Richard Montanari

by The Echo Man

  The temperature had dropped a few degrees since they had entered the Beckman house. The rain continued, getting colder. For the first time that year, it felt as if it might snow.

  In the parking lot at the Roundhouse they saw Josh Bontrager getting into one of the detective cars. Spotting them, Bontrager closed the door and crossed the lot. Dennis Stansfield, already in the car, wisely stayed put.

  'What's up, Josh?' Byrne asked.

  'Have you made notification yet?'

  'Just did. What do you have?'

  'I ran Kenneth Beckman,' Bontrager said. 'A couple of things jumped out.'

  'Such as?'

  'Well, at one time he was a person of interest.'

  Bontrager meant that the deceased had been looked at by the police for some sort of crime.

  'What was the job?' Jessica asked.

  'A homicide.'

  Jessica felt her pulse kick up a notch. 'This guy was looked at for a murder? When was this?'

  '2002.'

  'How far did the investigation go?'

  'They had him in, but I guess he didn't roll,' Bontrager said. 'The detective working the case kept an eye on the guy for a few years, made a few more notes, but then it went cold. Nothing in the file since '06.'

  'Who was the victim?'

  Bontrager pulled out his notebook. 'A nineteen-year-old girl named Antoinette Chan. Cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma. Weapon was a claw hammer found at the scene. The weapon had been wiped clean of prints.'

  'What was the date?' Jessica asked.

  Bontrager flipped a few pages. 'March 21, 2002.'

  A cold finger traced a path along Jessica's spine. It was the date that the old codgers had mentioned earlier. She shot a look at Byrne, who also seemed transfixed by the information.

  'I'm going to take a ride over to Record Storage, get the whole story,' Bontrager said.

  'We'll do it,' Byrne said. 'Check out the next of kin in the Chan family, see where they are, who they are. If they held Beckman responsible they may be worth looking at.'

  'No problem.'

  Josh Bontrager got into the car, drove away, a stone-faced Dennis Stansfield in the passenger seat.

  'What do you think?' Jessica asked.

  Byrne took a few moments to answer. He absently ran a finger over the small V-shaped scar located above his right eye, a keloid souvenir of the time he had been grazed by a bullet years ago. Jessica knew this meant the wheels were turning.

  'I think we need to see that original file.' He looked at his watch. 'But first I want to have another word with the lovely and talented Mrs. Beckman.' He looked back at Jessica. 'Funny she didn't mention any of this.'

  'Right. When I asked her if she knew who might have done this and she said "Look in the fucking mirror" I didn't really get it. Now I do. She blames the police.'

  'What a rarity,' Byrne said. 'And she seemed so nice.'

  'Real debutante,' Jessica said. 'I'll run checks on her and the stoned kid. See where they were and what they were doing in March '02.'

  'I'll meet you at Record Storage,' Byrne said. 'Call me if she has any wants or warrants. I don't care if Sharon Beckman did just lose her husband. I'd love to toss her in a cage for a while.'

  'Oh, please,' Jessica said. 'You just like putting women in handcuffs.'

  Chapter 12

  In the first ten minutes after the police left her house, Sharon Beckman found she couldn't move. She stood by the front door, paralyzed.

  Jason went back out. God only knew what he did these days. What Jason had not told the cops was that the last time he had seen Kenny the two had gotten into a fist fight. The last thing Jason had said to his stepfather was 'If you ever touch me again I'm going to fucking kill you.'

  That was not something you told the police. She knew Jason would never do anything like that, but they didn't.

  The house was quiet.

  Kenny was dead.

  Sharon knew she was supposed to be feeling something, something akin to grief, something like heartache, but she didn't. All she felt was a faint cold fear. And the knowledge that she had to move. Fast.

  From right when she'd first met Kenny, Sharon had known it was all going to fall apart one day. It wasn't like she didn't know who he was when they'd met, what kind of life she was getting into. She was no angel herself. But eight years ago, when Kenny had robbed all those houses and put himself on the police radar, she'd known a day like this would come.

