The Stolen Ones Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the courts and the politicians closure meant one thing: a number on a ComStat report, a headline in the paper, a campaign slogan. For survivors, it was a nightmare that never found the morning.
    At times Byrne forgot simple things – he’d once left a pair of dress shirts at a dry cleaner’s for over a year – but he recalled in rich detail every case he had ever worked, every notification he’d ever made. He often drove through the city and got a feeling when he passed the scene of a murder, felt the hair on his arms bristle. For more than twenty years – since he himself had been pronounced dead for more than a minute, only to come back to life – he’d had these intuitions, these vague feelings that led him down dark paths.
    On this day, standing in a place where murder was done, Byrne saw that there were no flowers, no wreaths, no crosses, no remembrance of the evil that had been loosed here. The field probably looked as it had a hundred years earlier.
    It was not.
     
    Byrne walked the grid as he imagined it, the path by which Robert Freitag had come to this place.
    When he had read the files in the binder, such as it was, the first thing he noticed was that there was no hand-drawn sketch of the crime scene. Even in this age of iPads and Nexus tablets, the most frequently used method of detailing a murder scene was still a pencil and a yellow legal pad. If you were a real up-and-comer you bought your own grid paper.
    Whether John Garcia was capable of such a thing, so close to the very end of his life, was unknown.
    Byrne wondered what it looked like from the inside for Garcia. Byrne had twice been shot in the head. The first time, he was just grazed by the bullet. The second time it was much more serious. He was extremely fortunate that there was no lasting damage, but his lot in life, for the rest of his life, was to undergo a yearly MRI. The prevailing theory, at least as far as his neurologists went, was that the MRI was just precautionary. The truth was that Kevin Byrne was at risk for a litany of neurological maladies, not the least of which were aneurysms and tumors.
    Many a night – too many, if truth were told – he had stayed up, cruising the internet for horror stories that involved aneurysms and tumors, especially the warning signs. Usually, for the first few days after those Bushmills-fueled research sessions, he was certain that he exhibited nine out of ten symptoms.
    Lately, there had been one sign that lingered. It was probably something that he should contact his doctors about, but he hadn’t had the courage to do so.
    At this moment, at the edge of this frozen field, there was a scent in the air, something Byrne was certain no one else could smell. Part of him hoped there was a reasonable explanation for it. Part of him feared there was not.
    Byrne closed his eyes and breathed deeply. There could be no doubt. The smell brought him to a time and a place he could not see; a flood of sensory input he knew was part of a memory not his own.
    There, beneath the odor of sack cloth and human waste, was the smell of wet straw.

6
    Priory Park, in the northeast section of the city, was tucked between Frankford Avenue and the banks of the Delaware River. The heavily wooded 62-acre tract acquired its name from the monastery that had once stood on the grounds in the early 1800s. All but one of the buildings had long since been razed, leaving only a small stone chapel near the northwestern corner. Threaded through the dense trees was a tributary of the Poquessing Creek, which emptied into the Delaware River, just a few hundred yards from the eastern edge of the park.
    When Jessica turned onto Chancel Lane she saw the solitary figure standing at the edge of the southern section of the park. Although it had only been two weeks since she had seen him, it seemed like a longer period of time. When you work as closely as she and Byrne did, time apart was, in many ways, the same as time apart in a marriage. At