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

by Richard Montanari

THE NIGHT BEHIND THE DUCT TAPE was a Dalí landscape, black velvet dunes rolling toward a far horizon. Occasionally, fingers of light crept through the bottom part of his visual plane, teasing him with the notion of safety.

  His head ached. His limbs felt dead and useless. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If the tape over his eyes was irritating, the tape over his mouth was maddening beyond discourse. For someone like Simon Close, the humiliation of being tied to a chair, bound with duct tape, and gagged with something that felt and tasted like an ancient tack rag finished a distant second to the frustration of not being able to talk. If he lost his words, he lost the battle. It had always been thus. As a small boy, in the Catholic home in Berwick, he had managed to talk his way out of nearly every scrape, every frightful jam.

  Not this one.

  He could barely make a sound.

  The tape was wrapped tightly around his head, just above his ears, so he was able to hear.

  How do I get out of this? Deep breath, Simon. Deep.

  Crazily, he thought about the books and CDs he had acquired over the years, the ones dealing with meditation and yoga and the concepts of diaphragmatic breathing, the yogic techniques for fighting stress and anxiety. He had never read a single one, nor listened to more than a few minutes of the CDs. He had wanted a quick fix for his occasional panic attacks—the Xanax made him far too sluggish to think straight—but there was no quick fix to be found in yoga.

  Now he wished he had stuck with it.

  Save me, Deepak Chopra, he thought.

  Help me, Dr. Weil.

  Then he heard the door to his flat open behind him. He was back. The sound filled him with a sickening brew of hope and fear. He heard the footsteps approach from behind, felt the weight on the floorboards. He smelled something sweet, floral. Faint, but present. A young girl’s perfume.

  Suddenly, the tape was ripped from his eyes. The grease-fire pain made it feel as if his eyelids came off with it.

  When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw, on the coffee table in front of him, his Apple PowerBook, opened and displaying a graphic of The Report’s current web page.

  MONSTER STALKS PHILLY GIRLS!

  Sentences and phrases were highlighted in red.

  . . . depraved psychopath . . .

  . . . deviant butcher of innocence . . .

  Behind the laptop, on a tripod, sat Simon’s digital camera. The camera was on and pointed right at him.

  Simon then heard a click behind him. His tormentor had the Apple mouse in his hand and was clicking through the documents. Soon, another article appeared. The article was from three years earlier, a piece he had written about blood being splashed on the door of a church in the Northeast. Another phrase was highlighted:

  . . . hark the herald assholes fling . . .

  Behind him, Simon heard a satchel being unzipped. Moments later, he felt the slight pinch at the right side of his neck. A needle. Simon struggled mightily against his bindings, but it was useless. Even if he could get loose, whatever was in the needle took almost immediate effect. Warmth spread through his muscles, a pleasurable weakness that, were he not in this situation, he might have enjoyed.

  His mind began to fragment, soar. He closed his eyes. His thoughts took flight over the last decade or so of his life. Time leapt, fluttered, settled.

  When he opened his eyes, the cruel buffet displayed on the coffee table in front of him arrested the breath in his chest. For a moment, he tried to conjure some sort of benevolent scenario for them. There was none.

  Then, as his bowels released, he recorded the final visual entry in his reporter’s mind—a cordless drill, a large needle, threaded with a thick black thread.

  And he knew.

  Another injection took him to the edge of the abyss. This time, he willingly went along with it.

  A few minutes later, when he heard the sound of the drill, Simon Close screamed, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, a disembodied wail that echoed off the damp stone walls of a Catholic home in the time-swept north of England, a plaintive sigh over the ancient face of the moors.

  55

  WEDNESDAY, 7:35 PM

  JESSICA AND SOPHIE sat at the table, pigging out on all the goodies they had brought home from her father’s house—panettone, sfogliatelle, tiramisu. It wasn’t exactly a balanced meal, but she had blown off the grocery store and there was nothing in the fridge.

