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

by Richard Montanari

  Patrick smiled. “God has a way of evening the score, doesn’t he?”

  “He does,” Jessica said.

  “If I remember correctly, there was a lot of craziness that Christmas Eve, wasn’t there?”

  It was true. Generally, when a blizzard hits, it keeps the nut jobs indoors. But for some reason, the stars lined up that night and they were all out. Shootings, arson, muggings, vandalism.

  “Yeah. We were running all night,” Jessica said.

  “Didn’t somebody throw blood on the door of some church, or something like that?”

  Jessica nodded. “St. Katherine’s. Up in Torresdale.”

  Patrick shook his head. “So much for peace on earth, huh?”

  Jessica had to agree. Although if there suddenly was peace on earth, she’d be out of a job.

  Patrick sipped his drink. “Speaking of insanity, I hear you caught that homicide on Eighth Street.”

  “Where did you hear that?

  With a wink: “I have my sources.”

  “Yeah,” Jessica said. “My first case. Thank you, Lord.”

  “Bad as I heard?”

  “Worse.”

  Jessica gave him a brief rundown of the scene.

  “My God,” Patrick said, reacting to the litany of horrors that befell Tessa Wells. “Every day I think I’ve heard it all. Every day I hear something new.”

  “I really feel for her father,” Jessica said. “He’s pretty sick. He lost his wife a few years ago. Tessa was his only daughter.”

  “I can’t imagine what he’s going through. Losing a child.”

  Jessica couldn’t either. If she ever lost Sophie, her life would be over.

  “Pretty tough assignment right out of the box,” Patrick said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Jessica thought about it before answering. Patrick had a way of asking questions like that. You got the feeling he really cared. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “How’s your new partner?”

  This one was easy. “Good. Really good.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he’s got this way of handling people,” Jessica said. “This way of getting people to talk to him. I don’t know if it’s fear or respect, but it works. And I’ve asked around about his solve rate. It’s off the charts.”

  Patrick looked around the room, back at Jessica. He formed a half-smile, the one that had always made her stomach go a bit spongy.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Mirabile visu,” Patrick said.

  “That’s what I always say,” Jessica said.

  Patrick laughed. “It’s Latin.”

  “Latin for what? Who beat the crap out of you?”

  “Latin for You are wonderful to behold.”

  Doctors, Jessica thought. Smooth talk in Latin.

  “Well . . . sono sposato,” Jessica replied. “That’s Italian for My husband would shoot us both in the friggin’ forehead if he walked in here right now.”

  Patrick put both hands up in surrender.

  “Enough about me,” Jessica said, silently berating herself for even bringing up Vincent. He wasn’t invited to this party. “Tell me what’s up with you these days.”

  “Well, it’s always busy at St. Joseph’s. Never a dull moment,” Patrick said. “Also, I might have a showing lined up at the Boyce Gallery.”

  Besides being a hell of a doctor, Patrick played the cello and was a talented painter. He had done a pastel sketch of Jessica one night when they were dating. Needless to say, Jessica had it well buried in the garage.

  Jessica nursed her drink while Patrick had another. They caught up fully, effortlessly flirting just like the old days. The hand touching, the electric brush of feet under the table. Patrick also told her that he was donating his time to a new free clinic opening on Poplar. Jessica told him that she was thinking about painting the living room. Whenever she was around Patrick Farrell, she felt like she was a drain on society.

  At around eleven Patrick walked her to her car, which was parked on Third Street. Then came the moment, as she knew it would. The scotch helped smooth it over.

  “So . . . dinner next week, maybe?” Patrick asked.

  “Well, I . . . you know . . .” Jessica hemmed and hawed.

  “Just friends,” Patrick added. “Nothing untoward.”

  “Well, then, forget it,” Jessica said. “If we can’t be toward, what’s the point?”

  Patrick laughed again. Jessica had forgotten how magical that sound could be. It had been a long time since she and Vincent had found anything to laugh about.

  “Okay. Sure,” Jessica said, trying, and failing, to find a single reason not to go to dinner with an old friend. “Why not?”

  “Great,” Patrick said. He leaned over and gently kissed the bruise on her right cheek. “Irish preop,” he added. “It’ll be better in the morning. Wait and see.”

  “Thanks, Doc.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  Patrick winked, setting loose a few hundred sparrows in Jessica’s chest. He put up his hands, in a defensive boxing posture, then reached out, smoothed her hair. He turned and walked to his car.

  Jessica watched him drive away.

  She touched her cheek, felt the lingering warmth of his lips. And was not at all surprised to discover that her face was starting to feel better already.

  16

  MONDAY, 11:00 PM

  SIMON CLOSE WAS IN LOVE.

  Jessica Balzano was absolutely incredible. Tall and slender and sexy as hell. The way she dispatched her opponent in the ring gave him, perhaps, the single most feral charge he had ever felt just looking at a woman. He felt like a schoolboy watching her.

  She was going to make great copy.

  She was going to make even better artwork.

