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

by Richard Montanari

  She called Brian Parkhurst’s cell phone number.

  Voice mail.

  She tried Kevin Byrne’s cell phone.

  Ditto.

  She pulled the hood of her rain slicker tighter.

  And waited.

  30

  TUESDAY, 8:55 PM

  He is drunk.

  That will make my job easier. Slower reflexes, diminished capacity, poor depth perception. I could wait for him outside the bar, walk up to him, announce my intentions, then cut him in half.

  He wouldn’t know what hit him.

  But where’s the fun in that?

  Where is the lesson?

  No, I think it is best for people to know. I realize that there is a good chance I will be stopped before I can complete this passion play. And if I am, one day, walked down that long corridor, and into an antiseptic room, and strapped to a gurney, I will accept my fate.

  I know that I will be judged by a much greater power than the commonwealth of Pennsylvania when my time comes.

  Until then, I will be the one sitting next to you in church, the one who offers you a seat on the bus, the one who holds the door for you on a windy day, the one who bandages your daughter’s scraped knee.

  That is the grace of living in God’s long shadow.

  Sometime the shadow turns out to be nothing more than a coat tree.

  Sometimes the shadow is everything you fear.

  31

  TUESDAY, 9:00 PM

  BYRNE SAT AT THE BAR, oblivious to the music, the din of the pool table. All he heard, for the moment, was the roar in his head.

  He was at a run-down corner tavern in Gray’s Ferry called Shotz, the farthest thing from a cop bar he could imagine. He could’ve hit the hotel bars downtown, but he didn’t like paying ten dollars a drink.

  What he really wanted was a few more minutes with Brian Parkhurst. If only he could take another run at him, he would know for sure. He downed his bourbon, ordered one more.

  Byrne had turned off his cell phone earlier, but he had left his pager on. He checked it, seeing the number of Mercy Hospital. Jimmy had called for the second time that day. Byrne checked his watch. He’d stop by Mercy and charm the cardiac nurses into a brief visit. There are never any visiting hours when a cop is in the hospital.

  The other calls were from Jessica. He’d call her in a little while. He just needed a few minutes to himself.

  For now, he just wanted the peace of the noisiest bar in Gray’s Ferry.

  Tessa Wells.

  Nicole Taylor.

  The public thinks that when a person is murdered, cops show up at the scene, make a few notes, then go home to their lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the unavenged dead never stay dead. The unavenged dead watch you. They watch you when you go to the movies or have dinner with your family, or lift a few pints with the boys at the corner tavern. They watch you when you make love. They watch and they wait and they question. What are you doing for me? they whisper in your ear, softly, as your life unfolds, as your kids grow and prosper, as you laugh and cry and feel and believe. Why are you out having a good time? they ask. Why are you living it up while I’m laying here on the cold marble?

  What are you doing for me?

  Byrne’s solve rate was one of the highest in the unit, partially, he knew, because of the synergy he’d had with Jimmy Purify, partially due to the waking dreams he’d begun having, courtesy of four slugs from Luther White’s pistol and a trip beneath the surface of the Delaware.

  The organized killer, by nature, believed himself superior to most people, but especially superior to the people tasked with finding him. It was this egotism that drove Kevin Byrne, and in this case, the Rosary Girl case, it was becoming an obsession. He knew that. He had probably known that the moment he had walked down those rotted steps on North Eighth Street and seen the brutal humiliation that had befallen Tessa Wells.

  But he knew it was as much a sense of duty as it was the horror of Morris Blanchard. He had been wrong many times earlier in his career, but it had never led to the death of an innocent. Byrne wasn’t sure if the arrest and conviction of the Rosary Girl killer would expiate the guilt, or if it would square him once again with the city of Philadelphia, but he hoped it would fill an emptiness inside.

  And then he could retire with his head held high.

  Some detectives follow the money. Some follow the science. Some follow the motive. Kevin Byrne trusted the door at the end of his mind. No, he couldn’t predict the future, nor divine the identity of a killer just by laying hands. But sometimes it felt like he could, and maybe that was what made the difference. The nuance detected, the intention discovered, the path chosen, the thread followed. In the past fifteen years, ever since he had drowned, he had only been wrong once.