  When she had set fire to the house on Lenox Avenue, back in 2002, destroying all that evidence, she'd known she'd pay for it some day. Today. She had been a little sorry that the whole block had gone up in flames, but no one had got hurt. She didn't lose much sleep over it. There was no love lost between her and her neighbors on Lenox Avenue anyway. Fucking lowlife crackheads.

  She turned around three times in the living room, trying to organize her thoughts, trying to think straight.

  She should have left a long time ago. When cops followed up on things it was a clear sign that they had you in their sights. Cops always knew a lot more than they let on. It was like those jobs she used to go on with her father when she was small. Her dad would work on somebody's plumbing, and when he was all done he'd turn the water back on and slide a sheet of newspaper under the pipes. If one drop of water fell, blotting out on the paper, the job was shit. Her father would always tear it out and start over. If there was one solitary drop there was certain to be more.

  Same thing with cops.

  Drip, drip, drip.

  Then they had you.

  Kenny had put all the new stolen merchandise into a storage locker on Linden Avenue. He'd learned the first time not to keep anything in the house. They both had. She wasn't sure what he had in there these days and that was fine with her. The less she knew, the better.

  Sharon also knew what Kenny had done to that girl in 2002, even as she tried hard to block it out of her mind. Of course, there wasn't a jury in the world that would give a shit. They had gotten away with it once, but now that Kenny was dead everything was going to fall on her like a load of bricks. There was no way she could deal with this on her own. She knew at least a dozen people who might have wanted to do Kenny in, a dozen people who'd had a beef with him, and once the police realized this they were going to see her as a link. It was only a matter of time until they revisited the Antoinette Chan case. She knew how hard cops worked on burglaries. They didn't give up until they had you in a jail cell.

  Murder?

  Forget it.

  Sharon ran upstairs. She would load the car with what she could, go find Jason. She would get the keys to the Master lock that was on the door at the storage locker, throw them in the Delaware River, and she and her son would be long gone.

  But where would they go? They couldn't go to her sister's in Toledo. That would be the first place they'd look. She had exactly eight hundred twenty-six dollars to her name. Plus whatever was in the coin jar, plus whatever was in the gas tank.

  Sharon was only forty-four. Still young. Still had her looks, or whatever looks she'd had to begin with. She'd start a new life. Meet a man with a real job.

  Kenny was dead.

  Before she could get her things out of the drawers in the upstairs bedroom she heard a noise.

  'Jason?' No answer.

  She listened for a few more moments, heard nothing. Must have been the brats next door, she thought. One day they'd thrown a basketball against an adjoining wall for three straight hours. She wouldn't miss them.

  She grabbed her two battered suitcases from the top shelf of the bedroom closet, began to stuff them with clothing. She soon realized she would need some big plastic garbage bags to take it all.

  Sharon ran down the stairs, her mind racing in a hundred different directions. When she turned the corner toward the kitchen she saw the shadow on the wall. She stopped, spun around, her heart pounding.

  'Jason, we—'

  It wasn't Jason.

  Chapter 13
<
br />   The building at 31st and Market streets where old police records were kept had once been the offices and publishing plant of the Evening Bulletin. The Bulletin, published from 1847 to 1982, was at one time the largest evening newspaper in the United States.

  Now the massive and deceptively benign-looking building was fenced and sealed like Fort Knox, with concertina wire ringing the exposed public areas. The enormous brick wall that faced the parking lot rose more than four stories and boasted only five small windows near the roofline. A dozen or so parking-lot lights jutted from the wall like rusted bowsprits.

  Jessica signed in at the gate, drove in, parked. She was about twenty minutes late, but had not spotted Byrne's van. She decided to wait in the car.

