The Killing Room (Richard Montanari) - By Richard Montanari Page 0,64

this girl, that he met her on a job a year earlier when the girl’s mother was shot in West Philly, and he walked her through it all, held her hand at the trial, and one thing led to another. He asks me what I can do for her, seeing as how I caught the case.’

Jessica considered the options. There were only a few, none of them good. ‘What could you do?’

‘Yeah, well, I had no idea. I walked back into the room, looked at her on the couch, and immediately saw the next two decades of her life, how she would look after twenty years in Muncy.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I interviewed her. She said that her boyfriend would usually come home drunk, beat on her, night after night. Went on for almost a year. She showed me her left arm where he broke it. Never healed right. She said she told him a week earlier, in no uncertain terms, that if he ever did it again she was going to get a gun and kill him. She said he laughed at her, said when he came home that night, he started to push her around, and she just pulled a .38, drew down and popped him. Single shot, center mass. One dead asshole to go.’

‘But she wasn’t assaulted that night.’

‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘There wasn’t a mark on her. She could have walked away, but she didn’t. And you know how a jury was going to see it.

‘So I look out the window, and I see CSU and the ME’s office show up. I tell Marcus to go down there and stall them. I also told him to call paramedics. When he leaves I go back over to where the girl is sitting, and I ask her to tell me what happened one more time. Very carefully.’

Jessica knew what Byrne meant. Sometimes the good people, the citizens, needed a little help remembering.

‘Right at that moment she completely shuts down, so I told her how it went down. I told her that her boyfriend came home, roaring drunk. He started pushing her around. She told him to stop. He hit her in the face, and that’s when she picked up the gun. Then he picked up a baseball bat, came at her again, and that’s when she fired.’

‘What did she say?’

‘At first she didn’t say anything. I think she was still a bit in shock. I told her that she had to decide if that’s what really happened, because any second there were going to be a dozen people in her apartment and then there would be no going back.’ Byrne picked up the photograph again. ‘After what seemed like a full minute, she looked up at me and said, “Ain’t got no bat.”

‘When I told her I would take care of that, she looked straight at me, and it all fell into place. She glanced at the body on the floor, then back at me. I knew what she meant. I crossed the room, crouched down. The dead man was wearing a ring on his right hand. I got down, pulled off the ring, put it on the same finger on my hand, walked back to where she stood. She nodded, then closed her eyes.’

Jessica knew what was coming next. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

‘I hit her, Jess. I meant to pull it, but I didn’t. She went down. A few seconds later I slipped the boyfriend’s ring back on his hand. I knew that CSU would be able to match the mark on her face with the ring, and that they would also find trace evidence of the girl’s skin on it. I also knew that I could spin the two rookies who responded if it came to that. There had been no pictures taken at that point. I’d get a bat into evidence.’

Jessica had a thousand questions, but she just listened. Byrne had to play this out.

‘By the time paramedics showed up, the girl had come around. As they were wheeling her out, she looked up, directly at me. The left side of her face was completely swollen. Our eyes met, and I couldn’t tell if she remembered what we talked about. If she didn’t remember, or she suddenly decided she still loved this dead fucker, she might bring charges against me. But when they wheeled her by me she reached out a finger, and ran it along the back of my hand. And I knew. I