Deuces was quiet at this hour. Byrne sat in an empty room on the second floor. Most drug houses were filthy places, littered with empty crack bottles, fast-food trash, thousands of spent kitchen matches, quite often vomit, sometimes excrement. Pipeheads didn’t subscribe to Architectural Digest as a rule. The customers who frequented Deuces—a shadowy consortium of cops, civil servants, city officials who couldn’t be seen cruising the corners—paid a little extra for the ambience.

He positioned himself cross-legged on the floor near the window, his back to the river. He sipped the bourbon. The sensation wrapped him in a warm amber embrace, easing the impending migraine.

Tessa Wells.

She had left her house Friday morning, a contract with the world in hand, a promise that she would be safe, that she would go to school, hang out with her friends, laugh at some silly jokes, cry at some silly love song. The world had broken that treaty. She was just a teenager, and she had already lived out her life.

Colleen had just become a teenager. Byrne knew that, psychologically speaking, he was probably way behind the curve, that the “teenaged years” began somewhere around eleven these days. He was also fully aware that he had long ago decided to resist that particular piece of Madison Avenue sexual propaganda.

He looked around the room.

Why was he here?

Again, the question.

Twenty years on the streets of one of the most violent cities in the world put him on the block. He didn’t know a single detective who didn’t drink, hadn’t rehabbed, didn’t gamble, didn’t frequent the whores, didn’t raise a hand to his children, his wife. With this job came excess, and if you didn’t balance the excess of horror with an excess of passion for something—even domestic violence—the valves creaked and moaned until you imploded one day and put the barrel against your palate.

In his time as a homicide detective he had stood in dozens of parlors, hundreds of driveways, a thousand vacant lots, the voiceless dead waiting for him like a gouache of rainy watercolor in the near distance. Such bleak beauty. He could sleep with distance. It was detail that sullied his dreams.

He recalled every detail of that sweltering August morning he had been called to Fairmount Park: the thick buzz of flies overhead, the way Deirdre Pettigrew’s skinny legs emerged from the bushes, her bloodied white panties bunched around one ankle, the bandage on her right knee.

He knew then, as he had known every single time he had seen a murdered child, that he had to step up, regardless how eroded his soul, how diminished his instincts. He had to brave the morning, no matter what demons tracked him through the night.

In the first half of his career it had been about the power, the inertia of justice, the rush of the capture. It was about him. But somewhere along the way, it became bigger. It became about all the dead girls.

And now, Tessa Wells.

He closed his eyes, again felt the frigid waters of the Delaware River eddy around him, the breath being wrenched from his chest.

Below him, the gang gunships cruised. The sound of the hip-hop bass chords shook the floor, the windows, the walls, rising from the city streets like steel steam.

The deviant’s hour was coming. Soon he would walk among them.

The monsters were sliding out of their lairs.

And as he sat in a place where men traded their self-respect for a few moments of numbed silence, a place where animals walk erect, Kevin Francis Byrne knew that a new monster had stirred in Philadelphia, a dark seraph of death that would lead him to an uncharted dominion, summoning him to a depth to which men like Gideon Pratt only aspired.

MONDAY, 8:00 PM

It is night in Philadelphia.

I am standing on North Broad Street, looking toward Center City and the commanding figure of William Penn, craftily lighted atop city hall, feeling the warmth of the spring day fading into the sizzle of red neon and long, de

Chirico shadows, marveling once more at the two faces of the city.

This is not the egg tempera of daytime Philly, the bright colors of Robert Indiana’s Love or the Mural Arts Program.This is Philly at night, a city rendered in thick, violent brushstrokes, an impasto of sedimentary pigments.

The old building on North Broad has witnessed many nights, its cast pilasters standing silent guard for almost a century. In many ways, it is the stoic face of the city: the old wooden seats, the coffered ceiling, the carved medallions, the worn canvas where a thousand men have spat and bled and fallen.

We file in.We smile at each other, raise eyebrows, clap shoulders. I can smell the copper of their blood.

These men might know my deeds, but they do not know my face.They think

I am a madman, that I pounce from the darkness like some horror movie villain. They will read about the things I have done, at their breakfast tables, on SEPTA, in the food courts, and they will shake their heads and ask why.

Could it be they know why?

If one were to peel back the phyllo layers of wickedness and pain and cruelty, could it be that these men might do the same if they had the chance? Might they lure each other’s daughters to the dark street corner, the empty building, the deep-shadowed heart of the park? Might they wield their knives and pistols and bludgeons and finally utter their rage? Might they spend the currency of their wrath and then scurry off to Upper Darby and New Hope and Upper Merion and the safety of their lies?

There is always a morbid contest in the soul, a struggle between the loathing and the need, between the darkness and the light.

The bell rings.We rise from our stools.We meet in the center.

Philadelphia, your daughters are not safe.

You are here because you know that.You are here because you do not have the courage to be me.You are here because you are afraid of becoming me.

I know why I am here.

Jessica.

MONDAY, 8:30 PM

Forget Caesar’s Palace. Forget Madison Square Garden. Forget the MGM Grand. The best place in America—some would argue, the world—to watch a prizefight, was The Legendary Blue Horizon on North Broad Street. In a town that had spawned the likes of Jack

O’Brien, Joe Frazier, James Shuler, Tim Witherspoon, Bernard Hopkins—not to mention Rocky Balboa—The Legendary Blue Horizon was a treasure, and, as goes the Blue, so goes Philly fisticuffs.

Jessica and her opponent—Mariella “Sparkle” Munoz—dressed and warmed up in the same room. As Jessica waited for her great-uncle Vittorio, a former heavyweight himself, to tape her hands, she glanced over at her opponent. Sparkle was in her late twenties, with big arms and what looked like a seventeen-inch neck. A real shock absorber. She had a flat nose, scar tissue over both eyes, and what seemed to be a perpetual game face: a permanent grimace that was supposed to intimidate her opponents.