The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

‘I would have to say no.’ Leone riffled the volume, put the red ribbon between the pages. ‘The meaning here is unclear. Christ was most likely referring to seven communities, not necessarily seven brick-and-mortar buildings.’

  ‘Why these seven?’

  ‘Christ believed these communities were failing in some way.’

  Father Leone flipped a few more pages, found what he was looking for, put a finger between these pages. ‘Let me think about this for a day. My mind isn’t as sharp as it used to be.’

  ‘Of course, Father,’ Byrne said.

  At this, the old man’s eyes seemed to go distant again.

  ‘Have they torn it down yet?’ Leone asked again. He had clearly forgotten that he’d asked the question before.

  Byrne had told Jessica on the way up that St Gedeon’s was slated for demolition. It was on the list of closed churches they had gotten from the archdiocese. Jessica had never been inside, but she had been by it many times. It was an impressive structure with a high spire.

  ‘Not yet, Father,’ Byrne said. ‘Not for a few days.’

  ‘I want you to bring me a piece of it, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Nothing big. A small piece of stone.’

  Byrne got down on one knee, brought himself face to face with the old man. ‘How do we stop this, Father?’

  The question brought the priest back to the moment.

  ‘There have been three murders?’ Leone asked.

  ‘Yes. Three that we know of.’

  At that moment there were investigators in four counties – city police, state police, county sheriffs – visiting all the closed churches on the list, methodically searching the premises.

  ‘There will be four more,’ Leone said.

  The statement was uttered so calmly that a shiver plaited down Jessica’s back. Was the old priest saying the killings could not be stopped?

  ‘These churches,’ Byrne said. ‘Is there any way to know which one he’ll pick next?’

  ‘I don’t know. But there is something you might find interesting, and perhaps most relevant to your case.’

  ‘What would that be?’

  Leone opened the book on his lap. ‘There was a church, one of the seven, that waited patiently. A community that endured, if you will.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Father.’

  Leone turned the book to face them. One page contained a large color-plate illustration of seven churches floating in a golden sky. Father Thomas Leone tapped the lower right-hand side of the illustration, and said, ‘The sixth church of the Apocalypse is called Philadelphia.’

  THIRTY

  Over the next six hours a task force was assembled and coordinated at the Roundhouse. There had now been three murders – three bizarre murders, including the drowning of an infant – and it was no longer possible to keep a lid on the fact that there was a connection between them.

  There was no talk among the detectives in the duty room of Byrne’s appearance on the news the night before, but everyone knew he was set to meet with the captain. They all gave him space on this, knowing it could have been any of them. The video clip had already fallen off the news cycle, but there was little doubt it would resurface in the next day or so when there was a new witness or talking head to plaster across the screen.

  Meanwhile, they all had a job to do.

  Although the Catholic Church was not the power it had once been in the city of Philadelphia, considering its large Italian and Irish population, it was still a mammoth financial and political force. There had no doubt been calls from the archdiocese to the mayor and district attorney.

  The task force met at one end of the duty room. In attendance were Sergeant Dana Westbrook, along with Jessica, Byrne, Maria Caruso, Josh Bontrager, Bobby Tate, and Dre Curtis. Bobby and Dre had fallen into a partnership a few years earlier when they worked a series of robbery homicides in West Philadelphia. Both were fashion plates, but with different styles. Bobby was all about Valentino and Armani, where Dre Curtis was old school. Every homicide unit has a lid man, and Dre Curtis seemed to have a hat for every occasion. On this day he was wearing a gray pork pie.

  Before the meeting began Jessica and Byrne decided to hold off on what they had learned from Father Leone. At this point, it was still speculation.

  The three churches were marked on the large map with red push pins. The material they had gotten from the archdiocese was overwhelming. There were sixty-seven churches that had closed in the past fifty years. Of those, six had been razed, thirty-one had been repurposed, leaving thirty buildings standing vacant across four counties. Watching them all was going to be an enormous task, involving dozens of personnel, not to mention a lot of overtime money that simply wasn’t there.