  Jessica knew it wasn’t a good idea to let Sophie eat so much sugar at this late hour, but Sophie had a sweet tooth the size of Pittsburgh, just like her mother, and, well, it was so hard to say no. Jessica concluded long ago that she had better start saving for the dental bills.

  Besides, after seeing Vincent mooning with Britney or Courtney or Ashley, or whatever the hell her name was, tiramisu was just about the right medicine. She tried to exile the image of her husband and the blond teenager from her mind.

  Unfortunately, it was immediately replaced by the picture of Brian Parkhurst’s body, hanging in that hot room, the rank smell of death.

  The more she thought about it, the more she doubted Parkhurst’s guilt. Had he been seeing Tessa Wells? Perhaps. Was he responsible for the murders of three young women? She didn’t think so. It was nearly impossible to commit a single abduction and homicide without leaving behind trace evidence.

  Three of them?

  It just didn’t seem feasible.

  But what about the P A R on Nicole Taylor’s hand?

  For a fleeting moment, Jessica realized that she had signed on for a lot more than she felt she could handle with this job.

  She cleaned the table, plopped Sophie down in front of the TV, popped in the Finding Nemo DVD.

  She poured herself a glass of Chianti, cleared the dining room table, then spread out all her notes on the case. She walked her mind over the time line of events. There was a connection among these girls, something other than the fact that they attended Catholic schools.

  Nicole Taylor, abducted off the street, dumped in a field of flowers.

  Tessa Wells, abducted off the street, dumped in an abandoned row house.

  Bethany Price, abducted off the street, dumped at the Rodin Museum.

  The selection of dump sites seemed in turn random and precise, elaborately staged and mindlessly arbitrary.

  No, Jessica thought. Dr. Summers was right. Their doer was anything but illogical. The placement of these victims was every bit as significant as the method of their murder.

  She looked at the crime scene photographs of the girls and tried to imagine their final moments of freedom, tried to drag those unfolding moments from the dominion of black and white to the saturated color of nightmare.

  Jessica picked up Tessa Wells’s school photograph. It was Tessa Wells who troubled her most deeply; perhaps because Tessa had been the first victim she had seen. Or maybe because she knew that Tessa was the outwardly shy young girl that Jessica had once been, the chrysalis ever yearning to become the imago.

  She walked into the living room, planted a kiss on Sophie’s shiny, strawberry-scented hair. Sophie giggled. Jessica watched a few minutes of the movie, the colorful adventures of Dory and Marlin and Gill.

  Then her eyes found the envelope on the end table. She had forgotten all about it.

  The Rosarium Virginis Mariae.

  Jessica sat down at the dining room table and skimmed the lengthy letter, which seemed to be a missive from Pope John Paul II, affirming the relevance of the holy rosary. She glossed over the headings, but her attention was drawn to one section, a segment titled “Mysteries of Christ, Mysteries of His Mother.”

  As she read, she felt a small flame of understanding ignite within her, the realization that she had crossed a barrier that, until this second, had been unknown to her, a barricade that could never be breached again.

  She read that there are five “Sorrowful Mysteries” of the rosary. She had, of course, known this from her Catholic school upbringing, but hadn’t thought of it in years.

&nbs
p; The agony in the garden.

  The scourge at the pillar.

  The crown of thorns.

  The carrying of the cross.

  The crucifixion.

  The revelation was a crystalline bullet to the center of her brain. Nicole Taylor was found in a garden. Tessa Wells was bound to a pillar. Bethany Price wore a crown of thorns.

  This was the killer’s master plan.

  He is going to kill five girls.

  For a few anxious moments she didn’t seem to be able to move. She took a few deep breaths, calmed herself. She knew that, if she was right about this, the information would change the investigation completely, but she didn’t want to present the theory to the task force until she was sure.

  It was one thing to know the plan, but it was equally important to understand why. Understanding why would go a long way toward knowing where their doer would strike next. She took out a legal pad and made a grid.

  The section of sheep bone found on Nicole Taylor was intended to lead investigators to the Tessa Wells crime scene.

  But how?

