Jessica opened her eyes and sat upright, her heart rattling around in her chest. She looked at the window. Pitch black. It was the middle of the night and the phone was ringing. Only bad news made the trip at this hour.

Vincent?

Dad?

The phone rang a third time, offering no details, no comfort. She reached for it, disoriented, frightened, her hands shaking, her head still throbbing. She lifted the receiver.

“H-hello?”

“It’s Kevin.”

Kevin? Jessica thought. Who the hell is Kevin? The only Kevin she knew was Kevin Bancroft, the weird kid who lived on Christian Street when she was growing up. Then it hit her.

Kevin.

The job.

“Yeah. Right. Okay. What’s up?”

“I think we should catch the girls at the bus stop.”

Greek. Maybe Turkish. Definitely some foreign language. She had no idea what these words meant.

“Can you hang on a sec?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Jessica sprinted to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face. The right side was still slightly swollen, but much less painful than it was last night, due to an hour of ice packs when she’d gotten home. Along with Patrick’s kiss, of course. The thought made her smile, the smile made her face hurt. It was a good hurt. She ran back to the phone, but before she could say anything, Byrne added:

“I think we’ll get more out of them there than we will at the school.”

“Sure,” Jessica replied, and she suddenly realized that he was talking about Tessa Wells’s friends.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty,” he said.

For a minute, she thought he meant twenty minutes. She glanced at the clock. Five forty. He did mean twenty minutes. Luckily, Paula Farinacci’s husband left for work in Camden by six, so she was up. Jessica could drop Sophie off at Paula’s and have just enough time for a shower. “Right,” Jessica said. “Okay. Great. No problem. See you then.”

She hung up, threw her legs over the side of the bed, ready for a nice, brisk nap.

Welcome to Homicide.

20

TUESDAY, 6:00 A M

Byrne had been waiting for her with a large coffee and a sesame seed bagel. The coffee was strong and hot, the bagel fresh. Bless him.

Jessica hurried through the rain and slipped into the car, nodded a token greeting. To put it mildly, she was not a morning person, especially a six-o’clock-in-the-morning person. Her fondest hope was that she was wearing matching shoes.

They rode into the city in silence, Kevin Byrne respecting her space and waking ritual, realizing he had forced the shock of the new day upon her unceremoniously. He, on the other hand, looked wide-awake.A little ragged, but wide-eyed and alert.

Men had it so easy, Jessica thought. Clean shirt, shave in the car, a spritz of Binaca, a drop of Visine, ready for the day.

They made the ride to North Philly in short order. They parked near the corner of Nineteenth and Poplar. Byrne put on the radio at the half hour. The Tessa Wells story was mentioned.

With half an hour to wait, they hunkered down. Occasionally, Byrne flipped the ignition to start the wipers, the defrosters.

They tried to talk about the news, the weather, the job. The subtext kept bulling forward.

Daughters.

Tessa Wells was someone’s daughter.

This realization hardwired them both into the brutal soul of this crime. It might have been their child.

“She’ll be three next month,” Jessica said.

Jessica showed Byrne a picture of Sophie. He smiled. She knew he had a marshmallow center. “She looks like a handful.”

“Two hands,” Jessica said. “You know how it is when they’re that age. They look to you for everything.”

“Yeah.”

“You miss those days?”

“I missed those days,” Byrne said. “I was working double tours in those days.”

“How old is your daughter now?”

“She’s thirteen,” Byrne said.

“Uh-oh,” Jessica said.

“Uh-oh is an understatement.”

“So... she have a house full of Britney CDs?”

Byrne smiled again, thinly this time. “No.”

“Oh boy. Don’t tell me she’s into rap.”

Byrne spun his coffee a few times. “My daughter is deaf.”

“Oh my,” Jessica said, suddenly mortified. “I’m... I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. Don’t be.”

“I mean...I just didn’t—”

“It’s okay. Really. She hates sympathy.And she’s a lot tougher than you and me combined.”

“What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant. My wife and I went through years of sorry. It’s a natural reaction,” Byrne said. “But to be quite honest, I’ve yet to meet a deaf person who thinks of herself as handicapped. Especially Colleen.”

Seeing as she had opened this line of questioning, Jessica figured she might as well continue. She did, gently. “Was she born deaf?”

Byrne nodded. “Yeah. It was something called Mondini dysplasia. Genetic disorder.”

Jessica’s mind turned to Sophie, dancing around the living room to some song on Sesame Street. Or the way Sophie would sing at the top of her lungs amid the bubbles in the tub. Like her mother, Sophie couldn’t tow a tune with a tractor, but she was earnest in the attempt. Jessica thought about her bright, healthy, beautiful little girl and considered how lucky she was.

They both fell silent. Byrne ran the wipers, the defroster. The windshield began to clear. The girls had yet not arrived at the corner. Traffic on Poplar was beginning to thicken.

“I watched her once,” Byrne said, sounding a little melancholy, as if he had not spoken of his daughter to anyone in a while. The longing was obvious. “I was supposed to pick her up at her deaf school, and I was a little early. So I pulled over to the side of the street to grab a smoke, read the paper.

“Anyway, I see this group of kids on the corner, maybe seven or eight of them. They’re twelve, thirteen years old. I’m not really paying them any mind. They’re all dressed like homeless people, right? Baggy pants, big shirts hanging out, untied sneakers. Suddenly I see Colleen standing there, leaning against the building, and it’s like I don’t know her. Like she’s some kid who kind of resembles Colleen.