  He had flashed his smile and press ID at the Blue Horizon and gotten in with relative ease. Granted, it wasn’t like getting into the Linc for an Eagles game, or the Wachovia Center to see the Sixers, but still, it gave him a sense of pride and purpose whenever he was treated like part of the mainstream press. Tabloid writers rarely got free tickets, never went on the press junkets, had to beg for press kits. He had misspelled many names in his career, due to the fact that he never got a decent press kit.

  After Jessica’s fight, Simon parked half a block from the crime scene tape on North Eighth Street. The only other vehicles were a Ford Taurus, parked inside the perimeter, along with a Crime Scene Unit van.

  He watched the eleven o’clock news on his Watchman. The lead story was the murdered young girl. The victim’s name was Tessa Ann Wells, seventeen, of North Philly. Immediately, Simon had his Philadelphia white pages open on his lap, his Maglite in his teeth. There were a total of twelve possibilities in North Philly: eight spelled Welles, four spelled Wells.

  He pulled out his cell phone, dialed the first number.

  “Mr. Welles?”

  “Yes?”

  “Sir, my name is Simon Close. I’m a writer with The Report.”

  Silence.

  Then: “Yes?”

  “First off, I just want to say how sorry I was to hear about your daughter.”

  A sharp intake of air. “My daughter? Something has happened to Hannah?”

  Oops.

  “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”

  He clicked off, dialed the next number.

  Busy.

  Next. A woman this time.

  “Mrs. Welles?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Madam, my name is Simon Close. I’m a writer with The Report.”

  Click.

  Bitch.

  Next.

  Busy.

  Jesus, he thought. Doesn’t anyone in Philly sleep anymore?

  Then Channel 6 did a recap. They called the victim “Tessa Ann Wells of Twentieth Street in North Philly.”

  Thank you, Action News, Simon thought.

  Check this actio
n.

  He looked up the number. Frank Wells on Twentieth Street. He dialed, but the line was busy. Again. Busy. Again. Same result. Redial. Redial.

  Damn.

  He thought about driving over there, but what happened next, like a crack of righteous thunder, changed everything.

  17

  MONDAY, 11:00 PM

  DEATH HAD COME here unbidden, and, for its penance, the block mourned in silence. The rain had diminished to a thin mist, whispering off the rivers, slicking the pavement. Night had buried its day in a glassine shroud.

  Byrne sat in his car across the street from the Tessa Wells crime scene, his exhaustion now a living thing within. Through the fog he could see a faint orange glow coming from the basement window of the row house. The CSU team would be there all night, and probably most of the next day.

  He slipped a blues CD into the player. Soon, Robert Johnson scratched and crackled from the speakers, talking about that hellhound on his trail.

  I hear you, Byrne thought.

  He considered the short block of dilapidated row houses. The once graceful façades swooned beneath the yoke of weather and time and neglect. For all the drama that had unfolded behind these walls over the years, both petty and grand, it was the perfume of death that would remain. Long after the footers were plowed back into the earth, madness would dwell here.

  Byrne saw movement in the field to the right of the crime scene. A slum dog regarded him from the cover of a small pile of discarded tires, his only worry his next bite of spoiled meat, his next tongueful of rainwater.

  Lucky dog.

  Byrne shut off the CD, closed his eyes, absorbed the silence.

  There had been no fresh footprints through the weed-thick field behind the death house, no recently snapped branches on the low scrub. Whoever killed Tessa Wells had probably not parked on Ninth Street.

  He felt the breath catch in his chest, the way it had the night he had plunged into the icy river, locked in death’s caress with Luther White—

  The images slammed into the back of his skull—brutal and vile and base.

  He saw Tessa’s final moments.

  The approach comes from the front . . .

  The killer turns off his headlights, decelerates, rolls slowly, cautiously, to a stop. Cuts the engine. He exits the vehicle, sniffs the air. He finds this place ripe for his insanity. A bird of prey is most vulnerable when it eats, mantling its catch, exposed to attack from above. He knows he is about to put himself at momentary risk. He has chosen his quarry with care. Tessa Wells is that thing that is missing within him; the very idea of beauty that he must destroy.

  He carries her across the street, into the empty row house on the left. Nothing with a soul stirs here. It is dark inside, borrowing no moonlight. The rotted floor is a danger, but he does not risk a flashlight. Not yet. She is light in his arms. He is full of a terrible power.

  He exits the rear of the house.

  (But why? Why not dump her in the first house?)

  He is sexually aroused, but he does not act on it.

  (Again, why?)

  He enters the death house. He takes Tessa Wells down the stairs into the dank and putrid cellar.

  (Has he been here before?)

  Rats scurry, frightened off their meager carrion. He is in no hurry. Time does not come here anymore.

  He is in complete control at this moment.

  He is . . .

  He is—

  Byrne tried, but he could not see the killer’s face.

  Not yet.

  The pain flashed with a bright, savage intensity.

  It was getting worse.

  BYRNE LIT A CIGARETTE, smoked it down to the filter without the curse of a single thought, or the blessing of a single idea. The rain began again in earnest.

  Why Tessa Wells? he wondered, turning her photograph over and over in his hands.

  Why not the next shy young girl? What did Tessa do to deserve this? Did she refuse the advances of some teenaged Lothario? No. As crazy as every new crop of young men seemed to be, tagging each successive generation with some hyperbolic level of larceny and violence, this was far beyond the pale of some jilted teenager.

