Weyrich held up the envelope. It contained a small picture, a reproduction of an old painting. “This was between her hands.”

He extracted the picture with rubber-tipped forceps.

“It was rolled up between her palms,” he continued. “It’s been dusted for prints. There were none.”

Jessica looked closely at the reproduction, which was about the size of a bridge playing card. “Do you know what it is?”

“CSU took a digital photograph of it and sent it to the head librarian at the fine arts department of the Free Library,” Weyrich said. “She recognized it right away. It is called Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell by William Blake.”

“Any idea what it means?” Byrne asked.

“Sorry. No idea at all.”

Byrne stared at the picture for a few moments, then put it back into the evidence bag. He turned back to Tessa Wells. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

“Yes and no,” Weyrich said.

Byrne and Jessica exchanged a glance. Tom Weyrich was not given to theatrics, so there must be a good reason he was putting off what he had to tell them.

“What do you mean?” Byrne asked.

“My preliminary findings are that she wasn’t raped and, as far as I can tell, she didn’t have intercourse in the past few days,” Weyrich said.

“Okay. That’s the no part,” Byrne said. “What’s the yes?”

Weyrich hesitated a second, then pulled the sheet down to Tessa’s thighs. The young woman’s legs were slightly spread. What Jessica saw took her breath away. “My God,” she said, before she could stop herself.

The room fell silent, its living occupants adrift on their own thoughts.

“When was this done?” Byrne finally asked.

Weyrich cleared his throat. He’d been at this a while and it appeared that, even for him, this was a new one. “At some point in the past twelve hours.”

“Premortem?”

“Premortem,” Weyrich replied.

Jessica looked back at the body, the image of this young girl’s final indignity finding, and settling, in a place in her mind where she knew it would live for a very long time.

Not only was Tessa Wells kidnapped from the street on her way to school. Not only was she drugged and taken to a place where someone broke her neck. Not only were her hands mutilated by a steel bolt, sealing them in prayer. Whoever had done these had finished the job with a final disgrace that turned Jessica’s stomach.

Tessa Wells’s vagina was sewn shut.

And the crude stitching, which was done with a thick black thread, was in the sign of the cross.

12

MONDAY, 6:00 PM

If J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life in coffee spoons, Simon Edward Close measured his in deadlines. He had less than five hours to make the deadline for the next day’s print edition of The Report. And as of the opening credits of the evening local news, he had nothing to

report.

When he moved among the reporters from the so-called legitimate press he was an exile. They regarded him the way you might a Mongoloid child, with looks of spurious compassion and ersatz sympathy, but also with an expression that said: We can’t kick you out of the party, but please don’t touch the Hummels.

The half a dozen reporters lingering near the cordoned-off crime scene on Eighth Street barely gave him a glance as he arrived in his tenyear-old Honda Accord. Simon would have liked to be a little more discreet in his arrivals, but his muffler—which was attached to the manifold pipe by a recently performed Pepsi-canectomy—insisted on announcing him first. He could almost hear the smirks from half a block away.

The block was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Simon turned the car around, drove down to Jefferson, left to Ninth. Ghost town.

Simon got out, checked the batteries in his recorder. He smoothed his tie, the creases in his trousers. He had often thought that, if he didn’t spend all his money on clothes, he might be able to upgrade his car or his flat. But he always rationalized that he spent most of his time on the street so, if no one saw his car or apartment, they would think him in the chips.

After all, in this business of show, image was everything, yes? He found the access path he needed, cut through. When he saw the uniformed officer standing, behind the crime scene house—but not a solitary reporter, not yet, anyway—he made his way back to his car, and tried a trick he had learned from a wizened old paparazzo he knew from years ago.

Ten minutes later, he approached the officer behind the house. The officer, a huge black linebacker with enormous hands, held up one of those hands stopping him.

“How ya doing?” Simon asked.

“This is a crime scene, sir.”

Simon nodded. He held up his press ID. “Simon Close with The Report.”

No reaction. He could have just as well said, Captain Nemo with the Nautilus.

“You’ll have to speak to the detective in charge of the case,” the cop said.

“Of course,” Simon said. “Who would that be?”

“That would be Detective Byrne.”

Simon made a note, as if this information was new to him. “What is her first name?”

The uniform screwed up his face. “Who?”

“Detective Byrne.”

“Her first name is Kevin.”

Simon tried to look appropriately confused. Two years of high school drama, including the part of Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, helped somewhat. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I heard a female detective was working on this case.”

“That would be Detective Jessica Balzano,” the officer said, with punctuation and a narrowing of brow that told Simon that this conversation was over.

“Thanks so much,” Simon said, heading back down the alley. He turned, snapped a quick photograph of the cop. The cop got immediately on his radio, which meant that within a minute or two the area behind the row houses would be officially sealed.

By the time Simon got back to Ninth Street, there were already two reporters lingering behind the yellow tape across the access passageway—yellow tape Simon himself put there a few minutes earlier.

When he came strolling out, he could see the look on their faces. Simon ducked under the tape, tore it from the wall, handed it to Benny Lozado, a staffer from the Inquirer.

The yellow tape read: del-co asphalt.

“Fuck you, Close,” Lozado said.

“Dinner first, love.”