The Rosary Girls by Richard Montanari

themselves counted off by sixty agonizing seconds apiece. Now the cycle of grief began again.
    They had looked through some of the drawers and closets in Tessa’s room, finding nothing of particular interest.A methodical young woman, organized and precise, even her junk drawer was orderly, separated into clear plastic boxes: matchbooks from weddings, ticket stubs from movies and concerts, a small collection of interesting buttons, a pair of plastic bracelets from hospital stays. Tessa favored satin sachets.
    Her clothes were plain and of medium quality. On the walls had been a few posters, not of Eminem or Ja Rule or DMX or any of the current harvest of boy bands, but rather of maverick girl violinists Nadja SalernoSonnenberg and Vanessa-Mae. An inexpensive Skylark violin stood in a corner of her closet. They had searched her car and found nothing. They would examine the contents of her school locker later.
    Tessa Wells was a working-class kid who took care of her sick father, got good grades, and probably had a scholarship to Penn State in her future. A girl who kept her clothes in dry-cleaning bags and her shoes in boxes.
    And now she was dead.
Someone was walking the streets of Philadelphia, breathing the warm spring air, smelling the daffodils bursting through the soil, someone who had taken an innocent young girl to a filthy, decayed place and brutally ended her life.
In doing that monstrous thing, this someone had said:
There are one and a half million people in Philadelphia.
I am one of them.
Find me.

pa rt t wo 7
    MONDAY, 12:20 PM
    Simon Close, the star reporter for Philadelphia’s leading weekly shock tabloid, The Report, had not set foot in a church in more than two decades and, although he didn’t exactly expect the heavens to part and a bolt of righteous lightning to split the sky and rend him in
    half, leaving him a smoldering pile of fat and bone and gristle if he did so, there was enough residual Catholic guilt inside him to give him a moment’s pause if he ever entered a church, dipped his finger in the holy water, and genuflected.
    Born thirty-two years ago in Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Lake District, the rugged north of England that abuts the border of Scotland, a fell rat of the first order, Simon had never been one to put too much faith in anything, not the least of which was the church. The scion of an abusive father and a mother too drunk to notice or care, Simon had long ago learned to put whatever belief he had in himself.
    He had lived in half a dozen Catholic group homes by the time he was seven—where he had learned many things, none of them reflecting the life of Christ—after which he was pawned off on the one and only relative willing to take him in, his spinster aunt Iris who lived in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a small town about 130 miles northwest of Philadelphia.
    Aunt Iris had taken Simon to Philadelphia many times when he was young. Simon recalled seeing the tall buildings, the vast bridges, smelling the city smells and hearing the bustle of urban life, and knew—knew as fully as the realization that he would, no matter what, hang on to his Northumberland inflections at all costs—that one day he would live there.
    At sixteen, Simon interned as a copy dog at the News-Item, the local Coal Township daily paper, his eye, like everyone working at any rag east of the Alleghenies, on the city desk at The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Daily News . But after two years of running copy from the editorial office to the typesetter in the basement, and writing the occasional listing and schedule for the Shamokin Oktoberfest, he saw the light, a radiance that had yet to dim.
    On a storm-lashed New Year’s Eve, at the newspaper’s offices on Main Street, Simon was sweeping up when he saw a glow from the newsroom. When he peeked in, he saw two men. The paper’s leading light, a man in his fifties named Norman Watts, was poring over the enormous Pennsylvania Code.
    The man who covered arts and