When he stood and turned to look at them, his face was grim. Jessica knew what it meant. This girl had suffered the same indignity in death as had Tessa Wells.

Jessica looked at Byrne. There was a deep anger rising within him, something primal and unrepentant, something that reached far beyond the job, his sense of duty.

A few moments later Weyrich joined them.

“How long has she been here?” Byrne asked.

“At least four days,” Weyrich said.

Jessica did the math and a cold frost crept over her heart. This girl was dumped here right around the time Tessa Wells was kidnapped. This girl was killed first.

One decade of beads was missing from this girl’s rosary. Two were missing from Tessa’s.

Which meant that, of the hundreds of questions that floated above them, like the dense gray clouds, there was one truth here, one reality, one horrific fact apparent in this morass of uncertainties.

Someone was killing the Catholic schoolgirls of Philadelphia.

From all appearances, the rampage had just begun.

part three 22

TUESDAY, 12:15 PM

The Rosary Killer task force was assembled by noon.

As a rule, task forces were organized and authorized by the big bosses in the department, and always after an assessment of the political impact of the victims. Despite all the rhetoric regarding how all homicides are equal, manpower and resources are always made more readily available when the victims are important. If someone is knocking off drug dealers or gangbangers or streetwalkers, it’s one thing. If someone is killing Catholic schoolgirls, it’s quite another. Catholics vote.

By noon a good deal of the initial legwork and preliminary lab work had been rushed through the channels. The rosaries both girls held in death were identical, available at a dozen religious article retail stores in Philadelphia. Investigators were currently compiling a customer list. The missing beads were not found at either scene.

The preliminary report from the medical examiner’s office concluded that the killer had used a carbon bit drill to bore the hole in the hands of the victims, and that the bolt used to secure their hands together was also a common item, a four-inch galvanized carriage bolt available at any Home Depot, Lowe’s, or corner hardware store.

No fingerprints were found on either victim.

The cross on Tessa Wells’s forehead was of blue chalk. The lab had not yet concluded a type. There was trace evidence of the same material on the second victim’s forehead. In addition to the small William Blake print found on Tessa Wells, there was also an object found clasped between the hands of the other victim. It was a small segment of bone, approximately three inches in length. It appeared to be very sharp, and had not yet been identified by type or species. These two facts were not given to the media.

Neither was the fact that both victims were drugged. But now there was new evidence. In addition to the midazolam, the lab had confirmed the presence of an even more insidious drug. Both victims had a drug called Pavulon in their systems, a powerful paralytic that induced paralysis in the victim but did nothing for pain.

Reporters from the Inquirer and The Daily News, as well as the local television and radio stations, had so far been cautious about calling the murders the work of a serial killer, but there was no such restraint with The Report, the birdcage liner published out of two cramped rooms on Sansom Street.

who is killing the rosary girls? screamed the headline on their website.

The task force met in the common room on the first floor of the Roundhouse.

There were six detectives in all. In addition to Jessica and Byrne, there was Eric Chavez, Nick Palladino, Tony Park, and John Shepherd, the latter two detectives from the Special Investigations Unit.

Tony Park was Korean American, a longtime veteran of the Major Case Squad. The Auto Unit was part of Major Case, and Jessica had worked with Tony before. He was in his midforties, quick and intuitive, a family man. She had always known he would make his way to Homicide.

John Shepherd was an all-star point guard for Villanova in the early 1980s. Denzel-handsome and just graying around the temples, at an intimidating six eight he had his conservative suits custom tailored at Boyds on Chestnut Street. Jessica had never seen him without a tie.

Whenever a task force was assembled, the effort was made to staff it with detectives who brought a unique ability to the table. John Shepherd was good “in the room,” a seasoned and skilled interrogator. Tony Park was a wizard with databases—NCIC, AFIS, ACCURINT, PCBA. Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez were good on the street. Jessica wondered what she brought to the table, hoping it was something other than her gender. She knew she was a born organizer, good with coordinating, arranging, scheduling. She hoped this would be the opportunity to prove it.

Kevin Byrne headed the task force. Even though he was clearly the right person for the job, Byrne had told Jessica that it had taken every bit of his persuasive powers to get Ike Buchanan to give it to him. Byrne knew that it wasn’t any lack of confidence in his abilities, but rather that Ike Buchanan had to think about the bigger picture, that being the possibility of another firestorm of negative press if things, God forbid, went wrong the way they had in the Morris Blanchard case.

Ike Buchanan, as supervisor, would act as liaison to the big bosses, but Byrne would run the briefings and submit the status reports.

Byrne stood at the assignment desk as the team assembled, taking any available seat in the cramped space. Jessica thought Byrne looked a little shaky, a little burned around the cuffs. She had only known him a short while, but he hadn’t struck her as the kind of cop to get rattled in a situation like this. It had to be something else. He looked like a haunted man.

“We have more than thirty sets of partial prints from the Tessa Wells crime scene, none from the Bartram site,” Byrne began. “No hits yet. Neither victim has yielded any DNA in the form of semen or blood or saliva.”

As he spoke, he placed pictures on the white board behind him. “The underlying signature here is a Catholic schoolgirl being taken right off the street. The killer puts a galvanized-steel bolt and nut through a drilled hole in the center of their hands. He is using a thick nylon thread—probably the sort used in sail making—and is sewing shut their vaginas. He is leaving a mark, in the shape of a cross, on their foreheads, made of a blue chalk. Both victims died of a broken neck.

“The first victim found was Tessa Wells. Her body was discovered in the basement of an abandoned house on Eighth and Jefferson. The second victim found, in a field at Bartram Gardens, had been dead for at least four days. In both instances, the doer wore nonporous gloves.