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

by Richard Montanari

  For the first time in her life, Jessica was glad that a teenager did drugs.

  But if the killer’s inspiration was the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the rosary, why were there ten girls on Parkhurst’s list? Besides attempting suicide, what did five of them have in common? Was he really going to stop at five?

  They compared their notes.

  Four of the girls overdosed on pills. Three of them tried to cut their wrists. Two of the girls tried to commit suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. One girl drove her car through a guardrail and over a ravine. She was saved by the airbag.

  It wasn’t method that tied any five together.

  What about school? Four of the girls went to Regina, four went to Nazarene, one went to Marie Goretti and one to Neumann.

  As to age: four were sixteen, two were seventeen, three were fifteen, one eighteen.

  Was it neighborhood?

  No.

  Clubs or extracurricular activities?

  No.

  Gang affiliations?

  Hardly.

  What was it?

  Ask and ye shall receive, Jessica thought. The answer was right in front of them.

  It was the hospital.

  St. Joseph’s was what they had in common.

  “Look at this,” Jessica said.

  On the day they had tried to kill themselves, the five girls treated at St. Joseph’s were Nicole Taylor, Tessa Wells, Bethany Price, Kristi Hamilton, and Lauren Semanski.

  The rest were treated elsewhere, at five different hospitals.

  “My God,” Byrne said. “That’s it.”

  It was the break they were looking for.

  But the fact that all of these girls were treated at one hospital was not what made Jessica shaky. The fact that they all tried to commit suicide wasn’t it, either.

  The fact that made the room lose all of its air was this:

  The same doctor had treated them all: Dr. Patrick Farrell.

  64

  FRIDAY, 6:15 PM

  PATRICK SAT in Interview Room A. Eric Chavez and John Shepherd handled the interview while Byrne and Jessica observed. The interview was being videotaped.

  As far as Patrick knew, he was merely a material witness in the case.

  He had a recent scratch on his right hand.

  When they could, they would scrape beneath Lauren Semanski’s fingernails, looking for DNA evidence. Unfortunately, according to the CSU, it probably wouldn’t yield much. Lauren was lucky to even have fingernails.

  They had gone over Patrick’s schedule for the previous week, and, to Jessica’s chagrin, they had learned that there wasn’t a single day that would have prevented Patrick from abducting the victims, nor dumping their bodies.

  The thought made Jessica physically ill. Was she really considering the notion that Patrick had something to do with these murders? With each passing minute, the answer was getting closer to yes. The next minute dissuaded her. She really didn’t know what to think.

  Nick Palladino and Tony Park were on their way to the Wilhelm Kreuz crime scene with a photograph of Patrick. It was unlikely that old Agnes Pinsky would remember him—even if she did pick him out of a photo lineup, her credibility would be torn to shreds by even a public defender. Nick and Tony would canvass up and down the street nonetheless.

  “I HADN’T BEEN KEEPING UP with the news, I’m afraid,” Patrick said.

  “I can understand that,” Shepherd replied. He was sitting on the edge of the battered metal table. Eric Chavez leaned against the door. “I’m sure you see enough of the ugly side of life where you work.”

  “We have our triumphs,” Patrick said.

  “So, you’re saying that you were not aware that any of these girls had at one time been a patient of yours?”

  “An ER physician, especially in an inner-city trauma center, works triage, Detective. The patient needing the most immediate care is treated first. After patients are patched up and sent home, or admitted, they are always referred to their primary care physician. The concept of patient doesn’t really apply. People who come to an emergency room may only be a patient of any given doctor for an hour. Sometimes less. Quite often less. Thousands of people pass through St. Joseph’s ER every year.”

  Shepherd listened, nodding at all the appropriate cues, absently straightening the already perfect creases in his pants. Explaining the concept of triage to a veteran homicide detective was wholly unnecessary. Everyone in Interview Room A knew that.

  “That doesn’t really answer my question, though, Dr. Farrell.”

