Rosary girls jbakb-1

by Richard Montanari

  For this, I will destroy these photographs.

  If not, look for the pictures (yes, I have many) on the front page of the very next issue of The Report

  Have a great day!

  As Simon looked it over-he always cooled off a bit before sending his most inflammatory e-mails-Enid meowed and leapt onto his lap from her perch on top of the file cabinet. "What's up, dolly-doll?"

  Enid seemed to peruse the text of Simon's mail to Kevin Byrne.

  "Too strident?" he asked the cat.

  Enid purred a response.

  "You're right, kitty-kitty. Not possible."

  Still, Simon decided he would read it over a few more times before sending it. Maybe he'd wait a day, just to see how big the story of the dead black kid in the alley would get. He could afford twenty-four more hours if it meant he could get a thug like Kevin Byrne under his thumb. Or maybe he should send the e-mail to Jessica. Brilliant, he thought.

  Or maybe he should just copy the photos to a CD and head down to the paper. Just publish them and see how Byrne liked it.

  Either way, he should probably make a backup copy of the photos, just to be safe.

  He thought about the headline, huge type over a photo of Byrne walking out of that alley in Gray's Ferry.

  VIGILANTE COP? would read the headline.

  DETECTIVE IN DEATH ALLEY ON NIGHT OF MURDER! would read the deck. God, he was good.

  Simon walked over to the hall closet and fished out a clean CD-R.

  When he closed the door and turned back to the room, something was different. Maybe not so much different as off-center. It was like the feeling you get when you have an inner-ear infection and your balance is just that little bit tipsy. He stood in the archway leading to his tiny living room, trying to pin down the feeling.

  Everything seemed to be as he had left it. His PowerBook on the coffee table, his empty demitasse cup next to it. Enid purring on the throw rug near the heat register.

  Maybe he was mistaken.

  He looked at the floor.

  He saw the shadow first, a shadow that mirrored his own. He knew enough about key lighting to know that you need two light sources to cast two shadows.

  Behind him, there was only the small ceiling fixture.

  Then he felt the hot breath on his neck, smelled the faint scent of peppermint.

  He turned, his heart suddenly in his throat.

  And stared straight into the eyes of the devil.

  50

  WEDN E S DAY, 1:22 PM

  Byrne had made a few stops before returning to the Roundhouse and briefing Ike Buchanan. He then arranged for one of his registered confidential informants to call him with the information about Brian Parkhurst's whereabouts. Buchanan faxed the DA's office and arranged for a search warrant of Parkhurst's building.

  Byrne called Jessica on her cell phone and found her at a cafe near her father's house in South Philly. He swung by and picked her up. He briefed her at the Fourth District headquarters at Eleventh and Wharton.

  The building Parkhurst owned was a former florist shop on Sixty- first Street, itself converted from a spacious brick row house built in the 1950s. The stone-front structure was a few battered doors down from the Wheels of Soul clubhouse. The Wheels of Soul was an old and venerable motorcycle club. In the 1980s, when crack cocaine had hit Philly hard, it was the Wheels of Soul MC, as much as any law enforcement agency, that had kept the city from burning to the ground.

  If Parkhurst was taking these girls somewhere for short periods of time, Jessica thought as they approached the property, this place would be ideal. There was a rear entrance large enough to pull a van or minivan partially inside.

  When they arrived at the scene, they drove slowly behind the building. The rear entrance-a large, corrugated-steel door-was padlocked from the outside. They circled the block and parked on the street, under the El, about five addresses west of the location.

  Two patrol cars met them. Two uniformed officers would cover the front; two, the rear.

  "Ready?" Byrne asked.

  Jessica felt a little shaky. She hoped it didn't show. She said: "Let's do it."

  Byrne and Jessica approached the door. The front windows were whitewashed, impossible to see through. Byrne slammed a fist into the door three times.

  "Police! Search warrant!"

  They waited five seconds. He pounded again. No response.

  Byrne turned the handle, pushed on the door. It eased open.

  The two detectives made eye contact. On a count, they rolled the jamb.

