Black Irish by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page A

Point on the Irish coast, the one that had resulted in a broken finger and left his own father furious. Or one of the clues that led him to catch the .22 Caliber Killer, Buffalo’s only serial murderer and the case that had got him on the front page of the
Buffalo News
. Or the name of his dead brothers back in Clare.
    Maybe the face of Abbie’s mother, of whom no photographs existed.

CHAPTER SIX
    I N THE MORNING , A BBIE DROVE DOWN E LMWOOD TO POLICE HEADQUARTERS in her beloved green Saab. The building was a lovely old brick monstrosity on Franklin Street that had been gutted inside to make way for modern offices. Homicide was on the third floor. She exited the elevator and saw that the 9 a.m. conference had already started.
    Z nodded at her as she walked in. Perelli, her boss, looked up.
    “Slept in, huh?”
    “Yes, I did,” she said, but offered no explanation. Her father had been hacking up a lung in the night, and she’d run to the twenty-four-hour CVS for cough syrup. It was none of Perelli’s business.
    “I was telling the squad that the preliminary autopsy is out on Jimmy Ryan. There are some things you’re going to want to see.”
    O’Halloran, a broad-shouldered, bantam-sized detective with ginger hair and brooding blue eyes, passed her a pile of photos, eight-by-tens. They were blowups from the coroner’s report. She stared at the first one. It showed Jimmy Ryan’s face, cleaned of the caked and blackened blood. The sight was even more disturbing than she’d anticipated.
    “Cause of death?”
    “Strangulation. Looks like the killer used the nylon rope from thetruck, looped it around his neck and legs, and let him strangle himself to death every time he kicked out. There’s chafing on the neck that matches what you’d get with that type of motion.”
    “What is that on his forehead?” she said.
    “A number.”
    The mark was crude, but it was clearly the number “1.”
    “Was it postmortem?”
    “No,” Perelli said, taking a sip of his coffee and grimacing. “The killer did it when he was still alive.”
    “Why would he do that? Just from a practical point of view, it would be much easier to make a clear mark if you waited until after death.”
    “He wanted to inflict pain.”
    “He did that in other ways,” Abbie said, paging slowly through the photographs. There was a circular cut underneath the belly button, and the coroner had made a notation in the margin of the photo.
Incision, multiple indiv. cuts within
.
    “This cut is an inch and a half deep,” Abbie said. “It looks like he was trying to carve a piece of flesh off him.”
    “But he kept stopping,” said Perelli. “Look at the hesitation marks inside the wound.”
    Abbie brought the photo closer, and nodded.
    “Extortion?” she said.
    “Judging from early information that Zangara got from his bank, Jimmy Ryan didn’t have shit to extort. Maybe the killer was trying to get something else?”
    “Like what?” said Z.
    “Information,” Abbie said.
    “We have anything similar statewide? Something that tells us he’s traveling and this could be his latest victim?”
    Alexander, the Department’s lone black detective, shook his head before shifting his enormous bulk in his chair. “Nothing. There was a prostitute in Syracuse two months ago with her right nipple cut off, but the detectives there like her live-in boyfriend for that one. They had a history of playing around with knives during sex and I guess itgot out of control, he nicked her and she screamed, so he decided to go ahead and kill her.”
    Perelli nodded and spun away from the table in his chair. A few seconds later, he came wallowing back and pointed at Alexander.
    “Wait. You remember that thing three years ago, on the East Side?”
    Alexander looked at Perelli blankly, then nodded. “Oh, yeah. The old lady.”
    Abbie looked at both of them. “Wait, what was that?”
    Alexander turned to her. “It looked like a break-in robbery. A retiree living on