21

Jessica lay in bed, her eyes wide open. Vincent was enjoying the sleep of the dead, as usual. She’d never known anybody who slept more deeply than her husband. For someone who saw just about every depravity a city had to offer, every night around midnight, he reconciled himself with the world, and drifted right off to sleep.

Jessica had never been able to do that.

She couldn’t sleep, and knew why. Actually, there were two reasons. One, the image in the story Father Greg had told her kept galloping around her mind: a man being torn in half by the Sun Maiden and the sorceress. Thanks for that one, Father Greg.

The competing image was of Kristina Jakos, sitting on the riverbank like a battered doll on a little girl’s shelf.

Twenty minutes later Jessica was at the dining room table, a mug of cocoa in front of her. She knew that chocolate contained caffeine, and that it would probably keep her up a few more hours. She also knew that chocolate contained chocolate.

She spread the Kristina Jakos crime-scene photographs on the table, put them in order, top to bottom: photographs of the road, the driveway, the front of the building, the abandoned cars, the back of the building, the slope to the riverbank, then poor Kristina herself. Looking at them top to bottom Jessica approximated the view of the scene as seen by the killer. She retraced his steps.

Had it been dark when he posed the body? It must have been. Seeing as the man who had taken Kristina’s life did not commit suicide at the crime scene, or turn himself in, he had wanted to get away with his twisted crime.

SUV? Truck? Van? A van would certainly make things easier for him.

But why Kristina? Why the odd clothing and mutilation? Why the “moon” on her stomach?

Jessica looked out the window at the ink-black night.

What kind of life is this? she wondered. She sat not fifteen feet from where her sweet little girl was sleeping, from where her beloved husband was sleeping, and she was looking at pictures of a dead woman in the middle of the night.

Still, for all the danger and ugliness Jessica encountered, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. From the moment she’d entered the academy, all she had ever wanted to do was work homicides. And now she was. But the job began to eat you alive the moment you stepped onto the first floor of the Roundhouse.

In Philadelphia, you got a job on Monday. You worked it, chasing down witnesses, interviewing suspects, compiling forensics. Just when you started to make progress, it was Thursday and you were up on the wheel again and another body fell. You had to move on it, because if you didn’t make an arrest within forty-eight hours, there was a good chance you might never make an arrest. Or so the theory went. So you dropped what you were doing—while still keeping an ear to all the calls you had out—and worked the new case. The next thing you knew it was next Tuesday, and another bloody corpse landed at your feet.

If you made your living as an investigator—any kind of investigator—you lived for the gotcha. For Jessica, as well as every detective she knew, the sun rose and set on gotcha. At times, gotcha was your hot meal, your good night’s sleep, your long passionate kiss. No one understood the need but a fellow investigator. If junkies could be detectives for one second, they would toss away that needle forever. There was no high like gotcha.

Jessica wrapped her hand around her cup. The cocoa was cold. She looked back at the photographs.

Was the gotcha in one of these pictures?