Soul Murder
Daniel Blake

For Michael and Sheila Royce, whose friendship means more to my family than they can possibly imagine.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Friday, October 1st. 12:15 p.m.

Monday, October 4th. 8:12 a.m.

9:38 a.m.

Thursday, October 7th. 10:57 p.m.

Tuesday, October 12th. 10:08 a.m.

1:25 p.m.

Friday, October 15th. 7:11 a.m.

Monday, October 18th. 6:53 p.m.

10:04 p.m.

10:30 p.m.

11:17 p.m.

11: 42 p.m.

Tuesday, October 19th. 11:24 a.m.

1: 09 p.m.

Thursday, October 21st. 10:26 a.m.

Thursday, October 28th. 3:51 p.m.

Saturday, October 30th. 9:32 p.m.

Sunday, October 31st. 9:24 p.m.

10:12 p.m.

11:17 p.m.

Monday, November 1st. 8:22 a.m.

11:30 a.m.

12:57 p.m.

2: 01 p.m.

Tuesday, November 2nd. 11:54 a.m.

Wednesday, November 3rd. 9:11 a.m.

Thursday, November 4th. 9:20 a.m.

Friday, November 5th. 7:14 a.m.

Sunday, November 7th. 12:15 p.m.

Monday, November 8th. 8:52 a.m.

Tuesday, November 9th. 5:44 p.m.

Wednesday, November 10th. 7:46 a.m.

8: 44 a.m.

11:31 a.m.

12:28 p.m.

1:39 p.m.

Thursday, November 11th. 9:41 a.m.

Friday, November 12th. 4:00 p.m.

Saturday, November 13th. 10:16 a.m.

11: 08 a.m.

Sunday, November 14th. 3:33 p.m.

Monday, November 15th. 9:49 a.m.

9:55 a.m.

10:10 a.m.

Tuesday, November 16th. 7:24 p.m.

Wednesday, November 17th. 4:56 a.m.

8:23 a.m.

Thursday, November 18th. 3:07 p.m.

4:01 p.m.

11:52 p.m.

Friday, November 19th. 10:37 a.m.

Saturday, November 20th. 2:48 p.m.

11:43 p.m.

Sunday, November 21st. 12:39 p.m.

4:44 p.m.

Monday, November 22nd. 7:20 p.m.

7:58 p.m.

8:05 p.m.

9:12 p.m.

10:09 p.m.

10:56 p.m.

Tuesday, November 23rd. 1:28 a.m.

4:17 a.m.

8:49 a.m.

11:06 a.m.

11:35 a.m.

1:13 p.m.

1:20 p.m.

Wednesday, November 24th , 9:37 a.m.

11:44 a.m.

4:51 p.m. (Pacific Time)

5:28 p.m. (Pacific Time)

Thursday, November 25th. 2:29 p.m. (Central Time)

Friday, November 26th. 3:49 p.m.

5:10 p.m.

Monday, November 29th. 9:23 a.m.

Tuesday, November 30th. 4:15 p.m.

6:04 p.m.

Wednesday, December 1st. 8:18 a.m.

9:29 a.m.

10:47 a.m.

11:31 a.m.

11:45 a.m.

2:12 p.m.

Thursday, December 2nd. 2:56 p.m.

Saturday, December 4th. 11:03 a.m.

Sunday, December 5th, 10:10 a.m.

10:38 a.m.

11:15 a.m.

12:35 p.m.

12:47 p.m.

2:38 p.m.

3:15 p.m.

3:34 p.m.

Monday, December 6th. 8:30 a.m.

6:32 p.m.

8:08 p.m.

Tuesday, December 7th. 9:48 p.m.

10:32 p.m.

Wednesday, December 8th. 9:12 a.m.

11:41 a.m.

3:03 p.m.

Thursday, December 9th. 5:45 p.m.

6:37 p.m.

6:39 p.m.

6:41 p.m.

7:02 p.m.

7:24 p.m.

8:15 p.m.

10:10 p.m.

Friday, December 10th. 2:13 a.m.

8:00 a.m.

8:34 a.m.

8:51 a.m.

8:53 a.m.

8:55 a.m.

8:56 a.m.

9:00 a.m.

11:00 a.m.

11:07 a.m.

12:37 p.m.

1:04 p.m.

1:16 p.m.

1:22 p.m.

1:40 p.m.

1:52 p.m.

1:56 p.m.

1:57 p.m.

2:23 p.m.

2:45 p.m.

2:51 p.m.

2:58 p.m.

3:00 p.m.

3:04 p.m.

4:30 p.m.

5:55 p.m.

Saturday, December 11th. 9:43 a.m.

Sunday, December 12th. 3:12 p.m.

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Friday, October 1st. 12:15 p.m.

Franco Patrese hadn’t been inside a church for ten years.

Ironic, then, that his first time back was straight into the mothership itself; Saint Paul Cathedral, center of spiritual life for close on a million Pittsburgh Catholics.

The bishop himself had insisted. Gregory Kohler had first gotten to know Franco’s parents when he, as a young priest, had helped officiate at their wedding. He’d taught Franco and his sisters in the days when priests and nuns could still be found inside the classroom, and over the years had become family friend as well as pastor.

Now he’d offered Franco and his sisters the cathedral. You didn’t turn the bishop down, not if you were a good Catholic; and Bianca and Valentina had certainly kept the faith, even if Franco hadn’t. Besides, they needed all the seats they could get. Half of Bloomfield – an area of the city so Italian that the parking meters are painted red, green and white – had come to pay their respects to Franco’s parents.

Alberto and Ilaria Patrese had been killed five days before. Alberto had gone to pass a truck on the freeway at exactly the moment the truck driver had himself pulled out to overtake an eighteen-wheeler. The collision had flipped the Patreses’ car across the central reservation and into the path of three lanes of traffic coming the other way.

They hadn’t had a prayer.

The police had come to Franco first, as he was one of them: a homicide detective, working out of the department’s North Shore headquarters. When two uniformed officers had approached Franco’s desk, he’d known instantly that someone in his family was dead. He recognized the expression on those officers’ faces as clearly as if he’d looked in a mirror. He’d had to break similar news many times. It was the worst part of the job, and by some distance. Nothing rips at people’s lives like the death of a loved one.

Franco had found the immediate aftermath unexpectedly bittersweet. There’d been tears, of course, and shock giving way to spikes of anger and confusion; but there’d also been rolling gales of laughter at the hundreds of family stories polished and embellished down the years. He’d kept himself occupied with death’s legion of petty bureaucracies: police reports, autopsies, certificates, funeral arrangements, contacting relatives long-lost and far-flung. Busy meant less time to think, and less time to think meant more time to be strong, to make sure everyone else was bearing up all right, to deflect even the slightest gaze away from himself.

He was doing it even now, during the funeral service, sat in the front pew with his sisters either side of him and his nephews and niece tucked solemnly between the adults. Determined to be the rock on which the waves of grief could crash themselves out, Franco pulled Valentina close, ruffled the children’s hair, and squeezed Bianca’s hand when her jaw juddered and bounced against the tears.

The last notes of ‘Amazing Grace’ faded, and the congregation sat as Kohler climbed the steps to the pulpit. He was in his sixties, with a mane of hair that would have been the envy of a man half his age. The hands he raised as though in benediction of his flock were large and strong, and they did not shake.

Franco tuned out. He heard the grateful laughter when the bishop said something dry and affectionate, but he was miles away, thinking about the things he wished he’d told his parents while he’d still had the chance, and about the things he was glad he hadn’t told them. They hadn’t known everything about his life, and he had no illusions that they should have done so. He knew they’d loved him, and nothing was more important. But he knew too that loving people meant protecting them.

Somewhere in the distance, Kohler was talking about God, though it was not a God Franco believed in any more. As far as he was concerned, his parents’ death had been blind chance, nothing more. Wrong place, wrong time. Why them? Turn it round: why not them? You were born, you lived, you died. Mercy and justice and compassion weren’t divine traits; they were human ones, and by no means universal. If you didn’t believe that, Franco thought, working homicide would soon change your mind. Religion was just a polite word for superstition, and superstition was just a polite word for fear.

Franco hooked a finger inside his collar and pulled at it. He felt suddenly short of breath, and his skin was clammy.

When Bianca looked at him, her face seemed to swim slightly in his vision before settling. Her eyebrows made a Chinese hat of concern and query.

‘Is it hot in here?’ he whispered.

She shook her head. ‘Not for me.’

Franco’s ribs quivered with the thumping of his heart. He stood on unsteady legs, stepped over Bianca’s feet and walked quickly down the aisle, looking neither left nor right till he was out the huge main door and into the shouty, safe bustle of students from the nearby university ragging each other and putting the world to rights.

Monday, October 4th. 8:12 a.m.

The police department offered Patrese two weeks’ compassionate leave.

He took two days, and even those didn’t really count, given that they were both at the weekend. So he was back at his desk first thing Monday morning, to the unsurprised but good-natured exasperation of his homicide partner, Mark Beradino.

‘Sheesh, Franco. You don’t want your fortnight, I’ll take it.’

Patrese laughed, thankful that Beradino knew better than to kill him with kindness.

Physically, Beradino was pretty nondescript. Five ten, 180 pounds, hair graying but still pretty much all there, and features which were bang-on regular. He was no Brad Pitt, but nor was he a Michael Moore. You could walk past him in the street without noticing; even if you did notice, you’d have forgotten him five steps later. He’d have made a great spy.

But he was a detective; a hell of a detective, in fact.

As far as Pittsburgh Homicide was concerned, he was practic ally an institution.

He’d been there since the early eighties – most of his clothes looked as though he’d bought them around that time – and he was known on both sides of the law as a good cop. A tough one, sure, one who thought cops should be cops rather than politicians or social workers, but an honest one too. He’d never taken a bribe, never faked evidence, never beaten a suspect up.

Not many cops could say the same.

He and Patrese had been partners for three years – itself a vote of confidence in Patrese’s ability – and in that time they’d become friends. Patrese was a regular guest at the condo in Punxsutawney which Beradino shared with his partner Jesslyn Gedge, a warder at the State Correctional Institute in Muncy. Both Beradino and Jesslyn had been among the mourners in Saint Paul’s.

‘But since you’re here,’ Beradino continued, ‘make yourself useful. We just got a case. Domestic dispute, shots fired, man dead. Zone Five.’

There are six police districts in Pittsburgh, numbered with the complete absence of discernible logic that’s the hallmark of the true bureaucrat. Zone Five covered the north-eastern corner of the city; East Liberty, East End and Homewood.

Nine times out of ten, an incident in Zone Five meant an incident in Homewood.

Homewood was Pittsburgh’s pits, no question. Homicides, aggravated assaults, weapons and narcotics offenses, prostitution arrests; you name it, there were twice as many in Homewood as in any other neighborhood. It was one of the most dangerous places to live in all of Pennsylvania, and that was saying something.

It was half an hour from police headquarters on the North Shore to Homewood. Patrese and Beradino drove there in an unmarked car; no need for lights or sirens, not when the victim was dead and the uniforms had the scene secured.

You could always tell when you were getting close. First came one splash of gang graffiti, then another, and within a couple of blocks these bright squiggles were everywhere: walls, houses, sidewalks, stop signs.

Our turf. Back off.

Then the pockets of young men on street corners, watching sullenly as the cop cruisers came past; then the rows of abandoned buildings, swallowing and regurgitating an endless stream of vagrants, junkies and whores; then the handful of businesses brave or desperate enough to stay: bars, barber shops, convenience stores, fast-food joints.

Wags from out of town liked to call Patrese’s city ‘Shitsburgh’. He usually jumped down their throat when they did – he loved this city – but when it came to Homewood, even Patrese was forced to admit that they had a point.

Tragedy was, it hadn’t always been like this.

A century and a half ago, Homewood had been the place to live. Tycoons like Westinghouse and Frick had kept estates here. Businesses boomed, a trolley system was built, and people couldn’t move in fast enough.

And so it stayed till after the Second World War, when the city planners decided to build the Civic Arena downtown. In doing so they had to displace thousands of people, mainly poor black families, who’d been living in the Lower Hill District nearby. Most of them moved to Homewood; and, sure as sunrise, most of Homewood’s whites upped sticks and left, fleeing to suburbs further out. The few middle-class blacks who could afford to follow them did.

Then came the riots, here as everywhere else during the civil rights era. With the riots came drugs and gangs with names that sounded almost comic: Tre-8s-Perry and Charles, Sugar Top Mob, Down Low Goonies, Reed Rude Boyz, Climax Street.

Nothing comic about what they did, though. Not then, not now. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs. It was a rare gangbanger who died of old age.

Up ahead, Patrese saw a crowd of people spilling from the sidewalk on to the street. A handful of cops held them back. Across the way, two more police cruisers were pulling up. The officers held themselves tense and watchful, as well they might. Cops here were the enemy, seen as agents of an alien and oppressive ruling class rather than impartial upholders of law and order.

Patrese and Beradino got out of the car. A few feet away, a young man in a bandana and baggy pants was talking urgently into his cell.

‘Yo, tell cuz it’s scorchin’ out here today. And this heat ain’t from the sun, you know wha’ I’m sayin’?’

He stared at Patrese as he ended the call, daring Patrese to challenge him. The police call it eye fucking, when an officer and a criminal stare each other down. As a cop, you can’t afford to back away first. You own the streets, not them.

Patrese and Beradino pushed their way through the crowd, flashed their badges at one of the uniforms, and ducked beneath the yellow-and-black stretched taut between two lampposts.

It was a three-story rowhouse, the kind you see all over Homewood, set slightly up from road level with a veranda out front. Every homicide cop with more than a few months’ experience had been inside enough of them to know the layout: kitchen and living room on the ground floor, couple of bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above, and an attic room with dormer windows under the eaves.

A uniform showed Patrese and Beradino upstairs, briefing them as they climbed.

The deceased was J’Juan Weaver, and he’d been no stranger to the police, the courts, or the prison system. He’d lived in this house with Shaniqua Davenport, his girlfriend, and her (but not his) teenage son Trent.

Shaniqua and Weaver had been running for years, though with more ons and offs than the Staten Island ferry. Before Weaver had been a string of undesirables, who between them had fathered Shaniqua’s three sons. Trent was fifteen, the youngest of them. His two elder half-brothers were both already in jail.

You’d have been a brave man to bet against him following suit, Patrese thought.

The uniform showed them into one of the bedrooms.

It was twelve feet square, with a double bed in the far corner. Weaver was lying next to the bed, his body orientated as if he had been sleeping there, with his head up by the end where the pillows were.

The shot that killed him had entered at the back of his head. Patrese could see clips of white bone and gray brain matter amidst the red mess.

Weaver had been a big man; six two and 200 pounds, all of it muscle. There were a lot of sculpted bodies in Homewood, most all of them from pumping iron while inside. Free gym, three hots and a cot; some of them preferred to be inside than out.

‘Where are the others?’ Beradino asked.

The uniform showed them into the second bedroom.

Shaniqua and Trent, both cuffed, were sitting next to each other on the bed.

Shaniqua was in her late thirties, a good-looking woman with a touch of Angela Bassett about her and eyes which glittered with defiant intelligence.

Trent had a trainer fuzz mustache and a face rounded by puppy fat; too young to have had body and mind irrevocably hardened by life here, though for how long remained to be seen.

They both looked up at Patrese and Beradino.

Beradino introduced himself, and Patrese, then asked: ‘What happened?’

‘He was goin’ for Trent,’ Shaniqua said. ‘He was gonna kill him.’

That was a confession, right there.

‘Why was he going to kill him?’

Silence.

An ambulance pulled up outside, come to remove Weaver’s body. Beradino gestured for one of the uniforms to go and tell the paramedics to wait till they were finished up here.

Trent looked as though he was about to say something, then thought better of it.

‘We got reports of an argument, then shots were fired,’ Patrese said. ‘That right?’

‘That right.’

‘What was the argument about?’

‘Oh, you know.’

‘No, I don’t. What was the argument about?’

‘Same kinda shit couples always argue ’bout.’

‘Like what?’

‘Usual shit. Boring shit.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

Above their heads, the ceiling creaked.

The detectives might have thought nothing of it, had Trent’s eyes not darted heavenwards, involuntary and nervous.

Patrese felt a sudden churning in his gut.

‘Who’s up there?’

‘No one,’ Shaniqua said quickly. Too quickly. ‘Just us.’

One of the uniforms moved as if to investigate. Patrese raised a hand to stay him, and then slipped out of the room himself.

Up the stairs, quiet as he drew his gun; a Ruger Blackhawk, single action revolver, .357 Magnum caliber, four and five-eighths-inch barrel, black checkered grip.

Surprise was on his side. Use it.

He found her, alone, in the attic bedroom.

She was flat on her back; half on the floor, half on a mattress which looked as though it could break new grounds in biological warfare. She was wearing a bra and cut-off denim shorts. The rest of her clothes lay in a pile on top of her right hand, which was hidden from view. Track marks marched like centipedes down the inside of her arms. No wonder Shaniqua and Trent hadn’t wanted the cops to find her.

And she was white.

Homewood wasn’t a place for white folks.

A few of the more enterprising suburban kids might cruise the avenues in late afternoon and buy a few ounces on a street corner before skedaddling back home and selling it on to their friends at a tidy profit – half the amount for twice the price was the usual – but they stayed in their cars the whole time they were in Homewood, if they had any sense. They didn’t walk the streets, and they damn sure didn’t go into the crack dens.

So this one must have been desperate. And Patrese knew what all cops knew; desperate people are often the most dangerous.

‘Hands where I can see ’em,’ he said.

Her body jerked slightly, and instinctively he jumped, his finger tightening on the trigger to within a fraction of the pressure needed for discharge.