  The front room was a mess. Drywall, paint cans, drop cloths, scaffolding. Nothing to the left. To the right, stairs leading up.

  "Police! Search warrant!" Byrne repeated.

  Nothing.

  Byrne pointed to the stairs. Jessica nodded. He would take the second floor. Byrne mounted the stairs.

  Jessica worked her way to the rear of the building on the first floor, checking every alcove, every closet. The interior was half renovated. The hallway behind what was once a service counter was a skeleton of open studs, exposed wiring, plastic water lines, heat ducts.

  Jessica stepped through a doorway, into what had once been the kitchen. The kitchen was gutted. No appliances. Recently drywalled and taped. Beneath the pasty smell of the drywall tape, there was something else. Onions. Jessica then saw a sawhorse in the corner of the room. On it sat a half-eaten take-out salad. Next to it was a full cup of coffee. She dipped a finger into the coffee. Ice cold.

  She walked out of the kitchen, inched toward the room at the back of the row house. The door was only slightly ajar.

  Drops of sweat rolled down her face, her neck, then laced her shoulders. The hallway was warm, stuffy, airless. The Kevlar vest felt confining and heavy. Jessica reached the door, took a deep breath. With her left foot she slowly edged the door open. She saw the right half of the room first. An old dinette chair on its side, a wooden toolbox. Smells greeted her. Stale cigarette smoke, freshly cut knotty pine. Beneath it was something ugly, something rank and feral.

  She kicked the door open fully, turned into the small room, and immediately saw a figure. Instinctively she spun and pointed her weapon at the shape, silhouetted against the whitewashed windows in the rear.

  But there was no threat.

  Brian Parkhurst was hanging from an I-beam in the center of the room. His face was a purplish brown, swollen, his extremities distended, his black tongue lolling out of his mouth. An electrical wire was wrapped around his neck, digging deep into the flesh, then looped over a support beam overhead. Parkhurst was barefoot, shirtless. The sour smell of drying feces filled Jessica's sinuses. She dry-heaved once, twice. She held her breath, cleared the rest of the room.

  "Upstairs is clear!" Byrne yelled.

  Jessica nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. She heard Byrne's heavy boots on the stairs. "In here," she yelled.

  In seconds, Byrne entered the room. "Ahfuck."

  Jessica saw the look in Byrne's eyes, read the headlines there. Another suicide. Just like the Morris Blanchard case. Another suspect hounded into taking his own life. She wanted to say something, but it was not her place, and not the time.

  A diseased silence filled the room. They had been batted back to square one and both of them, in their own way, attempted to reconcile that fact with all they had contemplated on the way over.

  The system would now go about its business. They would call the medical examiner's office, the Crime Scene Unit. They would cut Parkhurst down, transport him to the ME's office where they would perform an autopsy on him, pending notification of family. There would be a notice in the papers and a service at one of Philadelphia's finer funeral homes, followed closely by interment on a grassy hillside.

  And exactly what Brian Parkhurst knew, and what he had done, if anything, would forever be cast in darkness.

  They milled around the homicide unit, loose aggies in an empty cigar box. There were always mixed feelings at times like these, when a suspect
cheats the system with suicide. There would be no allocution, no admission of guilt, no punctuation. Just an endless Mobius strip of suspicion.

  Byrne and Jessica sat at adjoining desks.

  Jessica caught Byrne's eye.

  "What?" he asked.

  "Say it."

  "Say what?"

  "You don't think it was Parkhurst, do you?"

  Byrne didn't answer right away. "I think he knew a hell of a lot more than he told us," he said. "I think he was seeing Tessa Wells. I think he knew that he was going to do time for statutory rape, and that's why he went into hiding. But do I think he murdered these three girls? No. I don't."

  "Why not?"

  "Because there wasn't a single shred of physical evidence anywhere near him. Not one fiber, not one drop of fluid."