  Before leaving the Roundhouse she had run Sharon Beckman and Jason Crandall through the databases. The kid had a misdemeanor possession charge from last year, a charge that was dropped when Jason did community service.

  Sharon Beckman had no record.

  Jessica thought about how the case was developing. The bizarre condition of Kenneth Beckman's corpse was still a mystery and indicated something that festered deep in the heart of the killer, something personal and twisted. She thought about the paper band wrapped around the victim's head, the way the cut traversed the forehead, the way the—

  There was a loud sound, inches from her left ear, a cracking noise that made her jump. She spun in her seat, her hand automatically unsnapping her holster.

  Byrne had tapped her window with his ring. Jessica slowly rolled down the window, making him wait in the drizzling rain.

  'This is how people get shot, you know,' Jessica said.

  'I could use the rest.'

  She took her time getting out of the car, driving home her point. A minute later they entered the building, walked over to the elevators, shaking off the rain.

  'Did you talk to Sharon Beckman again?' Jessica asked.

  Byrne shook his head. 'She wasn't home,' Byrne said. 'Neither was Spicoli.'

  Referencing the Sean Penn role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Byrne was, of course, referring to Jason Crandall. Jessica had no idea where Kevin Byrne's frame of cultural references began and ended.

  In the extensive basement were records for thousands of crimes, some going back two hundred years, the residue of a city's shame: names, dates, weapons, wounds, witnesses. What was absent was the evidence of loss. There was no record to be found here of a father's tears, a son's loneliness, or a grandmother's empty Sundays.

  Instead, here were block after block of huge steel shelving racks, some reaching twenty feet high, each packed firm with thousands of cardboard boxes, each box tagged with a white label detailing name of the deceased, case number, and year.

  They split up the Beckman files. Byrne read the witness statements and forensic reports, while Jessica went through the original police reports and the notes written by the lead detective.

  Just inside the binder was a picture of Antoinette Chan. She'd been a pretty girl, with flawless skin and a beguiling smile. Jessica moved on to the police report on Beckman.

  Kenneth Arnold Beckman, born in 1970, was originally from the Brewerytown area of Philadelphia. At the time of Antoinette Chan's murder he had worked as a handyman for a pair of apartment complexes in Camden, and had lived in the Nicetown/Tioga area on Lenox Avenue.

  By the age of twenty-nine he had been arrested five times for breaking and entering, twice convicted of possession of stolen merchandise.

  In 2001 Beckman took his ten-year-old stepson Jason trick-or- treating on North 18th Street between Westmoreland and Venango. They went door to door, with Beckman accompanying the boy to each stoop. Some of the people in the neighborhood later remarked about how Beckman hovered a little too close to the door, how he seemed to be looking into the houses with a little too much interest as the little boy received his candy.

  Over the next five months there were six burglaries in the neighborhood, all occurring during daylight hours when the residents were at work. Each time the same sort of items were stolen: cameras, jewelry, cash, MP3 players. Nothing too big to fit in a pillowcase.

  A pair of astute divisional detectives noticed the pattern and created a photo lineup of people living in a one-mile radius of the break-ins who had a criminal history of burglaries. One of the people in that lineup was Kenneth Beckman.

  After getting positive IDs of Beckman as someone who had come to neighborhood houses on Halloween, the detectives placed him under surveillance. Within a few days they followed him to a pawnshop in Chinatown, a known address for fencing stolen items. In forty-eight hours they set up a sting operation, with a detective posing as an employee of the shop. But Beckman, perhaps sensing a problem, never returned.

  In mid-March 2002 they received a call from a young woman they had spoken to earlier, a woman named Antoinette Chan, the daughter of one of the burglary victims. She said she had gone down to her basement for the first time in a few weeks to do laundry and had seen a shoe print in the small lavatory off the furnace room. Whoever had broken into her house had come through the basement window. It appeared that the burglar had made a comfort stop. The original investigators had never looked in the lavatory.