  She thumbed through the indices of some of the books she had taken from the Free Library. She found a section on Roman customs, and learned that scourging practices in the time of Christ included a short whip called a flagrum, to which they often attached leather thongs of variable lengths. Knots were tied in the ends of each thong, and sharp sheep bones were inserted into the knots at the ends.

  The sheep bone meant there would be a scourge at the pillar.

  Jessica wrote notes as fast as she could.

  The reproduction of Blake’s painting Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell that was found inside Tessa Wells’s hands was obvious. Bethany Price was found at the gates leading into the Rodin Museum.

  An examination of Bethany Price had found that she had two numbers written on the insides of her hands. On her left hand was the number 7. On her right hand, the number 16. Both numbers were written in black magic marker.

  716.

  Address? License plate? Partial zip code?

  So far, no one on the task force had had any idea what the numbers meant. Jessica knew that, if she could divine this secret, there was a chance they could anticipate where the murderer’s next victim would be placed. And they could be waiting for him.

  She stared at the huge pile of books on the dining room table. She was certain the answer was somewhere in one of them.

  She walked into the kitchen, dumped the glass of red wine, put on a pot of coffee.

  It was going to be a long night.

  56

  WEDNESDAY, 11:15 PM

  The headstone is cold. The name and date are obscured by time and wind-borne debris. I clean it off. I run my index finger along the chiseled numbers. The date brings me back to a time in my life when all things were possible. A time when the future shimmered.

  I think about who she would have been, what she might have done with her life, who she might have become.

  Doctor? Politician? Musician? Teacher?

  I watch the young women and I know the world is theirs.

  I know what I have lost.

  Of all the sacred days on the Catholic calendar, Good Friday is, perhaps, the most sacred. I’ve heard people ask: If this is the day that Christ was crucified, why is it called good? Not all cultures call it Good Friday. The Germans call it Charfreitag, or Sorrowful Friday. In Latin it has been called Parasceve, the word meaning preparation.

  Kristi is in preparation.

  Kristi is praying.

  When I left her, secured and snug in the chapel, she was on her tenth rosary. She is very conscientious and, from the way she earnestly says the decades, I can tell that she wants to please not only me—after all, I can only affect her mortal life—but the Lord, as well.

  The chilled rain slicks the black granite, joining my tears, flooding my heart full of storms.

  I pick up the shovel, begin to dig the soft earth.

  The Romans believed that there was significance to the hour that signaled the close of the business day, the ninth hour, the time when fasting began.

  They called it the Hour of None.

  For me, for my girls, the hour is finally near.

  57

  THURSDAY, 8:05 AM

  THE PARADE OF POLICE CARS, both marked and unmarked, that snaked their way up the rain-glassed street in West Philadelphia where Jimmy Purify’s widow made her home seemed endless.

  Byrne had gotten the call from Ike Buchanan at just after six.

  Jimmy Purify was dead. He had coded at three that morning.

  As he walked toward the house, Byrne fielded hugs from other detectives. Most people thought it was tough for cops to show emotion—some said the lack of sentiment was a prerequisite for the job—but every cop knew better. At a time like this, nothing came easier.

  When Byrne entered the living room he considered the woman standing in front of him, frozen in time and space in her own house. Darlene Purify stood at the window, her thousand-yard stare reaching far beyond the gray horizon. The TV babbled in the background, a talk show. Byrne thought about turning it off, but realized that the silence would be far worse. The TV indicated that life, somewhere, went on.

  “Where do you want me, Darlene? You tell me, I go there.”

  Darlene Purify was just over forty, a former R&B singer in the 1980s, having even cut a few records with an all-girl group called La Rouge. Now her hair was platinum, her once slight figure given to time. “I stopped loving him a long time ago, Kevin. I don’t even remember when. It’s just . . . the idea of him that’s missing. Jimmy. Gone. Shit.”

  Byrne walked across the room, held her. He stroked her hair, searching for words. He found some. “He was the best cop I ever knew. The best.”

