Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  Having grown up in a cop family, having witnessed the nightly torment, Jessica was well aware that there were moments like these, times when someone had to question the closest relative of a murdered loved one, times when anger and rage became a twisting, savage thing within you. Jessica’s father had once told her he sometimes envied doctors, for they were able to point to some incurable disease when they approached relatives in the hospital corridor, grim-faced and grimly cordial. All homicide cops ever had was a torn human body, and all they could ever point to were the same three things over and over and over again. I’m sorry, ma’am, your son died of greed, your husband died of passion, your daughter died of revenge.

  Kevin Byrne edged ahead.

  “Did Tessa have a best friend, sir? Someone she spent a lot of time with?”

  “There was one girl who would come by the house now and then. Patrice was her name. Patrice Regan.”

  “Did Tessa have any boyfriends? Anyone she was seeing?”

  “No. She was . . . she was a shy girl, you see,” Wells said. “She did see this boy Sean for a while last year, but she stopped.”

  “Do you know why they stopped seeing each other?”

  Wells blushed slightly, then regained his composure. “I think he wanted to . . . Well, you know how young boys are.”

  Byrne glanced at Jessica, signaling her to take the notes. People get self-conscious when police officers write down what they say, as they say it. While Jessica took notes, Kevin Byrne could maintain eye contact with Frank Wells. It was cop shorthand, and Jessica was pleased that she and Byrne, no more than a few hours into their partnership, were already speaking it.

  “Do you know Sean’s last name?” Byrne asked.

  “Brennan.”

  Wells turned from the window, heading back to his chair. He then hesitated, steadying himself on the sill. Byrne shot to his feet, crossed the room in a few strides. Taking Frank Wells by the arm, Byrne helped him back to the overstuffed recliner. Wells sat down, positioning the oxygen tube into his nose. He picked up the Polaroid and glanced at it again. “She’s not wearing her pendant.”

  “Sir?” Byrne asked.

  “I gave her an angel pendant watch when she made her confirmation. She never took it off. Ever.”

  Jessica looked to the photo on the mantel, the Olan Mills–type shot of the fifteen-year-old high school student. Her eyes found the sterling pendant around the young woman’s neck. Crazily, Jessica remembered when she was very young, in that strange and confusing summer when her mother became a skeleton, her mother had told her that she had a guardian angel who would look after her all her life, keeping her safe from harm. Jessica wanted to believe it was true for Tessa Wells, too. The crime scene photo made it very hard.

  “Is there anything else you can think of that might help us?” Byrne asked.

  Wells thought for a few moments, but it was clear he was no longer part of a dialogue, but rather adrift on his memories of his daughter, memories that had not yet turned into the specter of dreams. “You didn’t know her, of course. You came to meet her in this terrible way.”

  “I know, sir,” Byrne said. “I can’t tell you how sorry we are.”

  “Did you know that, when she was really small, she would only eat her Alpha-Bits in alphabetical order?”

  Jessica thought of how systematic her own daughter Sophie was about everything, the way she would line up her dolls by height when she played with them, the way she organized her clothes by color. Reds to the left, blues in the middle, greens on the right.

  “And then she would skip when she was sad. Isn’t that something? I asked her about it once when she was about eight or so. She said that she would skip until she was happy again. What sort of person skips when they are sad?”

  The question hung in the air for a few moments. Byrne caught it, soft-pedaled it in.

  “A special person, Mr. Wells,” Byrne said. “A very special person.”

  Frank Wells stared blankly at Byrne for a few moments, as if he had forgotten the two police officers were there. Then he nodded.

  “We are going to find whoever did this to Tessa,” Byrne said. “You have my word on that.”

  Jessica wondered how many times Kevin Byrne had said something like that, and how many times he was able to make good. She wished she could be so confident.

  Byrne, the veteran cop, moved on. Jessica was grateful. She didn’t know how much longer she could sit in this room before the walls would begin to close in. “I have to ask you this question, Mr. Wells. I hope you understand.”