  The Crime Scene Unit had combed every square inch of both of Brian Parkhurst's properties, yielding nothing. They had pinned a great deal of their suspicions on the possibility-actually, the certainty-that incriminating scientific evidence would be found in Parkhurst's building. Everything they had hoped to find there simply did not exist. Detectives had interviewed everyone in the vicinity of his home and the building he was renovating, yielding nothing. They had yet to find his Ford Windstar.

  "If he was bringing these girls to his house, someone would have seen something, heard something, right?" Byrne added, "If he was bringing them to the building on Sixty-first Street, we would have found something"

  When they had searched the building, they had discovered a number of items, including a box of miscellaneous hardware that contained an assortment of screws, nuts, and bolts, none of which precisely matched the bolts used on the three victims. There was also a chalk box, the carpenter's tool used for snapping lines in the rough-framing stage of construction. The chalk inside was blue. They had sent a sample to the lab, to see if it matched the blue chalk found on the victims. Even if it did, carpenter's chalk could be found at every construction site in the city, and in half the home remodelers' toolboxes. Vincent had some in his toolbox in the garage.

  "But what about his call to me?" Jessica asked. "What about telling me that there are 'things we need to know' about these girls?"

  "I've been thinking about that," Byrne said. "Maybe there is something that they all have in common. Something that we're not seeing."

  "But what happened between the time he called me and this morning?"

  "I don't know."

  "Suicide doesn't exactly fit the profile, does it?"

  "No. It doesn't."

  "Which means there's a good chance that…"

  They both knew what it meant. They sat mute for a while, the cacophony of the busy office flowing around them. There were at least a half dozen other homicides being investigated, and those detectives inched and plowed forward. Byrne and Jessica envied them.

  There are things you need to know about these girls.

  If Brian Parkhurst was not their killer, then the possibility existed that the man they were looking for had murdered him. Perhaps for taking the spotlight. Perhaps for some reason that spoke to the basic pathology of his madness. Perhaps to prove to authorities that he was still out there.

  Neither Jessica nor Byrne had as yet mentioned the similarity in the two "suicides," but it permeated the air in the room like a noxious cloud.

  "Okay," Jessica broke the silence. "If Parkhurst was murdered by our doer, how did he know who he was?"

  "Two ways," Byrne said. "Either they knew each other, or he got his name off TV when he left the Roundhouse the other day."

  Score another one for the media, Jessica thought. They batted around the idea that Brian Parkhurst was another victim of the Rosary Killer for a while. But even if he was, it didn't help them figure out what was coming next.

  The time line, or lack of it, made the killer's movements unpredictable.

  "Our doer picks Nicole Taylor off the street on Thursday," Jessica said. "He dumps her at Bartram Gardens on Friday, right around the time he picks up Tessa Wells, whom he holds until Monday. Why the lag time?"

  "Good question," Byrne said.

  "Then Bethany Price was grabbed Tuesday afternoon, and our one and only witness saw her body dumped at the museum on Tuesday evening. There's no cycle. No symmetry."

  "It's almost like he doesn't want to do these things on the weekend."

  "That may not be as far-fetched as you think," Byrne said.

  He got up, approached the white board, which was now covered in crime scene photos and notes.

  "I don't think our boy is motivated by the moon, the stars, voices, dogs named Sam, any of that shit," Byrne said. "This guy has a plan. I say we learn his plan, we find him."

  Jessica glanced at her pile of library books. The answer was in there somewhere.

  Eric Chavez entered the room, got Jessica's attention. "Got a minute, Jess?"

  "Sure."

  He held up a file folder. "There's something you should see."

  "What is it?"

  "We ran a background check on Bethany Price. Turns out she had a prior."

  Chavez handed her an arrest report. Bethany Price had been arrested as part of a drug sting operation about a year earlier, having been found with nearly a hundred hits of Benzedrine-the illicit diet pill of choice for overweight teenagers. It certainly had been when Jessica was in high school, and it remained so now.

  Bethany pled out and received two hundred hours of community service and a year's probation.

  None of that was surprising. The reason Eric Chavez had brought it to Jessica's attention was the fact that the arresting officer in the case was Detective Vincent Balzano.