Close, he thought, close.

His heart hammered against the inside of his chest.

He was scared. Fear was good; scared cops tended to be live cops.

She opened her eyes and regarded him fuzzily.

Perhaps too fuzzily, he thought.

Was she shamming?

Cops had been killed in these situations before. Places like this, you were on your guard, always. It wasn’t just the guys with tattoos and biceps who knew how to shoot.

‘Lemme see your hands,’ he said again.

She stayed perfectly still, looking at him with an incurious blankness.

This wasn’t the way people tended to react, not when faced with an armed and armored cop. Sure, there were those who were too scared to move, but they tended to be wide-eyed and gabbling.

Not this one.

Patrese felt a drop of sweat slide lazily down his spine.

Why won’t she co-operate?

Two possibilities, he thought.

One, she was so bombed that she didn’t know who she was, who he was, where they were or what he was saying.

Two, she wanted him to think all the above, but she was in fact perfectly lucid, and trying to lull him into a false sense of security.

The pile of clothes next to her moved slightly.

She was rummaging around in it.

‘Hands. Now!’ he shouted, taking a quick step towards her.

A flash of black as she pulled something from the pile, bringing her arm up and across her chest.

Patrese fired, twice, very fast.

She was already prostrate, so she didn’t fall. The only part of her that moved was her arm, flopping back down by her side as her hand spilled what she’d been holding.

A shirt. Black, and cotton, and nothing but a shirt.

Everyone seemed to be shouting: uniforms barking into their radios, paramedics demanding access, Shaniqua bawling out Trent, Trent yelling back at her.

To Patrese, it was all static, white noise. He felt numb, disconnected.

Should have taken the fortnight’s leave, Patrese thought. Should have taken it.

Whether he’d followed procedure, or whether he could have done something different, he didn’t know. There’d be an inquiry, of course; there always was when a police officer shot someone in the line of duty.

But that was for later. Getting down to the station was their immediate priority, both for questioning Shaniqua and for tipping Patrese the hell out of Homewood.

Beradino took charge, quick and efficient as usual. He told the uniforms to stay in the rowhouse with Trent until backup arrived to deal with the girl in the attic. Then he and Patrese took Shaniqua down the stairs and out through the front door.

‘Don’t tell ’em shit, Mama,’ Trent shouted as they left the bedroom.

She looked back at him with an infinite mix of love and pain.

The crowd outside was even bigger than before, and more volatile to boot. They’d heard Patrese’s shots, though they didn’t yet know who’d fired or what he’d hit. When they saw Shaniqua being led away, they began to jeer.

‘I ain’t talkin’ to no white man, you hear?’ Shaniqua yelled. ‘I was born in Trinidad, you know? Black folks don’t kiss honky ass in Trinidad, that’s for damn sure.’ She turned to one of the uniforms on crowd control. ‘And I ain’t talkin’ to no Uncle Tom neither.’

‘Then you ain’t talkin’ to no one, girl,’ someone shouted from the crowd, to a smattering of laughter.

Trent was standing at the window, one of the uniforms next to him. For a moment, he looked not like a gangbanger-in-waiting, but like what he was; a frightened and confused teenager.

‘I’ll be back, my darlin’,’ Shaniqua shouted. ‘I love you for both. Just do good.’

9:38 a.m.

Homewood flashed more depressing vistas past the cruiser’s windows as Beradino drove them back to headquarters: telephone pole memorials to homicide victims, abandoned buildings plastered with official destruction notices. The Bureau of Building Inspection spent a third of its annual citywide demolition budget in Homewood alone. It could have spent it all here, several times over.

Patrese, forcing his thoughts back to the present, tried to imagine a child growing up here and wanting to play.

He couldn’t.

He turned to face Shaniqua through the grille.

‘Is there somewhere Trent can go?’

‘JK’ll look after him.’

Patrese nodded. JK was John Knight, a pastor who ran an institution in Homewood for young gang members and anyone else who needed him. The institution was called The 50/50, gang slang for someone who was neutral, not a gang member. Knight had also taken a Master of Divinity degree, served as a missionary in South America, and been chaplain of a prison in Arizona. He was a good man, but no pushover; even in his fifties, he carried himself like the linebacker he’d once been, and shaved his black head to a gleaming shine every morning.

That was it for conversation with Shaniqua till they reached headquarters. Patrese didn’t bother asking why someone with Shaniqua’s looks, personality, and what he guessed was no small amount of brains behind the front she presented to the world, should have wasted her time on the bunch of losers she’d welcomed into her bed, and her life, over the years.

He didn’t ask for one reason: he already knew the answer.

There were always fewer men than women in places like Homewood; too many men were in jail or six feet under. So the women had to fight for the remaining men, and fight they did. There was no surer way for a girl to get status than to be on the arm of a big player.

But on the arm sooner or later meant up the duff and, when that happened, the men were out of there. Some were gone so fast they left skid marks. They didn’t want to stay around to be pussy-whipped; that was bad for their rep. Far as they were concerned, monogamy was what high-class furniture was made of.

So out and on they went, and in time their sons, growing up without a daddy – or, perhaps even worse, with a step-daddy who cared little and lashed out lots – did the same thing. Beneath the puppy fat, Trent was a good-looking boy. Give him a year or two and he’d be breaking hearts wide open, just as his father had done to Shaniqua.

At headquarters, Beradino logged her arrest with the clerk, found an empty interview room, and turned on the tape recorder.

‘Detectives Mark Beradino and Franco Patrese, interviewing Shaniqua Davenport on suspicion of the murder of J’Juan Weaver. Interview commences at’ – Beradino checked his watch

– ‘ten eighteen a.m., Monday, October fourth.’

He turned to Shaniqua and gave her the Miranda rights off the top of his head.

Detectives had been discouraged from reading the Miranda script for a couple of years now, ever since Patrese had left the card lying on the table during an interrogation. Several hours into the interview and on the point of confession, the suspect had glanced at the card, suddenly remembered he had the right to an attorney, and shazam! No confession and, in that instance, no case.

‘You have the right to remain silent,’ Beradino said. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?’

Shaniqua nodded.

‘Suspect has indicated assent by nodding,’ Beradino said to the tape recorder.

‘You damn right I assent,’ she said.

There’s usually a time in a homicide interrogation when the suspect cracks, the floodgates open, and they tell the police anything and everything. That time may come several hours into questioning, sometimes even days; rarely does it come right at the start.

But Shaniqua could hardly wait.

‘J’Juan dealt horse, that ain’t no secret,’ she said. ‘And sometimes he’d bring his, er, his clients’ – she arched her eyebrows – ‘back to our house, when they were too wasted to get the fuck back to their own homes.’

‘You were happy with this?’

‘You lemme tell you what happened, we’ll get done here a whole lot quicker.’

Beradino was far too much of a pro to take offense. He smiled and gestured with his head: Go on.

‘No, I weren’t happy. I done seen too much of what drugs do, and I don’t want no part of it. Not in my house. Every time he brings someone back – black, white, boy, girl, it don’t matter – I hit the roof. Every time, he swears it’s the last time.

‘And every time, like a fool, I believe him.

‘But today, when it happens, I’ve just had enough, I dunno why. We in the bedroom, Trent and I, sittin’ on the bed, chattin’ ’bout tings: school, grandma – those kinda tings. We talk a lot, my boy and me; we’re tight. He tells me tings, I tells him tings. Only man in my life I can trust. Anyhow, J’Juan comes in, says he off out now, and I says, “You take that skanky-ass bitch with you, like five minutes ago, or I’m callin’ the police.”

‘He looks surprised, then he narrows his eyes. Man can look mean as a snake when he wants to, you know?

‘“You do that and I’ll kill you, bitch,” he says.

‘Trent says to him, “Don’t you talk to my mama like that.”

‘J’Juan tells Trent to butt the fuck out, it ain’t nothin’ to do with him.

‘“Come on, Trent,” I say, gettin’ up from off the bed, “let’s go.”

‘“Go where?” says J’Juan. “Go the fuck where? You leavin’ me, bitch?”

‘“No,” I says, “we just goin’ for a walk while you cool the fuck off.”

‘“You leavin’ me?” he keeps sayin’. “You goin’ to the cops?”

‘“You keep on like this,” I says, “then, yeah, we’re leavin’ you. Gonna go live with my auntie in Des Moines. Gotta be better than bein’ stuck here.”

‘I’m nearest the door, J’Juan’s standin’ by the end of the bed. He’s between me and Trent, between Trent and the door.

‘He grabs Trent, and says we ain’t goin’ nowhere.

‘And right then, I see he’s left his gun on the sill.

‘So I pick up the gun, and I level it at him.

‘He’s got his back to me, so he don’t see straight away; but Trent sees, and his eyes go like this wide’ – she pulled her own eyes open as wide as they’ll go – ‘and I say to J’Juan, “You leave that boy the fuck alone.”

‘And he turns to me all slow like, and he says “Put that fuckin’ ting down. You don’t know what you’re doin’.”

‘And I say, “Trent, come on.”

‘And J’Juan looks at me, and then at Trent, and then at me again, and he says – I’ll never forget this – he says: “You walk out that door, I’ll kill this little motherfucker with my bare hands.”

‘And Trent tries to break free, and J’Juan dives for Trent, and I just shoot him. I said I would, and I did, ’cos he was gonna hurt my boy, right before my eyes, and he does that over my dead body.

‘Not my boy. Take me, but not my boy.

‘Trent’s real daddy’s about as useless a piece-a-shit as God ever gave breath to, so no one loves that boy like me. That’s why I tell him I love him for both, you know; I love him as his mama and his pops too. Boy needs a daddy, know what I’m sayin’? Boy needs a father like he needs our Father in heaven. But Trent ain’t got one. So J’Juan can kiss my ass.

‘I shot him, and I ain’t ashamed of it.

‘Shit, if he walked through that door right now, I’d shoot the motherfucker again.’

Patrese was silent for a moment, and then he laughed; he couldn’t help it.

‘Now that’s what I call a confession,’ he said.

Shaniqua looked at him for a moment, and then she laughed too.

‘I guess it is. That’s the way it happened. But it ain’t murder, right? It was self-defense. He was goin’ to kill me and my boy.’

‘How did you feel when you realized you’d killed him?’ Beradino said.

‘Feel? Ain’t nothing to feel. It was him or me. And if it hadn’t been me shot him, it’d have been someone else. He weren’t the kinda guy who’d have lived to take out his pension and dandle grandkids on his knee.’

Many people freaked at the sight of a dead body, certainly the first time they saw one. Patrese guessed Shaniqua had seen more than her fair share.

Patrese had charged dozens of suspects over the years, and he’d never apologized to a single one of them. But he wanted very badly to say sorry to Shaniqua; not just for what the law obliged him to do, but also for every shitty thing in her life which had brought her to this place.

Oh, Shaniqua, he thought. What if you’d been born somewhere else, to another family – to any family worth the name, in fact? If you’d never set foot in Homewood? Never opened yourself up to men whose idea of fatherhood started and stopped at conception? Never had your soul leached from you atom by atom?

‘It ain’t murder, right?’ she repeated.

He was about to tell her things weren’t that simple when Beradino’s cellphone rang. He took it from his pocket and answered.

‘Beradino.’

‘Mark? Freddie Hellmore here.’

Freddie Hellmore was one of the best-known criminal defense lawyers, perhaps the best-known, in the United States. A Homewood boy born and bred, he split his cases between the nobodies – usually poor, black nobodies on murder charges – and the rich and famous. He was half Don King, half Clarence Darrow.

Love him or hate him – and most people did both, sometimes at the same time – it was hard not to admire him. His acquittal rate was excellent, and he was a damn good lawyer; not the kind of man you wanted across the table on a homicide case.

‘I hear you’ve got a client of mine in custody,’ he said.

‘I’ve probably got several clients of yours in custody.’

‘Funny. Let me clarify. Mizz Davenport?’

Beradino wasn’t surprised. Someone in Homewood must have called him.

‘Has she appointed you?’

‘Has she appointed anyone else?’ When Beradino didn’t answer, he continued. ‘I’ll take that as a no. Put her on.’

‘I have to tell you; she’s already confessed.’

That piece of news rattled Hellmore, no doubt, but he recovered fast. He was a pro, after all.

‘I’m going to have you seven ways to Sunday on improper conduct.’

‘We did it by the book, every second of the way. It’s all on tape.’

‘Put her on, Detective. Now.’

Beradino passed Shaniqua the phone. The conversation was brief and one-sided, and even from six feet away it wasn’t hard to get the gist; sit tight, shut up, and wait for me to get there.

‘He wants to speak to you again,’ Shaniqua said, handing the phone back.

Indeed he did; Beradino could hear him even before he put the phone back to his ear.

‘You don’t ask her another damn thing till I get there, you hear?’ Hellmore said. ‘Not even if she wants milk in her tea or what her favorite color is. Clear?’

‘Crystal.’

Thursday, October 7th. 10:57 p.m.

She’d been in the hospital almost three days now, in the chair beside her sister’s bed.

She left only to eat, attend calls of nature, and when the medical staff asked her for ten minutes while they changed the sheets or performed tests. Those occasions apart, she was a constant presence at Samantha’s bedside.

Sometimes she talked softly of happy memories from their childhood, conjuring up apple-pie images of lazy summer evenings by mosquito-buzzed lakes and licking cake mix from the inside of the bowl.

Sometimes she fell silent and simply held Samantha’s hand, as if the tendrils of tubes and lines snaking to and from Samantha’s emaciated body weren’t enough to anchor her in this world. And in the small hours, she rested her head against the wall and allowed herself an hour or two hovering above the surface of sleep.

People recognized her, of course, though few seemed sure how they should react when they did, especially in a hospital – this hospital – after everything that had happened here. For every person who smiled uncertainly at her, there was another who glared and muttered something about how she should be ashamed of herself.

She acted as though she didn’t care either way. She was one hell of an actor.

And now, late in the evening, one of the doctors asked if he could have a word.

‘Of course,’ she said.

He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just be straight with you. Your sister is brain dead. Life support is all that’s keeping her going.’

‘I know.’

‘To be honest, with the injuries she received, it’s a miracle she’s got this far. Multiple gunshot wounds to the head…’ He tailed off, spreading his hands.

‘So what are you asking me?’ she said, even though she knew exactly what was being asked of her.

He swallowed. It was never easy, no matter how often you did it.

‘You’re next of kin. I need your permission to turn Samantha’s life support off.’

It was still a shock to hear it stated so baldly, she thought.

‘And if I refuse?’

‘Then we get a court order.’

She thought for a moment.

‘I understand a certain amount of medical jargon,’ she said. The doctor nodded, knowing – as did everybody – what she’d been through in the past. ‘Tell me.’

‘There’s total necrosis of the cerebral neurons,’ he replied. ‘All Samantha’s brain activity – including the involuntary activity necessary to sustain life – has come to an end. We’ve conducted all the usual physical examinations to find clinical evidence of brain function. The responses have been uniformly negative. No response to pain, no pupillary response, no oculo-cephalic reflex, no corneal reflex, no caloric reflex.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Sorry. Eye tests; reaction to light, movement, contact and water being poured in the ears. As I said, all negative. And her EEGs have been isoelectric – sorry, flatline – since she was admitted.’

‘And you don’t want to waste your time keeping her alive.’

‘It’s not a question of wanting.’

‘It is.’

‘It’s a question of prioritizing. The damage is irreversible. She’s not going to get better. She’s not going to improve even an iota from what she is now. The only way, medically, we could justify maintaining life support would be to remove her organs for transplant donation, but…’ He spread his hands again.

‘But she was a junkie, and no one in their right mind would touch her organs with a ten-foot pole. I get it, Doctor. You don’t have to soft-soap me.’

‘Thank you. Please understand; we don’t have the capacity or resources to keep her here indefinitely. Even if we did, she has no reason, no consciousness. She’s not living. She’s existing.’

She tipped her head slightly and examined him.

‘You really believe that?’

‘It’s fact. It’s a medical fact. Medicine’s what I believe in.’

When she sighed, it sounded to her like condemnation.

‘You square it with your conscience,’ she said.

Tuesday, October 12th. 10:08 a.m.

The police look after their own. Always have, always will.

The inquiry into what had happened in Shaniqua’s house was conducted by Allen Chance, one of a triumvirate of assistant police chiefs referred to, not entirely without irony, as the three wise monkeys.

The Pittsburgh police department boasted three divisions: administration (the back-room bureaucracy which kept the whole place going), operations (uniformed officers) and investigation, Chance’s crew, which along with Homicide included Burglary, CSI, Missing Persons, Narcotics, Robbery, Sex Crimes and Financial Crimes.

Not far north of five foot six, with rimless eyeglasses and the neatest of side partings, Chance looked – and thought – more like an accountant than a cop. Murder clearance rates, targets, statistics: Chance crunched them all with a zeal the Federal Reserve would have envied.

He also knew that the quickest way to send those numbers the wrong way was to hammer the morale of his officers, and the quickest way to do that was to leave them dangling when the heat was on.

So his investigation into Patrese’s conduct was perfunctory almost to the point of insult. Independent? Not a chance. Pragmatic? You bet.

Beradino, called as a character witness, testified that Patrese was an excellent detective, that the situation had been fast-moving, and that Patrese had done what any well-trained officer would have.

The suspect had ignored two warnings before making a sudden movement for a hidden object, Beradino pointed out. Patrese’s only option had been to shoot.

Chance made appropriate noises about the death being a tragedy. Not the only tragedy of the victim’s truncated life, if the toxicological reports were any guide.

On legal advice, Chance did not offer condolences to the deceased’s relatives.

