Richard Montanari: The Killing Room

Love you, babe.

Vincent Balzano was good. Really good. It was one of the reasons he was one of the most feared and respected detectives working out of the Narcotics Field Unit North. Vincent could turn a witness into a suspect without the person ever knowing they were giving it up. Jessica knew all his tricks, and Vincent mostly got over with his Italian charm and swarthy good looks because she let him.

With breakfast more or less eaten, Jessica did a tornado cleanup of the kitchen, piling everything in the sink for later, wiping down the countertops. Sophie and Carlos sat at the table. They had a few minutes before they had to leave.

‘Okay,’ Sophie said to her little brother. ‘Do you remember how to play?’

Carlos nodded. At three years old he was just learning to comb and part his hair, a vanity he fiercely guarded. Today, though, the part in his hair made the Schuylkill River look straight by comparison.

‘Okay.’ Sophie made a fist with her right hand, held it in front of her. ‘This is the rock.’

Carlos mimicked his sister, clenching a small fist. ‘Rock.’

Sophie flattened her hand, palm down. ‘This is paper.’

‘Paper.’ Carlos put his hand out palm up, then corrected himself, turning it palm down.

Sophie made a V with her index and middle finger. ‘And this is scissors.’

Again, Carlos followed the instructions. ‘Scissors.’

‘Okay. Do you remember what beats what?’

Carlos nodded.

‘Ready?’ Sophie asked.

‘Ready.’

Sophie put her hand behind her back. Carlos followed suit. Sophie said, ‘One, two, three .’

As Sophie pulled her fist from behind her back, and said ‘rock,’ Carlos threw out his hand — index finger and thumb extended — and yelled, ‘Gun!’

Sophie rolled her eyes, looked at her mother, back at her brother. ‘There is no gun, Carlos.’

‘No?’

‘No. The game is called rock, paper, scissors .’

Carlos giggled. ‘Okay.’

Sophie looked again at Jessica. Jessica just shrugged.

‘Boys,’ Sophie said.

The Roundhouse, the police administration building at the corner of Eighth and Race Streets, was humming when Jessica walked in at just after 8 a.m. Thank God the humming in her ears had stopped. It would begin again, she imagined, when she next stepped into the ring, sometime in the next few days. She didn’t want to admit it, but she just didn’t bounce back like she did in her twenties.

Still, she had stood her ground with a buff nineteen-year-old, and came out of it with just a bruise or two. And sore hands. And, if truth be told, it kind of hurt on the right side when she took a deep breath. Other than that …

Maybe she was getting too old for this.

The Homicide Unit was ninety detectives strong, working three tours. Although the murder rate in Philadelphia had dropped in the past few years, the violence had not. New trauma centers in urban areas had eased the number of fatalities, and victims who may have died in the past were now reaching emergency care more quickly. But, as the old saying went: a homicide is just an aggravated assault gone wrong.

Somehow, with the three cases Jessica and Byrne had pending, St Michael — the patron saint of police — had smiled upon them, and they had three suspects in custody, with preliminary hearings spread out over the next two weeks.

For this one glorious moment, their plate was clean.

In most professions, that was a good thing. An empty outbox makes for a clear conscience on payday. In homicide work it meant that you were back up on the wheel. It meant that any minute someone in the City of Brotherly Love was going to pick up a gun or a knife or a bludgeon and visit violence on another human being, and it would then become your job to sort it all out, making sure the guilty party was apprehended and brought to justice, and that the loved ones of the victim were notified, their grief assuaged, their anger and rage corralled.

With this in mind Jessica sat at a computer terminal. One of her cases was a double homicide in Juniata Park, and witness statements put a second man at the scene, gun in hand, although ballistics could only ID one weapon. With only a rough description of the second suspect, Jessica decided to begin with known associates of the man they had in custody. She scrolled through mug shots, six at a time. No one looked promising.

After a few fruitless minutes the phone on the desk rang. Jessica looked longingly at her Spinach Florentine breakfast wrap from Cosi, the one she probably shouldn’t be eating, but somehow couldn’t resist. She hadn’t even got in a single bite.

If this call was a new case, it would be hers. She picked up the phone, punched the button.

‘Homicide. Balzano.’

At first it sounded like white noise, albeit white noise at the lower end of the spectrum, like the setting on sound conditioning machines that simulate rainstorms.

Jessica waited. And waited. Nothing.

‘This is Homicide, Detective Balzano.’

‘One God,’ the caller said.

The words were spoken in a soft whisper. The volume was so low that it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman speaking.

‘Excuse me?’ Jessica asked. ‘Could you speak up a bit?’

‘Seven churches.’

It sounded like the caller said seven churches . ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand. Are you calling about a case?’

For a few seconds the caller said nothing. Jessica was just about to hang up when she heard:

‘You will find the first of the dead at Amber and Cumberland.’

Dead. First of the dead. This got Jessica’s attention.

She took out her notebook, started writing. ‘Amber and Cumberland, you say?’ Technically, this meant East Cumberland Street, but hardly anybody called it that. This told Jessica she was probably talking to a native Philadelphian. But not necessarily.

‘Beneath the dove,’ the caller whispered.

‘Okay. The dove. Got it. We’ll check it out. In the meantime, why don’t I — ’

‘We will not speak again.’

The line went dead.

Jessica held the phone for a few seconds, trying to digest what she’d just heard. Crank call? Maybe yes, maybe no. The nutcases usually called 911. This was on a direct line.

First of the dead .

Jessica put the phone back in its cradle, her day suddenly changed.

The purview of the PPD Homicide Unit was to investigate every suspicious non-hospital, non-hospice death. Sometimes the jobs turned out to be suicides, sometimes they turned out to be hoaxes. Jessica had been on many of each.

She debated for a moment whether to take this to Dana Westbrook, the day work supervisor. After all, it wasn’t a citizen call to 911 that started this, it was a direct call to the Homicide Unit.

She had no choice. As she walked toward Sergeant Westbrook’s office, the siren call of her Cosi breakfast wrap grew cold, as did the sandwich itself.

*

‘And you couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman?’

‘No,’ Jessica said. ‘The voice was just a whisper.’

‘What did the caller say again?’

Dana Westbrook was in her early fifties, fit and toned and agile. Although she was easily four inches shorter than Jessica’s five-eight, she was by no means petite. And God help you if you crossed her, or shirked your duty.

Women in law enforcement worldwide knew that when you were in uniform you had to work twice as hard as men. It was a fact of life. At the command level it was double even that. Jessica did not envy Dana Westbrook’s rank, just as she knew she would never try for the position. Detective work was hard enough.

Jessica flipped a page in her notebook. ‘Whoever it was said One God , then something about seven churches .’