Or had they?
Who was to say that the gun had not been removed from the box and used over and over to commit crimes? Who was to say that there was not, right at this moment, bullet evidence in an envelope at FIU that would match this weapon and bring a killer or killers to justice?
There was no question in Byrne’s mind that he was being, at the very least, derelict in his duties by not turning the weapon in to FIU for examination. His failure to do so bordered on the criminal.
He went to the hall closet, took down a shoebox he used for news clippings and old photographs. He found the three items he was looking for.
One was a picture taken by the river beneath the South Street bridge. In it, Byrne stood with Dave Carmody, Ronan Kittredge and Jimmy Doyle. It had been taken sometime in June 1976. Dave, as always, wore his spotless Phillies jersey. Ronan had on his running shorts and worn Nikes. Jimmy wore a white T-shirt and Levi’s.
It was the last picture they had ever taken together. After the events of the Fourth of July that year, they had drifted apart. Part of it was that they were teenagers, and, like all teenagers, had begun to leave behind those things of childhood, including friendships. Part of it was the darkness they all carried from having been in some way involved in the maelstrom of evil surrounding the deaths of Catriona Daugherty and Desmond Farren.
Byrne had never spent another summer in the Pocket. The four of them never discussed what happened that night.
The second item Byrne removed from the box was a yellowed news clipping from 1996. It was from the Newark Star-Ledger. The headline read: Hunterdon County Teacher Dies in Fiery Crash.
Byrne skimmed the short article, although he knew most of it by heart. It told how Ronan Ian Kittredge, 33, had been found at the bottom of a hill, off Route 31, burned to death in his 1995 Ford Aspire. The article said that the road had been treacherous that night due to a blinding snowstorm.
When news of Ronan’s death had reached Byrne, he had called the Hunterdon County sheriff’s office to find out more details. He was told that there were two sets of tracks found on the shoulder of the road that night. One set–the set that ran down the hill–belonged to Ronan’s Aspire. The other set belonged to a much bigger vehicle.
The sheriff’s office also said that no one had come forward with any information. They promised to call Byrne if and when there were further details. They never called.
The third item was also a newspaper clipping. Although it was newer, from August 2004, it was more worn and creased. There were rips in the paper, a few spots where liquid had been splashed. That was because Byrne had removed it from the box dozens of times, reading it over and over again with his coffee, or with his Bushmills in the middle of the night, as he was doing now.
This headline read: Pittsburgh Man Found Shot to Death. The article chronicled how David Paul Carmody, 41, was found dead in an alleyway in the Homewood section of the city.
When Byrne had got the call from Dave’s mother, he drove to Pittsburgh and met with the homicide detectives assigned to the case. They had graciously allowed him to look at the files, the autopsy findings, the toxicology results. Nothing made sense. Dave lived all the way across town from Homewood, had no record of drug use. He did not drink, was happily married. According to the ME’s office he had been killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head. No bullet or casing was found. His car was discovered a block away. No witnesses came forward.
Byrne looked at the photograph that accompanied the article. A smiling, early-middle-aged Dave Carmody looked back.
Byrne had called the homicide unit in Pittsburgh once a year since 2004. No arrest was ever made.
Of his three friends from the Pocket, Jimmy Doyle was the one Byrne had lost track of most completely. In fact, after the summer of 1976, he did not talk to him until the day five years ago when Jimmy walked into the Roundhouse, clapped him on the back and announced that he had taken a position with the Philadelphia DA’s office homicide division.
They’d met at a number of functions, but had never sat down over a bottle and fully caught up.
Byrne got online, did a search for Greene Towne LLC, the company that was doing the rehabilitation on the house in Devil’s Pocket where the box had been found.
He discovered that the company was based in Chestnut Hill, and had a small website by corporate standards, only a few pages deep. It appeared that the project in Devil’s Pocket was their first. On one page were short bios of the four principal owners.