Summing up, he declared Patrese’s actions and behavior to have been beyond reproach. No charges would be brought, and Detective Patrese would continue with his duties as usual. A press release to that effect would be prepared and released to the media.

Patrese couldn’t help feeling he’d dodged a bullet.

PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS REPORT OF INVESTIGATION INTO ALLEGED EMPLOYEE MISCONDUCT

INSTITUTION: SCI MUNCY, P.O. BOX 180, MUNCY, PA 17756

DATE OF INVESTIGATION: THURSDAY, OCTOBER 14TH

EMPLOYEE IN QUESTION: JESSLYN H. GEDGE

POSITION: DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT FOR FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

CASE HISTORY:

Complaints against JESSLYN H. GEDGE were brought on June 23rd by inmate MARA E. SLINGER, number A/38259728-2.¹

SUMMARY OF ALLEGATIONS:

Inmate Slinger alleges that Deputy Superintendent Gedge:

1 entered into a non-consensual sexual relationship with her;

2 used her position and influence within the institution to maintain this relationship for several months, substantially against inmate Slinger’s will;

3 eavesdropped on inmate Slinger’s confidential telephone conversations with her attorney;

4 took revenge when inmate Slinger finally terminated their sexual relationship in the following ways:

4.1. carried out repeated personal searches, strip searches and body-cavity searches on inmate Slinger, sometimes in public owing to the alleged lack of suitable private facilities;

4.2. scheduled repeated dental examinations for inmate Slinger, knowing that inmate Slinger has a phobia of dentists, and that no inmate within the state DOC system has the right to refuse such an examination;

4.3. otherwise harassed inmate Slinger on repeated occasions, applying maximum penalties for minor infractions of prison regulations, including but not limited to: failure to use the shortest route when traveling between two points in the prison complex; stepping out of line in the dining hall; bringing books or papers into the dining hall; giving part of her meals to other prisoners; not taking a full set of cutlery at mealtimes; not eating all the food accepted at mealtimes; and talking to inmates working on the refectory serving line.

4.4. withheld packages addressed to inmate Slinger, or removed certain items before handing such packages over;

4.5. repeatedly confiscated inmate Slinger’s prison ID card, in full knowledge that inmates must carry said card at all times except when showering, and that inmates must pay for replacement cards if they lose, destroy or damage said card;

4.6. planted contraband (including money, potential escape tools e.g. nail files, unprescribed pharmaceuticals, illegal narcotics paraphernalia, weapons) in inmate Slinger’s cell during searches, and forbade inmate Slinger to be present during such searches on the grounds that her presence would constitute a threat;

4.7. held inmate Slinger down and forcibly shaved her head;

4.8. refused to hand back personal items upon inmate Slinger’s release.

SUMMARY OF RESPONSE:

Deputy Superintendent Gedge responded to the allegations as follows:

1 She admitted that she and inmate Slinger had conducted a sexual relationship, but maintained that it was entirely consensual, and that inmate Slinger had in fact initiated sexual contact in the first instance.

2 The answer to this point is implicit in her answer to point 1.

3 On the occasions that she did overhear such conversations, it was while she was monitoring technical faults with the institution’s telephone system, and she stopped listening immediately when she realized the conversation was subject to attorney-client privilege.

4 Termination of the sexual relationship was mutual and amicable, and therefore Deputy Superintendent Gedge felt no need for revenge.

4.1 Deputy Superintendent Gedge carried out all searches in strict accordance with institution policy. On occasion, when all private interview and meeting rooms were being used, searches were carried out in public. Deputy Superintendent Gedge strove to keep these occasions to a minimum.

4.2 Deputy Superintendent Gedge scheduled all inmate dental examinations in strict accordance with institution policy.

4.3 Deputy Superintendent Gedge enforced all regulations in strict accordance with institution policy.

4.4 Deputy Superintendent Gedge checked mail sent to inmate Slinger, removed contraband items, and read letters when she had reason to believe they were being used to plan an escape or other illegal activity. This was all in strict accordance with institution policy;

4.5 Deputy Superintendent Gedge maintains that inmate Slinger mislaid or deliberately destroyed her ID card on several occasions;

4.6 Deputy Superintendent Gedge absolutely denies planting contraband items in inmate Slinger’s cell;

4.7 Deputy Superintendent Gedge maintains that inmate Slinger shaved her own head to remove traces of illegal drugs in her hair follicles;

4.8 Deputy Superintendent Gedge denies this absolutely.

SUPPORT FOR INMATE SLINGER

Inmate MADISON A-S. SETTERSTROM, prisoner number A/73647829-5, was a former cellmate of inmate Slinger.

She testified that inmate Slinger had repeatedly confided in her that she was unhappy with Deputy Superintendent Gedge’s advances towards her, and only acquiesced for fear of negative consequences if she did not.

Inmate Setterstrom said Deputy Superintendent Gedge’s behavior after the end of the relationship indicated that inmate Slinger’s fears of such consequences had been largely justified.

Several other inmates, speaking on condition of anonymity, also voiced their support for inmate Slinger.

SUPPORT FOR DEPUTY SUPERINTENDENT GEDGE

Lieutenant VALERIE Y. MARGRAVINE testified that the Deputy Superintendent was well respected among her fellow Corrections Officers for her attention to discipline and detail.

Several Corrections Officers stated that Deputy Superintendent Gedge is a devout Christian and a lay minister who presides over services of worship in the institution’s chapel on Sundays and other days.

OTHER FACTORS

Inmate Slinger is a high-profile individual whose original conviction attracted substantial media attention, as did the subsequent overturning of that conviction by the Appeal Court. She remains a newsworthy individual.

Any similar media attention in regard to this procedure would be undesirable. The department therefore believes a quick and final resolution to be in the interests of all parties.

Inmate Slinger has signed a confidentiality agreement preventing her from disclosing details of this investigation and hearing to the press, on condition that Deputy Superintendent Gedge receives appropriate punishment.

Deputy Superintendent Gedge has also been the subject of previous complaints from inmates (see cases T637-02, T432-00, T198-96, T791-89).

VERDICT

Pennsylvania Department of Corrections? code of conduct expressly and absolutely forbids all corrections officers from conducting sexual or intimate relationships with inmates.

Irrespective of the validity of the other allegations, Deputy Superintendent Gedge’s maintenance of a relationship with inmate Slinger qualifies as gross misconduct and is by itself grounds for immediate dismissal.

Consequently, Deputy Superintendent Gedge is dismissed from her post with immediate effect, and is disqualified from holding any other position within the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections for a period of no less than ten years.

Signed

Anderson M. Thornhill

Anderson M. Thornhill

Governor, SCI Muncy

1:25 p.m.

When Jesslyn pulled in at the truck stop just outside DuBois on I-80, she realized with a start that she could hardly remember a thing about the last hour or so she’d been driving. She’d been operating the car on instinct and muscle memory alone, while her thoughts chased themselves into rolling, tumbling tendrils of confusion.

Her career was over. That much – that alone – she knew. She believed in punishment, and retribution; that was why she’d sought a vocation in corrections. Taking that from her, and in a way which meant she’d never find work in that sector again, was more than she could bear. It was as though Mara Slinger had first led her into evil, then cut her heart out. Here, truly, was the devil.

She wondered whether she should buy a razor here, open the arteries in her wrists, and be done with it all; and even as the thought came to her, she stamped on it with frantic fury, as though trying to beat down a grass fire.

Just the fact that she could entertain such a notion was a deep, shaming sin; 1 Corinthians 3: 16 said: ‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.’

She’d preached that passage repeatedly in the Muncy chapel, knowing that barely a week went past without an inmate trying to take her own life.

Jesslyn stopped her car, a silver Toyota Camry she’d had for a few years, and walked across the parking lot to the restaurant building.

She hadn’t eaten all day. She’d been too nervous to eat breakfast this morning, knowing that today her fate would be decided one way or another, and afterwards she’d been given half an hour to pack up all her belongings, hand in her credentials, and get out. No time to say her goodbyes, let alone get some food.

Twenty years’ hard work, ripped from her in a flash.

The burger bar smelt like all burger bars do; of cooking oil, sweat and resentment.

Jesslyn walked up to the counter, where a Hispanic-looking woman whose nameplate read ‘Esmerelda’, and who was too young to be as overweight as she was, regarded the world without enthusiasm.

‘Help you?’ Esmerelda asked, her tone so polite as to be insolent.

Jesslyn mumbled her order and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter.

Fat fingers handed her change and food oozing grease through its wrappers.

Jesslyn went to the far corner of the room, past an EMPLOYEES WANTED sign and a couple of truckers with baseball caps trailing raggedy ponytails.

She was halfway through her burger when the tears came, hot with anger and self-pity. She pressed her hands to her face, not to staunch the flood but in the illogical, childish belief that if she couldn’t see the other diners, they couldn’t see her.

Through the hot rising of mucus in her throat, she repeated silently to herself the words of Lamentations 2: 18. ‘Their heart cried out to the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; give thyself no rest, nor let the apple of thine eye cease.’

Friday, October 15th. 7:11 a.m.

Jesslyn left early the next morning, as though she was going to work as usual.

She’d told Mark – Mark Beradino, her partner – nothing. It helped that she liked to keep her work and home lives separate – whatever Mark knew of her job was what she chose to tell him, or not tell him – but still…How could she explain it all to him? Where would she even begin?

She had no idea; and, until she did, she figured it was best to keep quiet, and somehow square the silence up between herself and God.

What she did know was that the longer she left it, the harder it would be. Every secret she kept from Mark made keeping the next one both easier and necessary.

She hadn’t told him about her affair with Mara, so she hadn’t been able to tell him about Mara’s complaints, so she hadn’t been able to tell him about yesterday’s tribunal, so she hadn’t been able to tell him she’d been dismissed, so she had to go off today to keep the pretence that everything was normal.

And going off today meant she’d have to go off tomorrow, and the next time.

She couldn’t keep doing that indefinitely; at least, not without somewhere to go and something that would pay her, because corrections didn’t pay like Wall Street in the first place, and she didn’t have much in the way of savings.

So she needed a job. Not just any job – a job which offered shifts. Prison work wasn’t nine to five; like the police, prison officers worked eight-hour shifts, sometimes on the night watch. She couldn’t keep up the pretence for long if she took employment as an office clerk.

It didn’t have to be a great job. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn’t be.

But as long as it paid, and got her out of the house, it would do, at least until something better came along. And she could pass the time by savoring the righteous anger which burned within her. She’d given her life to her vocation, and she’d been cast aside like a piece of flotsam.

That wasn’t the way you treated people. There would be retribution; that was not only her right, but her duty too.

She recited to herself the words of Exodus 21: 23. ‘And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.’

Burning for burning. Stripe for stripe.

Jesslyn realized she was heading towards Muncy; reflex, perhaps, or providence. Ahead, she saw signs to the DuBois travel plaza, where she’d stopped yesterday.

She pulled off the interstate, parked the Camry, and went back into the burger bar.

Esmerelda wasn’t on duty today. At the counter was a guy with acne and eyeglasses who could barely have been out of his teens. His nametag proclaimed him not only to be ‘Kevin’, but also the manager.

‘Help you?’ he said, in exactly the same tone Esmerelda had used the day before. Must have been something they taught at burger college.

Jesslyn couldn’t remember feeling as demeaned as she did now. Only her faith that God would provide, and that He moved in mysterious ways, forced the index finger of her right hand up and in the direction of the EMPLOYEES WANTED sign.

‘I’d like a job, please,’ she said.

Monday, October 18th. 6:53 p.m.

‘You don’t recognize me?’ I ask.

Michael Redwine shakes his head. He can’t speak, as I’ve put duct tape across his mouth; and he can’t take the tape off or lash out at me, as I’ve cuffed his hands behind his back. The cuffs are those thin plastic ones, good for one use only.

One use only is all I need.

Besides, the plastic won’t last long, not with what I’ve got in store for him; but by the time he’ll be able to break them off, he’ll be long past doing anything at all.

His mouth moves furiously around the gag, spilling saliva down his jaw. It takes me a moment to work out what he’s saying.

‘You’re praying?’ I ask.

He looks at me with wide eyes and nods.

‘That’s funny,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think people like you believed in a higher power.’

His brows contract in puzzlement.

I look round his apartment again.

Nothing much wrong with it, truth be told. He lives in The Pennsylvanian, about the most luxurious apartment block in all of downtown. It’s built on the site of the old Union rail station, and the arched canopy which covers the main entrance is often cited as the most captivating architectural arrangement in all of Pittsburgh.

The Pennsylvanian has thirteen stories, the apartments getting ever grander the higher you go. Redwine’s apartment is on the tenth floor, where the building’s loft homes are located: all elegant arched windows, crown moldings, wood paneling and intricately detailed, fifteen-foot ceilings. The windows give on to warehouse roofs and overpasses swooping towards the Strip. Far below me, streetlights glow low sodium.

This, all this luxury, is what you get when you’re one of the premier brain surgeons in all Pennsylvania, possibly in the entire United States.

And all this luxury means nothing when you’ve done what Michael Redwine did, and you’re going to be punished like I’m about to punish him.

I open my bag and bring out a red plastic container. It can take a gallon, and pretty much everyone in the world recognizes its shape and what it’s designed to hold.

Redwine is screaming mutely behind the duct tape even before I open the lid and let him smell the gasoline.

‘Remember what you did?’ I ask, beginning to pour the gasoline over his head.

He jerks his body across the floor and tries to stand; anything to get away from the pulsing glugs that mat his hair to his forehead and run into his eyes.

He kicks at me, but I skip easily out of reach, still pouring.

The gasoline is drenching his shirt now, rivuleting down his trousers.

‘Remember what you said to me?’ I ask.

He throws himself against the wall; to knock himself out and spare himself the agony of what he knows is coming, perhaps, or as a last desperate call for help.

Neither works. He’s still conscious, and no one’s coming.

‘And remember what I said to you?’

When the plastic can’s empty, I put it back in my bag.

I take out the juggling torch and the lighter. Then I put the bag by the door, the easier to grab it fast on my way out if I have to make a sharp exit.

I light the torch’s wick and look at Redwine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more terrified in my entire life.

‘Isaiah chapter fifty-nine, verse seventeen,’ I say. ‘“For I put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon my head; and I put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and am clad with zeal as a cloak.”’

The torch flares in my hand like the fount of justice. I take a step towards him.

He backs away until he reaches the far corner and can go no further.

He curls himself into a ball and turns his face away from me.

I lower the torch to his shoulder.

10:04 p.m.

From the point of view of a homicide detective, fire scenes are among the most difficult of all to work. What fire doesn’t destroy, it damages; and what it damages, the firefighters tend to destroy in their efforts to extinguish the blaze. None of this bodes well for the preservation of evidence. Only bomb sites boast more destruction and disorder.

The fire department had been on the scene within four minutes of first being called, when one of Redwine’s neighbors had smelt burning, looked out of the window, and seen large black clouds billowing from Redwine’s apartment. The firemen had evacuated the entire apartment block and set to putting the fire out.

It had taken them two and a half hours, but they’d managed it, and had kept it contained to the apartment of origin, more or less. There were scorch marks in the apartment above and those to either side, but nothing worse than that, and no serious structural damage, except to Redwine’s apartment itself.

The senior fire officer on site having declared the building safe, Patrese and Beradino pulled on crime-scene overalls, shoe covers and latex gloves, in that order, and entered Redwine’s apartment.

They’d been called in the moment the firefighters had discovered both the body – presumed to be Redwine’s, though obviously not proved as such yet – and the demarcation line on the carpet next to him.

A demarcation line, in fire terms, marks the boundary between where a surface – in this case, the carpet – has burnt and where it hasn’t. More often than not, it indicates the use of a liquid accelerant, which in turn means the fire was started deliberately.

And since very few people choose to start a fire and then hang around inside a burning apartment – suicide by self-immolation is extremely rare – it seemed likely that someone other than Redwine, someone long since gone, had been responsible for both the fire and Redwine’s death.

This left two possibilities. Either the arsonist had killed Redwine and then set the fire to cover his tracks; or it had been the fire itself that had killed Redwine.

The crime-scene photographer was already there. Patrese and Beradino watched as he fired off round after round of shots, changing lenses and films with practiced ease.

In close for the serious detail, magnifying things a few millimeters across up to the size of a normal print; mid-range images which concentrated on specific objects; and wide-angle images capturing as much of the room as possible.

He was using both black-and-white and color films. Color is usually better, but gruesome photos are best shown to squeamish juries in monochrome.

Beradino glanced across at Patrese, who read in the furrow of the older man’s brow exactly what it meant; concern, that all this would scald Patrese’s memories. It was barely three weeks since his parents had perished in a freeway fireball.

‘I’m OK,’ Patrese said.

They looked round what was left of the room. It was rectangular, though not by much; fourteen feet by seventeen, at a guess.

At either end of the longer side were the windows and a pass-through to the kitchen. The shorter side was bounded by walls, one exterior and one interior.

There were two sofas; a two-seater beneath a window, and a three-seater up against the exterior wall. In the corner between them sat a low, small table, and in the nearest corner to that, where the windows met the interior wall, was a plasma TV.

All of them burnt to the edge of recognition, as was Redwine’s body.

His skin was cracked and patched charred black and bright red, splashed with different colors where his clothes had melted on to him. He was hunched like a prizefighter, arms drawn up in front of him and legs bent at the knee.

This in itself proved nothing, they knew. The position was caused by muscles contracting in response to the heat of the fire, and could not indicate by itself whether the victim had been alive or dead when the fire was set.

But the color of the body could do so.

Reddening of the skin, and blistering, tend to take place on a victim who was still breathing rather than one who wasn’t.

