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

by Richard Montanari

I glance at my watch. I pour the gasoline.

  Act III.

  I light the match.

  I think of Backdraft. Firestarter. Frequency. Ladder 49.

  I think of Angelika.

  73

  BY ONE O’CLOCK they had set up a situation room at the Roundhouse. Every piece of paper found in Nigel Butler’s house had been boxed and tagged and was currently being sifted through for an address, a telephone number, or anything else that might provide a lead as to where he might have gone. If there really was a cabin in the Poconos, there was no rental receipt found, no deed located, no pictures taken.

  The lab had the photo albums and had reported that the glue used to affix the photographs of movie stars to the face of Angelika Butler was standard white craft glue, but what was surprising was that it was fresh. In some instances, according to the lab, the glue was still wet. Whoever had glued those pictures into the album had done so in the past forty-eight hours.

  AT ONE TEN, the call for which they were both hoping and dreading came in. It was Nick Palladino. Jessica took the call, put him on the speakerphone.

  “What’s up, Nick?”

  “I think we found Nigel Butler.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s parked in his car. North Philly.”

  “Where?”

  “In the parking lot of an old gas station on Girard.”

  Jessica glanced at Byrne. It was clear that he didn’t need to be told which gas station. He had been there once. He knew.

  “Is he in custody?” Byrne asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Palladino took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. It seemed like a full minute passed before he answered. “He’s sitting behind the wheel of his car,” Palladino said.

  A few more excruciating seconds passed. “Yeah? And?” Byrne asked.

  “And the car is on fire.”

  74

  BY THE TIME they arrived, the PFD had extinguished the fire. The acrid smell of burning vinyl and immolated flesh hung upon the already humid summer air, steaming the entire block with a thick redolence of unnatural death. The car was a blackened husk; the front tires were melted into the asphalt.

  As they got closer, Jessica and Byrne could see that the figure behind the wheel was charred beyond recognition, its flesh still smoldering. The corpse’s hands were fused to the steering wheel. The blackened skull offered two empty caves where eyes once were. Smoke and greasy vapor rose from seared bone.

  Four sector cars ringed the crime scene. A handful of uniformed officers directed traffic, kept the growing crowd away.

  The arson unit would tell them exactly what happened here eventually, at least in the physical sense. When the fire started. How the fire started. Whether an accelerant was used. The psychological canvas on which this had all been painted was going to take a lot longer to profile and analyze.

  Byrne considered the boarded-up structure before him. He recalled the last time he had come here, the night they had found Angelika Butler’s body in the ladies’ room. He had been a different man then. He recalled how he and Phil Kessler had pulled into the lot, parking just about where Nigel Butler’s ruined shell of a car stood now. The man who had found the body—a homeless man who had teetered between running, in case he would be implicated, and staying, in case there was some sort of reward—had nervously pointed to the ladies’ room. Within minutes they had determined that this was probably just another overdose, another young life thrown to the wind.

  Although he couldn’t swear to it, Byrne would bet that he had slept well that night. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

  Angelika Butler had deserved every bit of his attention, just like Gracie Devlin. He had let Angelika down.

  75

  THE MOOD WAS mixed at the Roundhouse. For what it was worth, the media was prepared to run with the story as a tale of a father’s revenge. Those in the Homicide Unit, however, knew they had not exactly triumphed in the closing of this case. This was not a shining moment in the 255-year history of the department.

  But life, and death, went on.

  Since the discovery of the car, there had been two new, unrelated homicides.

  AT SIX O’CLOCK Jocelyn Post entered the duty room, six CSU evidence bags in hand. “We found something in the trash at that gas station you should see. These were in a plastic portfolio, stuffed into a Dumpster.”

  Jocelyn arrayed the six bags on the table. In the bags were eleven-by-fourteens. They were the lobby cards—miniature movie posters originally designed for display in a movie theater’s lobby—to Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques, and Road to Perdition. In addition, there was the torn corner from what might have been a sixth card.