  Wells stared, his face an unvarnished canvas, primed with heartache.

  “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to do something like this to your daughter?” Byrne asked.

  There was a proper moment of silence, the span of time needed for the appearance of deductive thought. The fact was, nobody knew anyone who could do what was done to Tessa Wells.

  “No” was all Wells said.

  A lot went with that no, of course; every side dish on the menu, as Jessica’s late grandfather used to say. But for the moment, it went unsaid here. And as the spring day raged outside the windows of Frank Wells’s tidy living room, as the body of Tessa Wells lay cooling in the medical examiner’s office, already beginning to conceal its many mysteries, that was a good thing, Jessica thought.

  A damn good thing.

  THEY LEFT FRANK WELLS STANDING in the doorway to his row house, his pain fresh and red and raw, a million exposed nerve endings waiting for the infection of silence. He would make a formal identification of the body later in the day. Jessica thought about the time Frank Wells had spent since his wife had died, the two thousand or so days that everyone else involved had gone about their lives, living and laughing and loving. She considered the fifty thousand or so hours of inextinguishable grief, each one populated by sixty horrible minutes, themselves counted off by sixty agonizing seconds apiece. Now the cycle of grief began again.

  They had looked through some of the drawers and closets in Tessa’s room, finding nothing of particular interest. A methodical young woman, organized and precise, even her junk drawer was orderly, separated into clear plastic boxes: matchbooks from weddings, ticket stubs from movies and concerts, a small collection of interesting buttons, a pair of plastic bracelets from hospital stays. Tessa favored satin sachets.

  Her clothes were plain and of medium quality. On the walls had been a few posters, not of Eminem or Ja Rule or DMX or any of the current harvest of boy bands, but rather of maverick girl violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Vanessa-Mae. An inexpensive Skylark violin stood in a corner of her closet. They had searched her car and found nothing. They would examine the contents of her school locker later.

  Tessa Wells was a working-class kid who took care of her sick father, got good grades, and probably had a scholarship to Penn State in her future. A girl who kept her clothes in dry-cleaning bags and her shoes in boxes.

  And now she was dead.

  Someone was walking the streets of Philadelphia, breathing the warm spring air, smelling the daffodils bursting through the soil, someone who had taken an innocent young girl to a filthy, decayed place and brutally ended her life.

  In doing that monstrous thing, this someone had said:

  There are one and a half million people in Philadelphia.

  I am one of them.

  Find me.

  PART TWO

  7

  MONDAY, 12:20 PM

  SIMON CLOSE, THE STAR REPORTER for Philadelphia’s leading weekly shock tabloid, The Report, had not set foot in a church in more than two decades and, although he didn’t exactly expect the heavens to part and a bolt of righteous lightning to split the sky and rend him in half, leaving him a smoldering pile of fat and bone and gristle if he did so, there was enough residual Catholic guilt inside him to give him a moment’s pause if he ever entered a church, dipped his finger in the holy water, and genuflected.

  Born thirty-two years ago in Berwick-
upon-Tweed in the Lake District, the rugged north of England that abuts the border of Scotland, a fell rat of the first order, Simon had never been one to put too much faith in anything, not the least of which was the church. The scion of an abusive father and a mother too drunk to notice or care, Simon had long ago learned to put whatever belief he had in himself.

  He had lived in half a dozen Catholic group homes by the time he was seven—where he had learned many things, none of them reflecting the life of Christ—after which he was pawned off on the one and only relative willing to take him in, his spinster aunt Iris who lived in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a small town about 130 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

  Aunt Iris had taken Simon to Philadelphia many times when he was young. Simon recalled seeing the tall buildings, the vast bridges, smelling the city smells and hearing the bustle of urban life, and knew—knew as fully as the realization that he would, no matter what, hang on to his Northumberland inflections at all costs—that one day he would live there.

