The Killing Room (Richard Montanari) - By Richard Montanari Page 0,32

and Arlene got the message. She looked at her watch.

‘Nothing for me, thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get going.’

The waiter turned to Danica. She tapped the rim of her wine glass. ‘I’ll have the same.’

Perfect.

Danica and Arlene made their goodbyes. Shane politely shook the other woman’s hand. When she was gone, he took up position on the other side of the table, opposite Danica Dooley. She really was beautiful. A symmetrical face, soft features, a minimal amount of makeup and jewelry.

When the waiter left, they clinked glasses, sniffed, swirled, sipped. A few seconds later Shane found Danica staring at him, smiling. ‘Now I know who you are,’ she said. ‘You’re on the news.’

‘Yes.’

She fluffed her hair, smoothed a cheek. She seemed a little star-struck, or maybe it was the second glass of Barolo. Shane preferred star-struck.

Danica pointed to the wine and the copy of The Good Mother.

‘I can’t believe we have exactly the same tastes.’

You have no idea, Shane thought.

He left Danica’s apartment around 3 a.m. When he got home he showered again, prepared everything he needed for the morning, a day that was going to begin in just three hours.

Before crawling into bed, he opened the database, put the red X in the field next to Danica’s name, looked at the next few entries on the list. It was a list that had grown to seventy entries.

Shane fell asleep to the sound of the intermittent crackling of the police scanner he kept next to his bed. He had gone to sleep this way for many years. Although Shane might be loath to admit it to anyone outside the business, he could no longer sleep without it.

Soon he drifted off, the sound of swirling water filling his dreams, as it had every night since he was five years old, the sound of the baptismal waters engulfing him, filling his mind.

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I set you apart, came the phantasm of his mother’s voice.

On the good nights the sound of the waters lulled him to sleep.

On the bad nights he drowned.

ELEVEN

In the days following the discovery of Daniel Palumbo’s body in the basement of the North Philadelphia building that once housed St Adelaide’s, the Homicide Unit interviewed more than three dozen people who either knew Palumbo, or had been in the neighborhood at the time.

Ultimately, they learned nothing about Danny Palumbo’s movements the day he either voluntarily went, or was led, to the abandoned church where ten days later he would die.

The medical examiner performed an autopsy on the victim, and the official cause of death was ruled exsanguination, meaning Palumbo had bled to death. A toxicology report was also filed, and concluded that, in addition to small traces of heroin and Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, there was also trace of a drug called Pavulon.

Jessica had run into the drug Pavulon once before. It was a neuromuscular blocking agent, essentially a paralytic. It was used for general anesthesia during surgery as an aid to intubation or ventilation. In higher doses it would completely paralyze the muscles, though have no pain-numbing effect.

Jessica considered Danny Palumbo in that chair, unable to move, the barbed wire wrapped around his body and neck. When he finally could move, his head fell forward from fatigue, and the sharpened barb cut into his carotid.

As to the crime scene, there were enough partial prints in that building to keep the latent print division busy for months, and that was not going to happen. In a building that old, the number of people who had passed through the space, touching those surfaces most likely to retain full prints – doors and jambs, handrails, window panes – numbered in the hundreds. In time, dust and soot formed a layer on everything, reducing the viability of the surfaces to yield clean, identifiable prints.

A half-dozen partial exemplars had been run, yielding no hits. The only good prints belonged to the victim, fingerprints in blood on the back of the wooden chair in which he was bound.

There were no eyewitnesses, and no other blood types were found on the victim or at the scene. They had not found anyone in the PCIC system named Boise.

The barbed wire used to wrap Danny Palumbo’s body – essentially, the murder weapon, their only lead at this point – was unremarkable in every way. The firearms unit determined that the wire was anywhere from five to fifteen years old. It was made of galvanized mild