Richard Montanari: Rosary girls

Pray for us sinners…

He pushed her skirt up her thighs, then all the way to her waist. He dropped to his knees, spread her legs. The lower half of her body was completely paralyzed.

Please God, make it stop.

Now…

Make it stop.

And at the hour of our death…

Then, in this damp and decaying place, this earthly hell, she saw the steel drill bit glimmer, heard the whir of the motor, and knew her prayers were finally answered.

MONDAY, 6:50 AM

"Cocoa puffs."

The man glared at her, his mouth set in a tight yellow rictus. He was standing a few feet away, but Jessica could feel the danger radiate from him, could suddenly smell the bitter tang of her own terror.

As he held her in his unwavering stare, Jessica sensed the edge of the roof approaching behind her. She reached for her shoulder holster but, of course, it was empty. She rummaged her pockets. Left side: something that felt like a barrette, along with a pair of quarters. Right side: air. Great. On her way down she would be fully equipped to put her hair up and make a long-distance call.

Jessica decided to employ the one bludgeon she had used her entire life, the one fearsome device that had managed to get her into, and out of, most of her troubles. Her words. But instead of anything remotely clever or threatening, all she could manage was a wobbly:

"What?"

Again, the thug said: "Cocoa Puffs."

The words seemed as incongruous as the setting: a dazzlingly bright day, a cloudless sky, white gulls forming a lazy ellipse overhead. It felt like it should be Sunday morning, but Jessica somehow knew it wasn't. No Sunday morning could shoulder this much peril, nor conjure this much fear. No Sunday morning would find her on top of the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Philadelphia, with this terrifying gangster moving toward her.

Before Jessica could speak, the gang member repeated himself one last time. "I made you Cocoa Puffs, Mommy."

Hello.

Mommy?

Jessica slowly opened her eyes. Morning sunlight burrowed in from everywhere, slim yellow daggers that poked at her brain. It wasn't a gangster at all. It was, instead, her three-year-old daughter Sophie, perched on her chest, her powder-blue nightie deepening the ruby glow of her cheeks, her face a soft pink eye in a hurricane of chestnut curls. Now, of course, it all made sense. Now Jessica understood the weight on her heart, and why the gruesome man in her nightmare had sounded a little bit like Elmo.

"Cocoa Puffs, honey?"

Sophie Balzano nodded.

"What about Cocoa Puffs?"

"I made you breakfess, Mommy."

"You did?"

"Uh-huh."

"All by yourself?"

"Uh-huh."

"Aren'tyou a big girl."

I am.

Jessica offered her sternest expression. "What did Mommy say about climbing on the cabinets?"

Sophie's face went into a series of evasive maneuvers, attempting to conceive a story that might explain how she got the cereal out of the upper cabinets without climbing on the countertops. In the end, she just gave her mother a flash of the big browns and, as always, the discussion was over.

Jessica had to smile. She envisioned the Hiroshima that must be the kitchen. "Why did you make me breakfast?"

Sophie rolled her eyes. Wasn't it obvious? "You need breakfess on your first day of school!"

"That's true."

"It's the most 'portant meal of the day!"

Sophie was, of course, far too young to grasp the concept of work. Ever since her first foray into preschool-a pricey Center City facility called Educare-whenever her mother left the house for any extended period of time, for Sophie, it was going to school.

As morning toed the threshold of consciousness, the fear began to melt away. Jessica wasn't being held at bay by a criminal, a dream- scenario that had become all too familiar to her in the previous few months. She was in the arms of her beautiful baby. She was in her heavily mortgaged twin in Northeast Philadelphia; her heavily financed Jeep Cherokee was in the garage.

Safe.

Jessica reached over and clicked on the radio as Sophie gave her a big hug and a bigger kiss. "It's getting late!" Sophie said, then slid off the bed and rocketed across the bedroom. "C'mon, Mommy!"

As Jessica watched her daughter disappear around the corner, she thought that, in her twenty-nine years, she had never been quite so grateful to greet the day; never so glad to be over the nightmare she began having the day she heard she would be moving to the Homicide Unit.

Today was her first day as a murder cop.

She hoped it would be the last day she had the dream.

Somehow, she doubted it.

Detective.

Even though she had spent nearly three years in the Auto Unit, and had carried a badge the entire time, she knew that it was the more select units of the department-Robbery, Narcotics, and Homicide-that carried the true prestige of that title.

As of today, she was one of the elite. One of the chosen. Of all the gold-badge detectives on the Philadelphia police force, those men and women in the Homicide Unit were looked upon as gods.You could aspire to no more lofty a law enforcement calling. While it was true that dead bodies showed up in the course of every kind of investigation, from robberies and burglaries, to drug deals gone bad, to domestic arguments that got out of hand, whenever a pulse could not be found, the divisional detectives picked up the phone and called Homicide.

As of today, she would speak for those who could no longer speak for themselves.

Detective. "You want some of Mommy's cereal?" Jessica asked. She was halfway through her huge bowl of Cocoa Puffs-Sophie had poured her nearly the entire box-which was rapidly turning into a sort of sugary, beige stucco.

"No sankoo," Sophie said through a mouthful of cookie.

Sophie was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, vigorously coloring what appeared to be an orange, six-legged version of Shrek, making roundabout work of a hazelnut biscotti, her favorite.

"You sure?" Jessica asked. "It's really, really good."

"No sankoo."

Damn, Jessica thought. The kid was as stubborn as she was. Whenever Sophie made up her mind about something, she was immovable. This, of course, was good news and bad news. Good news, because it meant that Jessica and Vincent Balzano's little girl didn't give up easily. Bad news, because Jessica could envision arguments with the teenaged Sophie Balzano that would make Desert Storm look like a sandbox fracas.

But now that she and Vincent were separated, Jessica wondered how it would affect Sophie in the long term. It was painfully clear that Sophie missed her daddy.

Jessica looked at the head of the table, where Sophie had set a place for Vincent. Granted, the silverware she selected was a small soup ladle and a fondue fork, but it was the effort that mattered. Over the past few months, whenever Sophie went about anything that involved a family setting-including her Saturday-afternoon tea parties in the backyard, soirees generally attended by her menagerie of stuffed bears, ducks, and giraffes-she had always set a place for her father. Sophie was old enough to know that the universe of her small family was upside down, but young enough to believe that little-girl magic just might make it better. It was one of the thousand reasons Jessica's heart ached every day.

Jessica was just starting to formulate a plan for distracting Sophie so she could get to the sink with her salad bowl full of Cocoa muck when the phone rang. It was Jessica's first cousin Angela. Angela Giovanni was a year younger, and was the closest thing to a sister Jessica had ever had.

"Hey, Homicide Detective Balzano,"Angela said.

"Hey, Angie."

"Did you sleep?"

"Oh yeah. I got the full two hours."