  At sixteen, Simon interned as a copy dog at the News-Item, the local Coal Township daily paper, his eye, like everyone working at any rag east of the Alleghenies, on the city desk at The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Daily News. But after two years of running copy from the editorial office to the typesetter in the basement, and writing the occasional listing and schedule for the Shamokin Oktoberfest, he saw the light, a radiance that had yet to dim.

  On a storm-lashed New Year’s Eve, at the newspaper’s offices on Main Street, Simon was sweeping up when he saw a glow from the newsroom. When he peeked in, he saw two men. The paper’s leading light, a man in his fifties named Norman Watts, was poring over the enormous Pennsylvania Code.

  The man who covered arts and entertainment, Tristan Chaffee, was wearing a shiny tux, his tie down, his feet up, a glass of white Zinfandel in his hand. He was working on a story about a local celebrity—an overrated singer of syrupy love songs, a low-rent Bobby Vinton—who had apparently been caught in a child porn sting.

  Simon pushed his broom, covertly watching the two men work. The serious journalist pored over obscure details of land plots and abstracts and eminent domain rights, rubbing his eyes, butting out long-ashed cigarette after cigarette, forgetting to smoke them, making frequent trips to the loo to drain what must have been a pea-sized bladder.

  And then there was the entertainment hack, sipping sweet wine, chatting on the phone with record producers, club owners, groupies.

  The decision made itself.

  Sod the hard news, Simon had thought.

  Gimme the white Zin.

  At eighteen, Simon enrolled at the Luzerne County Community College. A year after graduation, Aunt Iris passed silently in her sleep. Simon packed his few belongings and moved to Philly, at long last loping after his dream (that being, becoming the British Joe Queenan). For three years he lived on his small inheritance, trying to sell his freelance articles to the major national glossies, with no luck.

  Then, after three more years of writing freelance music and film reviews for the Inquirer and Daily News, and eating his share of ramen noodles and hot ketchup soup, Simon landed a feature job at a new start-up tabloid called The Report. He worked his way up quickly, and for the past seven years Simon Close had written a weekly discourse of his own design called “Up Close!,” a rather lurid crime beat column that covered the city of Philadelphia’s more shocking crimes and, when he was so blessed, the transgressions of its more luminous citizens. In these areas Philadelphia rarely disappointed.

  And while his venue at The Report—THE CONSCIENCE OF PHILADELPHIA read the tag—was not the Inquirer or The Daily News or even CityPaper, Simon had managed to file near the top of the news cycle on a number of big stories, much to the consternation of his far-better-paid colleagues in the so-called legitimate press.

  So-called because, according to Simon Close, there was no such thing as the legitimate press. They were all knee deep in the cesspool, every hack with a spiral-bound notebook and acid reflux disease, and the ones who considered themselves solemn chroniclers of their times were seriously deluded. Connie Chung spending a week shadowing Tonya Harding and the “reporters” from Entertainment Tonight covering the JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson cases were all the blur one needed.

  Since when were dead little girls entertainment?

  Since serious news was flushed down the toilet with an O. J. chaser, that’s when.

  Simon was proud of his work at The Report. He had good instincts and an almost photographic memory for quotes and details. He had been front and center on the story of the homeless man found in North Philly, his internal organs removed from his body, as well as the scene of the crime. On that one, Simon had bribed a night technician at the medical examiner’s office with a joint of Thai stick for an autopsy photo, which, unfortunately, never saw the ink of print.

  He had beaten the Inquirer to print on a scandal at the police department about a homicide detective who had hounded a man to suicide after the murder of the young man’s parents, a crime of which the young man was innocent.

  He’d even had a cover story on a recent adoption scam where a South Philly woman, owner of a shadow agency called Loving Hearts, was taking thousands of dollars for phantom children she never delivered. Although he would have preferred a higher body count in his stories, and grislier photos, he was nominated for an AAN award for “Phantom Hearts,” as that adoption scam piece had been called.

  Philadelphia Magazine had also run an exposé on the woman—a full month after Simon’s piece in The Report.