  “Do you know what movie this one is from?” Jessica asked, holding up the sixth bag. The piece of glossy cardboard had a partial bar code on it.

  “No idea,” Jocelyn said. “But I made a digital image and sent it to the lab.”

  It was probably a movie that Nigel Butler never got to, Jessica thought. It was hopefully a movie that Nigel Butler never got to.

  “Well, let’s follow up on it anyway,” Jessica said.

  “You got it, Detective.”

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, preliminary reports had been written, detectives were filing out. There was none of the joy or elation at having brought a bad man to justice usually prevalent at a time like this. Everyone felt relief that this bizarre and ugly chapter was closed. Everyone just wanted a long, hot shower, and a long, cold drink. The six o’clock news had broadcast video footage of the burned and smoldering shell of the car at the North Philly gas station. THE ACTOR’S FINAL PERFORMANCE? the crawl asked.

  Jessica got up, stretched. She felt as if she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t. She was so tired, she couldn’t remember. She walked over to Byrne’s desk.

  “Buy you dinner?”

  “Sure,” Byrne said. “What do you have a taste for?”

  “I want something big and greasy and unhealthy,” Jessica said. “Something with a lot of breading and a carb count that has a comma.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Before they could gather their belongings and leave the room they heard a sound. A rapid, beeping sound. At first, no one paid much attention. This was the Roundhouse, after all, a building full of beepers, pagers, cell phones, PDAs. Something was always beeping, pinging, clicking, faxing, ringing.

  Whatever it was, it beeped again.

  “Where the hell is that coming from?” Jessica asked.

  All the detectives in the room rechecked their cell phones, their pagers. No one had received a message.

  Then, three more times in quick succession. Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  It was coming from inside a box of files on a desk. Jessica looked into the box. There, in an evidence bag on top, was Stephanie Chandler’s cell phone. The bottom of the LCD screen was flashing. At some point during the day, Stephanie had received a call.

  Jessica opened the bag, retrieved the phone. It had already been processed by CSU, so there was no reason to wear gloves.

  1 MISSED CALL the readout proclaimed.

  Jessica clicked the SHOW MESSAGE key. The LCD displayed a new screen. She showed the phone to Byrne. “Look.”

  There was a new message. The readout declared that a private number had sent the file.

  To a dead woman.

  They ran it down to the AV unit.

  “IT’S A MULTIMEDIA message,” Mateo said. “A video file.”

  “When was it sent?” Byrne asked.

  Mateo checked the readout, then his watch. “A little over four hours ago.”

  “And it just came in now?”

  “Sometimes that happens with really big files.”

  “Any way to tell where it was sent from?”

  Mateo shook his head. “Not from the phone.”

  “If we play the video, it’s not going to delete itself or anything, wi
ll it?” Jessica asked.

  “Hang on,” Mateo said.

  He went into a drawer, retrieved a thin cable. He tried to plug it into the bottom of the phone. No fit. He tried another cable, failed again. The third one slipped into a small port. He plugged the other into a port on the front of a laptop. In a few moments, a program started on the laptop. Mateo tapped a few keys, and a progress bar appeared, apparently transferring the file from the phone to the computer. Byrne and Jessica looked at each other, once again in awe of Mateo Fuentes’s capabilities.

  A minute later, he put a fresh CD-ROM in the drive, dragged and dropped an icon.

  “Done,” he said. “We’ve got the file on the phone, on the hard drive, and on disc. No matter what happens, we’re backed up.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said. She was a little surprised to find that her pulse was racing. She had no idea why. Maybe the file was nothing at all. She wanted to believe that with all her heart.

  “You want to watch it now?” Mateo asked.

  “Yes and no,” Jessica said. It was a video file, sent to the phone of a woman who had been dead for more than a week—a phone they had recently gotten courtesy of a sadistic serial killer who had just burned himself to death.