  “It seemed that I knew the name Tessa Wells when I heard it on the news. I didn’t, however, make any immediate connection to whether or not St. Joseph’s had provided her with emergency care.”

  Bullshit, Jessica thought, her anger growing. They had discussed Tessa Wells the night they had a drink at Finnigan’s Wake.

  “You say St. Joseph’s as if it was the institution that treated her that day,” Shepherd said. “It’s your name on the file.”

  Shepherd held up the file for Patrick to see.

  “The record doesn’t lie, Detective,” Patrick said. “I must have treated her.”

  Shepherd held up a second file. “And you treated Nicole Taylor.”

  “Again, I really don’t recall.”

  A third file. “And Bethany Price.”

  Patrick stared.

  Two more files in his face now. “Kristi Hamilton spent four hours in your care. Lauren Semanski five.”

  “I defer to the record, Detective,” Patrick said.

  “All five of these girls were abducted and four of them were brutally murdered this week, Doctor. This week. Five female, teenaged victims who just happened to pass through your office within the past ten months.”

  Patrick shrugged.

  John Shepherd asked, “You can certainly understand our interest in you at this point, can’t you?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Patrick said. “As long as your interest in me is in the nature of material witness. As long as that’s the case, I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.”

  “By the way, how did you get that scratch on your hand?”

  It was clear that Patrick had an answer well prepared for this. He wasn’t, however, going to blurt anything out. “It’s a long story.”

  Shepherd looked at his watch. “I’ve got all night.” He looked at Chavez. “How about you, Detective?”

  “I cleared my schedule just in case.”

  They both turned their attention back to Patrick.

  “Let’s just say that one should always beware of a wet cat,” Patrick said. Jessica saw the charm shine through. Unfortunately for Patrick, these two detectives were immune. At the moment, so was Jessica.

  Shepherd and Chavez exchanged a glance. “Have truer words ever been spoken?” Chavez asked.

  “You’re saying a cat did that?” Shepherd asked.

  “Yes,” Patrick replied. “She was outside all day in the rain. When I got home tonight, I saw her shivering in the bushes. I tried to pick her up. Bad idea.”

  “What’s her name?”

  It was an old interrogation trick. Someone mentions an alibi-related person, you slam them immediately with a question regarding the name. This time, it was a pet. Patrick was not prepared.

  “Her name?” he asked.

  It was a stall. Shepherd had him. Shepherd then got closer, looking at the scratch. “What is it, a pet bobcat?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Shepherd stood up, leaned against the wall. Friendly, now. “See, Dr. Farrell, I have four daughters. They absolutely love cats. Love ’em. In fact, we have three of them. Coltrane, Dizzy, and Snickers. That’s their names. I’ve been scratched, oh, at least a dozen times in the last few years. None of the scratches looked anything like yours.”

  Patrick looked at the floor for a few moments. “She’s not a bobcat, Detective. Just a big old tabby.”

  “Huh,” Shepherd said. He rolled on. “By the way, what sort
of vehicle do you drive?” John Shepherd, of course, already knew the answer to this question.

  “I have a few different vehicles. I mostly drive a Lexus.”

  “LS? GS? ES? SportCross?” Shepherd asked.

  Patrick smiled. “I see you know your luxury cars.”

  Shepherd returned the smile. Half of it, anyway. “I can tell a Rolex from a TAG Heuer, too,” he said. “Can’t afford one of them, either.”

  “I drive a 2004 LX.”

  “That’s the SUV, right?”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “I would call it an LUV,” Patrick said.

  “As in Luxury Utility Vehicle, right?”

  Patrick nodded.

  “Gotcha,” Shepherd said. “Where is that vehicle right now?”

  Patrick hesitated. “It’s in the back parking lot here. Why?”

  “Just curious,” Shepherd said. “It’s a high-end vehicle. I just wanted to make sure it was safe.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “And the other vehicles?”

  “I have a 1969 Alfa Romeo and a Chevy Venture.”

  “That’s a van?”

  “Yes.”

  Shepherd wrote this down.

