by The Echo Man
Inside she got out her small toolkit and, with her back to the mirrors - she knew all the tricks - removed the electronic tags from one sweater and the dress, affixing them to the second sweater. She slipped the first sweater and the dress into her bag, left the dressing room, replaced the other sweater on the display rack, tarried a bit to make sure that she wasn't being watched, then walked out of the store.
When she arrived back at Le Jardin, with just a few minutes to spare, Lucy could see that the convention guests - the members of Société Poursuite - were milling about the lobby. They weren't all guests, of course. It was a convention that attracted a lot of locals, as well as people from all over the tri-state area who drove in for the three days of seminars, lectures and dinners.
In all, over the next few hours there would be ninety-two new guests, and all of them had to be quickly and efficiently processed, greeted with smiles and pleasant repartee, their concerns listened to with rapt attention, their every need anticipated and met, their next three days in the city of Philadelphia - and specifically in Le Jardin - a promised and delivered haven.
Lucy stopped by the Loss Prevention office, picked up her room key.
A door to your subconscious, Mr. Costa had called it. A portal to what happened to you nine years ago.
Lucy finished her last room, room 1214, at 3:45.
She stepped into the closet, closed the door, sat down. In moments, the darkness embraced her. When she closed her eyes she saw the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania from above, saw the school on Cornerstone Road, Lake Stonycreek, and the church on Main Street.
The Dreamweaver had asked her questions, his silken voice floating above her, behind her, around her, like a warm breeze. Her own voice belonged to a little girl.
What day is it, Lucy?
Tuesday.
Is it morning, afternoon, evening?
It's morning. Tuesday morning.
What time?
Around ten. I didn't go to school.
Why not?
Mama was out the night before, and she didn't get up in time.
Where are you?
I am across the street from the church.
Are you alone?
No. Mama's with me. She is wearing her long leather coat. The one with the rip in the right pocket. She is wearing sunglasses. She asked a lady for a cigarette and the lady gave her one.
What happened then?
There was a big bang. It was loud. Even the ground shook.
What did you do?
I don't remember exactly.
Try to remember. Do you smell anything? Taste anything?
I taste milkshake.
What flavor is it?
Chocolate. But it's warm milkshake. I don't like warm milkshake.
What about smell?
I smell smoke, but not like regular smoke. Not like burning leaves, or logs in a fireplace. More like when people burn their plastic garbage bags.
What happens next?
I stand here for a long time, watching the fire and smoke rise up into the sky.
Where is your mother?
Right beside me. Or maybe not.
What do you mean?
Someone is beside me, but I'm not looking at that person. I can't take my eyes off the smoke over the trees. It is making pretty patterns in the sky.
What kind of patterns?
At first it looks like the face of Jesus. Then it looks likes birds.
What happens next?
I reach up my hand for my mother to take me somewhere. Anywhere but here. I'm scared.
Does she take your hand?
I take the person's hand, but as we walk away I realize it can't be my mom.
Why not?
The hand is too big. And rough. It is a man's hand.
Is there anything else you remember?
Yes. We get into a car. And there is a new smell. Two new smells.
What are the new smells?
A different kind of smoke. Different from the burning plastic smell. Like from a pipe, I think. A pipe that people smoke. Like men smoke.
And what else?
Apples. Empire apples. We have lots of apples in Western Pennsylvania. Especially near the fall.
Do you remember what else happened that day?
The fire. The ground shaking. Being scared.
What about the man? What happened with him?
I don't know.
What about his face? Do you see his face?
When I look at his face it isn't there.
What about the fire? Do you remember what that was? Do you remember what caused the fire?
Yes. I remember, but only because I found out later.
What was it?
It was Flight 93. It was September 11, 2001, and Flight 93 crashed right near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Lucy looked down at her hands. She had been clenching her fists so tightly that she had eight little red crescents on the palms of her hands. She eased her fists open, stepped out of the closet, looked around. For a few crazy moments she did not know what room she was in. Most people, even people who worked at Le Jardin, would be hard pressed to tell the standard guest rooms apart, their only clues being, perhaps, the view from any given window But Lucy knew every room on the twelfth floor. It was her floor.
She smoothed out her uniform, stepped into the bathroom, went through the mental checklist in her mind, then checked the entire room.
Done.
She opened the door, stepped into the hall. Two older men were approaching from the elevator. They were probably with the convention. Everyone on the floor this week was with the convention. They nodded to her, smiled. She smiled back, although she didn't feel it inside.
When she reached the business center on the twelfth floor - really just a small niche with computer, fax machine and printer - she sensed another guest coming down the hall. The unwritten rule was that in the hallways, elevators and most public spaces, guests, along with all front-of-the-house personnel, had the right of way. You didn't hide or sidestep from anyone, but if you were any good at your job you knew how to defer with style.
Lucy stepped into the alcove just as the man passed the door of the business center. She did not get a good look at him, just a glimpse of his dark coat.
But she didn't have to see him. It was not her sense of sight that took the floor from beneath her. It was her sense of smell.
