The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

  ‘I think we’re okay,’ Byrne said. ‘I think they left.’

  Jessica wanted to believe he was right. She wasn’t so sure.

  For the moment her thoughts returned to the case, and to Ida-Rae Munson’s words:

  Word was she had a devil-child.

  In the context of the horrors they had seen in the desecrated churches, the words certainly took on a new meaning. She just didn’t know what that meaning might be. Either way, it was time for some old school, shoe leather police work. She just didn’t want to do it here.

  ‘I think we should go back to the town,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe there’s some forwarding address for this Ruby Longstreet, some attorney who handled the property. I want to see the records of this place.’

  Byrne reached into his coat pocket, gave Jessica the deputy’s card. ‘Nice kid. Believe me, he’ll fall all over himself to help you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll wait here.’

  Jessica looked at her partner. ‘You’re going to stay here.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘In the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Byrne said. ‘You might want to fix your hair.’

  Jessica did a quick comb-through with her fingers. ‘Better?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘You sure you want to do this?’

  Byrne just nodded.

  Jessica backed her way to the car, listening for the sound of eight heavy paws loping up the hill. She heard nothing. She opened the driver’s door.

  ‘Kevin?’

  Byrne looked over.

  ‘The dogs?’

  Byrne raised a hand, waved. He’d heard her.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Byrne walked to the top of the hill, weapon in hand. There was a tree line about a hundred yards away. There was no sign of the dogs.

  He holstered, walked back down, stood at the base of the foundation where the old shack had stood, listened to the silence. He had grown up in the city, had spent most of his life in one. The mind-numbing quiet of a place like this was profound.

  His mind was not quiet for long.

  Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?

  Byrne crouched down near the footer, an old track-style foundation made of packed earth and stones. He picked up one of the white stones and knew where he had seen one like it before. It was in the victim’s mouth at St Regina’s. He rolled the smooth rock in his hand, felt the malign presence of this place, a history that was fearsome and dark.

  Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?

  Byrne glanced skyward. The air was cold, but the sun warmed his face. He stood, walked around the frozen pond and saw, just at the bottom of the rise, the handful of homemade crosses, a half-dozen in all. This was the family plot. He wondered if Elijah Longstreet was buried beneath his feet.

  Byrne looked at the edge of the overgrown area, saw an old realtor sign, rusted and battered by time and weather. He turned it over. There, painted on the back, was a telling legend.

  Ida-Rae Munson had not been kidding. The Longstreets were not the most popular family in these parts.

  But he had known that. It didn’t take an Ida-Rae, or a county zoning archive, or even God to tell him that. He knew it as soon as they turned onto the property. He felt it.

  The father had the devil in him and the boy came out evil.

  In his mind Byrne saw the end. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in more than two decades invited the darkness in.

  Inside the darkness were two graves.

  And although he could not see names on the headstones, he could see the date of death. It was less than a week away.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Shane Adams couldn’t get onto the grounds at the Roundhouse unobserved, but here it was different. Here, behind the apartment building in which Kevin Byrne lived, he was shielded from the street. Unfortunately, the Dumpster in the alley behind the building was full, and looked to contain trash from six different rowhouses, and one low-rise four-suiter. He’d never be able to pick through it, find what belonged to Byrne, and spirit it away. Not in broad daylight.

  He left the alley, rounded the corner onto Third Street. The street was lined with parked cars. He found the one he was looking for, stepped into an alcove, checked his notes. It was Kevin Byrne’s personal car. Shane looked up and down the street. If he approached the car, he could be seen by any one of a dozen vantage points. He took out one of his cell phones – specifically an old flip phone he’d had for years, one that was no longer connected to any service, and therefore was never in any danger of ringing at an inopportune time – and put it to his ear. He sauntered up the street, talking aloud into the phone, meandering in that aimless way people do when they’re on the phone in a public place.

  He leaned against the wall across the sidewalk from Byrne’s car. He could see a few things on the dashboard. Nothing of much interest. He leaned forward, saw two large boxes in the back seat; one with a top, one without. The open box seemed to be full of papers.

  Shane pretended to be on his cell phone as he leaned against the car, and covertly took as many pictures as he could of the back seat and front seat.

  He then raced back to his own car, checked all the mirrors. The big cop was nowhere to be seen. Shane scrolled through the photos. Crap, except for the news clippings on top of the papers in the open box. One of the headlines read:

  WHO IS THE BOY IN THE RED COAT?

  By the time he got back to the station Shane found that he couldn’t get the headline out of his mind. He sat down at a computer terminal, looked up the story.

  There was a ton of information. Not nearly as much as there was for Philadelphia’s most famous mystery – The Boy in the Box, a four- or five-year-old victim found in a box in the Fox Chase section of the city in 1957, still unsolved – but there was at least three months of data.

  The Boy in the Red Coat case was not ruled a homicide, so the investigation went to divisional detectives at the time, who interviewed people in the neighborhood, trying to determine the boy’s identity. They spoke to hundreds of people in the neighborhood, as well as everyone in the church’s parish. The boy’s picture went out nationally and internationally, but no one came forward.

