We’ve got him,
Jessica thought.
We’ve fucking got him.
Jessica and Nicci drew their weapons, slipped quietly out of the car. As they neared their subject, Jessica made eye contact with Nicci. It was a moment for which all police officers live. The excitement of an arrest, tempered by the fear of the unknown. If Bruno Steele was the Actor, he had brutally killed two women that they knew of, both in cold blood. If he was their unsub, he was capable of anything.
They closed the distance in shadow. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Twenty. Jessica was just about to draw down on the subject when she stopped.
Something was wrong.
In that moment, reality came crashing down around her. It was one of those times— unsettling enough in life in general, potentially fatal on the job— when you realize that what you thought you had in front of you, what you assumed to be one thing, was not only something else, but something wholly other.
The man in the doorway was not Bruno Steele.
The man was Kevin Byrne.
57
THEY STEPPED ACROSS THE STREET, INTO THE SHADOWS. JESSICA didn’t ask Byrne what he was doing there. That would come later. She was just about to head back to the surveillance vehicle when Eric Chavez raised her on channel.
“Jess.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s music coming from the house.”
Bruno Steele was already inside.
* * *
BYRNE WATCHED THE team prepare to take the house. Jessica had quickly briefed him on the events of the day. With each word she said, Byrne saw his life and career spiral. It all fell into place. Julian Matisse was the Actor. Byrne had been so close, he had not seen it. The system was now going to do to what it did best. And Kevin Byrne was right under its wheels.
A few minutes, Byrne thought. If he had gotten there a few minutes before the strike team, this would have been over. Now, when they found Matisse tied up in that chair, bloodied and beaten, they would trace it all back to him. Regardless what Matisse had done to Victoria, Byrne had kidnapped and tortured the man.
Conrad Sanchez would find cause for a police brutality charge at the very least, maybe even federal charges. There was a very real possibility that Byrne might be sharing a holding cell, right next to Julian Matisse, this very night.
* * *
NICK PALLADINO and Eric Chavez took the lead into the row house; Jessica and Nicci, the rear. The four detectives searched the first and second floors. They were clear.
They began to make their way down the narrow stairs.
It was a damp, vile heat that permeated the house, redolent of sewage and human salt. Beneath it, something primal. Palladino reached the bottom tread first. Jessica followed. They ran their Maglites over the cramped room.
And saw the very heart of evil.
It was a slaughter. Blood and viscera everywhere. Flesh clung to the walls. At first, the source of the blood was not apparent. But soon it dawned on them what they were looking at, that the thing draped over the metal rod was once a human being.
Although it would be more than three hours before fingerprint tests would confirm it, at that moment what the detectives knew for certain was that the man known to adult-film aficionados as Bruno Steele— but better known to the police and the courts and the penal system, and to his mother, Edwina, as Julian Matisse— had been cut in half.
The bloody chain saw at his feet was still warm.
58
THEY SAT IN A BOOTH AT THE BACK OF A SMALL BAR ON VINE Street. The image of what was found in the cellar of the row house in North Philly pulsed between them, unyielding in its profanity. They had both seen a lot in their time on the force. They had rarely seen the brutality of what was done in that room.
CSU was processing the scene. It was going to take all night and most of the next day. Somehow, the media was already all over the story. Three television stations were camped across the street.
While they waited, Byrne told Jessica his story, starting from the moment he had received the call from Paul DiCarlo and ending at the moment she had surprised him outside the row house in North Philly. Jessica had the feeling he had not told her everything.
When he exhausted his tale, there were a few moments of silence. The silence spoke volumes about them— about who they were as police officers, as people, but especially as partners.
“You okay?” Byrne finally asked.
“Yeah,” Jessica said. “It’s you I’m worried about. I mean, two days back, and all of this.”
Byrne waved her concern away. His eyes told another story. He downed his shot, called for another. When the barmaid brought his drink and left, he settled back. The booze softened his posture, eased the tension in his shoulders. It appeared to Jessica that he wanted to tell her something. She was right.
“What is it?” she prodded.
“I was just thinking about something. About Easter Sunday.”
“What about it?” She had never talked to him in any kind of depth about his ordeal getting shot. She had wanted to ask, but she figured he would tell her when he was ready. Maybe now was that time.
“When it all happened,” he began, “there was this split second, right when the bullet hit me, when I saw it all happening. Like it was happening to someone else.”