  Jessica absorbed this, considered the coincidence.

  Vincent knew Bethany Price.

  According to the sentencing report, it was Vincent who recommended the community service in lieu of jail time.

  "Thanks, Eric," Jessica said.

  "You got it."

  "Small world," Byrne said.

  "I'd still hate to paint it," Jessica replied, absently, reading the report in detail.

  Byrne checked his watch. "Look, I've got to pick up my daughter. We'll start fresh in the morning. Tear this all apart and start at the beginning."

  "Okay," Jessica said, but she saw the look on Byrne's face, the concern that the firestorm that had erupted in his career after the Morris Blanchard suicide might be igniting all over again.

  Byrne placed a hand on Jessica's shoulder, then slipped on his coat and left.

  Jessica sat at the desk for a long time, looking out the window.

  Although she didn't want to admit it, she agreed with Byrne. Brian Parkhurst was not the Rosary Killer.

  Brian Parkhurst was a victim.

  She tried Vincent on his cell phone, got his voice mail. She called Central Detectives and was told that Detective Balzano was out on the street.

  She didn't leave a message.

  51

  WEDNESDAY, 4:15 PM

  When Byrne brought up the boys name, Colleen went four shades of red.

  "He is not my boyfriend,"his daughter signed.

  "Uh, okay. Whatever you say," Byrne signed back.

  He s not.

  "Then why are you blushing?" Byrne signed, a huge smile on his face. They were on Germantown Avenue, heading to the Easter party at the Delaware Valley School for the Deaf.

  "I'm not blushing," Colleen signed, ever redder.

  "Oh, okay," Byrne said, letting her off the hook. "Somebody must have left a stop sign in my car."

  Colleen just shook her head, looked out the window. Byrne noticed that the vents on his daughter's side of the car were blowing around her silky fine blond hair. When had it gotten so long? he wondered. And were her lips always this red?

  Byrne got his daughter's attention by waving his hand around, then signed: "Hey. I thought you guys went on a date. My mistake."

  "It wasn't a date," Colleen signed. "I'm too young to date. Just ask Mom."

  "Then what was
it, if it wasn't a date?"

  Big eye roll. "It was two kids going to see the fireworks with, like, a hundred million adults around."

  "I'm a detective, you know."

  "I know, Dad."

  "I have sources and snitches all over town. Paid, confidential informants."

  "I know, Dad."

  "I just heard that you guys were holding hands and stuff."

  Colleen replied with a sign that was not to be found in The Handshape Dictionary but was well known to all deaf kids. Two hands shaped like razor-sharp tiger claws. Byrne laughed. "Okay, okay," he signed. "Don't scratch."

  They drove in silence for a while, enjoying each other's nearness, despite their sparring. It wasn't often that it was just the two of them. Everything was changing with his daughter, she was a teenager, and the idea scared Kevin Byrne more than any armed gangbanger in any dark alley.

  Byrne's cell phone rang. He answered. "Byrne."

  "Can you talk?"

  It was Gauntlett Merriman.

  "Yeah."

  "He's at the old safe house."

  Byrne took it in. The old safe house was five minutes away.

  "Who's with him?" Byrne asked.

  "He's alone. At least for now."

  Byrne glanced at his watch, saw his daughter looking at him out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to the window. She could read lips better than any kid at the school, probably better than some of the deaf adults who taught there.

  "You need some help?" Gauntlett asked.

  "No."

  "Okay, then."

  "Are we good?" Byrne asked.

  "All fruits ripe, my friend."

  He closed the phone.

  Two minutes later, he pulled to the curb in front of the Caravan Serai deli. ALTHOUGH IT WAS TOO EARLY for the dinner trade, there were a few regulars scattered about the twenty or so tables at the front of the deli, sipping the thick black coffee and nibbling on Sami Hamiz's famous pistachio baklava. Sami was behind the counter, slicing lamb for what appeared to be a huge order he was preparing. When he saw Byrne he dried his hands and walked to the front of the restaurant, a grin on his face.