Richard Montanari - The skin Gods

The coppery scent of fresh blood filled the world.

Jessica looked at Byrne. They would be forever linked by this moment, by the events that had occurred in this dank and ugly place.

Jessica found that she was still holding her weapon out, a two-handed death grip. Smoke seeped from the barrel. She felt the tears dam up behind her eyes. She fought them, lost. Time passed. Minutes? Seconds?

Kevin Byrne gently took her hands in his, and eased the gun out.

Byrne knew that Jessica had saved him. He would never forget. He would never be able to pay her in full.

No one has to know…

Byrne had held his gun to the back of Ian Whitestone's head, mistakenly believing he was the Actor. When he had shot the lights out, there had been noises in the darkness. Crashes. Stumbling. Byrne had been disoriented. He couldn't risk firing again. When he lashed out with the butt of the pistol he had connected with flesh and bone. When he turned the overhead light on, the monk was on the floor in the center of the room.

The images he had gotten were from Whitestone's own blackened life-what he had done to Angelika Butler, what he had done to all the women on the tapes they had found in Seth Goldman's hotel room. Whitestone had been bound and gagged beneath his mask and robe. He had tried to tell Byrne who he was. Byrne's gun had been empty, but a full magazine was in his pocket. If Jessica had not come through that door…

He would never know.

At that moment a battering ram crashed through the painted picture window. Dazzlingly bright daylight flooded the room. Within seconds a dozen very nervous detectives spilled in after, weapons drawn, adrenaline raging.

"Clear!" Jessica yelled, holding her badge high. "We're clear!"

Eric Chavez and Nick Palladino stormed through the opening, got between Jessica and the mass of divisional detectives and FBI agents who looked a little too eager to cowboy up this detail. The two men held up their hands, stood protectively on either side of Byrne and Jessica and the now prostrate, sobbing Ian Whitestone.

The blue womb. They were sheltered. No harm could come to them now.

It really was over. Ten minutes later, as the machine that was a crime scene investigation began to rev up around them, as the yellow tape unspooled and the CSU officers began their solemn ritual, Byrne caught Jessica's eye, the one question he needed to ask on his lips. They huddled in a corner, at the foot of the bed. "How did you know Butler was behind you?"

Jessica glanced around the room. Now, in the bright sunlight, it was obvious. The interior was covered in a silken dust, the walls patchworked with cheaply framed photographs of a long-faded past. Half a dozen padded stools lay on their sides. And then there were the signs.

WATER ICE. FOUNTAIN DRINKS. ICE CREAM. CANDY.

"It isn't Butler," Jessica said.

The seed had been planted in her mind when she read the report of the break-in at Edwina Matisse's house, when she had seen the name of the responding officers. She hadn't wanted to believe it. She had all but known the moment she had talked to the old woman next to the former candy store. Mrs. V. Talman.

Van! the old woman had yelled. It wasn't her husband she was yelling for. It was her grandson.

Van. Short for Vandemark.

I came close once.

He had taken the battery from her two-way radio. The dead body in the other room was Nigel Butler.

Jessica walked over, peeled back the mask on the dead man in the monk's robe. Although they would wait for the ME's ruling, there was no doubt in Jessica's mind, or anyone else's for that matter. Officer Mark Underwood was dead.

Byrne held his daughter. Someone had mercifully cut the rope from her hands and feet and put a suit coat over her shoulders. She shivered in his arms. Byrne thought of the time she had defied him when they had gone to Atlantic City one unseasonably warm April. She had been about six or seven. He had told her that, just because the air temperature was seventy-five, it didn't mean the water was warm. She had run into the ocean anyway.

When she'd come out, just a few minutes later, she had been a pastel blue. She had quivered and quaked in his embrace for almost an hour, teeth chattering, signing I'm sorry, Dad, over and over again. He had held her then. He vowed to never stop.

Jessica knelt down next to them.

Colleen and Jessica had become close after Byrne had been shot that spring. They had spent many an afternoon waiting out his coma. Colleen had taught Jessica a number of handshapes, including the basic alphabet.

Byrne looked between them, and sensed their secret.

Jessica raised her hands, spelled the words in three clumsy hand- shapes:

He's behindyou.

With tears in his eyes, Byrne thought about Gracie Devlin. He thought about her life force. He thought about her breath still inside him. He glanced at the body of the man who had brought this latest evil to his city. He glimpsed his own future.

Kevin Byrne knew he was ready.

He exhaled.

He drew his daughter even closer. And it was in this way they comforted each other, and would for a long time to come.

In silence.

Like the language of film.

The story of Ian Whitestone's life and downfall was tHe stuff of movies, and at least two of them were in the preproduction stages even before the story hit the papers. In the meantime, the report of his having been involved in the porn industry-and perhaps involved in the death, accidental or otherwise, of a young porno starlet-was dripping red meat for the tabloid wolf packs. The story was surely being readied for publication and broadcast all around the world. How it would affect the box office of his next picture, along with his personal and professional life, was yet to be seen.

But that might not be the worst of it for the man. The district attorney's office was looking into opening a criminal investigation into exactly what had caused the death of Angelika Butler three years earlier, and what role in her death Ian Whitestone might have played.

Mark underwood had been seeing Angelika Butler for almost a year when she had drifted into the life. The photo albums found at Nigel Butler's house depicted a number of photographs of the two of them at family functions. When Underwood had kidnapped Nigel Butler, he had defaced the photos in the albums, as well as gluing all those photographs of movie stars onto Angelika's body.

They would never know exactly what drove Underwood to do what he did, but it was clear that he knew from the start who was involved in the making of Philadelphia Skin, and whom he held responsible for Angelika's death.

It was also clear that he blamed Nigel Butler for what he had done to Angelika.

There was a good chance that Underwood had been stalking Julian Matisse the night Matisse killed Gracie Devlin. I secured a crime scene for him and his partner in South Philly a couple of years ago, Underwood had said of Kevin Byrne at Finnigan's Wake. On that night, Underwood had taken Jimmy Purify's glove, soaked it in the blood, and held it, perhaps not knowing at the time what he would do with it. Then Matisse went away for twenty-five to life, Ian Whitestone became an international celebrity, and everything changed.

A year ago Underwood broke into Matisse's mother's house, stealing the gun and the blue jacket, putting his strange and terrible plan in motion.

When he learned that Phil Kessler was dying, he knew it was time to act. He had reached out to Phil Kessler, knowing the man was strapped for money to pay his medical bills. Underwood's only chance of getting Julian Matisse out of prison was to trump a charge against Jimmy Purify. Kessler had jumped on the opportunity.