  The third victim’s name was Martin David Allsop. He had been fingerprinted at the morgue and, like Daniel Palumbo, had a criminal record. Twice convicted of gross sexual imposition on a minor, he had spent eighteen months in Curran-Fromhold on a three-year sentence. He had no family in Philadelphia. Until recently he worked as a salesman at the Best Buy on Roosevelt Boulevard.

  When everyone was settled, Jessica took the lead.

  ‘The first victim found was Daniel E. Palumbo, twenty-three, late of Latona Street in South Philly. As you all know, Daniel was once PPD. He was pronounced at St Adelaide’s Church. Cause of death was ruled exasanguination, due to a sharp object – in this instance a sharpened barb on a length of barb wire – cutting the carotid artery.

  ‘We have an eyewitness, Mara Reuben, whose mother lives across the street from St Adelaide’s. On the day before we received a call, directing us to the location, Ms Reuben witnessed a man in a long coat and pointed hood exit the alley next to the crime-scene building, and make a mark on the lamppost directly across the sidewalk from the entrance.’

  Jessica taped a pair of photographs onto the whiteboard, one of them a still picture from the pole camera on the corner; the other was a close-up photo of the X on the lamppost.

  ‘This was taken from a pole cam, and seems to back up what Ms Reuben told us. The time code coincides with her recollection of events. Unfortunately, she could not give us a better description.

  ‘A few days later we questioned one of Daniel Palumbo’s known associates, one Thomas L. Boyce, who had one of the victim’s old knapsacks with him. We found no solid leads in there. I then began a series of interviews at free clinics, which led me to the St Julius Clinic at Twelfth and Lehigh. One of the nurses there, a man named Ted Cochrane, remembered treating our second victim, Cecilia Rollins.’

  Jessica had decided to let Byrne brief the task force on Cecilia Rollins. Her level of rage about the murdered baby was still on the red line.

  Byrne stood up, consulted his notes. ‘Although Daniel Palumbo’s body was the first to be discovered, the medical examiner has ruled that Cecilia Rollins was the first to die. He puts the date of her death around February sixth. Her body was found in the basement of St Damian’s.’

  Jessica knew that Byrne knew he had to brief the team on how they got to St Damian’s in the first place. He wasn’t about to tell them that it came to him in one of his visions. The PPD brass, and even some of his fellow homicide detectives, were skeptical enough of Byrne’s methods the way it was.

  ‘After a search of St Adelaide’s, a portion of an old prayer card was found in the bell tower, an item we believe was deliberately left by the killer. It was a funeral card from 1966, issued by St Damian’s.

  ‘The child’s mother, Adria Rollins, nineteen, is severely mentally handicapped, and when I checked with DHS, they said they believed her great-grandfather – who signed forms claiming he was her grandfather – was competent enough as a guardian. When we went to question Adria, we found the old man deceased of natural causes, and Adria alone. We believe the baby was abducted from their apartment.’

  ‘Do we know anything about the baby’s biological father?’ Maria asked.

  ‘We do not. Ms Rollins is currently in the py
sch ward at Temple. We’re awaiting word on whether or not she is well enough to be questioned. We checked the birth record, and the father is listed as unknown.’

  Byrne turned his attention back to the photos on the board.

  ‘Once again a mark was left on the lamppost in front of the church. As before, the premises yielded hundreds of partial fingerprints, which are still being processed. A search of the scene also yielded a candleholder, the only candle-holder still in the church that could not be matched to St Damian’s.’

  ‘And we think this was deliberately placed, too?’ Bobby Tate asked.

  ‘We do. There was an inscription on the bottom of the glass that revealed it was property of St Regina’s, which turned out to be a closed church in Rhawnhurst. When we visited St Regina’s, we discovered the body of Martin Allsop.’ Byrne deferred to Maria Caruso. The Allsop case was hers.

  ‘Allsop was sixty-nine, a resident of Torresdale,’ Maria said. ‘We ran his prints and found he had a rather lengthy record. He was a twice-convicted sex offender, and was on the city’s watch list.’