Beradino crouched down by the body and took a small dictaphone from his pocket. He was gospel strict about making contemporaneous notes. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t rely on remembering everything when it came to writing things up a couple of hours later back at the station; it was also that making notes forced the investigator to slow down, think, take his time.

After all, the victim wasn’t going anywhere.

Beradino looked closely at what had once been Redwine’s face.

He didn’t think about what Redwine might have looked like in life, as that was no longer relevant. If he thought of anything, it was of over-barbecued meat. The less emotive and more commonplace he could make it seem, the better.

Twenty-five years on the homicide squad hadn’t hardened him to things, not really. It had merely made him better at coping with them.

There.

‘Around the nostrils,’ he said into the dictaphone. ‘Beneath the burn marks. Smoke stains, clearly visible.’

The pathologist would doubtless find blackened lungs when he came to do the autopsy, which would confirm it; but for now, Beradino had more than enough to be going on with.

Smoke stains meant inhalation. It was this which had almost certainly killed Redwine – breathing in smoke finishes people off before burning flesh does – but it didn’t alter the chronology of what had happened, or the central conclusion.

Michael Redwine had been alive when the fire had been set, and he’d been burned to death.

10:30 p.m.

The doorman was dressed in a suit which, Patrese thought, almost certainly cost more than any of his own suits, and very possibly more than all of them put together.

He tried to ignore this slight on his sartorial standards, and instead read the name on the doorman’s lapel badge. Jared Foxworth.

Foxworth handed Patrese two lists.

The first showed which apartments were occupied and by whom, though some of the names were of companies rather than individuals. The Pennsylvanian was a popular locale for corporate lets, allowing companies based outside of Pittsburgh to put up employees or clients here instead of paying for hotels.

The second was a record of every visitor who’d gone up to the apartments today. The Pennsylvanian’s rule was simple; you asked at the reception desk, the doorman rang up to the apartment in question, and if you went up, you signed in with him first. If you stayed in reception and waited for a resident to come down before leaving the building, you didn’t need to sign in; but Redwine’s killer couldn’t have done that, as Redwine had been found in his apartment. Anyway, he’d had no visitors at all today, said Foxworth; none, full stop.

There were, he added, no other ways into the building unless you knew enough about The Pennsylvanian’s layout to sneak in through the underground parking lot or up the fire escape; but even then you’d have to rely on doors being open that shouldn’t have been, and risk being spotted by someone who might ask you what you were doing. Hazardous, to say the least, but not out of the question.

Whichever way Redwine’s killer had entered the building, he – of course it could be a ‘she’ too, Beradino said, but since the majority of murderers were male, they would for simplicity’s sake refer to the killer as a ‘he’, all the while maintaining an open mind – had not had to force the door of the apartment itself. The firefighters had broken down the door when they’d arrived on scene, and they were adamant both door and lock had been intact.

Which in turn suggested two possibilities.

Firstly, that the killer had a key with which he’d let himself in. This might have been a surprise to Redwine, or he might have been expecting it. Perhaps the killer had thought Redwine would be out, and the surprise at finding him in the apartment had been mutual.

Secondly, that Redwine had known the killer, and opened the door to him.

There were two sets of crowds out front. First, the building’s residents, who’d been evacuated and were massed under the canopy waiting to be questioned. Second, the rubberneckers who’d heard that there’d been not just a fire but a death too, which was for a dispiriting number of people more than reason enough to drop everything and stand behind police barriers for hours on end.

One of the uniforms was subtly filming the latter group. Murderers sometimes returned to the scene of their crime; arsonists often did. The detectives would study the footage later, looking for known troublemakers or simply those who looked shifty.

A film crew from KDKA, Pittsburgh’s local TV station, were also on site. The event was newsworthy because of The Pennsylvanian’s prestige as a place to live, and the fact that the victim had been a surgeon, but the body language of the reporter and cameraman betrayed their instinct that this was not a major story.

Man dies in fire. Tragic, but happens every day. The TV crew would go through the motions and hope for something bigger, more exciting, or quirkier next time.

Beradino and Patrese introduced themselves to the residents and asked if a Magda Nagorska was among them as, according to their records, she lived directly beneath Redwine’s apartment.

She was indeed there, and she looked as old as God, possibly older.

If the way they had to shout every question two or three times was anything to go by, Redwine could have been murdered in her apartment, perhaps right next to her, without her having heard a damn thing.

‘Did you see or hear anyone go into his apartment?’ Patrese asked.

‘He was a charming man,’ she shouted.

‘No commotion? An argument? Your apartment didn’t shake?’

‘It’s dreadful, that it happens somewhere like here. Dreadful.’

One of the uniforms bit on his hand to stop himself from laughing. It was like giggling in church; the more taboo it was, the more tempting it became.

Patrese didn’t think it would do much for the reputation of the Pittsburgh homicide department if he fell to his knees weeping with laughter in front of a potential witness.

They continued in mutual incomprehension for several minutes, before Beradino asked in exasperation: ‘Do you have a hearing aid?’

‘Lemonade?’

‘HEA-RING-AID?’

‘Oh yes, but I don’t wear it too often. I’m not deaf. Just a little hard of hearing in one ear, you know.’

11:17 p.m.

‘How did the killer get in?’ Patrese asked, when he and Beradino were in the car.

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Well, one of them, anyway.’

That the fire escape and underground parking lot were risky methods of entry didn’t mean they were impossible. The parking lot had closed-circuit TV; the fire escape didn’t. The cops would trawl through the footage and see what they could find.

Failing either of those, could the killer have been a resident?

It seemed unlikely, to say the least. They’d spoken to all the residents, albeit briefly. None of them looked as though they could harm a fly, and none had an obvious motive to do away with Redwine.

The uniforms would follow up, of course, interviewing every resident properly.

What about one of the doormen? Probably not Foxworth himself – it would be hard to do it on one’s own shift, because it would have meant leaving the front desk unattended for too long – but one of the others, who was off shift? A doorman would know all the shortcuts and hidden entrances, and his presence wouldn’t be suspicious.

But again, it came back to the same stumbling block: why?

Why had Redwine been killed, and why – the second sixty-four-thousand-dollar question – why in that way? Why burned, rather than, say, shot, or stabbed?

To hide something? If not Redwine’s identity, then something else?

To destroy something? Forensic evidence, or something less directly connected to the corpse, such as documentation or other items?

As punishment; a cruel and unusual way of murdering someone?

Or were all these delving too deep into something very simple? Had Michael Redwine been burnt to death simply because the killer had felt that was the easiest way of doing it?

Redwine had been a surgeon at Mercy, Pittsburgh’s largest and most famous hospital. Mercy was located uptown, a few blocks from The Pennsylvanian.

‘We’re going to Mercy?’ Patrese asked.

‘You got any better ideas?’

‘Matter of fact, I do.’

Patrese flipped open his cellphone and hit one of the speed dials. A woman answered on the second ring.

‘Hey, Cicillo.’

‘Hey, sis. Are you on shift?’

‘No, at home, all alone; Sandro’s taken the kids to his mom’s for a few days. Why?’

‘Can we come by?’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Mark.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘Tell you when we get there. We’re leaving town now. See you in fifteen.’

He ended the call. Beradino looked across at him.

‘Who was that?’

‘Bianca. My sister.’

‘The one who’s a doctor at Mercy?’

‘The very same.’

Beradino smiled.

There were two ways to find out what Redwine had been like and why someone might have wanted to kill him in such a vile manner. There were formal channels, which involved managers, bureaucrats and warrants; and there were informal channels, which involved the promise of favors owed if you were lucky and good old dead presidents if you weren’t.

Either way, there were no prizes for guessing which method tended to be quicker and more effective.

‘You’re not as dumb as you look,’ Beradino said.

‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

11: 42 p.m.

‘What was he like?’ Bianca considered the question for a moment. ‘He was Harvard med school. That’s what he was like.’

‘You mean he thought he was God’s gift?’ Beradino said.

‘In my experience, most Harvard med schoolers think God is their gift to the world rather than vice versa.’

Patrese laughed. That was his sister in a nutshell, he thought; tell it like it is, no matter the circumstances. Her patients tended to appreciate her straight talking, particularly when it came to diagnosing the severity of whatever they had. Most people with illnesses liked to know what they were dealing with.

She’d been shocked, of course, when they’d told her what had happened to Redwine. You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy – unless, of course, it was the fact that they were your worst enemy which had made you do it in the first place.

But doctors saw an awful lot of life and certainly too much of death, and so they didn’t tend to stay shocked for very long. Bianca was no exception.

So now she sat with her brother and Beradino in her living room and tried to think of who might have wanted Redwine dead.

‘How well did you know him?’ Beradino asked.

‘Well enough, but as a professional colleague rather than a friend. You understand the difference? I spent a lot of time in his company, but almost always at work. We rarely socialized. I knew a lot about his life, and he mine, because those details tend to get shared around when you’re talking; but if one or other of us had taken a job someplace else, I doubt we’d have stayed in touch.’

‘Personal life?’

‘Divorced. Couple of teenage boys.’

‘Nasty split?’

‘Quite the opposite, far as I know. In fact, I remember him telling me once both he and his wife – Marsha, she’s called – had been sacked by three successive sets of divorce lawyers because they weren’t being greedy enough.’

Beradino and Patrese laughed. Cops appreciated a dig at lawyers as much as anyone else; more than most, in fact.

‘Wife and kids still in Pittsburgh?’

‘No. They went out west, to Tucson. He used to go and see them several times a year. Hung out with the kids, stayed over at their house.’

‘He and Marsha still sleeping together?’

‘You’d have to ask her that. But I don’t think so. Maybe that was why they split up to start with. He told me once he thought of her more as a sister than anything else.’

‘He have anyone else serious?

‘Not that I know of.’

‘No,’ said Beradino thoughtfully. ‘I can’t imagine they’d have been too happy with him playing happy families with his ex, whatever the real story.’

‘But I doubt he ever lacked female company. He was handsome, he was smart, he was successful.’

‘And arrogant.’

‘Yes, and arrogant. Most surgeons are. It comes with the territory. You ask them, they’d call it self-confidence. Patients like a surgeon who’s sure of what he’s doing. The last thing you need when someone’s about to open you up is to find they’re suddenly iffy about the job.’

‘He was a good surgeon?’

‘One of the best. A real pioneer, always looking for new techniques, new ways to make things better. There are people walking round Pittsburgh today who are still here because of Michael Redwine; not just because he saved their lives, but because he did so with methods and equipment which simply didn’t exist several years ago, and which he helped bring into being.’

‘He ever make mistakes?’

For the first time, Bianca paused.

The house was suddenly quiet, which in Patrese’s experience was an event about as frequent as Halley’s Comet. If it wasn’t Sandro’s endless practicing – he was a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony – it was the noise generated by three kids blessed with the kind of energy that ought to be illegal.

Vittorio was in ninth grade, Sabrina seventh and Gennaro sixth, and Patrese loved them all to bits. Acting the goofball uncle with them, taking them to Steelers games, playing touch football with them in the backyard till sundown – and telling them that Gramps and Gran were now in heaven, and holding them close when they cried.

‘All surgeons make mistakes,’ Bianca said eventually.

‘You sound very defensive about that.’

‘Yes, well…Listen, people expect doctors to be perfect, get everything absolutely right every time. But it doesn’t always work like that. We’re human, our knowledge is imperfect, some symptoms aren’t always clear-cut.’

‘I don’t think Mark intended it to be a value judgment,’ Patrese said softly.

Bianca might have been his big sister, but he was still protective of her; that was the Italian male in him.

And he understood her defensiveness, too. Doctors were no different from cops – they looked out for one another. You dissed one, you dissed them all; that was how they saw it.

So they covered each other’s backs. Like most professions, medicine was in essence a small world; you never knew when you might need someone to help you out, so you didn’t go round making unnecessary enemies. And old habits died hard, even when the person you were protecting was no longer around.

‘I’m just looking for why someone might have wanted him dead,’ Beradino said.

Bianca nodded. ‘I understand. I’m sorry.’

‘No need.’

‘OK. Every time you lose a patient, you consider it a mistake, even when you know deep down you couldn’t have done anything more. That’s just the way you feel. And Mike had his fair share of those. I mean, brain surgery, the stats aren’t that great. You don’t open up someone’s skull unless things are pretty bad to start with. But those ones, I’m not counting; they’re not mistakes, not really.

‘Then there are the ones where, perhaps, if you’d done something different, you might possibly have saved them. But in those cases you don’t know till it’s too late anyway, and you can drive yourself mad if you dwell on it. If everyone’s vision was as good as their hindsight, every optician across the land would be out of work.’

‘People sue you for those ones?’

‘Sure. If you could have done something different, they’ll say you should have done. So the lawyers get involved, everyone starts slinging writs around, and if you can, you settle before it gets to court, goes public and damages your rep. Comes with the turf, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly a crappy surgeon.’

She paused again.

‘And?’ Patrese said, not unkindly.

‘And then there are the real fuck-ups.’

‘Redwine have any of those?’

She nodded. ‘One.’

The technical term was ‘wrong-site surgery’, which barely hinted at how catastrophic such incidents were, and how insultingly, ridiculously amateur they seemed.

Wrong-site surgery was, in essence, when the surgeon operated on a perfectly healthy part of the patient’s anatomy, and left the offending area untouched.

The consequences tended to fall into two categories: drastic, and fatal.

Redwine had been scheduled to remove a blood clot from the brain of Abdul Bayoumi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

It was a routine enough operation, especially for a surgeon of Redwine’s standing; he’d done hundreds in his career.

The clot had been on the left side of Bayoumi’s brain.

Redwine had cut into the right-hand side.

Only when he’d got all the way through the skull did he realize his mistake.

He’d immediately closed up the incision, made another one on the correct side, and removed the clot.

In 99 per cent of cases, that would have been it; a near-miss, a bureaucratic snafu, and a story on which the patient could dine out when he’d made a full recovery.

But Bayoumi had suffered complications – Bianca wasn’t sure of the exact details – on the side of the brain where Redwine had made the first, erroneous, incision.

The complications had spread, multiplied, and worsened.

Within six hours, he was dead.

‘How the hell can that happen?’ Beradino asked. ‘Don’t you guys,’ he caught himself – ‘sorry; isn’t it standard procedure to have a checklist or something, so this kind of thing gets caught before it occurs?’

‘Sure it is,’ Bianca said. ‘There’s a three-step procedure, the Universal Protocol, which is absolutely standard. First, you check the patient’s notes and make sure they tally with the surgery schedule. Then you use indelible markers to spot the site where the surgeon’s going to cut. Finally, the entire operating team takes a time-out before the start and agrees that this is what they’re supposed to be doing.’

‘So how can something like this happen?’

‘Because a system is only as good as the people using it.’

‘And?’

‘And in an operating theatre, the surgeon is God. He’s captain of the ship; his word goes. So if he says we cut on the left, we cut on the left. And if the notes say otherwise, who’s going to tell him, and get yelled at, or worse? Shoot the messenger, you know. Everyone stands around looking at each other, and no one does a thing.’

‘Redwine was one of these surgeons?’

‘One of them? He was the archetype. He prided himself on not marking sites, as he claimed he could always remember. He didn’t think he needed to write things down, like the rest of us mortals.’

‘Christ on a bike,’ Patrese said.

‘Don’t blaspheme, Franco,’ Beradino said instantly. ‘You know I don’t like it.’ He turned to Bianca. ‘How often does this kind of thing happen?’

‘Per month, per week, or per day?’

Patrese and Beradino looked at her in astonishment.

‘Are you serious?’ Patrese said.

‘I never joke about my work, Cicillo, you know that.’

Patrese pursed his lips and blew out; Beradino shook his head.

‘And this guy’s family – Bayoumi – they’re suing?’

‘I think so.’

‘Bayoumi.’ Beradino turned the name over, as though inspecting it. ‘Arab?’

‘Egyptian, I think.’

‘What kind of family?’

‘Wife, one son.’

‘How old?’

‘Early twenties, far as I know. Student at Pitt.’

Patrese knew instantly why Beradino was asking. Ask a bunch of Americans chosen at random to play word association with the phrase ‘young Arab man’, and it was a dollar to a dime that ‘hothead’ wouldn’t be far away.

Call it racism, call it common sense; people did both, and more, and they wouldn’t stop till white kids flew airliners into skyscrapers too.

Tuesday, October 19th. 11:24 a.m.

Dr Bayoumi’s wife – widow – Sameera lived out in Oakland, the university district. Her apartment was one of three in a large, rambling house with a porch out front and Greek columns propping up the veranda roof.

Mid-morning but with all the curtains still closed, as if to block out hope as well as light, she offered them Egyptian tea: hot, strong and, at least to the palates of two Italian-American detectives, undrinkable without three heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

She was darker-skinned than they’d imagined. Like many Egyptians, and Sudanese, she was of Nubian descent, Arab by culture rather than race.

They spoke in near-whispers, mindful of the enforced twilight and the evident numbness of Sameera’s grief.

Beradino, sensing that Sameera would expect the elder and more senior man to take the lead, did the talking.

‘As far as you knew, Mrs Bayoumi, was your husband’s operation routine?’

‘I think so.’

‘Dr Redwine didn’t seem unduly concerned, when you met him beforehand?’

‘No.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How did Dr Redwine seem to you, after your husband died?’

‘I haven’t seen him since then.’

‘Not once?’

‘No.’

‘Have you tried to see him?’

‘Of course. But always, he busy. I remember something Abdul always like to say. With great power comes great responsibility. But Dr Redwine not see it like that.’

‘Would you say the hospital has been unco-operative?’

‘Yes. Very. Not just like that, blocking him from me. I ask for documents, records, and they no interested. Treat me like fly to swat. So I call lawyer.’

