Broken Angels Read Free Page B

stayed his trigger because of his wife. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of a single word to begin to express any of this.
“Laura,” the man said.
“Pardon me?”
“Her name was Laura.”
Before Byrne could say another word, the man swung his fist. It was a wild shot, poorly thrown, inexpertly leveraged. Byrne saw it coming at the last instant, and managed to sidestep it with ease. But the look in the man’s eyes was so full of rage and hurt and sorrow, Byrne almost wished he had taken the hit. It may have, for the moment, filled a need in both of them.
Before the man could take another swing, Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez grabbed him, held him. The man did not struggle, but began to sob. He went limp in their grasp.
“Let him go,” Byrne said. “Just . . . let him go.”
    the shooting team wrapped up around 3 am. A half dozen detectives from the homicide unit had shown up for support. In a loose circle they stood around Byrne, protecting him from the media, even from the brass.
    Byrne gave his statement and was debriefed. He was free to go. For a while, he didn’t know where to go, where he wanted to be. The idea of getting drunk wasn’t even appealing, though it just might blot out the horrible events of the evening.
    Just twenty-four hours earlier he had been sitting on the cold, comfortable porch of a cabin in the Poconos, feet up, and a few inches of Old Forester in a plastic mug. Now two people were dead. It seemed as if he brought death with him.
    The man’s name was Matthew Clarke. He was forty-one. He had three daughters—Felicity, Tammy, and Michele. He worked as an insurance broker for a large national firm. He and his wife had been in the city to see their oldest daughter, a freshman at Temple University. They had stopped at the diner for coffee and lemon pudding, his wife’s favorite.
    Her name was Laura.
She had hazel eyes.
Kevin Byrne had a feeling he would see those eyes for a long time to
    come.

3
    Two days l ater
    The book sat on the table. It was constructed out of harmless cardboard, benign paper, nontoxic ink. It had a dust jacket, an ISBN number, blurbs on the back, a title along the spine. It was similar in all ways to just about every other book in the world.
    Except it was different.
Detective Jessica Balzano, a ten-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, sipped her coffee and stared at the terrifying object. In her time she had squared off with killers, muggers, rapists, Peeping Toms, burglars, other model citizens; had once looked down the barrel of a 9mm weapon, aimed point-blank at her forehead. She had punched and been punched by a select group of thugs, creeps, whackos, punks, and gangsters; had chased psychopaths down dark alleys; had once been threatened by a man wielding a cordless drill.
And yet the book on her dining room table scared her more than all of that combined.
Jessica had nothing against books. Nothing at all. As a rule, she loved books. In fact, rare was the day she didn’t have a paperback in her purse for those down times on the job. Books were great. Except this book—the bright, cheerful, yellow and red book on her dining room table, the book with a menagerie of grinning cartoon animals on the front—belonged to her daughter, Sophie.
Which meant that her daughter was going to school.
Not preschool, which to Jessica had seemed like a glorified day-care center. Regular school. Kindergarten. Granted, it was only a getacquainted day for the real thing that began next fall, but all the trappings were there. On the table. In front of her. Book, lunch, coat, mittens, pencil case.
School.
Sophie came out of her bedroom dressed and primed for her first official day of academe. She wore a navy blue accordion-pleat skirt and crewneck sweater, a pair of lace-up shoes, and a wool beret-and-scarf set. She looked like a miniature Audrey Hepburn.
Jessica felt sick.
“You okay, Mom?” Sophie asked. She slid onto her chair.
“Of course, sweetie,”