  ‘Any connection to the clinic?’ Westbrook asked.

  ‘None yet,’ Maria said. ‘At least, not according to the clinic. We haven’t had the chance to question friends and family. If he had any friends.’

  Byrne took the floor again. ‘As to MO, Cecilia Rollins died as a result of drowning,’ he said. ‘Daniel Palumbo bled out, Martin Allsop died as a result of suffocation. Although he has not yet been autopsied, an X-ray revealed there are many more stones in his esophagus and stomach. One stone removed from his mouth at the scene had markings on it. The markings appear to be in a foreign language, one as yet unidentified. The lab has it now.’

  While Maria Caruso took a call on her cell and stepped out of the duty room, Byrne flipped a few more pages on his pad, continued speaking.

  ‘Our best guess is that the main suspect is male, white, somewhere around six feet tall, anywhere from twenty to fifty.’

  ‘Great,’ someone said.

  ‘What about the marks on the lampposts?’ Dre Curtis asked. ‘Were they made in blood?’

  ‘No. They are definitely not blood,’ Jessica said. ‘Preliminary reports reveal that the substance is a combination of a starchy compound, soil, with trace amounts of tannin.’

  ‘Tannin,’ Bontrager said. ‘Are we talking tannin as in red wine?’

  ‘We are,’ Jessica said. ‘But that’s all we have so far. Some of the material is so old it has begun to break down. The lab is conducting more tests as we speak. They’ll have more soon.’

  Byrne continued. ‘We ran this through ViCAP and, as you might imagine, the results were off the charts. Murder committed in the name of religion probably accounts for a third of the database.’

  ‘What about trauma on the baby?’ Dre Curtis asked.

  Byrne shook his head. ‘None. The ME ruled the baby drowned. There were marks on the baby’s legs, but these were unrelated to the cause of death. There were no cuts or lacerations.

  ‘CSU collected hair from all three scenes that shows promise. If the hair matches, and the owner is in CODIS, we’ll have something.’

  ‘Where are we on the DNA results?’ Bontrager asked.

  Everyone knew there was a backlog on DNA testing. The forensic lab had to process cases closest to the statute of limitations. Once in a while pressure was brought to bear to speed up the process. Jessica hoped this string of murders qualified.

  All eyes turned to Dana Westbrook.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Westbrook said. She stood up, took the floor. ‘Something connects these victims. I want questions and answers.’

  All five detectives looked at each other. Nobody wanted to raise their hand.

  Westbrook continued. ‘The victims lived in different neighborhoods, moved in different circles. As far as we know they never attended the churches in which their bodies were found.’

  ‘Both Palumbo and Allsop did time,’ Bobby Tate offered.

  ‘At two different correctional facilities,’ Westbrook replied.

  ‘Jailhouse jaw,’ Tate countered. ‘It travels.’

  ‘Possible,’ Westbrook said. ‘But that does not account for Cecilia Rollins. And why the baby? Why not the mother?’

  ‘Revenge?’ Bontrager asked.

  ‘Not against the mother,’ Jessica said. ‘Adria is not functional. I can’t imagine she had done something to someone so horrible that it would warrant the kidnapping and murder of her child.’

  ‘What about the great-grandfather?’

  ‘It’s hard to make too many enemies at his age. And if he did, they would be too old to do any of this. I’m not seeing it.’

  ‘Where was the baby born?’ Westbrook asked.

  Jessica checked her notes. ‘Jefferson.’

  ‘Maybe somebody put their eyes on the baby there,’ Westbrook said. ‘Any connection between Jefferson and the other two victims?’

  Nobody knew. The appropriate detectives made the note.

  ‘How is the killer picking the churches?’ Westbrook asked. ‘Why closed churches? I’m thinking this is significant.’

  ‘The archdiocese has a website of all active parishes,’ Byrne said. ‘If you have a list from ten or twenty years ago, simple math would do it, a simple side by side comparison. Or maybe it’s just by observation.’

