Free A Christmas Killing by Richard Montanari

A Christmas Killing
    The first time Detective Kevin Francis Byrne heard a reggae version of “The Little Drummer Boy” he was standing next to a pool of blood.
    Each subsequent Christmas, whenever he heard any version of the song, it would remind him of this night—the gouache of lights on the street seen through the fogged windows, the mélange of long-boiled coffee and powdered sugar, the tang of road salt.
    The heart of the memory, the shadow that crossed his dreams, was the young woman.
    It was her blood.
    It was Christmas Eve.
      
    Since becoming a gold badge Detective Kevin Byrne had become known, division-wide, as a comer. As much as he shunned the limelight, he could find no argument against it. In the past year he had closed a number of mid- to high-profile cases, had twice made the newspapers, had twice stood behind both the commissioner and the mayor on TV.
    Byrne knew that this reputation was partly due—in great part, he would tell anyone interested—to his being teamed with a lifer named Frankie Sheehan. Sheehan was a Two-Streeter in his late fifties, a family man who got married his senior year in high school, an outdoorsman who tied marabou jig lures in his spare time, sold them, and donated the proceeds to the Police Athletic League.
    The running joke was that Francis Xavier Sheehan had been a cop so long that his badge number was in Roman numerals.
    But now, in this brightly lit bodega, he looked every minute of his fifty-nine years. Maybe more. Sheehan had dropped twenty pounds in the past six months; his skin was sallow and soft, had a yellowish cast; his suit coats seemed to drape over his broad shoulders.
    Byrne knew the man well, but not brother-cop well, not yet, not well enough to inquire after the man’s health in any late-night, last-call detail. He wanted to, but hadn’t yet found the moment.
    Tonight felt like the right time. He would ask.
    But first there was this job.
      
    Byrne skirted the blood on the floor. Five big droplets near the front door of the convenience store, a pool near the end cap of a rack of bagged candy. The victim had begun to bleed out there.
    Byrne checked his notes, a short summary compiled from what his supervisor had gleaned from the responding patrol officer’s report.
    According to the store’s counter man, one Marko Tarasenko, the victim, a woman in her twenties, had entered the store—a small food market near the corner of Christian and Stillman Streets—at approximately eight pm, made a purchase, then left. Approximately five minutes later she returned, reentered the store, her face covered in blood. Just inside the door, without saying a word, she collapsed.
    The responding officer noted that the woman’s clothing had about it the smell of crack smoke, although no pipe or drugs were found in her possession. She had no ID of any kind.
    Since crack had come to Philly, as well as the streets of every big city in America, it had figured more and more prominently in the urban matrix of crime and bloodshed.
    Now, in the late 1980s, something in the neighborhood of one-third of the violent crimes committed in Philadelphia were, in some way, tied to the rock.
    The victim, as yet unidentified, was in the ICU at Graduate Hospital. She was listed as critical.
    The blood on the floor had not yet dried.
      
    Marko was in his late twenties, a native of the Ukraine. He was five-six, one-eighty, with cropped blond hair, Billy Idol–style, and a gold hoop earring in his left ear. It looked like he pumped iron—big biceps and triceps—but, it seemed, couldn’t be bothered to do his crunches. A layer of snack-fat bulged his midsection.
    After identifying himself and Sheehan, Byrne got down to business.
    “So, you know this woman?” Byrne asked.
    Marko shrugged. With the index finger of his right hand he traced something on the smudged glass counter, something unseen. It looked like a figure eight.
    “Yes, I know her. Not name, ” Marko said. “She’s