  So why were the papers in the back seat of Detective Byrne’s car? Was he reopening a twenty-year-old case? Did it have something to do with the spate of murders happening in churches now?

  Maybe there was something in his trash after all.

  Maybe Shane would go back tonight.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In the dream she can’t move. She can see, but she cannot move her arms and legs. She is in a big, drafty room. From somewhere in the distance she can hear chanting. Latin chanting. She looks up to see a tall figure standing in shadows. In his hand is a ring of barb wire. In the other is a handful of white stones. She suddenly realizes she is sitting on the rim of an old aluminum tub filled with ice. She manages to fall over, onto her side. When she looks into the tub, there is a newborn baby frozen inside.

  But it isn’t Cecilia Rollins.

  It is Sophie.

  Jessica woke up drenched in sweat, disoriented, her heart pounding. She turned, found Vincent dead to the world, as usual. It was a good thing Philadelphia didn’t get too many hurricanes. Vincent Balzano would sleep through them and wake up on a beach in South Carolina.

  Jessica had managed to stay awake on the ride back from West Virginia, mostly because Byrne chose that time to tell her about his run-in with DeRon Wilson. Byrne’s temper was formidable, but in the time she had known him he had only managed to lose it completely a handful of times. He told her that the brass were mandating that he see a psychiatrist for an assessment before meeting with the captain about whether or not there would be any problems arising from the incident.

  By the time they returned to the Roundhouse Jessica found that she was completely exhausted. She found herself home, fed, bathed, and in bed by 10 p.m.

  Now she was wide awake.

>   She got up, checked on Sophie and Carlos. Both were out like broken lamps.

  Jessica opened the closet door. Staring back was a jumble of boxes and baskets, plastic storage containers, things she had promised herself she would go through one of these days, weeding out the junk. The problem was that she was a sentimental fool. When they moved back to South Philly a year ago she had thrown out ten or so Hefty bags full of things she had collected over the years, including two full legal-sized boxes of Christmas and greeting cards. She had kept one small carton of cards, an old gift box from Strawbridge’s.

  Jessica walked into the kitchen and sat down. She opened the white box. Inside was her first communion rosary, a white rosary in a small leather pouch. There were also a few dozen prayer cards, mostly from St Paul’s.

  The two cards in the box that meant the most to her were for her mother and brother. There had been ten years or so between their deaths, but the wounds were still fresh, still open. She stared at the cards for a while, remembering the two services. She was five when her mother was buried. The church was filled with family and friends. Half the PPD showed up, it seemed.

  Her brother’s service was different. He had been killed in Kuwait in 1991, and there were members of every branch of the military at St Paul’s that day, everyone in the neighborhood who had ever served their country showed up – men, women, young, old, from WWI through Desert Storm. Some of the old boys wore their uniforms.

  Jessica held onto the two cards, made herself a cup of chamomile, took it into the living room. She curled up on the one big comfy chair they had, pulled a throw over her legs. Sometimes it was good to hurt, she thought. When you stop hurting, you start to forget. And she never wanted that.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Michelle Calvin tried to remember the last time she had been in a church. Was it her sister’s wedding? No, she had been in a church since then, hadn’t she? But when? She couldn’t recall.

  As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia she had been dragged to mass every Sunday, forced to sit in that sweltering, airless church on Margery Street. When she finally ran away at seventeen, never to return, Sunday became a day to do nothing but recover from Saturday night.

  And there had been some serious Saturday nights.

  She remembered. The last time she’d set foot in a church had been four years earlier, at her grandmother’s funeral. It was held at St Gregory’s, and the turnout was sparse to say the least. Her grandmother didn’t have many friends. Grandma Rita had been what people in her day called a loose woman – three husbands, more boyfriends than she could keep track of, a taste for Jack Daniel’s and a somewhat less than puritanical view when it came to backseat sex.

  In many ways, Michelle had turned out the same.

  But that was another life.

  Now that she was in real estate, now that she had a career with a capital C, it had all changed. Three years earlier, at the ripe old age of twenty-six, she had turned her life around. It had taken one too many scrapes with the law – including a brief stint in jail and two years of AA – but she had finally gotten her act together. She had nearly lost her only daughter in the process, but somehow convinced the court that she had put her wicked ways behind her, and retained custody.

  This job – its stability, its respectability, its ticket to better things – meant everything to her. Michelle Calvin was on the rise. And the sky, as they say, was the limit.

  Michelle thumbed the combination on the lock box, removed the keys inside, unlocked the side door. Ahead was a short hallway with two doors on the right. The building was old, and had that musty smell of disuse. She walked into the central space which, she imagined, was once the main room of the church.

  She hadn’t read up on the property, but she believed that this had one time been used as a chapel. When the old hospital next door was torn down they left this structure standing. Over the past few years it had been used for storage by the archdiocese, but no longer as a place of worship. The archdiocese sold the building to a company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio who were now looking to unload it.