There, beneath the hotel smells of cleaning products and filtered, heated air, was another smell, a scent that closed a cold hand over her heart, a smell that unquestionably trailed behind the man who had just passed her in the hallway.
The smell of apples.
She looked down the hall, and knew that he had come out of one of the rooms. Was it 1208? It had to be. She had just cleaned the other two rooms at that end, and they were empty.
Lucy pushed her cart madly down the hall, caught the service elevator to the basement. She left her cart in the basement, ran up the steps toward the service entrance to the first floor. She tried to calm herself as she walked toward the lobby. She didn't know what she would do if she confronted the man, or even who she was looking for.
She stepped into the northern end of the lobby. There were three men in the lobby, none of them wearing or carrying a dark overcoat. Everyone else was staff.
She went out the side door, onto Sansom Street. The sidewalk was crowded. Men, women, children, people making deliveries, cab drivers. She rounded the corner, looked in front of the hotel. Two bellmen were taking bags out of a limo for an elderly couple.
Lucy's heartbeat began to slow. She took a moment, then walked up the drive on the east side of the hotel.
The smell of apples.
It had to be her imagination. Brought on by going to see that crazy old man. She was never going to find out what had happened on those three days. Not really.
She rounded the wall at the back of the hotel, turned the corner.
'Hello, Lucy.'
She stop
ped, her heart in her throat, her legs all but giving out. She knew the man standing before her. She knew his face.
'It's you,' she said.
'Yes, Lucy,' he replied. 'It's Detective Byrne.'
Chapter 23
Jessica spent the early afternoon running data through ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP was a national registry of violent crimes - homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains. Case information submitted to ViCAP was available to authorized law-enforcement agencies around the world, and the system allowed investigators to compare their evidence with all other cases in the database and to identify similarities.
Jessica searched the database with the most salient points of the case, those being the signature marks of the shaving of the victims, as well as the use of paper to blindfold them.
She found a similar case from 2006 in Kentucky, where a man had shaved off the hair of three prostitutes before stabbing them to death and dumping their bodies along the banks of the Cumberland River. In this case the man had shaved only the hair on the victims' heads, including their eyebrows - not their entire bodies. There was another 1988 case in Eureka, California of a man who had shaved a strange pattern into the scalps of four victims. The pattern was later identified, through the man's confession, as what he thought were the first four letters of an alien alphabet.
There were many cases of blindfolded victims, most being execution- style homicides. There were also numerous examples of pre- and post-mortem mutilations. None matched Jessica and Byrne's case.
There were no incidents where all three signatures were present.
Jessica was just about to print off what she needed when all hell broke loose in the duty room. She stood aside as a half-dozen members of the Fugitive Squad ran down the hallway, then through the door to the stairs. They were soon followed by three men wearing US Marshals windbreakers.
Why were the US Marshals there? The purview of the marshal's office, among other things, was the apprehending of fugitives, the transport and managing of prisoners, as well as the protection of witnesses.
Jessica looked across the room to see Dana Westbrook walking toward her. 'What happened?' she asked.
'We had a break.'
Unfortunately, what Westbrook clearly meant was there had been a prison break, not a break in Jessica's case.
'From downstairs?' The sub-basement of the Roundhouse was where the PPD holding cells were located. The holding cells were staffed by the county sheriffs office, not the police.
Westbrook shook her head. 'From CF.'
Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, on State Road, was a prison in Northeast Philly. In Jessica's entire time on the job she had never heard of a break from CF. 'What happened?'
'It's sketchy right now, but it looks like the prisoner got his hands on a visitor's pass and some street clothes. They've got video of him just waltzing out of the visitor's area.'
The security at CF was tight, which probably meant that the escapee had an accomplice of some sort. Jessica knew the drill. Members of the PPD Fugitive Squad would team up both with US Marshals and with officers from the Pennsylvania State Police. They would scour motels, bus stations, train stations, and of course establish surveillance of the prisoner's residence and those of his known associates. She also knew there was a pretty good chance that a head or two would roll at Curran-Fromhold.
'Fugitive Squad is all over it, and as you can see the marshals are in,' Westbrook said. 'Only a matter of time. Captain wanted me to give you a heads-up, anyway.'
This got Jessica's attention. 'Me? Why?'
'The prisoner? The guy who escaped?'
'What about him?'
'He's your AA Killer suspect. Lucas Anthony Thompson.'
Byrne returned to the Roundhouse at just after three p.m. Jessica had tried to call him twice, got his voicemail both times.
'How did the doctor's appointment go?' she asked.
'Good.'
Jessica just stared. Byrne knew better than to give her the bum's rush on something like this, yet still he tried. Her icy look firmly in place, the moment drew out. Byrne caved in.
'They took the MRI, now they have to read the results. They said they'd call me.'
'When?'
Byrne took a deep breath, realizing he had to play this game or he'd never hear the end of it. 'Maybe tomorrow.'
'You'll let me know the second you hear from them, right?'
'Yes, Mom.'
'Don't make me ground you.'
