Richard Montanari - The Killing Room

Byrne knew he had to act. He stood up, slowly walked across the circle. He held out his hand. ‘Ruby?’

The woman said nothing.

‘I will kill the Preacher for you.’

‘That is a task for my son,’ she said. ‘He has waited a long time.’ She put the blade to Gabriel’s throat. ‘I’d thank you kindly to sit down now, sir.’

As Byrne took a step back he noticed movement in the vastness of the basement, shadows growing on the candlelit walls.

Jessica and Maria Caruso were in the room, guns drawn. Byrne saw other figures in the darkness. There had to be a dozen officers.

Mary Longstreet saw them, too.

In one fluid motion Byrne spun and knocked the knife from Mary Longstreet’s hand. Just as quickly she drew the other dagger. She danced to her left with blinding speed and drew the blade across Roland Hannah’s throat. Hannah’s body jerked and thrashed, spastic in its death throes. He put his hands to his throat, but he couldn’t stanch the bleeding. As blood spurted across the circle, extinguishing one of the remaining candles, Mary Longstreet flung herself at Gabriel. Byrne dove in front of the boy. The dagger entered the right side of Byrne’s stomach, slashing clean through. The pain was white fire.

But it didn’t stop Byrne. He reached for the hand that held the weapon and tried to turn the woman around.

In the madness of the moment Byrne saw Jessica run toward them. Hands slicked with blood, Byrne lost his grip on the woman. Mary Longstreet pivoted, regained her footing, and slashed wildly at Jessica. As Byrne fell to the floor he saw the wound open in Jessica’s shoulder, above her Kevlar vest.

No, Byrne thought.

No.

Then, as blackness descended, and the last of his will fell away, a hellish fury came to the cathedral basement. Gunfire roared. The smell of cordite and blood filled the air.

For Kevin Byrne it all faded to a distant past, a time when he was just a young boy, and these walls held more mysteries than answers.

Jessica couldn’t hear. The gunfire had stolen all sound. She was on her back, saw feet moving around her, heard muffled shouts and commands. She looked to her right and saw the body of Roland Hannah, his throat savaged. There could be no question. He was dead.

Jessica tried to sit up but the pain was too great. She saw Gabriel on his side, just a few feet away, his face streaked with blood. She did not know where the woman was. But right now neither of them were her priority. In the fog and confusion she found Byrne. He too was covered in blood, but not moving.

Jessica gathered all her energy and crawled across the cold stone floor.

With the last of her strength she reached Byrne, put two fingers to his neck. There was a pulse, but it was faint. She saw steam rising from his open wound, felt the life force leaving his body. She held him close.

In the distance she heard the sirens.

‘Hold on, Kevin,’ she whispered. ‘Hold on.’

Jessica closed her eyes, waiting, and in that moment heard the heartbeat of angels.

When Christ appeared on Patmos, an island off the coast of Greece, he sent his disciple John to visit the seven churches in Asia, and said:

‘Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamos, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea.’

Seven churches. She is the last.

Ruby sits in the final pew at St Gedeon’s, the same place her boy sat so many years ago. In her hand is a birth certificate, dotted with blood and tears. Now they would know his name.

Gedeon Mark Longstreet.

He would no longer be The Boy in the Red Coat. He would no longer be a cipher. When he died that day, in that clinic in Doylestown, she had spirited his small body away, and come to Philadelphia. She brought him to this church, the namesake of his patron saint.

She sat in the dark that night, sewing together the coat made from the Preacher’s vestment, the item Carson Tatum had gotten for her, vowing to one day return. She had specifically asked for the red vestment, the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Her lifeblood spreads on her white raiment. In the gloom of this final dusk she sees the men, guns raised, slowly approaching. They will never reach her. She glances down, at the bullet wound in her chest.

It is time.

Mary Elizabeth Longstreet closes her eyes and, like her son surely had so many years earlier, feels a peace blossom within her, and thus blessed, steps into the beyond.

In the two weeks following the bloodbath at St Gedeon’s there were eleven homicides in the city of Philadelphia, more than sixty aggravated assaults, a score of burglaries.

Philadelphia moved on.

Both the Inquirer and Daily News ran stories for six straight days, with the first Sunday edition of the Inquirer devoting a full page to Mary Elizabeth Longstreet’s life and murderous rampage. The story chronicled what investigators found in the woman’s small South Philly apartment, specifically the dozens of bound volumes of medical histories and transcripts, including the highlighted records of six patients who had been targeted.

One of Dr Sarah Goodwin’s patients, a thief who had been to prison twice for armed robbery, was replaced in Mary Longstreet’s mad scheme by DeRon Wilson, a crime of both necessity and opportunity, police believed.

In the woman’s closets investigators also found a long black coat with a pointed hood — a coat they surmised Mary Longstreet herself wore in the surveillance video taken at St Adelaide’s — along with a number of full sets of clothing, outfits for a boy of ten, twelve, and fifteen. There was also one for a full grown adult. Each was a black suit, white shirt, and black tie.

None had ever been worn.

On the morning after being rushed to the hospital, Jessica underwent surgery to repair her shoulder. She was discharged five days later, despite her protestations that she was very comfortable in her room, especially with the part about having people wait on her hand and foot. Not to mention that fabulous invention called Percocet. She was released nonetheless.

The surgery, and recovery time, for Kevin Byrne was more serious. Having lost a lot of blood, Byrne was in ICU for five days, in recovery for a week. Jessica visited him every day, but on the morning of Byrne’s release she ran late and missed him, a trio of shiny Mylar balloons in hand.

Jessica later learned that Byrne went immediately from the hospital to the PPD evidence room, where he stayed until well past midnight, obsessed with the material collected from St Ignatios, the chapel in which Michelle Calvin had been found brutally murdered, her body posed on a bloodied mattress.

They say Byrne pored over the evidence for a long time, searching for a clue he was certain would be there, a pointer designed to lead investigators to the final church. He eventually found it. It was on the mattress tag:

UNDER PENALTY OF LAW THIS TAG

NOT TO BE REMOVED

EXCEPT BY CONSUMER

All but six of the letters had been carefully painted out with Michelle Calvin’s blood, leaving a single word.

GEDEON

A week later, when the crime scene was finally cleared by investigators, the demolition of St Gedeon’s began.

She found him at Holy Cross Cemetery in Lansdowne. Standing in a shaded area near Baily Road, he wore a dark suit and white shirt. As Jessica got closer she could see the bulk of the bandages that wrapped his stomach. He’d lost more than ten pounds, and his skin was pallid.