One of the names was familiar: Robert Anselmo. Although the man was forty years older than the last time he had seen him, Byrne had no problem recognizing him.
Robert Anselmo had once been partners in the landscaping business with Jimmy’s stepfather, Tommy Doyle.
‘What did you do, Jimmy?’ Byrne asked of the night.
He navigated to Jimmy Doyle’s campaign website. He read Jimmy’s bio page.
After graduating high school, Jimmy had worked his way through Duquesne University, where he went on to obtain his law degree.
One item in Jimmy’s CV jumped off the page. From January 2002 to March 2005, he had been an assistant district attorney for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Byrne picked up the photograph of himself and his three boyhood friends.
As he looked at the young, smiling face of Jimmy Doyle, he felt a cold finger rake his spine.
The largest city in Allegheny County was Pittsburgh.
30
The meeting was for ADAs working the Farren case, and the unit chief of the homicide division. Unless and until arrests were made in the current string of murders, of which the DA’s office was all but certain Danny Farren was the orchestrator, the focus would be on building the case in the Jacinta Collins murder, and compiling as much collateral evidence against Farren as possible.
In attendance were Jimmy Doyle, Jessica, Amy Smith and three first-year ADAs.
‘We pretty much have what we had before,’ Jessica began. ‘We have a deposition and statement from the woman who saw Danny Farren park his car on the street that night. She saw him get out of the vehicle, walk behind the building. She said he was back there no more than a few minutes or so–which syncs with the pole-cam recording–then he returned to his car and drove off.’
‘Do we have any other eyewitnesses?’ Jimmy asked.
‘No, that’s it. But we do have that pole-cam video, and it aligns with what our witness says Farren was wearing that night.’
‘And you met with a member of the bomb squad?’ Jimmy asked.
Jessica nodded. ‘Detective Zachary Brooks. He walked us through the scene.’
‘I’ve had him on the stand,’ Jimmy said. ‘Good officer. Great witness.’
Jessica agreed. ‘And then we have Farren’s fingerprint on the duct tape.’
Before Zach Brooks had given her a crash course on the making, deploying and detonating of a pipe bomb, she would have bet against any kind of forensic evidence–hair, fiber, blood, DNA, fingerprints–surviving the heat and pressure of the blast. Now she knew the opposite.
A series of photographs taken in the basement of The Stone were spread out on the table.
‘What do we have from this evidence?’ Jimmy asked.
‘It’s still being tagged and collated. But I can tell you that these photographs and drawings go back many years,’ Jessica said.
She tapped one photograph. It showed a picture of a heavyset man wearing powder-blue double-knit slacks and a matching Ban-Lon shirt. It looked to be 1990s vintage.
Beneath the picture was a clipping from the Inquirer. The headline read: Reputed Mobster Gunned Down in Cherry Hill.
‘We’ve identified this man as Carmine Sciaccia. He was a captain in the Ruolo crime family from the late seventies until his demise in 1997. The article is about his as-yet-unsolved murder in the parking lot of the Cherry Hill mall. A pipe bomb on a timer.’
‘You’re saying we think the Farrens carried out the hit?’
/> ‘Too early to tell,’ Jessica said. ‘But I can tell you that there are at least a dozen other instances where we have a covert surveillance photograph over a news clipping wherein the subject of the photograph has been killed. I’ve run a half-dozen of them. None so far have been closed.’
Everyone in the room remained silent for a few moments. The possibility that they were on the brink of solving a dozen more homicides was energizing to say the least.
‘What about the rest of these photos? It looks like there are hundreds of them.’
‘Thousands,’ Jessica said.
‘Good work,’ Jimmy Doyle said. ‘Keep me posted.’
Jessica began to build her case. Along the way she would add anything she thought might help in the criminal conspiracy counts.
She began to research the Farren family. Records went back to 1944. They were all on paper then, and she had to take her lunch over to the building where they were stored, the vast complex that used to be home to the Philadelphia Bulletin, at one time the largest afternoon newspaper in the United States.