  Darlene dabbed her eyes. Grief was such a heartless sculptor, Byrne thought. At that moment, Darlene looked a dozen years older than she was. He thought about the first time they had met, in such happy times. Jimmy had brought her to a Police Athletic League dance. Byrne had watched Darlene shake it up with Jimmy, wondering how a player like him ever landed a woman like her.

  “He loved it, you know,” Darlene said.

  “The job?”

  “Yeah. The job,” Darlene said. “He loved it more than he ever loved me. Or even the kids, I think.”

  “That’s not true. It’s different, you know? Loving the job is . . . well . . . different. I spent every day with him after the divorce. A lot of nights, too. Believe me, he missed you more than you’ll ever know.”

  Darlene looked at him, as if this were the most incredible thing she had ever heard. “He did?”

  “You kidding? You remember that monogrammed hankie? The little one of yours with the flowers in the corner? The one you gave him on your first date?”

  “What . . . what about it?”

  “He never went out on a tour without it. In fact, we were halfway to Fishtown one night, heading to a stakeout, and we had to head back to the Roundhouse because he forgot it. And believe me, you didn’t give him lip about it.”

  Darlene laughed, then covered her mouth and began to cry again. Byrne didn’t know if he was making it better or worse. He put his hand on her shoulder until her sobbing began to subside. He searched his memory for a story, any story. For some reason, he wanted to keep Darlene talking. He didn’t know why, but he felt that, if she was talking, she wouldn’t grieve.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Jimmy went undercover as a gay prostitute?”

  “Many times.” Darlene smiled now, through the salt. “Tell me again, Kevin.”

  “Well, we were working a reverse sting, right? Middle of summer. Five detectives on the detail, and Jimmy’s number was up to be the bait. We laughed about it for a week beforehand, right? Like, who the hell was ever gonna believe that big slab of pork was sellin’ it? Forget sellin’ it, who the hell was gonna buy?”

  Byrne told her the rest of the story by rote. Darlene smiled at all the right places, laughed
her sad laugh at the end. Then she melted into Byrne’s big arms and he held her for what seemed like minutes, waving off a few cops who had shown up to pay their respects. Finally he asked: “Do the boys know?”

  Darlene wiped her eyes. “Yeah. They’ll be in tomorrow.”

  Byrne squared himself in front of her. “If you need anything, anything at all, you pick up the phone. Don’t even look at the clock.”

  “Thanks, Kevin.”

  “And don’t worry about the arrangements. The association’s all over it. It’s gonna be a procession like the pope.”

  Byrne looked at Darlene. The tears came again. Kevin Byrne held her close, felt her heart racing. Darlene was tough, having survived both her parents’ slow deaths from lingering illness. It was the boys he worried about. None of them had their mother’s backbone. They were sensitive kids, very close to each other, and Byrne knew that one of his jobs, in the next few weeks, would be shoring up the Purify family.

  WHEN BYRNE WALKED out of Darlene’s house, he had to look both ways on the street. He couldn’t remember where he had parked the car. The headache was a sharp dagger between his eyes. He tapped his pocket. He still had full scrip of Vicodin.

  You’ve got a full plate, Kevin, he thought. Shape the hell up.

  He lit a cigarette, took a few moments, got his bearings. He looked at his pager. There were still three calls from Jimmy that he’d never returned.

  There will be time.

  He finally remembered that he had parked on a side street. By the time he reached the corner, the rain began again. Why not, he thought. Jimmy was gone. The sun dared not show its face. Not today.

  All over the city—in diners and cabs and beauty parlors and boardrooms and church basements—people were talking about the Rosary Killer, about how a madman was feasting on the young girls of Philadelphia, and how the police couldn’t stop him. For the first time in his career, Byrne felt impotent, thoroughly inadequate, an impostor, as if he couldn’t look at his paycheck with any sense of pride or dignity.

  He stepped into the Crystal Coffee Shop, a twenty-four-hour spoon he had frequented many mornings with Jimmy. There was a pall over the regulars. They’d heard the news. He grabbed a paper and a large coffee, wondering if he’d ever be back. When he exited, he saw that someone was leaning against his car.