  Or maybe that was all an illusion.

  “I hear you,” Mateo said. “Here we go.” He clicked the PLAY arrow on the small button bar at the bottom of his video software screen. A few seconds later, the video rolled. The first few seconds of footage were a blur, as if the person holding the camera was whipping it right to left, then down, attempting to point it at the ground. When the image stabilized, and was brought into focus, they saw the subject of the video.

  It was a baby.

  A baby in a small pine coffin.

  “Madre de Dios,” Mateo said. He made the sign of a cross.

  As Byrne and Jessica stared in horror at the image, two things were clear. One was that the baby was very much alive. Two, that the video had a time code in the lower right-hand corner.

  “This tape wasn’t made with a camera phone, was it?” Byrne asked.

  “No,” Mateo said. “It looks like it was made with a basic camcorder. Probably an eight-millimeter tape camcorder, not a digital video model.”

  “How can you tell?” Byrne asked.

  “Quality of image, for one thing.”

  On screen, a hand entered the frame, placing a lid on the wood coffin.

  “Jesus Christ, no,” Byrne said.

  And that was when the first shovel full of dirt landed on the box. Within seconds the box was completely covered.

  “Oh my God.” Jessica felt nauseous. She turned away at the moment the screen went black.

  “That’s the whole file,” Mateo said.

  Byrne remained silent. He walked out of the room, immediately back in. “Run it again,” he said.

  Mateo clicked PLAY again. The image went from a blurry moving image to clarity as it came to focus on the baby. Jessica forced herself to watch. She noticed that the time code on the tape was from ten o’clock that morning. It was already past eight o’clock. She took out her cell phone. Within in a few seconds she had Dr. Tom Weyrich on the phone. She explained her reason for calling. She didn’t know if her question fell within the area of expertise of a medical examiner, but she didn’t know who else to call.

  “How big is the box?” Weyrich asked.

  Jessica looked at the screen. The video was running for a third time. “Not sure,” she said. “Maybe twenty-four by thirty inches.”

  “How deep?”

  “I don’t know. It looks to be about sixteen inches or so.”

  “Are there any holes in the top or sides?”

  “Not in the top. Can’t see the sides.”

  “How old is the baby?”

  This part was easy. The baby looked to be about six months old. “Six months.”

  Weyrich was silent for a few moments. “Well, I’m no expert at this. I’ll track someone down who is, though.”

  “How much air does he have, Tom?”

  “Hard to say,” Weyrich replied. “It’s just over five cubic feet inside the box. Even with that small of a lung capacity, I’d say no more than ten to twelve hours.”

  Jessica looked at her watch again, even though she knew exactly what time it was. “Thanks, Tom. Call me if you talk to someone who can give this kid more time.”

  Tom Weyrich knew what she meant. “I’m on it.”

  Jessica hung up. She looked back at the screen. The video was at the beginning again. The baby smiled and moved his arms. At the outside, they had less than two hours to save his life. And he could be anywhere in the city.

  MATEO MADE A second digital copy of the tape. The tape ran for a total of twenty-five seconds. When it was over, it cut to black. They watched it again and again, looking for something, anything, to give them a clue to where the baby might be. There were no other images on the recording. Mateo started it up again. The camera whipped downward. Mateo stopped it.

  “The camera is on a tripod, and a fairly good one at that. At least for the home enthusiast. It’s a smooth tilt, which tells me that the neck on the tripod is a ball head.

  “But look here,” Mateo continued. He started the recording again. As soon as he hit PLAY, he stopped it. On screen was an unrecognizable image. A thick vertical smudge of white against a reddish brown background.

  “What is that?” Byrne asked.

  “Not sure yet,” Mateo said. “Let me run it through the dTective unit. I’ll get a much clearer image. It will take a little time, though.”

  “How long?

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  In an ordinary investigation, ten minutes would pass in a snap. To the baby in the coffin, it might be a lifetime.