She handed them a glossy brochure from the firm in question, a medical malpractice specialist. Patrese glanced at it. Swanky downtown address, shots of a happy but industrious multi-ethnic workforce that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Benetton commercial, and a commitment in bold typeface to ‘help you down the path to a better tomorrow’.

‘What are your motivations for bringing proceedings, Mrs Bayoumi?’

To many Americans, accustomed to a culture where legal representation can seem not just a right but a duty, the question might have sounded odd. But Beradino figured Sameera had enough first-generation immigrant still in her to make recourse to the law a last rather than a first option.

The consideration she gave the question before answering showed him to be right.

‘Abdul and I, we had our own, how you say, parts in the marriage,’ she said eventually. ‘He go to work, I make the home, look after Mustafa. When Mustafa grow up, we keep the parts the same. Abdul still work, I make home, Mustafa live here still. We all happy that way. Maybe not modern, American, but it work for us.

‘And now Abdul gone, where will I find job? I am not educated, not college. Companies, they see my resumé, they say no, no interview, even. So how do I live? That’s why I call lawyer.

‘I want – all I want – is money Abdul earn between now and he retiring. Not a dollar more. I know it not millions, but it enough. That why lawyer, nothing more.

‘I know we can do nothing to make Abdul come back. If you talk of revenge, no, I don’t believe in that. And if the hospital say sorry…’ She made a sound to suggest she thought it unlikely.

‘And Mustafa. What does he think?’

‘Mustafa his own man now. You must ask him.’

‘I understand he’s a student at Pitt, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he studying?’

‘Chemistry.’

‘So that’s where we’d find him now? In the chemistry department?’

‘Not today. Today, he on outreach. At mosque, in Homewood.’

‘We’ll go talk to him there,’ Beradino said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Bayoumi.’

‘May I ask favor?’

‘Sure.’

‘How you say in slang? Go easy on him. For Arab boy, father is most important man in world. To lose that is very hard for him. So for me too. Mustafa is my world now. He my only son. Allah blessed us with him, no more. I lose one man, I no lose another. I do anything for that boy, you understand? Anything.’

1: 09 p.m.

Homewood, Patrese thought; always Homewood. It seemed less a geographical area than a vortex, forever dragging him back in.

On the sidewalk, a handful of youths waved at them, their gestures heavy with sarcasm. Patrese waved back, deadpan, his mind miles away.

After a few seconds, he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw exactly what he expected; a couple of them flipping the detectives the bird, another pair dropping their pants and mooning.

Patrese laughed. Beradino, swiveling round to follow his gaze, was angry.

‘Stop the car, Franco. Let’s go bust their asses.’

‘Ah, they’re just screwin’ around.’

‘To a marked cop car? You let that go, you let anythin’ go. Zero tolerance.’

‘You don’t like black people?’

‘I got nothin’ against black people. I’m a good Christian man, Franco. Jesus says that we should accept all men equally. I just don’t like these black people. If they were white people actin’ this way, I wouldn’t like ’em any better. Shoot, I’d probably like ’em worse.’ He pointed forward. ‘There, that’s the mosque.’

There was a plaque on the building’s front wall. In 1932, it read, Pittsburgh became home to the first chartered Muslim mosque in the United States.

‘What a claim to fame,’ said Beradino, deadpan. ‘Personally, I’d still take the four SuperBowls, you know?’

They stepped inside the main door of the mosque.

It didn’t seem like Osama’s nerve center, that was for sure. No firebrand preachers hollering death to the Great Satan or burning the Stars and Stripes; no rows of prostrate worshippers facing Mecca. Only the rows of shoes lined up inside on gray plastic shelves gave a hint as to the religion of those within.

It seemed more like a social club than a place of worship. People walked in groups or stood around chatting. Patrese and Beradino, watching this, noticed something pretty much simultaneously; most of the mosque-goers were black rather than ostensibly Arab. They could have been in pretty much any major city.

‘Help you?’ a man asked.

‘We’re looking for Mustafa Bayoumi,’ Beradino said.

‘You’ll find him in the outreach center.’ The man extended an arm to his left. ‘Through the double doors, then first right.’

They followed his directions and, after a couple of further inquiries, found Mustafa alone in an office, entering some data on a computer terminal.

Mustafa was skinny, with cheekbones you could cut your wrists on, hair blacker than Reagan’s when he’d been hard at the Grecian 2000, and a neatly trimmed beard. Like his mother, he looked substantially more black than Arab.

Still tapping the keyboard, he looked up. ‘Help you?’ he said.

They sure were polite round here, Patrese thought. That was two more offers of help than he’d usually get in a year in Homewood.

‘We’re with the Pittsburgh police department,’ said Beradino quietly, ‘but we’re not going to flash our badges, because we don’t want to embarrass you or cause a scene. We just want to ask you a few questions.’ He nodded towards a couple of chairs. ‘May we?’

He sat down without waiting for Mustafa’s assent. Patrese followed suit.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘What is it you guys do here? Outreach – what’s that?’

‘It’s, er, reaching out.’

Beradino laughed, pretending to be offended. ‘Hey, educational standards at the PD ain’t that bad just yet. I worked that one out for myself.’

Mustafa smiled too. Patrese said nothing, but he admired Beradino’s approach; relax them, put them at ease, find common ground.

‘Sorry. Outreach is helping people, mainly. We have a day-care facility, programs for entrepreneurs and released inmates, and a health clinic.’

‘Pretty impressive.’ Beradino sounded as though he meant it. ‘Who funds it all?’

‘We receive an annual grant from a non-profit organization called the Abrahamic Interfaith Foundation. In addition, Islam obligates all those who can feed their family to give two and a half per cent of their net worth in alms. Many of us give considerably more, both in time and money. Then there are book sales, telephone fundraisers, auctions, banquets; you name it, people have pitched in and helped out.’

‘Very good. We could use some of that community spirit round my way. But listen, Mustafa – you don’t mind if I call you Mustafa, do you? – we’re not here to admire your work, you know that. We’d like to ask you some questions about Dr Michael Redwine.’

Mustafa’s face darkened. Patrese supposed that was only natural.

‘The man who killed my father, you mean?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill your father.’

‘If you shoot someone, detective, and you mean only to wound them, but instead they die, you’ve still killed them, haven’t you?’

Patrese hoped that neither of them saw him wince.

Beradino chose not to answer the question, and parried it with one of his own. ‘You know Dr Redwine was killed yesterday evening?’

‘I saw it on the news.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Does it matter, how it makes me feel?’

‘It does if I’m asking you.’

Mustafa took a deep breath. ‘All right. I hope he suffered more than any of us could possibly imagine. That enough for you?’

‘Suffered, as in burning in hell?’

‘I don’t care how. It’s not a fraction of what he’s caused my mother and me.’

‘OK. Let me ask: where were you yesterday evening?’

‘At home. I got back about five, and didn’t go out again till this morning.’

‘Is there anyone who can confirm that?’

‘My mother. Of course.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No. Just her. I had nothing to do with Redwine’s death, so I didn’t take the precaution of getting five people to give me an alibi, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I didn’t ask whether you had anything to do with his death.’

‘Why else are you here?’

‘Listen, Mustafa, I’m sorry for your loss –’

‘That’s what people always say, when they don’t know what else to say.’

‘– but you being aggressive and giving me static isn’t going to help anyone here.’

‘Your father still alive, Detective?’

‘He is, as it happens.’

‘Then don’t tell me not to get aggressive. Not till it happens to you.’

Patrese reckoned Mustafa had a point. Best keep that thought to himself.

When it came to unsettling suspects, Patrese knew Beradino was a master. His trick – rather, one of his tricks – was to use their mood against them, as a martial arts practitioner will exploit his opponent’s weight and momentum to his own advantage.

If a suspect or a witness was calm, so too would Beradino be, looking to lull them into a sense of ever greater security until they, forgetting he was a cop rather than their best friend, let slip something they regretted.

If, on the other hand, they were upset, as Mustafa Bayoumi was increasingly becoming, Beradino would stoke the fires of their agitation as high as he could until they lost their sense of self-control – and again let slip something they regretted.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘You only help Muslims?’ His tone was suddenly snappy, all reasonableness and bonhomie gone as though in a puff of smoke.

‘We help our community.’

‘You proselytize?’

Patrese knew what Beradino was thinking. Places like Homewood – poor, deadbeat ’hoods where those who didn’t seek their oblivion via the liquor store or the crack house were open to almost anything which promised to improve their lot – were fertile grounds for Islamic recruiters.

And everyone knew what they were like, because everyone had seen footage of the Nation of Islam: Farrakhan and his bow-tie-wearing, bean-pie-selling disciples who hated whites, Jews, women and gays.

‘We welcome those who choose to come to us. Your religion does the same.’

‘Our religion was what America was founded on.’

‘And what an unqualified success Christianity’s been, hasn’t it?’

‘What does that mean?’ Beradino was no longer acting annoyed, Patrese knew; this was the real deal. The two of them had long ago agreed not to discuss religion, because it always ended in arguments; Beradino the devout, Patrese the unbeliever.

‘Jesus died for your sins, right?’

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘Then explain this to me. Either that was for everyone’s sins right up to the moment he died, in which case we’ve had two thousand years of some serious bad behavior left unchecked. Or he died for everyone’s sins then and for all time; in which case it hasn’t helped much, has it?’

Patrese almost laughed. It was a question he’d asked himself, and others, more than once, and no one – not teachers, not priests, probably not even the Pope himself – had been able to answer it properly.

‘Not to mention the impeccable behavior of priests up and down the country where young children are involved,’ Mustafa continued.

‘A few bad apples. Sinners, as we all are. Everyone in your culture’s perfect?’

‘I look around here, and I see people brought up to believe in the Christian faith. But I also know that, round here, all too often BC means before crack, and AD means after death. That’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough just to pray and hope everything will turn out all right. We have to go out and do the work.

‘And that work starts here. Islam prohibits drugs and alcohol. You stay off those, you can be a productive member of society. You turn to them, and you’re just waiting to die. And if the only way out of that is through Islam, then so be it. Because Islam places paramount importance on the education of our children. To be a teacher is a special calling. When I’ve finished my studies, I’m hoping to teach at the school we’re raising funds to build here; preschool to fifth grade.’

‘Somewhere to train the next generation of bombers?’

‘Not at all. A school where everybody has a strange name, so nobody feels alone. Muslim kids feel like outsiders in public schools. No matter how good those schools are, they can’t teach Islamic beliefs and morals. So we will. Kids hate being different; so we’ll make them not different. And you know why?’

‘I’ve no doubt you’re going to tell me.’

‘Because we have to do it ourselves now. Since 9/11, we haven’t been able to receive money from other Muslim countries, even from registered Islamic charities.’

‘That’s damn right. There’s a war on.’

Mustafa didn’t take the bait. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

‘We relied on that money a lot; perhaps too much. That was one of the reasons why, before 9/11, we – the immigrant Muslims – didn’t really have that much to do with the black Muslims.

‘Then suddenly we couldn’t move for surveillance, police raids, airport searches, special registration, and so on. All the time, we had to prove our loyalty to the flag. Still do, every day. I look black anyway, but African-American Muslims sympathize. They know what it’s like; not from being Muslim, but from being black.’

He looked at Beradino first, then Patrese; two white men who he felt would never understand, not fully.

‘We’re all niggers now, basically.’

Thursday, October 21st. 10:26 a.m.

You’ve seen homicide division rooms umpteen times on the silver screen, and it’s one of the few aspects of police work that TV gets right. There really are desks piled high with report forms and coffee cups, and the detectives sitting at those desks really do crick the phones into their necks while pecking two-fingered at their keyboards.

Amidst the barely controlled hubbub of a major homicide investigation, Patrese read the poster above Beradino’s head for the umpteenth time that day.

The Fifth Commandment, Book of Exodus, 20, of THE HOLY BIBLE.

Then: THE OATH OF PRACTICAL HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION.

Beradino, who’d written the poster and had it typeset himself, had clearly never met a capital letter he didn’t like.

Homicide investigation is a profound duty, and constitutes a heavy responsibility. Just as there is no crime worse than taking someone else’s life, so there is no task more important than bringing to justice the people who crossed that line. As such, let no person deter you from the truth and your own personal commitment to see that justice is done. Not only for the deceased, but for the surviving family as well.

And remember – ‘you’re working for God.’

No, Patrese thought angrily; he was working for the city of Pittsburgh. There were times when Beradino’s incessant God-squadding really got on his nerves, and this was one of them – not least because he was pissed anyway.

Every cop knows that the first forty-eight hours after a murder are critical. If they haven’t got a good lead in that time, the chances of solving the crime are halved as evidence disappears, suspects flee, and stories change.

More than forty-eight hours after Michael Redwine had been torched, Patrese and Beradino had nothing.

Sure, they had an autopsy report, but that just confirmed Beradino’s findings – that Redwine, alive when the fire started, had died from smoke inhalation.

And sure, Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi was provided by his mother, and her alone. But it was hard to see what they could do other than take it at face value. Yes, Sameera could have been lying – she’d said she’d do anything for him, after all – but to test that, they’d have to give her the full nine yards, on a hunch that was flimsy at best.

It didn’t take much imagination to see how carpeting a recent widow that way would look.

Because Patrese and Beradino had to accept Mustafa’s alibi, they had no probable cause to go search the house in Oakland for anything that might connect him to the fire. Even if they did get a warrant, and even if he had been involved, he was clearly a smart kid. He’d have ditched any clothing and other items that might have linked him to the blaze long before now.

That was how they consoled themselves, at any rate; because nothing and no one else in Redwine’s life seemed to point to any other suspects.

Every resident of The Pennsylvanian had been interviewed, as had all doormen, cleaners and maintenance workers; anyone with access to the building, in other words. No one had seen anything.

‘Either they’re on the level, or someone should win a damn Oscar,’ Patrese said.

It still didn’t answer what had started as the $64,000 question and was surely now into six figures – how had the killer got into The Pennsylvanian?

They retraced Redwine’s movements on the last day of his life. He’d been at Mercy in the morning, given a speech at a conference downtown after lunch, and been due to go to the opera – La Bohème – that evening. Nothing untoward.

They’d taken twelve officers from the regular police department and used them to turn Redwine’s life upside down. No friend, acquaintance or incident was deemed too insignificant or commonplace; everyone was followed up, checked out.

TIE, Beradino told the uniforms, TIE – trace, interview, eliminate as a suspect.

They found zilch. Redwine had been a regular attendee at church, done his part at charity fundraisers, and enjoyed hiking and fishing in his spare time. No embittered ex-girlfriends, no secret gay lovers, no outstanding sexual harassment cases. Even the professional jealousies were no more than the usual found among surgeons, which was to say at once endemic and excruciatingly professional.

All in all, no reason for anybody to have killed Redwine, let alone by such a horrific method as burning alive.

The fire had destroyed any physical evidence worth the name, so Patrese and Beradino could find no joy there either. Instant forensic breakthroughs were strictly the preserve of TV shows titled with snappy acronyms. Pittsburgh PD didn’t even have its own DNA lab. It had to use the FBI’s, which had a backlog running into the hundreds of thousands.

It couldn’t use private labs, as their results were inadmissible in court, due to concerns over accountability and maintenance of the chain of custody. Only government facilities were acceptable, though the technical standards at private labs were much higher; not surprisingly, perhaps, given that they were staffed by the best testers, many of whom had left the state sector because they wanted to be paid more, exacerbating staff shortages in public labs and increasing the backlog…

Franz Kafka was not dead, clearly. He was alive, well, and living in Pittsburgh.

Nothing of great value seemed to have been taken, ruling out burglary as a motive. Redwine was no serious collector of art, his TV set and computers were still in the apartment (though burnt to cinders, obviously), and everyone who knew him agreed that he never carried more than a hundred bucks or so in cash.

Every known arsonist within Allegheny County was interviewed, bar those already in prison. All of them had alibis for the night in question. Most said they’d pick easier targets than a portered apartment block, and that they certainly wouldn’t kill anyone in the process. Arson was a crime against property, not people.

Self-serving bullshit, Patrese thought, but anyway…

There was always the possibility that one of the uniforms had stumbled across the crucial bit of information without realizing it. Officers were human, not computers. Long days made them tired, repetitive interviews numbed and bored them. They could miss things and make mistakes, especially towards the end of a shift. But this was the same for every homicide investigation in history. Nothing you could do about it.

There are three nightmare scenarios for cops working homicide cases, and it looked very much as though Beradino and Patrese were facing one of them.

First, that they’d overlooked something so screamingly obvious that, if they ever did find it, they’d almost certainly be carpeted from here to Cincinnati and back again.

Second, that Redwine’s murder was a case of mistaken identity, and that in order to find the perpetrator, they’d need to discover first who he thought he’d killed.

Third, that the murder was the type of case that’s the absolute hardest to solve; a stranger homicide, where the connection between killer and victim is obvious only to one or both of them.

Killer spotting victim in the street; victim in the wrong place at the wrong time; victim who’d caught the attention of killer; and any or all of these happening for reasons unknown to the police, because they could simply have never imagined or reconstructed them, short of knowing each quotidian incident and occurrence in the lives of every single one of Pittsburgh’s citizens, and even the Soviet Union hadn’t managed such overwhelming control over its people.

Redwine’s ex-wife and sons had flown in from Tucson, their eyes rimmed red with tears and fatigue.

That was the worst part, Patrese felt; having to look these good people in the eye and say yes, we’re doing all we can to find the murderer, we’re following all lines of inquiry, we’re confident we’ll bring him to justice; when all the while he knew, and he knew they knew, that what he was really saying was this: we don’t have a damn clue.

Not a goddamn clue.