“You saw it?”
“Not exactly. I don’t mean in any New Age out-of-body way. I mean I saw it in my mind. I watched myself fall to the floor. Blood everywhere.
My
blood. And the only thing that kept running through my head, was this . . . this picture.”
“What picture?”
Byrne stared into the shot glass on the table. Jessica could tell that this was not easy for him. She had all the time in the world. “A picture of my mother and father. An old black-and-white snapshot. The kind with that rough edge. Remember those?”
“Sure,” Jessica said. “Got a shoe box full at home.”
“The picture is of them on their honeymoon in Miami Beach, standing in front of the Eden Roc, caught in what might have been the happiest moment of their lives. Now, everyone knew that they couldn’t afford the Eden Roc, right? But that’s what you did in those days. You stayed at some place called the Aqua Breeze or the Sea Dunes and you took a picture in front of the Eden Roc or the Fontainebleau, and pretended you were rich. My old man in this ugly purple-and-green Hawaiian shirt, big tanned forearms, bony white knees, grinning like the Cheshire cat. It was like he was saying to the world:
Can you believe my dumb mick luck here? What the hell did I do right to deserve this woman?
”
Jessica listened. Byrne had never before revealed much about his family.
“And my mother. Ah, what a beauty. A real Irish rose. She just stood there in this white sundress with little yellow flowers on it, this half smile on her face, like she had you all figured out, like she was saying,
Watch your step, Padraig Francis Byrne, because you’re gonna be on thin ice the rest of your life
.”
Jessica nodded, sipped her drink. She had the same snapshot somewhere. Her parents had honeymooned on Cape Cod.
“They hadn’t even thought of me when that picture was taken,” Byrne said. “But I was in their plans, right? And as I fell to the floor on Easter Sunday, my blood all over the place, all I could think about was someone saying to them, on that bright sunny day in Miami Beach:
You know that kid? That chubby little bundle you’re going to have? Someone’s gonna put a bullet in his head one day and he’s going to die the most undignified death imaginable.
Then, in the picture, I saw their expressions change. I saw my mother start to cry. I saw my old man clench and unclench his fists, which is the way he handles all emotion, even to this day. I saw my old man standing in the ME’s office, standing at my grave. I knew I couldn’t let go. I knew there was something left for me to do. I knew that I had to survive to do it.”
Jessica tried to absorb this, to ferret out the subtext of what he was telling her. “Do you still feel that way?” she asked.
Byrne’s eyes cut more deeply into her than anyone ever had. For a second, it felt like he turned her arms and legs into cement. It appeared he might not answer. Then he said, simply: “Yes.”
An hour later they stopped by St. Joseph’s Hospital. Victoria Lindstrom was out of surgery and in ICU. Her condition was critical but stable.
A few minutes later they stood in the parking lot, in the hush of the predawn city. The sun was coming up soon, but Philly still slept. Somewhere out there, beneath the watchful eye of William Penn, between the peaceful flow of the rivers, amid the drifting souls of the night, the Actor was planning his next horror.
Jessica drove home to catch a few hours’ sleep, thinking about what Byrne had been through in the past forty-eight hours. She tried not to judge him. As far as she was concerned, up until the time Kevin Byrne left that cellar in North Philly for Fairmount Park, what had happened down there was between him and Julian Matisse. There had been no witnesses, and there would be no investigation into Byrne’s conduct. Jessica was relatively certain that Byrne had not told her every detail, but that was all right. The Actor was still loose in their city.
They had work to do.
59
THE
SCARFACE
TAPE WAS RENTED AT AN INDEPENDENT VIDEO outlet in University City. For once, Eugene Kilbane did not own the store. The man who rented the tape was Elian Quintana, who worked as a night security guard at the Wachovia Center. He had watched the doctored video with his daughter, a sophomore at Villanova, who had fainted at the sight of the real murder. She was currently sedated under doctor’s orders.
In the edited version of the film, a bruised and battered and screaming Julian Matisse is seen handcuffed over a metal rod in the makeshift shower stall in the corner of the basement. A figure in a yellow rain slicker steps into the frame, takes a chain saw, and cuts the man virtually in half. It is spliced into the film at the moment when Al Pacino visits the Colombian drug dealer at the second-floor motel room in Miami. The young man who brought in the tape, an employee of the video store, had been questioned and released, as had Elian Quintana.