  Byrne and Jessica stood outside the AV Unit. Ike Buchanan walked into the room. “What’s up, Sarge?” Byrne asked.

  “Ian Whitestone is here.”

  Finally, Jessica thought. “Is he here to make a formal statement?”

  “No,” Buchanan said. “Someone kidnapped his son this morning.”

  WHITESTONE LOOKED AT the movie of the baby. They had transferred the clip to a VHS cassette. They watched it in the small snack room in the unit.

  Whitestone was smaller than Jessica had expected. He had delicate hands. He wore two watches. He had come with a personal physician and someone who was probably a bodyguard. Whitestone identified the baby in the video as his son, Declan. He looked gut-shot.

  “Why … why would someone do such a thing?” Whitestone asked.

  “We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on that,” Byrne said.

  According to Whitestone’s nanny, Aileen Scott, she had been taking Declan for a walk in his stroller at about nine thirty that morning. She had been struck from behind. When she awoke, hours later, she was in the back of an EMS rescue, on her way to Jefferson Hospital, and the baby was gone. The time frame told the detectives that, if the time code on the tape had not been manipulated, Declan Whitestone was buried within a thirty-minute drive of Center City. Probably closer.

  “The FBI has been contacted,” Jessica said. A patched and back-on-the-job Terry Cahill was at that moment assembling a team. “We’re doing everything possible to find your son.”

  They walked back into the common room, over to a desk. They put the crime scene photographs of Erin Halliwell, Seth Goldman, and Stephanie Chandler on the table. When Whitestone looked down, his knees buckled. He held on to the edge of the desk.

  “What … what is this?” he asked.

  “Both of these women were murdered. As was Mr. Goldman. We believe the man who kidnapped your son is responsible.” There was no need to tell Whitestone about Nigel Butler’s apparent suicide at this time.

  “What are you saying? Are you saying that all of them are dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, sir. Yes.”

  Whitestone weaved. His face turned the color of dried bones. Jessica had seen it many times. He sat down hard
.

  “What was your relationship to Stephanie Chandler?” Byrne asked.

  Whitestone hesitated. His hands were shaking. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged, just a parched, clicking noise. He looked like a man at risk of a coronary.

  “Mr. Whitestone?” Byrne asked.

  Ian Whitestone took a deep breath. Through trembling lips he said, “I think I should talk to my lawyer.”

  76

  THEY HAD GOTTEN the whole story from Ian Whitestone. Or at least the part his attorney would allow him to tell. Suddenly the past ten days or so made sense.

  Three years earlier—before all his meteoric success—Ian Whitestone made a film called Philadelphia Skin, directing under the name Edmundo Nobile, a character in one of Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s films. Whitestone had used two young women from Temple University for the pornographic film, paying them each five thousand dollars for two nights’ work. The two young women were Stephanie Chandler and Angelika Butler. The two men were Darryl Porter and Julian Matisse.

  On the second night of filming, what happened to Stephanie Chandler was more than a little fuzzy, according to Whitestone’s convenient memory. Whitestone said that Stephanie was shooting drugs. He said he didn’t allow it on the set. He said that Stephanie left in the middle of the shoot and never returned.

  Nobody in the room believed a word of it. But what was crystal clear was that everybody involved in the making of the film had paid dearly for it. Whether Ian Whitestone’s son would pay for the crimes of his father was yet to be seen.

  MATEO CALLED THEM down to the AV Unit. He had digitized the first ten seconds of the video field by field. He had also separated the audio track and cleaned it up. He played the audio first. There was only five seconds of sound.

  First there was a loud hiss, then a rapid decrease in intensity, followed by silence. It was clear that whoever was operating the camera had turned down the microphone as he began to roll the tape.

  “Run that back,” Byrne said.

  Mateo did. The sound was one of a quick burst of air, which began to fade immediately. Then the white noise of electronic silence.