  He needed sleep. He paid his tab, said goodbye to a few of the regulars, stepped out into the endless rain. Gray’s Ferry smelled clean.

  Byrne buttoned his raincoat, assessed his driving ability, considering the five bourbons. He pronounced himself fit. More or less. When he approached his car, he knew that something didn’t look right, but the image didn’t register immediately.

  Then it did.

  The driver’s window was smashed in, broken glass shimmering on the front seat. He looked inside. His CD player and CD wallet were gone.

  “Motherfucker,” he said. “This fucking city.”

  He walked around the car a few times, a rabid dog chasing his tail in the rain. He sat down on the hood, actually considering the folly of calling this in. He knew better. You’d have as much chance of recovering a stolen radio in Gray’s Ferry as Michael Jackson had of getting a job at a day care center.

  The stolen CD player didn’t bother him as much as the stolen CDs. He had a choice collection of classic blues in there. Three years in the making.

  He was just about to leave when he noticed someone watching him from the vacant lot across the street. Byrne couldn’t see who it was, but there was something about the posture that told him all he needed to know.

  “Hey!” Byrne yelled.

  The man took off, rabbiting behind the buildings on the other side of the street.

  Byrne took off after him.

  THE GLOCK FELT HEAVY IN HIS HAND, like a deadweight.

  By the time Byrne got across the street, the man was lost in the miasma of pouring rain. Byrne still-hunted through the debris-strewn lot, then up to the alley that ran behind the row houses that spanned the length of the block.

  He did not see the thief.

  Where the hell did he go?

  Byrne holstered his Glock, sidled up to the alleyway, peered to the left.

  Dead end. A Dumpster, a pile of garbage bags, broken wooden crates. He eased into the alley. Was someone standing behind the Dumpster? A crack of thunder made Byrne spin, his heart trip-hammering in his chest.

  Alone.

  He continued, minding every night-shadow. The machine gun of raindrops on the plastic garbage bags obscured every other sound for a moment.

  Then, beneath the rain, he heard a whimper, a rustling of plastic.

  Byrne looked behind the Dumpster. It was a black kid, maybe eighteen or so. In the moonlight Byrne could see the nylon cap, Flyers jersey, a gang tat on his right arm that identified him as a member of JBM: Junior Black Mafia. He had tats of prison sparrows on his left arm. He was kneeling, bound, and gagged. There were bruises on his face from a recent beating. His eyes were ablaze with fear.

  What the hell is going on here?

  Byrne sensed movement to his left. Before he could turn, a huge arm reached around him from behind. Byrne felt the ice of a razor-sharp knife blade at his throat.

  Then, in his ear: “Don’t fuckin’ move.”

  32

  TUESDAY, 9:10 PM

  JESSICA WAITED. People came and went, hurrying through the rain, hailing cabs, running to the subway stop.

  None of them was Brian Parkhurst.

  Jessica reached under her
rain slicker, keyed her rover twice.

  At the entrance to Center Square Plaza, less than fifty feet away, a disheveled man came out of the shadows.

  Jessica looked at him, hands out, palms up.

  Nick Palladino shrugged back. Before leaving the Northeast, Jessica had tried Byrne twice more, then called Nick on her way into the city; Nick had instantly agreed to back her play. Nick’s vast experience working undercover in Narcotics made him a natural for covert surveillance. He wore a ratty hooded sweatshirt and stained chinos. For Nick Palladino, this was the true sacrifice to the job.

  John Shepherd was under the scaffolding on the side of city hall, directly across the street, binoculars in hand. A pair of uniformed officers were stationed at the Market Street subway stop, both carrying the yearbook faculty photo of Brian Parkhurst, in case he showed up via that route.

  He had not showed. And it looked as if he wasn’t going to.

  Jessica called the station house. The team sitting on Parkhurst’s house reported no activity.

  Jessica ambled over to where Palladino stood.