Thursday, October 28th. 3:51 p.m.

Flames leapt high and jagged around the burgers on the grill.

Crammed into a sweltering kitchen, wearing a ridiculous polyester uniform with her hair in a net as though she’d just been caught by a trawler, Jesslyn’s anger mashed in tight oblongs.

The interview had been bad enough. Kevin the manager had proved as snotty as he was spotty, sneering at her throughout it all with a contempt he didn’t even bother to disguise. Why did she want this job? Why had she left her previous employment? Did she have references? Had she ever worked in the fast-food industry before?

And on, and on, and on, when they both knew this was a minimum-wage job that almost literally a monkey could do, and here was Kevin treating it as though he were personally responsible for choosing the next UN Secretary-General.

She even had to work some Sundays, her religious convictions be damned. Not because Kevin had forced her to – she could have claimed her constitutional right to freedom of religion and threatened him with a lawsuit if he’d even tried – but because she’d done Sunday shifts at Muncy so she could preach in the chapel there. Her suddenly spending every Sunday at home would arouse suspicion in a moron, and Mark was certainly not that.

But even if she did find a way to tell him about Mara, she thought, he wouldn’t understand, not really. Prison was one of those things you could never explain. If you knew what it was like, you didn’t need to be told. If you didn’t know, mere words weren’t enough.

Prison was a pressure cooker, a place of white heat where life had a suffocating intensity. Friendships, still less love affairs, weren’t casual, to be picked up and put down whenever one felt like it; they were life-rafts of survival in a place that tried to crush the soul, raging torrents of defiance and pride in being human.

Within prison walls, the rules changed. What went on inside stayed inside. That was why Jesslyn was so careful to keep her two worlds apart. Mark had some of his colleagues over to dinner or Sunday lunch at their condo from time to time; she never did. Mark brought documents home, discussed work problems with her, gave her tidbits of department gossip; she never did any of that either. If he thought it weird, he’d long since accepted it as just the way she was.

And with Mara, who’d been such a bright shining Technicolor light in the pallors of endless institutional gray…well, Jesslyn had been honored, frankly, that Mara, beautiful, radiant, poised, fragrant Mara who somehow kept her poise and fragrance in those conditions, had chosen her when she could have had pretty much anyone.

And then she’d gone. Gone in stages, each of them more painful than the last.

First, Mara had called time on their relationship.

One day, just like that, out of the blue, Mara had said she didn’t want to go on with it. Jesslyn had been standing six feet away, yet she’d honestly thought Mara had hit her, such was the physical shock. She’d rushed to the restroom and brought up her breakfast. Food poisoning, she’d said, before going home. They wouldn’t see her cry on the prison floor; not then, not ever. Crying was weakness, and weakness was death.

In the weeks that followed, Jesslyn had begged, pleaded, reasoned, shouted and threatened, all to no avail. Sometimes she sought Mara out; sometimes she tried to avoid her. Each time she saw her, it felt as though someone had opened up a wound and started scraping salt into it.

Second, Mara had been released; back into the outworld.

If seeing her had been a torment, Jesslyn quickly realized that not seeing her was a hundred times worse. Even after their split, Mara had been the center of Jesslyn’s universe, the point around which she orientated herself and her days.

Now all Jesslyn had was the whisper of Mara’s name in corridor gossip, and the few of Mara’s keepsakes she’d managed to hold on to, inhaling their scent as though it were the breath of life.

Third, Mara had officially complained about Jesslyn’s conduct.

Briefly, surgingly, Jesslyn had hoped Mara had brought the complaints as some warped way of trying to keep Jesslyn in her life. But she could only fool herself for so long and, as the process had ground forwards, Jesslyn had let her feelings curdle towards hatred, if only in hope that it would harden into a carapace around her heart.

She’d always thought of Mara as the innocent victim of an egregious miscarriage of justice. Now, she’d forced herself to damn her as the devil incarnate, vile and evil murderess, fit only for an eternity in hell.

And finally, obviously, when Muncy had given Jesslyn her marching orders.

Jesslyn stared into the flames.

Stripe for stripe, burning for burning.

Was it fair, what had happened to her? Was it fair that murderers, rapists and pedophiles were walking the streets while she was here, frying burgers made of meat she wouldn’t give to a dog? Was it fair that she’d given twenty years of her life to trying to make the world a better place, and in return had been given half an hour to pack up and go?

It wasn’t just Mara she’d grown to hate, of course. It was everyone who worked the system for their own ends, and then blamed that very system whenever they didn’t have the courage to take responsibility themselves. It was lawyers who made people terrified of using common sense; it was media executives who broadcast whatever got them ratings, no matter the harm to those involved; it was judges who gave light sentences; it was doctors who kept alive people any decent society would have executed. It was all these parasites, and more.

Jesslyn sought solace where she always did, in the Book; Ecclesiastes 3: 3–8.

‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’

Saturday, October 30th. 9:32 p.m.

Patrese’s sisters had gone to dinner with Bishop Kohler. Patrese had turned down the invitation. There were probably ways of spending Saturday night which he’d find even less appealing than listening to Kohler mouth platitudes by way of trying to offer spiritual succor, but he couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

Instead, he stood on the balcony of his apartment and looked down over the city.

He lived in a block called The Mountvue on Mount Washington, the hill on the city’s south side which rises so giddily that only cable cars can make the ascent. He paid $1,200 a month for the place, at least a third of which was surely for the vista over the city skyline, which would have made postcard sellers kill their grandmas.

Dusk was his favorite time; the moment when the city was held suspended in all its contradictions; halfway between day and night, sanity and madness, picturesque and squalid.

The heart of downtown was called the Golden Triangle, sandwiched between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers and tapering to the point where the two met and joined the Ohio. On crisp fall evenings like this it did indeed seem golden, the sunlight making the thrusting skyscrapers glow as though in belief that the day to come would hold more than the day just passed.

There was the medieval castle of PPG Place, all battlements and crenellations; there the four interlocking silver octagons of the Oxford Center; there the tallest of them all, the USX Tower, a behemoth of exposed steel columns and curtain walls; there the Grant Building flashing P-I-T-T-SB-U-R-G-H in Morse code over and again; and there the blue light on top of the Gulf Building which signified that the temperature was falling.

Patrese loved this city. Always had, always would.

He loved the way Pittsburgh held high the best of American values: hard work, unpretentiousness, renewal. Time was, in the heyday of the steel industry, when it had been virtually uninhabitable: palls of smoke so thick that streetlights had burned all day; desk jockeys who’d left their offices for an hour’s lunch downtown and returned to find their white shirts stained black; rivers so choked with chemicals that they had burned for days on end.

One writer had called Pittsburgh ‘hell with the lid taken off’. He hadn’t found much dissent.

But by the early 1980s the steel industry had shut down, and now hillsides above the mill sites had grown lush and green again. Pittsburgh was a riot of hills and valleys, slopes, hollows, streams, gulches too. It spilled out cockeyed across the landscape’s folds, taking its cues from the terrain.

It was therefore a city of neighborhoods, little worlds of their own separated by earth or water and rejoined by bridges. Pittsburgh had more bridges than Venice, something of which the tourist board was inordinately proud; that, and the fact that the ’Burgh had been voted America’s Most Livable City.

That kind of shit was always double-edged, Patrese thought. The surest way to stop it being Most Livable was to attract all the people who came here because it was Most Livable.

There was a sudden explosion of light from below as the sun reached just the right angle to fizz off one of the plate-glass corners on PPG Place. Patrese didn’t know whether the architect had designed it so, but he caught his breath every time he saw it happen.

He just wished Pittsburgh looked as good in Homewood as it did from up here.

Sunday, October 31st. 9:24 p.m.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Father,’ I say, ‘but I have some sins I’d like to confess.’

Bishop Kohler turns to face me.

I see two competing strands of thought in his expression: the temporal, which says it’s late and he wants to be leaving; and the spiritual, which demands he give what succor he can to a sinner.

‘Of course, my child,’ he says, biting down on his annoyance.

‘I won’t keep you long. I know you must want to get home.’

Home, in this case, being an eleven-bedroom mansion set in a couple of acres on the border between Shadyside and Squirrel Hill.

Far too large and ostentatious for a man of the cloth, you might think, and you’d be right. I read an interview where he defended his decision to live there. The mansion was given to the church just after the war and has been used by every bishop since; Giovanni Cardinal Montini stayed there once, and later he became Pope Paul VI; it’s useful for meetings and putting up visiting dignitaries; and on and on and on.

And yet he knows, as I know, as everyone knows, that what he should do, if he was as humble and holy as he makes out, is go and live in a seminary among those training to be priests, and sell the mansion, using the profits to help with the church’s work. The place would fetch a couple of million on the open market. Imagine what good could be done with that amount of money.

So forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of Bishop Kohler’s spiritual commitment.

Still, in the same interview, he said he liked to spend time alone in the Cathedral of Saint Paul, the diocese’s mother church out near the university in Oakland; that he preferred on occasion to do the locking-up rounds himself, solo, the better to be alone with God in His house.

Which is why I knew I’d find him here, now, and without witnesses.

Kohler leads me in silence to the confessional. He asks me nothing about myself, I think, the better to maintain the anonymity of the confession. He may know my face, but not my name, nor anything else about me.

He’s not to know that, in a few minutes, all this will have ceased to matter for him.

He motions me into one door of the confessional, and himself steps into the other.

The confessional is in classic style; two compartments separated by a latticed grille on which is hung a crucifix. I kneel on the prie-dieu.

I don’t know how to begin. I’ve always thought confession should be between the sinner and their God, with no other human present, so this is difficult for me.

‘Has it been long since your last confession?’ Kohler whispers.

It’s only the two of us in the entire place, but the near-darkness of the confessional – and of the cathedral itself – seems to make whispering appropriate.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘Would you like me to remind you of the purpose of confession?’

‘Yes.’

‘You must confess your sins in order to restore your connection to God’s grace and to escape hell, particularly if you have committed a mortal sin.’

‘What’s a mortal sin?’

‘A mortal sin must be about a serious matter, have been committed with full consent, and be known to be wrong.’

‘What kind of sins are mortal sins?’

‘Murder, for sure. Blasphemy. Adultery.’

He can’t see me, but I smile.

‘And what happens if these sins aren’t confessed?’ I ask.

‘It’s a dogmatic belief of the faith that if a person guilty of mortal sin dies without either receiving the sacrament or experiencing perfect contrition with the intention of confessing to a priest, that person will receive eternal damnation.’ He pauses. ‘These things are known to all Catholics,’ he adds.

‘I’m sorry, Father.’

‘It must have been a very long time since you last confessed, no?’ Another pause. ‘In order for the sacrament to be valid, the penitent must do more than simply confess their known mortal sins to a priest. They must be truly sorry for each of the mortal sins committed, have a firm intention never to commit them again, and perform the penance imposed by the priest. As well as confessing the types of mortal sins committed, the penitent must disclose how many times each sin was committed.’

I know that whatever’s said in the confessional stays there; this is an absolute, inviolable rule, even if to do otherwise might save lives. Doctors and attorneys can break their pledges of confidentiality in extremis; a priest, never.

So I can tell him, even if everything else goes wrong.

‘I have killed,’ I say.

Kohler gasps; in horror, surprise, perhaps both. He must think it unlikely, but perhaps the tone of my voice lets him know that I’m not joking.

‘How many times?’ he asks, more in a croak than a whisper.

‘More than once.’

‘When did you last kill?’

‘Now.’

I’m up off the prie-dieu and out of the door in a flash, pulling the gasoline can from my bag. I throw open the confessional’s other door and see Kohler there, his mouth a perfect circle of outrage at this violation of religious etiquette if nothing else.

I splash the gasoline on him. For an old man, he still looks strong, but gentle too. Years of turning the other cheek have left him useless in a situation like this.

In another two seconds, maybe three, he might have reacted to the danger; but those are seconds he doesn’t have, seconds I won’t give him.

I light the juggling torch and touch it to his face.

His screams echo loud and bounce round the cathedral, and the flames rush from his skin and clothes to the walls of the confessional, leaping orange through crackling wood as I step back and close the door on him, holding it shut for as long as I can stand before the heat drives me back.

It’s not long, but it’s enough.

‘Isaiah chapter fifty-nine, verse seventeen,’ I shout, so he can hear me above his screaming and through his agonies. ‘“For I put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation upon my head; and I put on the garments of vengeance for clothing, and am clad with zeal as a cloak.”’

The screaming stops, and in its place comes a rasped muttering, the words of a dying man, indistinct but their meaning clear if I strain to hear:

‘God the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.’

10:12 p.m.

The death of a surgeon in an upscale condo block had merited one mildly disgruntled local TV crew. The death of the bishop brought the national networks out in force. They crammed up against bumblebee-striped crime tape and turned glaring camera lights on anyone who stepped inside the police cordon.

At the edge of that cordon, a uniformed officer met Patrese and Beradino and checked their credentials. When he saw Beradino’s name, he touched the checkered band on his hat in respect.

‘Have you adapted?’ Beradino asked.

Adapt, in this case, was a police mnemonic rather than a Darwinian evolutionary imperative. ADAPT: arrest the perpetrator, if possible; detain and identify witnesses and suspects; assess the crime scene; protect the crime scene; and take notes.

‘All but the first, sir.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘Passer-by spotted the flames. Kelly Grubb. He’s over there.’ He indicated a middle-aged man sitting on the trunk of a police cruiser.

Grubb’s expression was typical of people who have stumbled across murder scenes; a mixture, in almost exactly equal parts, of revulsion at the sight and excitement at being part of a police investigation.

‘We’ll talk to him later. Did he alter the scene in any way?’

‘Says he called the fire brigade straight off. Didn’t go in, and they sure as hell wouldn’t have let him in once they got there.’

‘OK.’ More degradation of evidence, that was a given once the fire department had done their thing, but there was no point moaning about it. That was their job, to put out blazes, and damn the consequences, forensic or otherwise.

Beradino thought for a moment, looking towards the spot where the fire department had set up an improvised command post. It was right next to where the TV crews had gathered, and a few uniformed policemen were already shooting the breeze there with the firefighters. Beradino turned back to the officer.

‘Throw up another cordon, a hundred feet further out than this one,’ he said. ‘Keep every civilian – TV crews, general public – behind the new one, the outer one. They start moanin’, threaten to arrest them. They keep moanin’, make good on that threat.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good man.’

Patrese understood Beradino’s logic. At big crime scenes like this, cops meet up. They haven’t seen each other for a while and, since they’re used to such situations, they get to chatting, laughing, ribbing each other. They forget there’s a corpse nearby. They forget people get offended when they think police officers are being insensitive round the dead. Most of all, they forget there are TV mics around that pick up every word they say.

Patrese and Beradino left the uniform shouting at a colleague to bring more yellow-and-black, and headed towards the cathedral; twin-towered and Gothic, with a statue of St Paul mounted on the center pediment.

There was a poster by the entrance. St Paul Cathedral, it read: a foundation of faith, building a future of hope.

Patrese shuddered, and stopped. Beradino gripped his forearm.

‘Franco, listen. You want me to take care of this one alone? I understand.’

Patrese shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Come on, Franco. He was a friend of your family’s, this is the place you just buried your parents. You got a thousand-yard stare on you. Let me handle this.’

‘I told you, Mark, I’m fine.’ Patrese managed a weak laugh. ‘Vacant stare’s probably jet lag.’

‘Huh?’

‘Extra hour’s sleep this morning. When the clocks went back.’

‘Yeah.’ Beradino looked at Patrese a moment more, and then shrugged. ‘OK. You win. Come on.’

The cathedral’s main door was open. Before Patrese and Beradino were inside, they could smell the burning – the piquant aroma of woodsmoke and the half-sweet, half-acrid overlay of charred flesh.

Patrese puffed out his cheeks and rolled his head in a circle, counter-clockwise and then clockwise; preparing the body for what the mind was about to suffer.

A few hours ago, he’d been at Heinz Field, watching his beloved Steelers put thirty-four points past the New England Patriots. Now he was at the holding station inside the door, where he and Beradino put on the usual anti-contamination suits, the ones which made the wearer look like a hybrid astronaut cum sewage treatment worker.

Just a normal day in a homicide detective’s life, in other words.

The cathedral’s nave comprised five aisles beneath pointed arches and ribbed vaulting. The detectives walked between silent pews and past crime-scene officers and firefighters, men whose concerns – secular, scientific – usually had little place in here.

Focus, Patrese told himself, with a ferocity which made his teeth clench. Focus. Don’t think about Kohler, and everything he’d been. There’d be time enough for that later. Just work the scene, the way you would any other homicide.

Kohler’s body was prostrate on the floor, a yard or so in front of the confessional’s ruined timbers; too far simply to have fallen when the confessional collapsed.

He’d tried to escape. Died on his feet, as it were; gone towards death rather than simply waited for death to claim him.

You could mix religion up any way you chose, Patrese thought, believe absolutely in the afterlife and kingdoms beyond this realm; but when it came down to it, simple biological imperatives hardwired into humankind made people fight against the dying of the light. It was nothing to do with soul, or faith, or belief; it was the survival instinct, pure and simple, and it was in you for as long as you breathed.

Kohler looked much as Redwine had; arms raised as though to fight, and clothes – in this case, a bishop’s surplice – melted in patches to his skin.

‘Who could do this?’ Beradino said, and Patrese noted the tremble in his voice. ‘To a man of God, in the house of God…’ He shook his head, as though unable to fathom the limitless depths of mankind’s mendacity, and then turned to Patrese.

‘I know he was a special man, to you and your family…’

‘You could say that.’

‘…and so I promise you, we’ll find whoever did this. Just like when a cop’s killed, Franco, we’ll pull out all the stops. That’s my promise to you, right here.’

