Behind him, there was only the small ceiling fixture.

Then he felt the hot breath on his neck, smelled the faint scent of peppermint.

He turned, his heart suddenly in his throat.

And stared straight into the eyes of the devil.

50

WEDNESDAY, 1:22 PM

Byrne had made a few stops before returning to the Roundhouse and briefing Ike Buchanan. He then arranged for one of his registered confidential informants to call him with the information about Brian Parkhurst’s whereabouts. Buchanan faxed the DA’s office and

arranged for a search warrant of Parkhurst’s building.

Byrne called Jessica on her cell phone and found her at a café near her father’s house in South Philly. He swung by and picked her up. He briefed her at the Fourth District headquarters at Eleventh and Wharton.

The building Parkhurst owned was a former florist shop on Sixtyfirst Street, itself converted from a spacious brick row house built in the 1950s. The stone-front structure was a few battered doors down from the Wheels of Soul clubhouse. The Wheels of Soul was an old and venerable motorcycle club. In the 1980s, when crack cocaine had hit Philly hard, it was the Wheels of Soul MC, as much as any law enforcement agency, that had kept the city from burning to the ground.

If Parkhurst was taking these girls somewhere for short periods of time, Jessica thought as they approached the property, this place would be ideal. There was a rear entrance large enough to pull a van or minivan partially inside.

When they arrived at the scene, they drove slowly behind the building. The rear entrance—a large, corrugated-steel door—was padlocked from the outside. They circled the block and parked on the street, under the El, about five addresses west of the location.

Two patrol cars met them. Two uniformed officers would cover the front; two, the rear.

“Ready?” Byrne asked.

Jessica felt a little shaky. She hoped it didn’t show. She said: “Let’s do it.”

Byrne and Jessica approached the door. The front windows were whitewashed, impossible to see through. Byrne slammed a fist into the door three times.

“Police! Search warrant!”

They waited five seconds. He pounded again. No response. Byrne turned the handle, pushed on the door. It eased open. The two detectives made eye contact. On a count, they rolled the

jamb.

The front room was a mess. Drywall, paint cans, drop cloths, scaffolding. Nothing to the left. To the right, stairs leading up.

“Police! Search warrant!” Byrne repeated.

Nothing.

Byrne pointed to the stairs. Jessica nodded. He would take the second floor. Byrne mounted the stairs.

Jessica worked her way to the rear of the building on the first floor, checking every alcove, every closet. The interior was half renovated. The hallway behind what was once a service counter was a skeleton of open studs, exposed wiring, plastic water lines, heat ducts.

Jessica stepped through a doorway, into what had once been the kitchen. The kitchen was gutted. No appliances. Recently drywalled and taped. Beneath the pasty smell of the drywall tape, there was something else. Onions. Jessica then saw a sawhorse in the corner of the room. On it sat a half-eaten take-out salad. Next to it was a full cup of coffee. She dipped a finger into the coffee. Ice cold.

She walked out of the kitchen, inched toward the room at the back of the row house. The door was only slightly ajar.

Drops of sweat rolled down her face, her neck, then laced her shoulders. The hallway was warm, stuffy, airless. The Kevlar vest felt confining and heavy. Jessica reached the door, took a deep breath. With her left foot she slowly edged the door open. She saw the right half of the room first. An old dinette chair on its side, a wooden toolbox. Smells greeted her. Stale cigarette smoke, freshly cut knotty pine. Beneath it was something ugly, something rank and feral.

She kicked the door open fully, turned into the small room, and immediately saw a figure. Instinctively she spun and pointed her weapon at the shape, silhouetted against the whitewashed windows in the rear.

But there was no threat.

Brian Parkhurst was hanging from an I-beam in the center of the room. His face was a purplish brown, swollen, his extremities distended, his black tongue lolling out of his mouth.An electrical wire was wrapped around his neck, digging deep into the flesh, then looped over a support beam overhead. Parkhurst was barefoot, shirtless. The sour smell of drying feces filled Jessica’s sinuses. She dry-heaved once, twice. She held her breath, cleared the rest of the room.

“Upstairs is clear!” Byrne yelled.

Jessica nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. She heard Byrne’s heavy boots on the stairs. “In here,” she yelled.

In seconds, Byrne entered the room. “Ah fuck.”

Jessica saw the look in Byrne’s eyes, read the headlines there. Another suicide. Just like the Morris Blanchard case. Another suspect hounded into taking his own life. She wanted to say something, but it was not her place, and not the time.

A diseased silence filled the room. They had been batted back to square one and both of them, in their own way, attempted to reconcile that fact with all they had contemplated on the way over.

The system would now go about its business. They would call the medical examiner’s office, the Crime Scene Unit. They would cut Parkhurst down, transport him to the ME’s office where they would perform an autopsy on him, pending notification of family. There would be a notice in the papers and a service at one of Philadelphia’s finer funeral homes, followed closely by interment on a grassy hillside.

And exactly what Brian Parkhurst knew, and what he had done, if anything, would forever be cast in darkness.

They milled around the Homicide Unit, loose aggies in an empty cigar box. There were always mixed feelings at times like these, when a suspect cheats the system with suicide. There would be no allocution, no admission of guilt, no punctuation. Just an endless Möbius strip of suspicion.

Byrne and Jessica sat at adjoining desks.

Jessica caught Byrne’s eye.

“What?” he asked.

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“You don’t think it was Parkhurst, do you?”

Byrne didn’t answer right away. “I think he knew a hell of a lot more

than he told us,” he said. “I think he was seeing Tessa Wells. I think he knew that he was going to do time for statutory rape, and that’s why he went into hiding. But do I think he murdered these three girls? No. I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because there wasn’t a single shred of physical evidence anywhere near him. Not one fiber, not one drop of fluid.”

The Crime Scene Unit had combed every square inch of both of Brian Parkhurst’s properties, yielding nothing. They had pinned a great deal of their suspicions on the possibility—actually, the certainty—that incriminating scientific evidence would be found in Parkhurst’s building. Everything they had hoped to find there simply did not exist. Detectives had interviewed everyone in the vicinity of his home and the building he was renovating, yielding nothing. They had yet to find his Ford Windstar.