  “Still can’t reach Kevin?” he asked.

  “No,” Jessica said.

  “He’s probably crashed. He could use the rest.”

  Jessica hesitated, not knowing how to ask. She was new to this club and didn’t want to step on any toes. “He seem okay to you?”

  “Kevin’s tough to read, Jess.”

  “He seems completely exhausted.”

  Palladino nodded, lit a cigarette. They were all tired. “He tell you about his . . . experience?”

  “You mean about Luther White?”

  From what Jessica could glean, Kevin Byrne had been involved in an arrest gone bad fifteen years earlier, a bloody confrontation with a rape suspect named Luther White. White had been killed; Byrne had nearly died himself.

  It was the nearly part that confused Jessica.

  “Yeah,” Palladino said.

  “No, he hasn’t,” Jessica said. “I haven’t had the guts to ask him about it.”

  “It was a close call for him,” Palladino said. “About as close as you can get. The way I understand it, he was, well, dead for a little while.”

  “Then I did hear it right,” Jessica said, incredulous. “So, what, he’s like psychic or something?”

  “Oh, God no.” Palladino smiled, shook his head. “Nothing like that. Don’t ever even utter that word around him. In fact, it would be better if you never even brought it up.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Let me put it this way. There’s a bigmouthed detective over at Central who gave him some shit about it one night at Finnigan’s Wake. I think the guy is still eating his dinner through a straw.”

  “Gotcha,” Jessica said.

  “It’s just that Kevin’s got a . . . sense about the really bad ones. Or he used to, anyway. The whole Morris Blanchard thing was pretty bad for him. He was wrong about Blanchard, and it almost destroyed him. I know he wants out, Jess. He’s got his twenty in. He just can’t find the door.”

  The two detectives looked out over the rain-swept plaza.

  “Look,” Palladino began, “this is probably not my place to say this, but Ike Buchanan went out on a limb with you. You know that, right?”

  “What do you mean?” Jessica asked, although she had a fairly good idea.

  “When he formed this task force, and gave it to Kevin, he could have moved you to the back of the pack. Hell, maybe he should have. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Ike’s a stand-up guy. You might think he’s letting you stay at the front of the pack for political reasons—I don’t think it will come as a shock to you that there’s a few assholes in the department who think so—but he believes in you. You wouldn’t be here if he didn’t.”

  Wow, Jessica thought. Where the hell did all this come from?

  “Well, I hope I can justify that faith,” she said.

  “You’ll do fine.”

  “Thanks, Nick. That means a lot.” She meant it, too.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t even know why I told you.”

  For some unknown reason, Jessica hugged him. After a few seconds they broke, smoothed their hair, coughed into their fists, got over the show of emotion.

  “So,” Jessica said, a little awkwardly, “what do we do right now?”

  Nick Palladino scoured the block—city hall, over to South Broad, over to Center Square Plaza, down Market. He found John Shepherd under the canopy to the entrance to the subway. John caught his eye. The two men shrugged. The rain poured.

  “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s shut it down.”

  33

  TUESDAY, 9:15 PM

  BYRNE DIDN’T HAVE TO TURN AROUND to know who it was. The wet sounds coming from the man’s mouth—the missing sibilance, the destroyed plosive, along with the deep nasal quality of the voice—said that it was someone who had recently had a number of upper teeth removed and his nose recently demolished.

  It was Diablo. Gideon Pratt’s bodyguard.

  “Be cool,” Byrne said.

  “Oh, I’m cool, cowboy,” Diablo said. “I’m dry fuckin’ ice.”

  Then Byrne felt something much worse than the cold blade at his throat. He felt Diablo pat him down and take away his service Glock: the worst nightmare in the litany of bad dreams for a police officer.

  Diablo put the barrel of the Glock to the back of Byrne’s head.

  “I’m a cop,” Byrne said.

  “No shit,” Diablo said. “Next time you commit aggravated assault, you should stay off TV.”

  The press conference, Byrne thought. Diablo had seen the press conference, and then he had staked the Roundhouse and followed him.

