boxes I want to bring up.’

  Jessica took the steps to the second floor, walked down the hallway to the last apartment. Byrne’s door was ajar. She pushed it open, entered, closed the door behind her.

  Byrne was in the small kitchen, making coffee. The apartment looked exactly the same as it had the last time Jessica had been there, maybe five months earlier, right down to the same magazines in the same places.

  ‘Love what you’ve done with the place,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a process.’

  Byrne walked into the living room with two mugs of coffee. He handed one to Jessica. She blew on it, sipped. It was good. ‘What’s all this?’ she asked, gesturing at the small dining room, which had boxes stacked floor to ceiling.

  ‘I moved all my crap out of storage,’ Byrne said. ‘I was paying two hundred a month to keep a bunch a junk I don’t need anymore. I donated most of it. This is the stuff I couldn’t part with. I’ve got five more boxes in my car.’

  On top of one of the boxes on the dining-room table was a framed eight by ten photograph, a picture of a younger Kevin Byrne standing next to a heavyset black man. They were in front of Downey’s on Front Street. Jessica picked it up.

  ‘Did you know Marcus Haines?’ Byrne asked.

  Jessica had heard the name, but never met the man. She knew that his picture was on the wall in the lobby of the Roundhouse, the wall dedicated to fallen officers. ‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘Never had the honor.’

  Byrne took the picture from her. ‘Marcus was a piece of work, Jess. A true character. Great cop, lousy at everything else. Married three times, three alimonies, always looking for an angle to make a buck. At the end of the month he was always in the hole.’

  ‘He was in homicide?’

  ‘Yeah. When my old partner Jimmy had his first heart attack, he was out for six months. I partnered with Marcus for a while. We worked a few cases, closed a few cases, knocked back a few cases of Jameson.
’

  ‘Why do I feel a story coming on?’

  Byrne smiled, sipped his coffee. ‘If you insist.’ He leaned against the wall. ‘So, one August night we get this call, a domestic gone bad. DOA was the boyfriend, and it looked like the girlfriend was good for it.

  ‘We get there, and the job is laid out by the numbers. It’s like there was a tag on everything. Body, killer, weapon. Everything but motive, but that wasn’t a mystery. The woman is sitting on the couch, the boyfriend is on the floor, brains on the wall. The responding officers said the gun was on the floor at the woman’s feet. Open and shut, right?’

  ‘Sounds like it.’

  ‘I take it all in, and I look a little more closely at the woman on the couch, and she is stunningly beautiful. Coffee-colored skin, amber eyes. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five. But all of that was beneath a layer of crack. It was clear she was on the pipe, and she looked all beat to shit.’

  Byrne propped the photograph on the windowsill.

  ‘Marcus walks in, and all of a sudden it’s like he’s seen a ghost. Mumbling, walking in circles, clicking his pen. He takes me into the kitchen, lowers his voice, says, ‘Kevin. I know her, man. I know her.’ He goes on to tell me that he’s been seeing this girl, that he met her on a job a year earlier when the girl’s mother was shot in West Philly, and he walked her through it all, held her hand at the trial, and one thing led to another. He asks me what I can do for her, seeing as how I caught the case.’

  Jessica considered the options. There were only a few, none of them good. ‘What could you do?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I had no idea. I walked back into the room, looked at her on the couch, and immediately saw the next two decades of her life, how she would look after twenty years in Muncy.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I interviewed her. She said that her boyfriend would usually come home drunk, beat on her, night after night. Went on for almost a year. She showed me her left arm where he broke it. Never healed right. She said she told him a week earlier, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever did it again she was going to get a gun and kill him. She said he laughed at her, said when he came home that night, he started to push her around, and she just pulled a .38, drew down and popped him. Single shot, center mass. One dead asshole to go.’