Liam Farren and his wife Máire had arrived from Ireland in the early 1940s. Liam had been a fusilier in the British Army. Within a year they’d opened their tavern, The Stone.
Liam was first arrested in 1945 on a criminal complaint of assault and intimidation. The details were that he had offered protection to the owner of a small hardware store, who didn’t want to pay. He was convicted and did eleven months.
Jessica made notes on the principals, dates and times.
Over the next fifteen years, Farren was arrested six times, each time on a felony charge. Due to what looked like an efficient system of witness intimidation, he was able to beat all but two of the charges, returning to prison twice for a total of three years.
One of the raps he beat was the firebombing of an insurance firm in Grays Ferry. Jessica underlined the word firebombing.
In 1974, Liam Farren was again arrested and indicted, this time on a charge of manslaughter for beating a cab driver to death with a claw hammer. He was sentenced to a ten-year stretch at Graterford. He never made it out. According to prison records, he was killed in a prison yard fight that year.
If Liam Farren’s career in crime had been localized to Devil’s Pocket and a few surrounding neighborhoods, his sons Patrick and Daniel had taken the show on the road. Between the two of them there were no fewer than three dozen indictments, ranging from assault to arson to strong-arm robbery to residential burglary in neighborhoods as far apart as Cobbs Creek in West Philadelphia, Torresdale in the northeast and the Queen Village section of South Philadelphia.
Patrick Farren was killed in a shootout with police in 1988. Byrne had already filled Jessica in on his own role, as well that of Frankie Sheehan.
After Patrick’s death, Danny Farren went on to consolidate his hold on businesses in Devil’s Pocket, Schuylkill, Grays Ferry and Point Breeze.
With Michael and Sean Farren, Danny’s twin sons, the adage about the apples and the tree proved not to be a cliché. Each of the boys did time in juvenile detention. In 2006, Sean was arrested for menacing. He served two years of a five-year sentence.
According to current records, there was no last-known address for Sean Farren. Michael Farren’s only address was The Stone.
Detectives from South were currently looking for known associates of the two men.
When Jessica got home, she took a long, hot shower. She couldn’t seem to get the contents of that room full of photographs off her mind.
The photos of the mutilated faces of Edwin Channing and Laura Rousseau were beyond horrifying. Jessica knew why she had been kept out of the loop on the details of the murders. Her job had been to build a case against Danny Farren. Now that the case would include conspiracy on multiple counts, she was copied in on everything.
With Vincent taking care of the kids, she flopped into bed at just after nine o’clock.
She dreamed of The Stone, and what it must have been like in the 1940s and 1950s. Philadelphia had never had a shortage of corner taverns, ethnic neighborhood corner taverns at that. While The Stone had surely never been an elegant place, it was cozy and welcoming in her dream, certainly a contrast to the reality of the place: a den of thieves.
As light began to filter through the blinds, she opened her eyes, rolled over, reached for her husband. Vincent was already up and gone. He and his team at Narcotics Field Unit North were putting together a far-reaching sting operation, and he was working eighteen-hour days.
Jessica looked at the clock. It was nearly six, which gave her a good forty-five minutes before she got up. She needed every second of it. Thank God Sophie was old enough to take care of herself and her brother.
The job had other ideas. Jessica’s cell phone rang at just after 6 a.m.
It was Byrne.
There had been another murder.
31
The murder was not in Philadelphia County, but rather Montgomery County.
When Byrne pulled to the curb at just after 7 a.m., he had two cups of Starbucks in the cup holders. Bless him.
Jessica slipped in, sipped the coffee, still clearing the sleep and her dreams from her head.
As Byrne headed toward the expressway, he filled her in on what he had learned from Sister Kathleen. He handed her a copy of the Sator Square.
‘Is someone running it through ViCAP?’ Jessica asked.
Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP–the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program–was a national registry of violent crimes: homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains.
‘Josh is on it. He’ll be calling.’
‘How did we get this lead?’
‘The detective for the Montgomery County DA’s office said the case is a week old,’ Byrne said. ‘He picked up our cases on the wire. He says he thinks the MO is identical.’
Jessica shuddered. If the Farren brothers had taken their madness to another county, where else would the trail of blood lead?
The seat of Montgomery County was Norristown, a city of 35,000 residents located six miles from the Philadelphia city limits.
On the way up, Jessica read the case file the lead detective had faxed Byrne.
‘This is the Farrens,’ she said.
‘It sure looks like it.’
They met the lead investigator at the crime-scene house, a duplex on Haws Avenue, near Route 202.
Detective Ted Weaver was in his mid-forties. He had thinning blond hair, blond eyelashes, careful blue eyes. His suit coat was one size too small, and the patch pockets bulged with notebooks, receipts, bits of paper and minutiae that apparently did not fit in the bursting leatherette portfolio on which the zipper had long ago quit. He had that hunched-over posture that Jessica recognized immediately as belonging to an overworked investigator.
He smiled when they approached, and his expression lit up the otherwise depressing scene.
Jessica and Byrne introduced themselves.
‘You guys up to speed?’ he asked.
According to the summary Weaver had sent, the victim was a fifty-two-year-old man named Robert Kilgore. An attorney specializing in estate planning, Kilgore, according to co-workers, had left his office on the day he was murdered at 5.30. Credit-card receipts showed that he had stopped for pizza at an Italian restaurant on West Main Street at 5.50. He was not seen alive again.
When his tenant in the duplex, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Denise Joseph, knocked on his door at seven the next morning requesting that he move his car, she looked in the window and saw the horror in the living room.
Like Edwin Channing and Laura Rousseau, Robert Kilgore had no face.
‘And Miss Joseph didn’t see or hear anything the previous night?’ Byrne asked.
‘Not according to her statement. She said she got home at nine o’clock, took a shower, sat in front of her iMac with headphones on until midnight, then went to bed.’
‘What about the neighborhood interview?’
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br /> ‘Nothing. This is a pretty quiet place. Whoever did this was careful not to be seen or heard.’
‘Did you read the summaries of our cases?’ Byrne asked. Weaver nodded. ‘It looks like the same MO,’ he said. ‘Home invasion, single tap to the center of the chest.’
‘Duct tape?’
‘Yeah.’
Weaver opened the folder on the car’s hood, flipped through it. Jessica saw that the crime-scene photographs were as horrific as in the other two cases.
The victim sat in a chair in the middle of the dining room, his ankles tied to the legs, his hands bound behind him. His head slumped forward. A close-up from the front showed that his chest had a single entry wound.
It looked like he was wearing an expensive cashmere sweater and paint-stained sweat pants.
‘What about the forensics?’ Byrne asked.
Weaver shook his head. ‘Gloves on every surface. No latents on the duct tape.’
‘Did you recover the projectile?’ Jessica asked.
‘We did.’ He found two photographs of the slug. It wasn’t in good shape, but there was no reason to believe it came from anything other than the Makarov used in the other murders.
Byrne took out two photographs. They were the most recent mug shots of Sean and Michael Farren. He handed them to Weaver. Weaver studied them.
‘These are our guys?’ Weaver asked.
‘These are our guys,’ Byrne said.
The house was a large 1930s duplex on Haws Avenue, just a few blocks from the Schuylkill River. The house was set back from the road, on a rise, with a stone retaining wall. There were old-growth maples and pin oaks around the perimeter, and heavy shrubbery near the windows. Perfect cover for breaking and entering.
But the killers did not break and enter. Like the other two scenes, there was no sign of forced entry.
They stepped onto the porch. Jessica noticed that there had at one time been a porch swing. The two eyelets screwed into the ceiling had begun to rust.
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