  “You don’t want to do this,” Byrne said.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  The tied-up kid looked between them, back and forth, his eyes shifting, looking for a way out. The tattoo on Diablo’s forearm told Byrne he belonged to the P-Town Posse, an odd conglomerate of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and disaffected thugs who, for one reason or another, didn’t fit elsewhere.

  The P-Town Posse and the JBM were natural enemies, a hatred that ran ten years deep. Byrne now knew what was happening here.

  Diablo was setting him up.

  “Let him go,” Byrne said. “We’ll settle this between ourselves.”

  “This won’t be settled for a long time, motherfucker.”

  Byrne knew he had to make a move. He swallowed hard, tasted the Vicodin at the back of his throat, felt the spark in his fingers.

  Diablo made the move for him.

  Without warning, without a modicum of conscience, Diablo stepped around him, leveled Byrne’s Glock, and shot the kid point blank. One to the heart. Instantly, a spray of blood and tissue and flecks of bone hit the dirty brick wall, foaming deep scarlet, then washing to the ground in the heavy rain. The kid slumped.

  Byrne closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw Luther White pointing the pistol at him so many years ago. He felt icy water swirl around him, sinking deeper, deeper.

  Thunder clapped, lightning flashed.

  Time crawled.

  Stopped.

  When the pain did not come, Byrne opened his eyes and saw Diablo turn the corner, then disappear. Byrne knew what came next. Diablo would dump the weapon nearby—Dumpster, garbage can, drainpipe. Cops would find it. They always did. And Kevin Francis Byrne’s life would be over.

  Who would come for him, he wondered?

  Johnny Shepherd?

  Would Ike volunteer to bring him in?

  Byrne watched the rain hitting the dead kid’s body, washing his blood into the rutted concrete, unable to move.

  His thoughts scaled a tangled deadfall. He knew that, if he called this in, if he put this on the record, then all of this was just beginning. The Q&A, the forensic team, the detectives, the ADAs, the preliminary hearing, the press, the accusations, the Internal Affairs witch hunt, the administrative leave.

  Fear ripped throug
h him—shiny and metallic. The smiling, mocking face of Morris Blanchard danced behind his eyes.

  The city would never forgive him for this.

  The city would never forget.

  He was standing over a dead black kid, no witnesses and no partner. He was drunk. A dead black gangbanger, killed execution style with a slug from his service Glock, a weapon that, at the moment, he could not account for. For a white cop in Philly, the nightmare couldn’t get much deeper.

  There was no time to think about it.

  He squatted down, looked for a pulse. There was none. He got out his Maglite, cupping it in his hand to keep the light as hidden as possible. He looked closely at the body. From the angle, and the appearance of the entry wound, it looked like a through and through. He found the shell casing in short order, pocketed it. He searched the ground between the kid and the wall for the slug. Fast-food trash, sodden cigarette ends, a pair of pastel condoms. No bullet.

  Above his head, in one of the rooms overlooking the alley, a light flipped on. Soon there would be a siren.

  Byrne picked up the pace of his search. He tossed garbage bags, the foul stench of rotted food nearly making him gag. Sodden newspapers, wet magazines, orange peels, coffee filters, eggshells.

  Then the angels smiled on him.

  Next to the broken shards of a smashed beer bottle, was the slug. He picked it up, put it in his pocket. It was still warm. He then took out a plastic evidence bag. He always had a few in his coat. He turned it inside out and laid the bag over the entrance wound on the kid’s chest, making sure that he got a thick smear of blood. He stepped away from the body and turned the Baggie right-side out, sealing it.

  He heard the siren.

  By the time he turned to run, something other than rational thought had taken over Kevin Byrne’s mind, something much darker, something that had nothing to do with the academy, the manual, the job.

  Something called survival.

  He started down the alley, absolutely certain he had overlooked something. He was sure of it.

  At the mouth of the alley, he glanced both ways. Deserted. He sprinted across the vacant lot, slipped into his car, reached into his pocket, and turned on his cell phone. It rang immediately. The sound nearly made him jump. He answered.