Patrese nodded.

The photographer was snapping dispassionately away, a vulture with a Canon. He glanced up from his viewfinder as Beradino and Patrese came to a halt.

‘No chalk fairies, then,’ Beradino said.

No one could draw chalk outlines round the body or any other object until the photographers had been and gone. Photographs had to be representations of the crime scene as it was when the incident was reported, or they were inadmissible as evidence. A good lawyer could get a case thrown out of court for less.

‘None at all,’ the photographer said. ‘You train your cops well.’

‘Sometimes,’ Beradino replied.

Patrese looked around again.

The fire damage was substantially less extensive here than at Redwine’s apartment. Not only had the fire department been on the scene within three minutes of Grubb’s call, but the confessional had also been set against stone walls to one side of the church. Everything else flammable – pews, pulpits, curtains, altar cloths – was far enough away to have prevented the fire from making the jump.

Patrese swallowed hard, and again Beradino noticed; he knew, too, that Patrese hadn’t turned a hair at the sight of Redwine’s body, which had been no less horrific than this.

Patrese looked away, more to avoid Beradino’s quizzical gaze than anything else.

They set to searching the place.

There were several ways of doing this – spiraling out from or into a central point, dividing the area into zones, shoulder-to-shoulder along pre-designated lines – but Beradino’s chosen method was criss-crossing. They’d go up and down the room and then side to side, so that every point was covered twice.

If you missed something the first time, you’d find it the second.

If you missed it the second time, you were in the wrong job.

They used tweezers to pick up objects and bag them, and their elbows to open and close doors. The fewer traces of themselves they left here, the better.

It was lying on the flagstone floor, and Patrese saw it first.

A piece of wood, with what looked like some kind of sculpture attached to it; and broken, that was clear from the ragged edges, smashed rather than cut.

It wasn’t hard to recognize what it was. Half the Western world had one.

A crucifix.

More precisely, the bottom half of one.

The top half wasn’t far away. The break ran diagonally across Jesus’ chest.

‘You got these?’ Patrese asked the photographer.

‘Every which way.’

Patrese squatted down, pulled a transparent plastic evidence bag from his pocket, pushed it inside out and, with the plastic covering his fingers, carefully picked up one half of the crucifix.

It was broken, but not burnt.

Patrese turned it over in his hand.

It felt solid, weighty.

Not the kind of thing which would break if you simply dropped it on the floor.

If you hurled it, yes; but not if you just dropped it.

He looked around again.

Nearby, also smashed, were pieces of wood painted in bright gold and red.

Patrese found three, and could fit them together in his head without needing to check with the photographer again as to whether he could pick them up.

They looked very like the constituent parts of a medieval icon.

‘Mark,’ Patrese said. ‘Look at this.’

‘You look at this, Franco.’

Patrese glanced up; first at Beradino, and then in the direction he was staring.

Beradino was looking at the stained-glass windows high above them; in particular, at the three windows which had been smashed.

11:17 p.m.

Sunday nights in Pittsburgh are more or less traffic-free, so they had a clear run back from Saint Paul to the North Shore.

‘I spoke to him just this morning, you know?’ Patrese said, gliding the car through lights turning back from green to amber.

‘Spoke to who?’

‘Kohler.’

‘You didn’t tell me this.’

‘When could I tell you this? We’ve just been at a murder scene. His murder. I’m telling you now. I spoke to him around nine this morning.’

‘About what?’

Patrese sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

‘You really wanna know?’

‘I don’t ask unless I do.’

‘OK. This is a little personal, which is why I didn’t mention it before. I mean, it’s no big deal, it’s just…I was feeling a bit down, all right? My sisters had gone round to dinner with him the night before. I stayed home, didn’t want to go. Probably drunk a bit too much, felt shitty the next morning, was missing my mom and pop, wanted to talk to someone. Bianca was on shift at Mercy, Valentina…it was Sunday morning, she’d still have been in bed. So I called Kohler.’

‘And how did he seem to you?’

‘Totally normal. I didn’t really pay attention. I was doing most of the talking. He listened. He could have been cooking breakfast at the same time, for all I know.’

‘How long did you talk for?’

‘Six, seven minutes, I don’t know.’

‘You speak to your sisters today?’

‘Went to watch the Steelers with Valentina this afternoon.’

‘She say how Kohler was last night?’

‘Said he was fine. In good humor, in fact.’

Beradino made a moue. ‘Little did he know, huh? First Redwine, now…’

‘There’s no guarantee this is even related to Redwine.’

‘True. Could be copycat, could be coincidence. Method’s the same, location’s completely different. Only a few people had access to where Redwine was killed. Here, anyone could have come in off the street, literally. Few buildings more public than a cathedral.’

‘Why the smashing of the crucifix? The icon, the windows? None of that with Redwine, was there?’

‘Someone who hates religion? Someone who hates Christianity, certainly.’

‘Someone like Mustafa Bayoumi?’

Beradino glanced across at Patrese. ‘He seemed pretty hostile to it, for sure.’

‘So we look at Bayoumi first.’

‘Which means we believe the murders are connected, until proven otherwise.’

‘Yeah.’

‘First, we check his alibi. It’s just his mom again, no one else, we get suspicious.’

‘And we look for any connections between him and Kohler. Did they know each other personally? Did Kohler do something to piss him off?’

‘Or not do something to piss him off? Something Bayoumi thought he should have done, but didn’t? Was the diocese in dispute with the Homewood mosque project? Anything like that.’

‘Perhaps it’s something less concrete. If it is Bayoumi, maybe he chose Kohler as a symbol – as the symbol, the head – of the Catholic church in Pittsburgh?’

Beradino was quiet for a moment.

‘Let’s not get too carried away with Bayoumi, Franco,’ he said. ‘Whether it’s him or not, we turn Kohler’s life upside down, as we did Redwine’s. Who had a reason to kill Kohler? Who knew both Kohler and Redwine? We cross-reference every suspect, every witness, every friend, acquaintance, colleague. Some of Kohler’s parishioners must have been Redwine’s patients, and vice versa.’

‘And what else did they share? Were they members of the same country club? Did they play golf together? Were they on the board of the same charity? Were they members of the same professional association?’

‘Exactly. And on, and on, and on. Like I said before, Franco, back in Saint Paul, far as I’m concerned, this is like a cop killing. We give it full beans. You don’t go round burning bishops. Not on my watch.’

Patrese couldn’t help it. It started as a pricking behind his eyes and a flutter in the base of his throat, and then the tears were coming warm and too fast to stop. He wiped angrily at his face, not least so he could keep driving. Tears were weakness.

Beradino was silent, knowing better than to kill Patrese with kindness.

Patrese sniffed hard, twice, and swallowed.

‘What kind of man could do those things?’ he said. ‘What kind of monster?’

Monday, November 1st. 8:22 a.m.

First thing Monday morning, Chance called Beradino and Patrese into a meeting; the three of them in the room, with Mayor Negley on speakerphone like the voice of God.

Howard Negley was a billionaire businessman who’d won the mayoralty a couple of years back. Drawing a token salary of one dollar, he’d proved himself a dynamic presence in City Hall; too dynamic for most of the old stagers there, who’d swiftly found themselves seeking solace in their directorships. Ostentatiously using his business skills and contacts to help regenerate the city, Negley had consciously set himself apart from the endless infighting of career politicos. The public loved him.

‘I’m not having surgeons and bishops murdered in Pittsburgh, you understand?’ Negley said. ‘I will not stand by and see it happen. It’s bad for the city.’

Bad for your popularity, you mean, thought Patrese.

What Patrese could take from Beradino, as good and honest a cop as you’d find anywhere in the Lower 48, sounded false and shrill from an elected official. Besides, why did Negley always have to talk as though he were addressing a political rally?

‘Whatever you need to find the killer, you got it,’ Negley continued. ‘You want more officers, you tell me. You want men from other jurisdictions, I can arrange that.’

It was all Patrese could do not to rotate his tongue in his cheek. To judge from the expression on Beradino’s face, and even Chance’s, he wasn’t alone in his opinion.

Yes, they could have more officers, from inside Allegheny County and outside too, but that wasn’t within the mayor’s power to offer, let alone make happen.

Typical Negley, Patrese thought. No wonder he’d married a Hollywood actress. The only thing more titanic than the mutual appreciation society would have been the clash of egos.

He put it quickly from his mind, and turned his attention back to the room.

‘You should also bring the FBI in on this,’ squawked Negley from the box.

Patrese was about to say he’d suggest the same thing – he knew Caleb Boone, the head of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office, and thought him a good guy – when he saw Chance look at Beradino, and Beradino shake his head.

‘We don’t think that’s appropriate at this juncture, sir,’ Chance said.

Patrese knew Chance was a political animal; few people rose as high in the force as he’d done without being one. But he was also first and foremost a cop. Therefore, as he’d demonstrated at Patrese’s disciplinary hearing, he was flatly opposed to anything or anyone which threatened the integrity and independence of the police department.

The FBI was top of that list. It was a turf war, and it was as atavistic and ineradicable as all conflict. There would always be turf; therefore there would always be war.

‘Why the hell not?’ Negley snapped.

‘Because all they’ll do is muddy the waters, sir. The more agencies you involve, the more confusion, which helps no one but the killer. Besides, we’re perfectly capable of handling this investigation ourselves.’

‘The FBI has unparalleled resources. It also tracks extremists – Islamic extremists, other religious fanatics – who might have wanted to do this.’

‘Running to the G-Men at the drop of a hat doesn’t send out the right message, sir. These are crimes against Pittsburghers. Pittsburghers want to see their own police force solve them.’

‘It’s obvious you’ve got a serial killer here, so you must call the FBI in. The Bureau has infinitely more experience than you in dealing with such people.’

Chance actually licked his lips before replying.

‘I’m afraid not, sir, on both counts.’

‘I’m warning you…’

‘We don’t yet have a serial killer, sir, not necessarily. We have two murders, not necessarily linked. If they do prove to be linked, the FBI’s own criteria state a minimum of three before a murderer can be considered serial. And even then, we don’t have to call them in at all. Whether or not to seek the Bureau’s help is the decision of the local police department. Right now, we choose not to invite them.’

‘Allen, you know me well enough to know I’m not a man you want to annoy.’

‘And, sir, you know me well enough to know I’m not a man who needs to be told how to do my job. I don’t tell you how to run the city; don’t tell me how best to catch this man.’

Negley was drawing breath to say something else, but Chance beat him to it.

‘Now, if you’ll excuse us, sir, we have a killer to catch.’

11:30 a.m.

Press conferences were usually humdrum, routine affairs; a few crime correspondents, a couple of detectives, and a department press officer who was underpaid and under-motivated in equal measures.

They’d discuss a bar shooting, a domestic murder, a gang hit. The police would give their side of the story; the reporters would dutifully check names and details; the press officer would make random interjections to remind everyone he existed.

Small-time crimes, small-time meetings. Ninety-nine times over a hundred, they could have convened round a table at Starbucks.

The hacks didn’t tend to question the official version of events. If they did, they’d gradually find themselves frozen out of information and access; then their jobs would go to someone else, someone more prepared to toe the line.

Besides, the public appetite for other people’s disasters was insatiable. It didn’t really matter what the news was, as long as it was bad. Every media man knew the truth of the axiom: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’

But every now and then, those leads slipped from the crime beat to general news.

It could be something shockingly grotesque. There was the floater the cops had pulled from the Monongahela whose skin had slipped off the hands like a pair of gloves; the dog who’d chewed off his owner’s face because she’d died and there was no one to feed him; and, most celebrated of all, most gasped at and laughed over, the schizo who’d cut open his stomach and pulled out his guts before cutting them into neat pieces with a pair of tin snips.

Or it could involve someone important. Someone like Bishop Kohler.

The police department found the largest room available, and even so it was bulging at the seams. Reporters brandishing notebooks and voice recorders annexed every chair going; TV cameras ringed the back and sides of the room like a monk’s tonsure.

Chance led Beradino and Patrese into the room, holding his hands up as he did so; though whether to acknowledge the assembled multitude or shield his eyes from the popping of flashbulbs, Patrese couldn’t tell.

Three chairs had been arranged behind a table. Chance sat in the middle, gesturing that Patrese and Beradino should park their butts either side of him, as though he were Jesus and they the thieves.

Chance’s presence was largely symbolic. He was there for one reason only: to show the police were taking this murder so seriously that an assistant police chief would deign to come and break bread with the masses.

This was a double-edged sword, of course. If Patrese and Beradino found the killer, Chance would share the credit. If they failed, they’d fail alone.

Even though he was the junior man, and even though he’d been up half the night consoling his sisters – both of them predictably devastated by Kohler’s murder – Patrese did most of the talking.

Beradino despised the media, and made little secret of it. He disliked being second-guessed by reporters he considered uninformed at best and irresponsible at worst, and he hated their tacit demands that the police work to news deadlines rather than at an investigation’s natural pace.

Patrese took a more pragmatic approach. He figured that the media were part and parcel of every major homicide investigation, so he might as well accept it. Better to have them inside the tent pissing out than vice versa. The more he could run them, the less he ran the risk of them running him.

Picking questioners with a practiced hand, Patrese performed the traditional detectives’ balancing act in such situations: give enough to keep the media happy, not enough to jeopardize the investigation.

He pointed to a man with a mane of hair that would have shamed a lion.

‘Ed Sharpe, KDKA. You believe these killings are connected?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind, but obviously we’d be foolish not to be looking for connections. Burning bodies isn’t especially common, either as MO or signature.’

MO, modus operandi, is the way a killer goes about his business, the things he needs to do to effect the murders as efficiently as possible. Signature is what he needs to do to make the murder worthwhile, be it emotionally, physically or sexually.

The problem for Beradino and Patrese was this. They couldn’t be sure whether burning was signature or MO without knowing the killer’s internal logic, but finding that logic might be impossible unless they worked out the burning’s significance; whether the killer had burnt Redwine and Kohler because it had been the easiest option available to him, or because he’d felt compelled to.

‘Andy Rose, Post-Gazette. Were the victims alive when they were burned?’

‘Not as far as we can establish.’ Patrese was proud of his poker face. ‘We believe they’d been asphyxiated first, and then set on fire.’

And so, when the crazies started ringing up – as they would, sure as night followed day – and started claiming to have used a silk scarf or gimp ball on the victims, Patrese and Beradino could dismiss them out of hand.

‘Jess Schuring, 60 Minutes. Is it significant that Bishop Kohler was killed in the cathedral? Some kind of religious aspect?’

The poker face stayed on. ‘Again, not that we can establish. Probably just the place where the killer knew the bishop would be at a certain time.’

‘But some of the stained-glass windows had been smashed.’

Patrese thought fast. The broken windows were visible from the street outside, so there was no point trying to deny it. He’d have to give a plausible explanation instead.

‘Preliminary investigations suggest that the heat of the fire shattered them.’

He didn’t mention the crucifixes and icons, of course. Nor did he pass on the fact that the fire had also damaged a print of Michelangelo’s Hand of God Giving Life to Adam – an elderly, bearded God wrapped in a swirling cloak, his right arm outstretched to impart the spark of life into the first man.

Keeping these details quiet was another filter for the lunatics.

‘Hugo Carr, Philadelphia Inquirer. You think the Human Torch has a previous history of arson?’

‘I’m sorry?’ It was Beradino, tight-lipped with anger. ‘The Human Torch?’

‘You know. The Fantastic Four?’

‘Is this some kind of nickname for the killer?’

‘If you like.’

‘No, Mr Carr, I don’t like. I don’t like at all. I don’t like giving some cutesy moniker to anyone who does what this man does. I won’t be calling him the Human Torch or anything else like that. Nor will anyone else working this case. If they do, they’ll be reassigned before they can draw another breath. Is that clear?’

Subdued: ‘Yes.’

Beradino gestured towards Patrese: Go on.

‘We’re interviewing known arsonists in the area, of course,’ Patrese said. ‘We’ve found indications of accelerant at both scenes, but nothing too sophisticated. Certainly nothing that would rule out, you know, anyone but an experienced firestarter.’

Nothing that would need advanced chemistry, either; but Sameera Bayoumi had told them that Mustafa had spent the previous evening with her, had left for Philadelphia first thing this morning, and wouldn’t be back till Thursday.

Patrese looked straight down the lens of the KDKA camera. He knew Pittsburghers would appreciate him addressing them through their own, hometown, channel rather than one of the national networks.

‘I’m asking you, the public, to help us on this one. The police can’t be everywhere. You can; you are. Be our eyes and ears. Please, if you’ve seen anything, heard anything, noticed anything unusual, ring in and tell us. Don’t worry if it seems too small or insignificant or irrelevant. Let us be the judge of that. You never know; your piece of information could be the one that makes the difference.’

That kind of logic – it could be you – got people buying lottery tickets, so Patrese figured it was worth a try here. He knew that too much information could, and often did, swamp homicide task forces, but better too much than too little. Given enough time, manpower and luck, you could always find the needle in the haystack.

But if the needle wasn’t there to start with, you had no chance.

12:57 p.m.

For a man who’d presumably believed that earthly riches were a bar to the kingdom of God, Patrese thought, Bishop Kohler had sure hedged his bets.

He’d been to Kohler’s official residence on several occasions, but it was only now, with the time – and indeed the duty – to search every room from top to bottom, that he appreciated quite how lavish it was.

The house itself was double-fronted, finished in red brick and light gray stone with copper detailing long since oxidized to sea-foam green. Out back, a magnolia tree stood proud in magenta and mauve above perfectly maintained lawns and flowerbeds.

Inside, chandeliers sparkled in shards of silver crystal. Banisters were carved in dark oak and walnut. Intricate reliefs glided across four-square stone fireplaces.

