The Killing Room Read Free Page A

demolished concrete blocks. Soon, all Byrne could see was the top of the boy’s faded hoodie, and then Gabriel Hightower was gone.
    Byrne made himself a microwave meal for dinner – some sort of too-sweet chicken and limp snow pea pods – then, finding himself restless, went out. He stopped by the American Pub in the Centre Square Building, across from City Hall. He always felt completely dislocated on his days off. Whenever he pulled seven or eight tours in a row, including the inevitable overtime the job of being a homicide detective in Philadelphia demanded, he often found himself daydreaming of what he would do on his day off. Sleep in, catch up on the DVDs he found himself renting but never watching, actually doing laundry. When it came time to do these things he always found himself twitchy, wondering about lab results, ballistic reports, whether some witness had come forward in a current case, anxious to get back into the harness, compelled to be in motion, to pursue.
    He was loath to admit it, but his job was his life. If you opened a vein, Kevin Byrne would run blue.
    He left the pub around 11.30. At the corner of Pine and Fifth Streets, instead of heading home, he headed north.
    Byrne had called the office earlier in the evening and gotten a few more details on exactly what had happened to Terrell Hightower.
    After Tanya Wilkins’s death, Gabriel and his brother – both of whom had been adopted by Tanya’s third husband, Randall Hightower, himself killed in a high-speed chase with the PPD – were put into two different foster homes. By all accounts, Terrell Hightower was a good student at Central High, a tense, fidgety kid who came up at a time when there was no such thing as ADD, at least not in the inner city, a time when kids who tapped their feet or banged their pencils on their desks or acted out in any way, were sent to the office for being a disruptive influence.
    When he was fifteen, Terrell found an outlet for all that nervous energy. His outlet was track and field. With hardly a single season of training under his belt he became a holy terror in the 100- and 200-meter events, taking all-city in his sophomore year and leading his team to the state finals as a junior. Scouts came from as far away as UCLA.
    One night, while Terrell was sweeping up at his part-time job at an auto body shop on Frankford, two men entered. They fired six bullets into the shop’s owner, James DuBois, two into Terrell’s stomach. DuBois was DOA; Terrell was rushed to Jefferson Hospital where, within four hours, he was listed in stable condition.
    Nothing of value was stolen.
    Police investigated the case, but neighbors, as expected, sawnothing, heard nothing. Another phantom killer in the city of Philadelphia. Word on the street was that a North Philly drug dealer named DeRon Wilson had done it as a payback to Terrell because Terrell had disrespected Wilson by not joining the gang.
    A week later Terrell Hightower was released from Jefferson Hospital in a wheelchair. He went back to school, but his heart was no longer in his studies, as his legs were no longer able to carry him to victory on the track. He eventually walked again, with a cane, but his dreams of an athletic scholarship vaporized. After high school Terrell worked briefly as a mechanic in Camden, but the jobs didn’t last. He went from there to minimum-wage jobs, to disability, to the pipe.
    Ten minutes into the day that would be his nineteenth birthday Terrell Hightower put the barrel of a 9mm pistol against the soft palate in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Around his neck were two dozen ribbons he had won on the tracks of southeastern Pennsylvania.
    It was with these images in mind that Kevin Byrne pulled over near the corner of Third and Indiana. He knew he could be seen from any number of vantage points, had already been spotted. He wanted to be seen.
    Byrne reached into the glove compartment, took out a cold Colt .38 revolver. He checked the cylinder,