  Michelle checked her watch. The buyer she was supposed to meet was ten minutes late. She’d give it another ten, then make the call.

  As she took out her BlackBerry, a noise came from just behind her. She spun around. The woman had walked into the building and crept up behind her without a sound.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  The woman was well-dressed and accessorized. This told Michelle she was probably a serious buyer. Very good news. ‘Not at all,’ Michelle said. ‘I just didn’t hear you come in.’

  They shook hands, talked about the weather for a few moments.

  ‘Have we met before?’ Michelle asked. The woman looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘I don’t believe so.’

  It would come to Michelle. For the moment she gestured to the space, which was lit only by the light coming through the tops of some high, dirty windows. The rest of the windows were boarded up. There were no fixtures in the main room. ‘They’re definitely ready to sell,’ Michelle said. ‘They’ve been sitting on this for quite some time.’

  ‘This was a church,’ the woman said. It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Yes,’ Michelle said. ‘I believe it was a chapel when the hospital used to be next door. I don’t know if it was ever a regular church, a church where people came to mass on Sundays.’

  Michelle wondered why she added that. It looked like the woman was going to buy, and if Michelle had learned anything from Ray Rudolph, who was her boss and mentor, it was that anything you said after a client said yes began to talk them out of the sale.

  ‘Is there a basement?’

  Michelle consulted the listing. ‘Yes, there is,’ she said. ‘But I’ve never been inside before, so I’m not sure where the stairs are. You look around, I’ll do a little exploring.’

  Michelle walked to the far side of the main room, and there found a hallway. She walked down the corridor, and to the right discovered a small room that had probably been used as a kitchen at some point. She saw capped gas pipes coming up through the old tile floor. Beyond this room was another door. She opened it, and saw stairs leading downward. There was a light switch. She tried it, and was happy to see that the current owners had not yet turned off the juice. The listing said there was electricity, but you never knew.

  ‘I found it,’ Michelle said.

  No response.

  Michelle was just about to call out again when she turned to find the woman already standing next to her. Michelle tried to conceal her surprise.

  ‘Would you like to see the basement?’ she asked.

  ‘Very much.’

  Michelle silently prayed that the basement would be somewhat presentable, as in no broken water pipes, no homeless people, no rats.

  They slowly descended the stairs, Michelle on point. The basement was the same size as the main room above, broken into two sections by a half-wall. There were no ground-floor windows, just a pair of bare bulbs in grimy porcelain sockets. In one corner was an old stained mattress.

  While Michelle mentally prepared to close the deal, she suddenly felt a sharp pain on the left side of her back, just below her shoulder blade. It felt as if she had been stung by a bee. She turned around. The woman was holding a hypodermic.

  Had this woman just stuck her with a needle?

  Michelle Calvin did not have long to think about it. Her central nervous system answered the question for her. She felt it first in her legs, a deadness that seemed to rise up from the floor, claiming every part of her body.

  ‘What … what did you do to me?’

  The woman did not answer. Instead she stared straight ahead, past Michelle, at the smaller second room, bathed in darkness.

  ‘There is someone who wants to meet you,’ the woman said. ‘He has waited a long time.’

  Michelle Calvin slumped to the floor, her mind swirling red.

 
Then, blackness.

  An icy draft. She was on a mattress. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. In fact, Michelle Calvin could not tell if she had even opened her mouth.

  Was this a dream?

  No. Michelle knew it wasn’t, the same way she knew it was a dream sometimes, a realm in which there was an otherness to her senses, along with the belief that it all could end by opening her eyes.

  But Michelle Calvin’s eyes were already open.

  This was really happening.

  ‘She was a princess, you know,’ the woman said. ‘She was branded a whore because she dressed in finery and painted her face and body.’

  My God, Michelle thought. No.

  The woman knelt beside the mattress. ‘You made a promise,’ she said. ‘Like the others.’

  What promise?

  ‘You made a promise, and now he will take his due.’

  The woman began to slowly undress Michelle. Michelle could do nothing to stop her. Piece by piece the woman removed her clothes, folding them neatly on the floor next to the mattress.

  When the woman removed the last of Michelle’s clothing she took a white cloth from her bag and put it over Michelle’s eyes.

  Michelle heard footsteps. How much time had passed? She had no idea. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t fight.

  ‘Thyatira,’ came a whisper. ‘Jezebel.’

  Seconds later Michelle felt the mattress sag. First one side, then the other. Someone was on the bedding with her. Someone was kneeling over her.

  ‘If you let me keep my daughter I will do anything. I will even make a deal with the devil,’ the voice whispered in her ear.

  Michelle began to cry. Those were her words. She had gotten her wish and now she was going to pay for it.

  ‘Ego te absolvo,’ the whisperer said.

  The moments of Michelle Calvin’s life blistered through her mind – shadow-ridden images, long-forgotten voices, coils of memory unfurling at hellish speed.