  “Now, on Tuesday morning, according to records at St. Joseph’s, you didn’t go on duty until nine o’clock in the morning,” Shepherd said. “Is that accurate?”

  Patrick thought about it. “I believe it is.”

  “Yet your shift began at eight. Why were you late?”

  “Actually, it was because I had to take the Lexus in for service.”

  “Where did you take it?”

  There was a slight rap on the door, then the door swung open.

  In the doorway Ike Buchanan stood next to a tall, imposing man in an elegant Brioni pin-striped suit. The man had perfectly layered silver hair, a Cancún tan. His briefcase cost more than either detective made in a month.

  Abraham Gold had represented Patrick’s father, Martin, in a high-profile malpractice suit in the late 1990s. Abraham Gold was as expensive as they come. And as good as they come. As far as Jessica knew, Abraham Gold had never lost a case.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, using his best courtroom baritone. “This conversation is over.”

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Buchanan asked.

  The entire task force looked at her. She searched her mind for not only the right thing to say, but the right words to say it. She truly was at a loss. From the moment that Patrick had walked into the Roundhouse an hour or so earlier, she knew this moment would arrive. Now that it was here, she had no idea how to deal with it. The notion that someone she knew might be responsible for such horror was bad enough. The notion that it was someone she knew intimately—or thought she did—seemed to immobilize her brain.

  If the unthinkable was true, that Patrick Farrell was indeed the Rosary Killer, from a purely a professional standpoint, what would it say about her as a judge of character?

  “I think it’s possible.” There. It was said out loud.

  They had, of course, run a background check on Patrick Farrell. Except for a pot misdemeanor in his sophomore year in college, and a penchant for driving well above the speed limit, his record was clean.

  Now that Patrick had retained counsel, they would have to step up the investigation. Agnes Pinsky had said that he could’ve been the man she saw knocking on Wilhelm Kreuz’s door. A man who worked at a shoe repair shop across from Kreuz’s apartment building thought he recalled a cream-colored Lexus SUV parked out front two days earlier. He wasn’t sure.

  Regardless, there would now be a pair of detectives on Patrick Farrell 24/7.

  65

  FRIDAY, 8:00 PM

  THE PAIN WAS EXQUISITE, a slow rolling wave that inched up the back of his neck, then down. He popped a Vicodin, chased it with rancid water from the tap in the men’s room of a gas station in North Philly.

  It was Good Friday. The day of the crucifixion.

  Byrne knew that, one way or another, this was all probably coming to an end soon, probably tonight; and with it, he knew he would face something inside himself that had been there for fifteen years, something dark and violent and troubling.

  He wanted everything to be in order.

  He needed symmetry.

  He had one stop to make first.

  THE CARS WERE PARKED two deep on both sides of the street. In this part of the city, if the street was blocked, you didn’t call the police or knock on doors. You definitely didn’t want to blow your horn. Instead, you quietly put your car in reverse, and found another way.

  The storm door of the ramshackle Point Breeze row house was open, all the lights burning inside. Byrne stood across the street, sheltered from the rain beneath the tattered awning of a shuttered bakery. Through the bay window across the street he could see the three pictures that graced the wall over the strawberry velvet Spanish modern sofa. Martin Luther King, Jesus, Muhammad Ali.

  Right in front of him, in the rusted Pontiac, the kid sat alone in the backseat, completely oblivious to Byrne, smoking a blunt, rocking gently to whatever was coming through his headphones. After a few minutes he butted the blunt, opened the car door, and got out.

  He stretched, flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt, straightened his baggies.

  “Hey,” Byrne said. The pain in his head had settled into a dull metronome of agony, clicking loud and rhythmically at either temple. Still, it felt as if the mother of all migraines was just a car horn or flashbulb away.

  The kid turned, surprised but not scared. He was about fifteen, tall and rangy, with the kind of body that would serve him pretty well in playground hoops, but take him no further. He wore the full Sean John uniform—full-cut jeans, quilted leather jacket, fleece hoodie.