  Was she chosen at random?

  If that was the case, Byrne knew it was unlikely that this was going to stop.

  What was so special about this place?

  What was he failing to see?

  Byrne felt the rage build. The pain tangoed at his temples. He split a Vicodin, swallowed it dry.

  He hadn’t slept more than three or four hours in the past forty-eight, but who needed sleep? There was work to be done.

  The wind kicked up, fluttering the bright yellow crime scene tape—grand-opening pennants at Death Mart.

  He looked into the rearview mirror; saw the scar over his right eye and the way it glistened in the moonlight. He ran his finger over it. He thought about Luther White and the way his .22 had glimmered in the moonlight on the night they both died, the way the barrel exploded and painted the world red, then white, then black; the full palette of lunacy, the way the river had embraced them both.

  Where are you, Luther?

  I could do with a little help.

  He got out of the car, locked it. He knew he should go home, but somehow, this place filled him with the sense of purpose he needed at the moment, the peace he used to feel when he was sitting in the living room on some crisp fall day, watching an Eagles game, Donna on the couch next to him, reading a book, Colleen in her room, studying.

  Maybe he should go home.

  But go home to what? His empty two-room apartment?

  He would drink another pint of bourbon, watch the talk shows, probably a movie. At three o’clock he would slip into bed, waiting for a sleep that would not come. At six he would concede to the pre-alarm dawn, and get up.

  He glanced at the glow of light from the basement window, saw the shadows moving purposefully about, felt the pull.

  These were his brothers, his sisters, his family.

  He crossed the street to the death house.

  This was his home.

  18

  MONDAY, 11:08 PM

  SIMON HAD BEEN AWARE of the two vehicles. The blue-and-white Crime Scene Unit van nestled against the side of the row house, and the Taurus parked down the street, the Taurus containing his nemesis, as it were: Detective Kevin Francis Byrne.

  When Simon had broken the story on Morris Blanchard’s suicide, Kevin Byrne had waited for him one night outside Downey’s, a raucous Irish pub on Front and South Streets. Byrne had cornered him and had thrown him around like a rag doll, finally picking him up by the collar of his jacket and slamming him up against a wall. Simon was no bruiser, but he did go six feet tall, eleven stone, and Byrne had lifted him clean off the ground with a single hand. Byrne had smelled like a distillery after a flood, and Simon had prepared himself for a serious donnybrook. Okay, a serious beating. Who was he kidding?

  But luckily, instead of punching him flat—which, Simon had to admit, he might have had coming—Byrne just stopped, looked at the sky, and dropped him like a spent tissue, letting him off with sore ribs, a banged up shoulder, and a knit shirt stretched beyond all attempts at resizing.

  For his penance Byrne had gotten another half a dozen scathing articles out of Simon. For a year Simon had traveled with a Louisville Slugger in his car and an eye over his shoulder. Still did.

  But all of that was ancient history.

  There was a new wrinkle.

  Simon had a pair of stringers he used from time to time, Temple University students who had the same notions about journalism that Simon had once held. They did research and the occasional stakeout, all for a pittance, usually just enough to keep them in iTunes downloads and X.

  The one who had some potential, the one who could actually write, was Benedict Tsu. He called at ten after eleven.

  “Simon Close.”

  “It is Tsu.”

  Simon wasn’t sure if it was an Asian thing or
a college thing, but Benedict always called himself by his last name. “What’s up?”

  “That place you asked about, the place on the waterfront?”

  Tsu was talking about the dilapidated building under the Walt Whitman Bridge into which Kevin Byrne had mysteriously disappeared for a few hours earlier in the night. Simon had followed Byrne, but had to keep a discreet distance. When Simon had to leave to get to the Blue Horizon, he called Tsu and asked him to look into it. “What about it?”

  “It’s called Deuces.”

  “What’s Deuces?”

  “It’s a crack house.”

  Simon’s world began to spin. “A crack house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Simon let the possibilities wash over him. The excitement was overwhelming.

  “Thanks, Ben,” Simon said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Bukeqi.”

  Simon clicked off, considered his good fortune.

  Kevin Byrne was on the pipe.

  Which meant that what had become a casual endeavor—following Byrne to get a story—would now become a grand obsession. Because, from time to time, Kevin Byrne had to score his drugs. Which meant that Kevin Byrne had a brand-new partner. Not a tall, sexy goddess with smoldering dark eyes and a freight-train right cross, but rather a skinny white boy from Northumberland.

  A skinny white boy with a Nikon D100 camera and a Sigma 55-200mm DC zoom lens.

  19

  TUESDAY, 5:40 AM

  JESSICA HUDDLED IN THE CORNER of a dank cellar, watching a young woman kneeling in prayer. The girl was about seventeen, blond, freckled, blue-eyed, and innocent.

  The moonlight streaming through the small window cast brusque shadows across the rubble in the cellar, creating buttes and chasms amid the gloom.

  When the girl was done praying, she sat down on the damp floor and produced a hypodermic needle and, without ceremony or preparation, stuck the needle in her arm.