Jessica told Byrne about Thompson, as well as the scant information she had harvested on ViCAP. Then she gathered her notes, filled him in on the rest of the details regarding the second victim found that day. Black male, mid-fifties, no ID. Initial canvass turned up nothing.
'Has he been printed?' Byrne asked.
'The body's on the way to the morgue now. Boss is going to put Russ Diaz and his team on this. Russ did four years in Behavioral Science, you know. I have a sneaking suspicion we're going to need him.'
'What about the signature?'
'Identical,' Jessica said.
They turned back to the case files on the desk. Three bodies. Three identical MOs. Kenneth and Sharon Beckman were tied to the murder of Antoinette Chan. In the case of serial murder, the first order of business was to try and establish a link between the victims, a commonality that might lead to a denominator they all shared - job, family, circle of friends - and ultimately to the killer. Connecting Kenneth and Sharon Beckman was, of course, easy. They'd see about this new victim.
'I ordered you some garlic prawns, by the way,' Jessica said. 'But it got eaten. You know how Chinese food goes in this place. Like pork in a kennel.'
'I ate at the hospital,' Byrne said. 'But I did bring dessert.' He held up a white bag.
Jessica sat up straight in her chair. Dessert at lunch! She beckoned forth the bag. Byrne handed it to her.
Jessica opened the bag and saw that it was an apple fritter from that bakery on Seventeenth she liked.
'What took you to Seventeenth?' she asked.
'I had to pick up a pre-amp from a guy.'
'And a pre-amp would be ...'
'I'm converting all my old vinyl records to digital. Some of them are old 78s, and I'm trying to clean up the sound.'
Jessica took out the apple fritter, thinking that she couldn't wait for that moment in her life - a moment she fully expected, a moment she fully intended to savor - when she just didn't care about her weight anymore, a moment when she could fully embrace the slide into middle age and obesity.
Or when she got pregnant again. Pregnant would be better.
She bit into the apple fritter. Heaven. 'You can get MRIs as often as you want.'
'We're going to have to give statements, you know.'
Jessica nodded, wiped her lips. She and Byrne had met with Sharon Beckman the day before, and now the woman was the victim of a homicide. Jessica and Byrne had become part of the timeline.
The call came at just after four. Nicci Malone and Nick Palladino were at the morgue with the third victim. Jessica put them on speaker.
'We're at the ME's,' Nicci said. 'You wanted me to call?'
'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'Have you checked the victim's hands for tattoos?'
'No. We bagged them at the scene. You want us to check here?'
'Yeah,' Jessica said.
The next minute took somewhere around an hour for Jessica and Byrne. They both paced, neither of them having anything to say. They heard more rustling, then Nicci put the phone back up to her ear.
'Jess?'
'Yeah, Nicci,' Jessica said. 'Is there a tattoo?'
'There is,' Nicci said. 'It's a tattoo of a swan. A tiny blue swan. It's on the index finger of his left hand.'
Someone was on a rampage in the city of Philadelphia and every resource had to be summoned to stop him. The fact that the body of Kenneth Beckman had been found a half-block from an elementary school
put two other agencies on alert. Personnel had already been dispatched to Washington Elementary.
Over the next few hours the apparatus of an investigation handling multiple murders would gear up around them. Off-duty detectives would be called in, various sections of the forensic lab would be put on alert.
'Can you take a picture of the tattoo and send it to me?' Jessica asked.
'Sure,' Nicci said.
A few minutes later, Jessica received the image on her cellphone. She put it next to photos of Kenneth and Sharon Beckman that had been taken. The tattoo was in the same style. She got online to the World Ink site, put the word 'swan' in the search box, hit Enter. Soon a page came up with six different images of stylized swan tattoos. The third tattoo was a perfect match.
Michael Drummond arrived at five-thirty. The ADA had news for them.
'Before I left the office I heard from World Ink's legal department, which, for all I know, might have been a lawyer working out of his car,' Drummond said. He pulled out a fax, handed a copy to Jessica.
'It turns out that you can buy these tattoos a la carte, with a minimum of six tattoos in the order. They searched their database and discovered that, in the past year, they had sold only one package that contained the first two tattoos we found on the victims - the lion and the rooster.'
Drummond pulled out another fax.
'They mailed the package to a post-office box in Jersey City, New Jersey, which turned out to be a remailer. From there it went to a USPS box in Allentown.'
This meant that, for the moment, their most promising avenue of the investigation was blocked. Getting information on who rented a PO Box presented a whole new set of challenges. Anytime you dealt with a federal agency the red tape was massive. On this they would have to bring in the postal inspectors.
Drummond glanced at the notes in Jessica's notebook.
'So there's been a third murder,' he said. It was a statement, not a question.
Jessica picked up her iPhone, showed Drummond the photo of the victim, as well as the close-up of the tattoo. Drummond scanned the pictures, then looked at his watch. 'All right. I know where the judges will be drinking in about an hour. I'll catch them between their second and third martinis.' He gathered his papers. 'Speaking of martinis, are you coming to my party, Jess?'