  ‘Might this be a vendetta against the Church?’ Westbrook asked. It was almost rhetorical. It was on everyone’s mind. Of course, if that were the case, there would be no predicting any pattern. There were churches all over the four counties. And there was no shortage of scandals involving the Catholic Church, some legitimate, some not. ‘Or someone inside the Church,’ she added.

  This too was something no one wanted to think about, but neither could they rule it out.

  ‘We find the motive on this one, we find our boy,’ Westbrook said.

  There was general agreement on this. It was not a case of finding a single gun to match ballistics. All three methods of murder – one victim bleeding out, one drowning, one suffocating – meant that it wasn’t the means that tied the killings together, but the motive.

  If they could find a connection between these three victims, they might find a common denominator, and their killer. Friends, families, lovers, co-workers, doctors, dentists, lawyers. Something tied these people together. They were being killed for who they were, and carefully deposited in Catholic churches.

  Closed Catholic churches.

  Westbrook continued. ‘So this is where we are, folks. I want status reports from all of you every two hours. There’ve been three murders on our patch, and our psycho caller said “seven churches.” I think we all know what that means. Like Kevin said, according to the archdiocese there are thirty empty churches scattered around four counties. Sixteen of them are in our jurisdiction, which makes them all our responsibility. State police and county sheriff’s offices are coordinating surveillance in Montgomery, Chester, and Bucks. As for us, well, expect to do a lot of sitting, watching, and waiting.’ She tapped the picture on the whiteboard, the photograph taken from the surveillance camera of the figure in the dark hood. ‘Let’s bring this fucker into our house for a nice long visit, shall we?’

  The team stood up, gathered their materials. Before they could get their coats on, and get out the door, Maria Caruso came rushing in.

  ‘We have prints,’ she said.

  At this, everyone in the room stopped doing whatever they were doing. They all looked at Maria.

  ‘The prints were found on the inside back cover of the missal found at the Allsop scene,’ she said. ‘We got a hit from IAFIS.’

  Maria read from the sheet. ‘The prints belong to a man named Elijah Caleb Longstreet, white male, date of birth June twenty-fourth, 1951. Last known address is in a place called Cuzzart, West Virginia.’

  ‘What’s he in the system for?’ Dre Curtis asked.

  ‘It seems Mr Longstreet was involved in a number of assaults, one aggrav
ated, did some state and county time in the seventies.’

  ‘Is he still living there?’ Westbrook asked.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ Maria said. ‘I couldn’t find any current records on him at all. No DMV, telephone, nothing.’

  Dana Westbrook picked up the phone. ‘I’ll contact the West Virginia state police,’ she said. ‘See what I can find out.’

  Jessica glanced at her watch. It seemed like she’d been up for days. She wanted a long, hot bath, but she was afraid she’d fall asleep in the tub and drown.

  Westbrook looked at Jessica and Byrne. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘What do you mean, Sarge?’ Jessica asked.

  Westbrook handed Jessica the sheet with Elijah Longstreet’s last known address on it.

  ‘Get down there.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  They sit atop the small ridge overlooking the valley. The air is cold, but the sun is bright and warm, painting the hills in lustrous hues of rust and gold.

  ‘Tell me about how it looked then, Mama.’

  She tells the story as she knows it, of when the house was built, of how fine and strong it had stood, how level and true the ridge, how plumb the jambs. She tells about how there had been neighbors who had helped, and how the woods then were neither ragged nor sparse nor timbered flat. She tells about how the water in the creek once ran pure and cold, and how, every April, if you squinted your eyes, and gave rise to the belief, the mountains seemed to blush yellow with flowers.

  The house is fallen now, the old church stands empty, home to only pigeons and beetles and vermin. She tells about going there as a very young girl, when the service was full of majesty and mystery and solace. There was comfort in the Word, yes, there was.

  But when the Preacher came to her that night it all changed.

  She looks at the old stead, takes out what she needs, leaves it behind. It won’t be long. She knows that she has a connection to the detective, one that transcends all the machines and test tubes and electronic equipment. One that lives in their two hearts.

  ‘Are they coming?’