  The shoe print matched a size twelve Frye boot. Surveillance photos of Kenneth Beckman revealed him wearing the exact model.

  Detectives visited Beckman's place of employment, only to discover that he had left.

  When detectives arrived at the Beckman house on Lenox Avenue, search warrant in hand, they found a pair of PFD ladder trucks on the scene, and the block of row houses - four in all - ablaze. The old wooden structures burned to the ground in a matter of hours.

  Across the street, sitting on a curb, smoking a cigarette, was Sharon Beckman. There was little doubt in anyone's mind about who had started the blaze, and no doubt at all why. Unfortunately for the investigators, there was no direct evidence. Sharon was not formally questioned or charged.

  According to police, later that night Kenneth Beckman kidnapped Antoinette Chan, brought her to a location in South Philly and bludgeoned her to death. When Beckman was found in a motel in Allentown three days later and brought in for questioning, he dummied up and requested a lawyer.

  Without any witnesses, and without any opportunity to search his house, all charges against Kenneth Arnold Beckman were dropped.

  And now he was dead.

  Jessica opened the folder with the crime-scene photos and felt her heart leap. 'Holy shit.'

  'What?' Byrne asked.

  Jessica put two of the Antoinette Chan crime-scene photos on the table, took out her iPhone, opened the photos folder, swiped over to her most recent photographs. She put the phone on the table, next to the printed pictures.

  There was no mistake.

  The man they had found dead that morning, Kenneth Arnold Beckman, the lead suspect in an eight-year-old murder case - that case being the bludgeoning to death of a young woman named Antoinette Chan - was posed inside a building on Federal, the same place where Antoinette Chan had been found.

  Eight years before it became the Beckman crime scene it had been the Chan crime scene.

  'The suspect in an unsolved homicide gets murdered himself and placed in the same location as his victim,' Jessica summed up.

  'Yep,' Byrne said.

  'As in exactly the same place. Posed in exactly the same position as the original victim.' She held up both the photograph and her cellphone. 'Kevin, these are absolutely identical crime-scene photos, only the second murder, our murder, was eight years later.'

  'Eight and change, but yeah,' Byrne said. 'These are the facts as we know them.'

  The two detectives looked at each other, knowing that this case had just crossed the line. It was now more than a vendetta murder, more than some act committed in the fiery grip of passion.

  Jessica glanced again at the photographs. Some inner bell began to peal. In Philadelphia's history, any large city's history, there were many unsolved murders, vi
ctims of insanity and fury who for years went unavenged, evil echoing across time.

  There was just such a legacy in the City of Brotherly Love, shame and guilt and madness that ran beneath the cobblestone streets like a blood river. Staring at photographs taken eight years apart, at the ragged flesh of two victims connected in a way neither she nor her partner yet understood, Detective Jessica Balzano wondered how much of this history they were about to see.

  Chapter 14

  I float in darkness. i have always been nocturnal, eluding sleep, embraced by waking dreams.

  Here the screams are scuttled and still. It is a place of repose and reflection, a place of wintry silence. For many years I have felt at home here.

  I place the body on the ground. It is the third note. There are eight in this measure. Harmony and melody. I prop the leg against the low headstone. The music swells as I leap into the air, bringing down my full weight. The bone snaps. The sound echoes across the wet granite, the moonlit grass. I take the recorder in my hand, play back the sound. The cracking of bone is bright percussion.

  I move among the dead, listening. The departed speak softly to me, etudes of grace and humility. Soon my movements become fluid, an exaltation of this moment, a dance of death. Le danse macabre. Around and around I twirl. I am free here.

  Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,

  Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.

  I spin among the deceased, thinking about the next days, days leading up to All Hallow's Eve, when all the world's departed will rejoice.

  Soon we will dance, the detective and I. We will dance, and in our embrace we will find that we are of the same heart, the same mind, two damaged souls sipping from a tarnished cup of blood.

  Chapter 15