  The kid sized up Byrne, assessed the danger, the opportunity. Byrne kept his hands in plain sight.

  “Yo,” the kid finally offered.

  “Did you know Marius?” Byrne asked.

  The kid gave him the twice-over. Byrne was way too big to mess with.

  “MG was my boy,” the kid finally said. He flashed a JBM sign.

  Byrne nodded. This kid could still go either way, he thought. There was a simmering intelligence behind his now bloodshot eyes. But Byrne got the feeling the kid was too busy fulfilling the world’s expectations of him.

  Byrne reached slowly inside his coat—slowly enough to let this kid know there was nothing coming. He removed the envelope. The envelope was of a size and shape and heft that could only be one thing.

  “His mother’s name is Delilah Watts?” Byrne asked. It was more like a statement of fact.

  The kid glanced at the row house, at the bright bay window. A thin, dark-skinned black woman in oversized gradient sunglasses and a deep auburn wig dabbed at her eyes as she received mourners. She was no more than thirty-five.

  The kid turned back to Byrne. “Yeah.”

  Byrne absently thumbed the rubber band around the fat envelope. He had never counted the contents. When he had taken it from Gideon Pratt that night, he had no reason to think it was a penny less than the five thousand dollars they had agreed upon. There was no reason to count it now.

  “This is for Mrs. Watts,” Byrne said. He held the kid’s eyes for a few, flat seconds, a look that both of them had experienced in their time, a look that needed no embellishment, no footnoting.

  The kid reached out, cautiously took the envelope. “She gonna want to know who it’s from,” he said.

  Byrne nodded. Soon the kid understood that no answer was forthcoming.

  The kid stuffed the envelope into his pocket. Byrne watched as he swaggered across the street, up to the house, stepped inside, hugged a few of the young men standing sentinel at the door. Byrne looked through the window as the kid waited briefly in the short receiving line. He could hear the strains of Al Green’s “You Brought the Sunshine” playing.

  Byrne wondered how many times this scene w
ould be played out across the country this night—too-young mothers sitting in too-hot parlors, presiding over the wake of a child given to the beast.

  For all that Marius Green may have done wrong in his short life, for all the misery and pain he may have spread, there was only one reason he was in that alley that night, and that play had nothing to do with him.

  Marius Green was dead, as was the man who killed him in cold blood. Was it justice? Perhaps not. But there was no doubt that it all began the day Deirdre Pettigrew met a terrible man in Fairmount Park, a day that had ended with another young mother with a ball of damp tissue in her hands, and a front room full of friends and family.

  There is no solution, just resolution, Byrne thought. He was not a man who believed in karma. He was a man who believed in action and reaction.

  Byrne watched as Delilah Watts opened the envelope. After the initial shock set in, she put her hand to her heart. She composed herself, then looked out the window, directly at him, directly into Kevin Byrne’s soul. He knew that she could not see him, that all she could see was the black mirror of night, and the rain-streaked reflection of her own pain.

  Kevin Byrne bowed his head, then turned up his collar and walked into the storm.

  66

  FRIDAY, 8:25 PM

  AS JESSICA DROVE HOME, the radio predicted a huge thunderstorm. High winds, lightning, flood warnings. Parts of Roosevelt Boulevard were already inundated.

  She thought about the night she had met Patrick, so many years ago. She had watched him work in the ER that night, so impressed with his grace and confidence, his ability to comfort the people who came in those doors, looking for help.

  People responded to him, believed in his ability to relieve their pain. His looks certainly didn’t hurt. She tried to think rationally about him. What did she really know? Was she able to think about him in the same terms she had thought about Brian Parkhurst?

  No, she was not.

  But the more she thought about it, the more it became possible. The fact that he was an MD, the fact that he could not account for his time at crucial intervals in the time line of the murders, the fact that he had lost his kid sister to violence, the fact that he was a Catholic, and, inescapably, the fact that he had treated all five girls. He knew their names and addresses, their medical histories.