It wasn’t just the quality of the house which struck Patrese, but its size too. Nine thousand square feet over three stories. Eleven bedrooms and six bathrooms, plus a library, a morning room, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a butler’s pantry. Patrese had stayed in smaller hotels than this place.

All for one man, living alone.

It seemed to Patrese a terrible waste – no, more than a waste; hypocrisy and cant of the highest order – for Kohler to have had all this to himself. Sure, part of his job had involved entertaining, and accommodating visitors to the diocese, but still.

Though it was a dull afternoon, the high ceilings and large windows meant that Patrese and Beradino didn’t need to turn the lights on just yet. Quiet draped across the house like a blanket; the city may have been all around them, but it had been reduced to a gentle, distant hum, no more.

They were looking for everything and nothing; something, anything, which might help them discover who’d killed Kohler.

They started at the bottom of the house and worked upwards.

In the basement was a makeshift gym with a treadmill, an exercise bike, and a rack of free weights. The bike’s crank arms were rusty, and a cobweb stretched across the treadmill’s display screen.

The adjacent wine cellar had seen more use. Patrese counted more than five hundred bottles, their racks labeled in Kohler’s copperplate: Goosecross Cabernet, Rutherford Merlot.

But there was nothing which could possibly be relevant to the investigation in either room; nor in the living room, the morning room, the dining room, the kitchen or the pantry.

It wasn’t just evidence towards the murder they lacked, Patrese thought, but evidence of Kohler’s life, full stop. If Kohler had read, it hadn’t been for pleasure; the only books on the shelves were religious ones. The TV set looked like it dated from the Cuban missile crisis. There were no videos, no DVDs. A handful of CDs, classical and choral music. No family photographs, of course; Kohler had had no family.

You couldn’t give your life to God and live among humans, Patrese thought, not if you wanted to do both properly. Making a man go so far from his primal urges wasn’t natural. It certainly wasn’t healthy.

They went into the library.

‘We’ll find something here,’ Beradino said. ‘Read your Agatha Christie.’

He was right. They did find something there; more precisely, in the top drawer of the antique bureau where Kohler had worked on his papers.

It was a photo of a young man, probably fourteen or fifteen, dressed in the College of the Sacred Heart football uniform. He was squatting on his haunches, his helmet dangling from his right hand, and he was smiling up at the camera.

It was a photo of Patrese.

Not just Patrese, when they searched the bureau further.

Hundreds of children. Patrese reckoned they ranged in age from eleven to sixteen, give or take. Many were in Sacred Heart school uniforms, purple blazers with an elaborate crest on the breast pocket. Some were in football gear; others wore choir surplices. Boys outnumbered girls by about two to one.

All of them were fully dressed. There wasn’t even a bare chest in sight, let alone any nudity, and certainly nothing which could be described as in any way sexual.

Beradino was silent, but even so Patrese could sense his relief. He remembered that Beradino, while arguing with Mustafa Bayoumi at the mosque a couple of weeks back, had dismissed abusive priests as bad apples. Beradino believed. It would have devastated him to discover that the bishop himself had been a pedophile; that the apples had been rotten not just to the core but to the top too.

‘You recognize these kids?’ Beradino asked.

‘Some of them, yeah. The ones who were there same time as me, sure.’

‘The ones you recognize; you guys were his favorites?’

‘I guess.’ Patrese riffled through a few prints till he found a couple of other guys in football uniform. ‘Kohler coached the football team. You played football, you were a bit…’ – Patrese sought the right word – ‘special. Yeah, special. We called him the Pigskin Padre.’

‘Pigskin Padre. I like that.’ Beradino laughed softly and let a stack of photos fall gently on to the desk, where they fanned out as though dealt by a croupier. ‘You have favorite teachers as a kid, so why can’t teachers have favorite kids, huh?’

He gestured round the room; not at what was there, but at what wasn’t.

‘He had no one else, did he?’

2: 01 p.m.

They boxed the photos and sent them back by police courier to the North Shore, with orders that every child pictured should be traced and interviewed. The Sacred Heart’s ad ministrative office would have contact details for its alumni; they should start there.

At the edge of the police cordon around the bishop’s house, a woman with immaculately coiffed dark hair was talking urgently to one of the uniforms. He looked in the detectives’ direction. When they’d finished giving the courier his instructions, he hurried over.

‘That lady lives next door,’ he said. ‘She wants to tell you something.’

Patrese sized her up as they approached. Mid-forties, a figure which suggested good genes or a fastidious diet, blouse and skirt tailored just so, and a forehead whose perfection screamed Botox.

Typical Squirrel Hill dame, in other words.

‘Yesterday morning…’ she began.

‘Excuse me,’ Beradino said. ‘You are?’

‘I’m what?’

‘Your name.’

‘My name is Katharine Horowitz. I live there.’ She pointed to the nearest house, thirty yards away. It was half the size of the bishop’s, which still left it four times as big as Patrese’s apartment. ‘Yesterday morning, I heard the bishop shouting.’

‘Shouting?’

‘Yes. Like he was arguing with someone.’

Beradino looked across to Katharine’s house, and then back again. ‘You heard this all the way from there to here?’

‘I was in the garden.’

‘On a Sunday morning in November?’

‘I had some trimming and clipping to finish off before winter sets in for good. Anyhow, it wasn’t that cold yesterday. And so I could see that Father Gregory had a couple of windows open, overlooking his own garden.’

Sunday morning, little traffic noise, no one around. It was entirely plausible she could have heard him at that distance.

‘What time was this?’

‘About ten.’

‘What was he saying?’

‘I couldn’t catch all of it, but something about how this was all dead and buried, you – the other guy – had no right to bring it up now, show some respect and so on. He was really agitated. I’d never heard him like that before.’

‘You said “the other guy”. This was a man he was arguing with?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was he saying? What was this man saying?’

‘I couldn’t hear.’

‘You couldn’t hear what they were saying, or you couldn’t hear the other man’s voice at all?’

‘I couldn’t hear the voice at all.’

‘So how do you know he was a man?’

‘Because I heard his car draw up about three-quarters of an hour beforehand. I’d just started in the garden then.’

‘That might have been the bishop himself, returning from somewhere.’

‘No. I heard the bishop greet him, and the man say something back.’

‘You catch a look at him?’

‘No.’

‘The car?’

‘No.’

‘Pity.’

‘Anyone else see this man?’ Patrese asked.

‘How do you mean, anyone else?’

‘Your husband, perhaps?’

The slightest furrow fought its way through the Botox and rippled the perfection of Katharine Horowitz’ forehead.

‘I live alone, Detective.’

Rich divorcée, Patrese thought instantly; and the look of defensive defiance on her face told him he was spot on.

‘When you heard the bishop shouting; this man was still here?’

‘I presume so. I hadn’t heard the car leave, if that’s what you mean.’

‘OK. Thank you.’ Patrese reached into his jacket’s breast pocket and extracted a business card. ‘You think of anything else, you have any questions, you just ring the number here.’

‘I surely will,’ she said. ‘Such a tragedy. He was the best of men, Father Kohler.’

Beradino and Patrese walked out of her earshot.

‘You phoned Kohler around nine o’clock, you said?’ Beradino asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘So by the time you get off the phone, it’s nine ten, give or take. About nine fifteen, according to Katharine Horowitz, Kohler has a visitor. Forty-five minutes later, they’re having a pow-wow. You’re almost certainly the last person to speak with Kohler before this visitor arrived, you know?’

‘I guess. But it still doesn’t help, does it? Even if Katharine’s timings are a bit out, or mine are, I rang off before anyone arrived.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I didn’t hear a doorbell, or someone else’s voice. Kohler didn’t break off to answer the door, try to hurry me off of the phone, nothing like that.’

Beradino clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘Too much to hope for, huh?’

Tuesday, November 2nd. 11:54 a.m.

Patrese and Beradino were supposed to see Mayor Negley at ten. They sat in the antechamber to his office, on the fifth floor of the City-County building, for close on two hours, with one or other of Negley’s PAs appearing every few minutes to extend the mayor’s apologies, reiterate that he’d been caught up in meetings which had gone on much longer than anticipated, and promise he’d be with them as soon as he could.

Standard billionaire behavior. Treat anyone below your own level as supplicants to a medieval king, even when they had a major homicide investigation to run.

Had the meeting just been a progress report, Patrese and Beradino would have gone back to the North Shore long before. If Negley wanted to find out what was going on badly enough, he could make time for them, not vice versa.

But they wanted to see him for another reason entirely.

They’d discovered a connection between him and the two murder victims.

It was almost midday when he finally came bustling in, trailing a comet’s tail of advisers and assistants.

He gave both detectives a double-clasped handshake, his left hand clutching their wrists. Every politician Patrese had met did it, presumably in the belief that it made them seem open and sincere. Patrese thought it as phony as a seven-dollar bill.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen. My apologies. This city is a demanding mistress.’

Interesting choice of phrase, Patrese thought.

Negley ushered them inside his office. Patrese was surprised at how small it was, before remembering it was municipal property. In Negley’s billionaire incarnation, he probably worked out of something the size of Heinz Field.

Negley took a seat behind his desk and directed the detectives to a nearby sofa. They’d be sitting lower than him. Corporate intimidation 101.

A secretary appeared with tea, coffee and cookies. When she’d gone, Negley clapped his hands together.

‘Now. What can I do you for?’ He chuckled at his wordplay.

Beradino held up a brochure. Glossy, high-end, four-color, its cover emblazoned with the words ‘ABRAHAMIC INTERFAITH FOUNDATION’.

‘You’re a member of this foundation’s board, I believe.’

‘Yes, I am. We’re all listed in there, aren’t we?’

‘Bishop Kohler was a director too. We found this in his bureau.’

‘Yes, he was. But if this is something to do with the murders…

The surgeon, Michael Redwine, he was nothing to do with this.’

‘He wasn’t, no. But Abdul Bayoumi was.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow. Abdul Bayoumi died a few months ago.’

‘Only after Michael Redwine had messed up routine surgery on him.’

Negley’s eyes widened.

‘I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew something tragic had happened in the operating theatre, but not that Redwine had been responsible. I didn’t know Abdul well, I’m afraid. I only saw him at foundation meetings.’ He indicated the brochure.

‘This foundation; what exactly is it that you do?’

Negley switched instantly, perhaps even automatically, into pontificating-politico mode ‘Well, Detective, I believe that conflict between the faiths is second only to climate change in the list of issues threatening our society, and therefore resolving that conflict and promoting co-operation is of paramount importance.’

‘What exactly is it that you do?’ Beradino repeated, deadpan.

Patrese had to bite back laughter, both at Beradino’s sardonic tone, and at Negley’s complete failure to recognize it as such.

‘We facilitate symposiums, joint cultural events, exhibitions, seminars, talks, school programs, those kind of things.’

A lot of jaw-jaw, in other words, thought Patrese; a heap of hot air, and no action.

‘Would you describe any of your activities as controversial?’

‘Not to right-thinking people, no.’

‘You don’t, for instance, fund mosques?’

‘No. Nor churches, nor synagogues; not alone. Every program we fund, either wholly or in part, must involve at least two of the three Abrahamic religions.’

‘Can you think of anything the foundation does which would make someone want to kill one of its directors?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Anything about the directors themselves?’

‘Quite the opposite. They’re all people of the highest integrity. That’s why they were invited to join. We picked nine; three each from each of the three faiths.’

‘We’d like to give protection to you all. To the seven, er, remaining.’

‘I have my own protection, thank you, so you can save a little manpower there.’

‘With respect, sir, they’re not the police.’

‘No, they’re not. They’re ex-Delta Force. They’re a lot more skilled than the police, no offense; and they’re certainly better paid.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure the other six will appreciate it, however. Is that your strongest lead?’

‘At the moment, yes.’

Not just their strongest lead, Patrese thought, but pretty much their only one.

It would take a couple of days to trace and eliminate all the people in the photos found in Kohler’s bureau, even with the extra manpower they’d been allocated – a fivefold increase in officers, from twelve to sixty.

In the meantime, those officers had already received several hundred calls, all of which they’d have to follow up. Most would be irrelevant. Some, inevitably, were from wives trying to get rid of their husbands by accusing them of the murders.

Patrese had already recognized one voice as that of a woman who had in the past tried to pin ten separate murders on her husband. He’d given her a phone number.

‘This your cellphone?’ she’d asked.

‘No. It’s a divorce lawyer.’

The cops had studied CCTV footage of the road outside the cathedral, traced cars through their number plates, and interviewed their owners. No one had seen a thing.

A homeless man who’d been bedding down opposite the cathedral offered to tell the police what he knew in exchange for twenty bucks. One sniff of his breath had convinced them that the testimony of a man too drunk to remember what day it was would hardly stand up in court, even if by some miracle it did lead them to the killer.

They’d checked the list of the cathedral’s workers, regular attendees, friends and supporters against that of Redwine’s patients, and interviewed all those who appeared on both. No dice.

They’d discovered that Redwine and Kohler had been members of the same country club in Fox Chapel. They were interviewing the club’s management, staff and members; several hundred in all. One former employee, whom the club had dismissed the previous year for embezzlement, had already come briefly under suspicion – he’d written threatening letters to the club after being fired – until the police had discovered that he was already in custody, for mail fraud.

Given the desecration of the crucifixes and icons, they were also checking every Muslim recently convicted of any crime, no matter how small. Allen Chance had impressed on them the importance of subtlety here. They had to pick their way through minefields of political correctness and racial discrimination, and avoid turning a murder investigation into a civil rights issue.

What that meant in terms of Mustafa Bayoumi was anybody’s guess.

Wednesday, November 3rd. 9:11 a.m.

The first forty-eight hours after Kohler’s murder were already up. Patrese and Beradino both knew that no joy now meant ever-diminishing returns later.

‘Forensics have found a strand of hair in Saint Paul,’ Beradino said. ‘Near Kohler’s body, but unburnt. They reckon Asian origin. Probably Pakistan. Heavily treated, so almost certainly female. And cut neatly; not fallen out naturally, not yanked forcefully.’

‘A Pakistani woman who’d just been for a haircut?’

‘Could be. They’re checking hairdressers now. There are no Pakistani women on the cathedral’s staff roster, we know that. No Asians at all, actually.’

‘Which means nothing. The cathedral’s a public place. People come in and out the whole time. That hair could have come from anyone, anytime. You could clean that floor for days, weeks, and miss something like that. Or you could sweep it up and then deposit it back there again some time later without knowing. Perhaps it got tangled in the broom fibers and then dropped free again.’

‘Exactly. It’s the longest of long shots.’

‘And the kids in the photos?’

‘Sacred Heart have identified most of them, and given contact details for everyone they have in their database. Uniforms are working their way through those people as we speak. About two-thirds still live in Pittsburgh, so they’re being given priority.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing, so far. All of them have alibis. Most hadn’t seen Kohler in many moons. No discernible motives, that anyone can tell.’

‘What are they like now?’

‘What are who like?’

‘The people. The ones in the photos.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Are they, you know, fucked up in some way? Junkies, depressives, suicides?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Looking for a motive for whoever killed Kohler, that’s why. Happily married guy with kids ain’t gonna wake up one morning and decide to off the bishop, is he?’

‘I guess not. Far as I know, they’re a pretty standard cross-section. Check the files, if you want. They’re in the system.’

Patrese logged on, and soon found that Beradino was right; they were a pretty standard cross-section.

More than half were married, about a fifth were divorced, some of them shockingly young. A few gays, a handful with drug problems, or at least problems bad enough to have shown up on their records. There’d be a lot more beneath the surface, Patrese was sure of that; a lot of things that those people wouldn’t or couldn’t tell the cops. And why should they? Cops were cops, not social workers.

Patrese recognized more names than he’d thought he would. It was like some sort of surreal, virtual school reunion; people whom he’d frozen in his mind at some stage in their teens suddenly reincarnated on the screen in front of him as adults with jobs, and lives, and problems, years and heartbreaks and triumphs and catastrophes away from how he’d remembered them.

‘How you’ve grown!’ he recalled friends of his parents saying when he’d been a kid; and of course he’d grown, he’d always thought. It would have been a whole heap weirder if he hadn’t. So too with these people. Of course they’d changed.

Later that afternoon, Patrese went back in front of the media, and tossed them tasty but fundamentally unfilling morsels.

Yes, they were following up multiple leads. Yes, they were aware the first forty-eight hours had elapsed. Yes, they understood the city’s shock and outrage.

No, he wouldn’t give operational details. No, he wouldn’t commit himself to any predictions. No, he didn’t want to send a message directly to the killer.

He didn’t say what he really thought: that, two murders in – and if Mustafa Bayoumi’s alibi held when they finally managed to interview him – what they needed more than anything else was a third.

A third would give them more evidence. A third might persuade Chance to call in the Bureau. A third was what they feared and wanted in equal measures.

Thursday, November 4th. 9:20 a.m.

Of all Pittsburgh’s buildings, the Allegheny County Courthouse was Patrese’s favorite. It boasted the quintessential architecture of crime and punishment. Massive slabs of Massachusetts granite ran down long sides punctuated with brooding arches and flanked by half-towers, as though the edifice had been lifted wholesale from city gates in ancient Rome.

Richardson, the architect, regarded this building as his greatest work. He’d plundered from across Europe for it: detailing from Salamanca Cathedral for the front tower, still majestically authoritative despite the upstart skyscrapers which now dwarfed it on all sides; Notre-Dame’s cornice; the hollow rectangle massing from Rome’s Palazzo Farnese; and from Venice the rear campanile and the Bridge of Sighs, through which prisoners had been transported from jail to court and back again.