Free Broken Angels by Richard Montanari Page A

Department. And now her children would live out their lives without her. Their mother was gone. His best friend was gone. How does one go about accepting all that?
Despite all these uncertainties, Matthew Clarke was sure of one thing. One fact was as apparent to him as the knowledge that rivers ran to the sea, as clear as the crystal dagger of sorrow in his heart.
Detective Kevin Francis Byrne’s nightmare was just beginning.
    Pa r t Two
    The Nightingale

11
    “Rats and cats.”
“Huh?”
Roland Hannah closed his eyes for a moment. Whenever Charles
    said huh, it was the spoken equivalent of fingernails on a blackboard. It had been this way for a long time, ever since they’d been children. Charles was his stepbrother, slow to the world, sunny in his outlook and demeanor. Roland loved the man as much as he had ever loved anyone in his life.
    Charles was younger than Roland, preternaturally strong and fiercely loyal. More than once he had proven that he would lay down his life for Roland. Instead of admonishing his stepbrother for the thousandth time, Roland continued. There was no dividend to reprimand, and Charles hurt very easily. “That’s all there is,” Roland said. “You’re either a rat or a cat. There is nothing else.”
    “No,” Charles said in full agreement. This was his way. “Nothing else.”
“Remind me to make a note of that.”
Charles nodded, adrift on the concept, as if Roland had just decoded the Rosetta Stone.
They were driving south on Route 299, nearing the Millington Wildlife Management Area in Maryland. The weather in Philadelphia had been brutally cold, but here the winter was a little milder. This was good. It meant the soil would not yet be deeply frozen.
And while this was good news for the two men in the front of the van, it was probably the worst news of all for the man laying face down in the back, a man whose day had not been going all that well to begin with.
    roland hannah was tall and lithely muscular, precise in his language, although he’d never been formally educated. He wore no jewelry, kept his hair short, his body clean, his clothes modest and well pressed. He was of Appalachian descent, the child of a Letcher County, Kentucky, mother and a father whose ancestry and criminal past could be traced to the hollows of Helvetia Mountain, no further. When Roland had been four years old his mother had left Jubal Hannah—a brutal, violent man who had on many occasions taken the strap to his wife and child—and moved her son to North Philadelphia. Specifically, to an area known derisively, but quite accurately, as the Badlands.
    Within a year Artemisia Hannah married a man far worse than her first husband, a man who controlled every aspect of her life, a man who gave her two damaged children. When Walton Lee Waite was killed in a botched robbery in Northern Liberties, Artemisia—a woman of fragile mental health to begin with, a woman who looked at the world through the prism of burgeoning madness—sank into the bottle, into self-harm of all manners, into the devil’s own caress. By the age of twelve Roland was fending for his family, doing odd jobs of various natures, many of them criminal, dodging the police, the welfare services, the gangs. Somehow, he survived them all.
    At fifteen, through no choice of his own, Roland Hannah found a new path.
the man whom Roland and Charles had transported from Philadelphia was named Basil Spencer. He had molested a young girl.
    Spencer was forty-four, grossly overweight and equally overeducated, a Bala Cynwyd estate lawyer with a client list comprising mostly elderly and wealthy Main Line widows. His taste for young girls went back many years. Roland had no idea how many times Spencer had done this profane and defiling thing, but it really didn’t matter. On this day, at this time, they were meeting in the name of one particular innocent.
    By nine o’clock that morning the sun had breached the tops of the trees. Spencer knelt next to a