The Killing Room (Richard Montanari) - By Richard Montanari Page 0,74

bed. She wore a red coat. Next to her stood a tall young man in a pointed hood. Byrne knew it was the same man who had been watching them in Finnigan’s Wake, the same man they had seen in the surveillance video across from St Adelaide’s. Byrne tried to get out of bed, but his hands and feet were tied to the bed posts.

‘You were right, detective,’ she said.

‘Right?’

‘Evil is flesh.’

Byrne woke in a sweat. He turned, sat up, his heart pounding in his chest. Faith was gone. On the pillow was a note. He flipped on the light, read it. In the note she said she was on midnight to eight. She left her phone number.

Byrne slipped on a pair of jeans, walked to the kitchen, shaking off the nightmare, still in the grip of broken sleep. He flipped on the TV, poured himself a short one. Then poured the rest of a tall one. He checked the TV screen.

It was a recap of the day’s news. He found the lead story very interesting. The caption pretty much said it all.

VIDEO OF PHILLY COP GOES VIRAL

It was a grainy hand-held video, the kind you saw showing up more and more often these days, a video of him bracing DeRon Wilson.

‘This is Shane Adams reporting.’

Byrne turned off the TV, walked over to the fridge, opened it. The feeling of dread that had been building inside him since the moment he had walked into St Adelaide’s was growing by the minute. He opened a beer, swallowed most of it.

He looked out the window, at the glow of Center City and beyond. He then sat at his small dinette table, turned on his phone. He looked at the screen. There were thirty-nine messages. He turned it off, walked back to the bedroom, smoothed the sheets and blanket, wondering if he’d get back to sleep this night. He doubted it. The room still smelled of sex, of Faith Christian, of sage and nectarine. He sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the candle, blew it out.

I will come to thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick.

The words were almost shouted in his head.

*

There were no sector cars deployed at St Damian’s any longer; the yellow tape had been removed. It was no longer an active crime scene. The window pane that had been broken to gain entry had been covered over by plywood.

Byrne had anticipated this. He brought with him a large iron crow bar. The plywood square came off with ease, and within seconds he was inside.

Like St Adelaide’s, the interior was covered in black fingerprint dust which, at this hour, served to make the space even darker, seemed to absorb the beam of Byrne’s flashlight.

I will come to thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick.

He moved to a section to the right of where the altar once stood. It was an area devoted to the lighting of memorial votive candles. Although the three-tiered table was still there, the glass candleholders were boxed up beneath. Byrne pulled the boxes out. Most of the candleholders were broken. Byrne could see that a number of the glasses were imprinted with a cross. Some of the larger shards of glass had been dusted for prints, but not bagged.

Byrne snapped on a glove, aligned the glass holders on the old oaken table. They were identical. Some still had paraffin clinging to the sides. Even with the flashlight and naked eye, Byrne could see dozens of fingerprints. A glass surface – a glass surface coated with wax residue – was just about the perfect surface to leave a textbook exemplar of a fingerprint.

Byrne looked at the three dozen glasses, examined them, then saw something he had not noticed before. One of the glasses was a deep amber color, not red. He picked up the amber glass. The cross on the front was slightly different as well.

He turned it over. There, on the bottom, was a small metal plate that read:

Property of St Regina

It sounded as if he had awakened her. Entirely likely, seeing as it was 1.30 in the morning.

‘Jess. Have you ever heard of St Regina’s?’

‘St Regina’s?’

‘Yeah. The church.’

Byrne heard a liquid rustling of sheets, the flick of a lamp. ‘I hope you don’t think I have every church in Philly memorized,’ Jessica said. ‘Hang on.’

It seemed like minutes before she picked up the phone again.

‘I found it,’ she said. ‘It’s in Rhawnhurst.’

‘Get it onto radio,’ Byrne said. ‘I want everybody and his