  When his stories broke after the paper’s weekly deadline, Simon filed to the paper’s website, which was currently logging nearly ten thousand hits per day.

  And so it was when the phone rang around noon, rousing him from a rather vivid dream that included Cate Blanchett, a pair of Velcro handcuffs, and a riding crop, he was suffused with dread at the notion that he might once again have to revisit his Catholic roots.

  “Yeah,” Simon managed. His voice sounded like a mile of muddy culvert.

  “Get the fuck out of bed.”

  There were at least a dozen people he knew who might greet him thusly. It wasn’t even worth firing back. Not this early. He knew who it was: Andrew Chase, his old friend and co-conspirator in journalistic exposé. Although categorizing Andy Chase as a friend was a monumental stretch. The two men tolerated each other the way mold and bread might, a distasteful alliance that, for mutual profit, yielded the occasional benefit. Andy was a boor and a slob and an insufferable prig. And those were his selling points. “It’s the middle of the night,” Simon protested.

  “In Bangladesh, maybe.”

  Simon wiped the crud from his eyes, yawned, stretched. Close enough to wakefulness. He glanced next to him. Empty. Again. “What’s up?”

  “A Catholic school girl was found dead.”

  The game, Simon thought.

  Again.

  On this side of the night, Simon Edward Close was a reporter, and thus the words were a spike of adrenaline in his chest. He was awake now. His heart began that rattle he knew and loved, the noise that meant: story. He rummaged the nightstand, found two empty packs of cigarettes, poked around the ashtray until he hooked a two-inch butt. He straightened it out, fired it, coughed. He reached over, hit RECORD on his trusted Panasonic recorder with its in-line microphone. He had long since abandoned the notion of trying to take coherent notes before his first ristretto of the day. “Talk to me.”

  “They found her on Eighth.”

  “Where on Eighth?”

  “Fifteen hundreds.”

  Beirut, Simon thought. This is good. “Who found her?”

  “Some wino.”

  “On the street?” Simon asked.

  “In one of the row houses. In the basement.”

  “How old?”

  “The house?”

  “Jesus, Andy. It’s too fucking early. Don’t muck about. The girl. How old was the girl?”

  “Teenager,�
� Andy said. Andy Chase had been an EMS tech for the Glenwood Ambulance Group for eight years. Glenwood did a lot of the ambulance contract work for the city and, over the years Andy’s tips had led Simon to a number of scoops, as well as to a great deal of inside dope on the cops. Andy never let him forget that fact. This one would cost Simon a lunch at The Plough & The Stars. If the story became a cover story, he owed Andy a hundred extra.

  “Black? White? Brown?” Simon asked.

  “White.”

  Not as good a story as a little white one, Simon thought. Dead little white girls were a guaranteed cover. But the Catholic school angle was great. A load of cheesy similes to cull from. “They take the body yet?”

  “Yeah. They just moved it.”

  “What the hell was a white Catholic school girl doing on that part of Eighth?”

  “Who am I, Oprah? How should I know?”

  Simon computed the elements of the story. Drugs. And sex. Had to be. Bread and jam. “How did she die?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Murder? Suicide? Overdose?”

  “Well, the murder police were out there, so it wasn’t an overdose.”

  “Was she shot? Stabbed?”

  “I think she was mutilated.”

  Oh God, yes, Simon thought. “Who’s the primary detective?”

  “Kevin Byrne.”

  Simon’s stomach flipped, did a brief pirouette, then settled. He had a history with Kevin Byrne. The notion that he might lock horns with him again both excited and scared the shit out of him. “Who’s with him, that Purity?”

  “Purify. No. Jimmy Purify is in the hospital,” Andy said.

  “Hospital? Gunshot?”

  “Heart attack.”

  Fuck, Simon thought. No drama there. “He’s working alone?”

  “No. He’s got a new partner. Jessica something.”

  “A woman?” Simon asked.