The Skin Gods Read Online Free PDF

message stood for Colleen Byrne Over And Out.
     
     
Byrne closed the phone, his heart full.
     
     
The air conditioner finally began to cool off the room. Byrne considered what to do with himself. Maybe he’d take a ride down to the Roundhouse, hang around the unit. He was just about to talk himself out of that idea when he saw that there was a message on his answering machine.
     
     
What was it, five steps away? Seven? At the moment, it looked like the Boston Marathon. He grabbed his cane, braved the pain.
     
     
The message was from Paul DiCarlo, a star ADA in the district attorney’s office. Over the past five years or so, DiCarlo and Byrne had made a number of cases together. If you were a criminal on trial, you didn’t want to look up one day and see Paul DiCarlo enter the courtroom. He was a pit bull in Perry Ellis. If he got you in his jaws, you were fucked. Nobody had sent more killers to death row than Paul DiCarlo.
     
     
But the message Paul had for Byrne this day was not good. One of his quarry, it seemed, had loosed itself: Julian Matisse was back on the street.
     
     
The news was impossible, but it was true.
     
     
It was no secret that Kevin Byrne took a special interest in cases involving the murders of young women. He had felt this way ever since the day Colleen was born. In his mind and heart, every young woman was forever somebody’s daughter, somebody’s baby girl. Every young woman, at one time, had been that little girl who learned to hold a cup with two hands, had learned to stand up, sea-legged, five tiny fingers on the coffee table.
     
     
Girls like Gracie. Two years earlier, Julian Matisse had raped and murdered a young woman named Marygrace Devlin.
     
     
Gracie Devlin was nineteen years old the day she was killed. She had curly brown hair that fell in soft ringlets to her shoulders, a light dusting of freckles. She was a slight young woman, a freshman at Villanova. She favored peasant skirts and Indian jewelry and nocturnes by Chopin. She died on a frigid January night in a filthy, abandoned movie theater in South Philadelphia.
     
     
And now, by some profane twist of justice, the man who took her dignity and her life was out of prison. Julian Matisse had been sentenced to twenty-five years to life and he was being released after two years.
     
     
Two years.
     
     
The grass had only grown fully on Gracie’s grave this past spring.
     
     
Matisse was a small-time pimp, a sadist of the first order. Before Gracie Devlin, he had spent three and a half years in prison for cutting a woman who had refused his advances. Using a box cutter, he had slashed her face so savagely that she had required ten hours of surgery to repair the muscle damage, and nearly four hundred stitches.
     
     
Following the box cutter attack, when Matisse was released from Curran-Fromhold prison— after serving only forty months of a ten-year sentence— it didn’t take long for him to graduate to homicide. Byrne and his partner Jimmy Purify had liked Matisse for the murder of a Center City waitress named Janine Tillman, but they were never able to find any physical evidence tying him to the crime. Her body was found in Harrowgate Park, stabbed and mutilated. She had been abducted from an underground parking lot on Broad Street. She had been sexually assaulted both pre- and postmortem.
     
     
An eyewitness from the parking lot came forward and picked Matisse out of a photo lineup. The witness was an elderly woman named Marjorie Samms. Before they could find Matisse, Marjorie Samms disappeared. A week later they found her floating in the Delaware River.
     
     
Supposedly Matisse had been staying with his mother after his release from Curran-Fromhold. Detectives staked out Matisse’s mother’s apartment, but he never showed. The case went cold.
     
     
Byrne knew that he would see Matisse again one day.
     
     
Then, two years ago, on a freezing January night, a 911 call came in that a young woman was