THIRTY-FOUR
Shane Adams couldn’t get onto the grounds at the Roundhouse unobserved, but here it was different. Here, behind the apartment building in which Kevin Byrne lived, he was shielded from the street. Unfortunately, the Dumpster in the alley behind the building was full, and looked to contain trash from six different rowhouses, and one low-rise four-suiter. He’d never be able to pick through it, find what belonged to Byrne, and spirit it away. Not in broad daylight.
He left the alley, rounded the corner onto Third Street. The street was lined with parked cars. He found the one he was looking for, stepped into an alcove, checked his notes. It was Kevin Byrne’s personal car. Shane looked up and down the street. If he approached the car, he could be seen by any one of a dozen vantage points. He took out one of his cell phones – specifically an old flip phone he’d had for years, one that was no longer connected to any service, and therefore was never in any danger of ringing at an inopportune time – and put it to his ear. He sauntered up the street, talking aloud into the phone, meandering in that aimless way people do when they’re on the phone in a public place.
He leaned against the wall across the sidewalk from Byrne’s car. He could see a few things on the dashboard. Nothing of much interest. He leaned forward, saw two large boxes in the back seat; one with a top, one without. The open box seemed to be full of papers.
Shane pretended to be on his cell phone as he leaned against the car, and covertly took as many pictures as he could of the back seat and front seat.
He then raced back to his own car, checked all the mirrors. The big cop was nowhere to be seen. Shane scrolled through the photos. Crap, except for the news clippings on top of the papers in the open box. One of the headlines read:
WHO IS THE BOY IN THE RED COAT?
By the time he got back to the station Shane found that he couldn’t get the headline out of his mind. He sat down at a computer terminal, looked up the story.
There was a ton of information. Not nearly as much as there was for Philadelphia’s most famous mystery – The Boy in the Box, a four- or five-year-old victim found in a box in the Fox Chase section of the city in 1957, still unsolved – but there was at least three months of data.
The Boy in the Red Coat case was not ruled a homicide, so the investigation went to divisional detectives at the time, who interviewed people in the neighborhood, trying to determine the boy’s identity. They spoke to hundreds of people in the neighborhood, as well as everyone in the church’s parish. The boy’s picture went out nationally and internationally, but no one came forward.
So why were the papers in the back seat of Detective Byrne’s car? Was he reopening a twenty-year-old case? Did it have something to do with the spate of murders happening in churches now?
Maybe there was something in his trash after all.
Maybe Shane would go back tonight.