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

by Richard Montanari

  The building had an L-shaped parking lot that ran behind the structure, then down a slight slope to the river; a parking lot at one time fully fenced off with chain link. The fence had long ago been clipped and bent and tortured. Huge sections were missing. Trash bags, tires, and street litter were strewn everywhere.

  Before Jessica could inquire about the DOA, a black Ford Taurus, identical to the departmental car Jessica and Byrne were driving, pulled into the lot, parked. Jessica did not recognize the man behind the wheel. Moments later the man emerged, approached them.

  “Are you Detective Byrne?” he asked.

  “I am,” Byrne said. “And you are?”

  The man reached into his back pocket, pulled out a gold shield. “Detective Joshua Bontrager,” he said. “Homicide.” He proffered a big smile, the color rising in his cheeks.

  Bontrager was probably thirty or so, but he looked much younger. A slim five ten, his hair was summer blond gone December dull, cropped relatively short; spiky, but not in a GQ way. It looked like it may have been a homemade haircut. His eyes were mint green. He had about him the air of scrubbed country, of rural Pennsylvania that spoke of state college on an academic scholarship. He pumped Byrne’s hand, then Jessica’s. “You must be Detective Balzano,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Jessica said.

  Bontrager looked between them, back and forth. “This is just, just, just …great.”

  If nothing else, Detective Joshua Bontrager was full of energy and enthusiasm. With all the cutbacks, retirements, and injuries to detectives—not to mention the spiking homicide rate—it was good to have another warm body in the unit. Even if that body looked like it just stepped out of a high school production of Our Town.

  “Sergeant Buchanan sent me out,” Bontrager said. “Did he call you?”

  Ike Buchanan was their boss, the day watch commander of the homicide unit. “Uh, no,” Byrne said. “You’ve been assigned to homicide?”

  “Temporarily,” Bontrager said. “I’ll be working with you and two other teams, rotating tours. At least until things, you know, calm down a bit.”

  Jessica looked closely at Bontrager’s clothing. His suit coat was a dark blue, and his slacks were black, as if he had cobbled together an ensemble from two different weddings, or had gotten dressed while it was still dark. His striped rayon tie was from sometime around the Carter administration. His shoes were scuffed but sturdy, recently resoled, tightly laced.

  “Where do you want me?” Bontrager asked.

  The look on Byrne’s face fairly screamed the answer. Back at the Roundhouse.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, where were you before you got assigned to Homicide?” Byrne asked.

  “I was in the Traffic Unit,” Bontrager said.

  “How long were you there?”

  Chest out, chin high. “Eight years.”

  Jessica thought about looking at Byrne, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t.

  “So,” Bontrager said, rubbing his hands together for warmth, “what can I do?”

  “For now we want to make sure the scene is secure,” Byrne said. He pointed to the far side of the building, to the short driveway on the north side of the property. “If you could secure that entry point, it would be a great help. We don’t want folks coming onto the property and disturbing the evidence.”

  For a second, Jessica thought Bontrager was going to salute.

  “I am so on it,” he said.

  With this, Detective Joshua Bontrager all but ran across the grounds.

  Byrne turned to Jessica. “What is he, about seventeen?”

  “He’ll be seventeen.”

  “Did you notice he’s not wearing a coat?”

  “I did.”

  Byrne glanced at Officer Calabro. Both men shrugged. Byrne pointed at the building. “Is the DOA on the first floor?”

  “No, sir,” Calabro said. He turned and pointed to the river.

  “The victim is in the river?” Byrne asked.

  “On the bank.”

  Jessica glanced toward the river. The angle sloped away from them, so she could not yet see the bank. Through the few barren trees on this side she could see the opposite side of the river, the cars on the Schuylkill Expressway. She turned back to Calabro. “Have you cleared the immediate area?”

  “Yes,” Calabro said.

  “Who found her?” Jessica asked.

  “Anonymous 911 call.”

  “When?”

  Calabro looked at the log. “About an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Has the ME’s office been notified?” Byrne asked.

  “On the way.”

  “Good work, Mike.”

  Before heading down to the river, Jessica took a number of photographs of the exterior of the building. She also photographed the two abandoned vehicles in the lot. One, a twenty-year-old midsize Chevy; the other, a rusted out Ford van. Neither had plates. She walked over, felt the hoods of both vehicles. Stone cold. On any given day there were hundreds of derelict cars in Philadelphia. Sometimes it seemed like thousands. Every time someone ran for mayor or council, one of the planks in their platform was always the promise to get rid of the abandoned vehicles and tear down the abandoned buildings. It never seemed to happen.

  She took a few more photographs. When she was finished, she and Byrne snapped on latex gloves.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Let’s do it.”

  They walked to the end of the lot. From there, the ground gently sloped down toward the soft riverbank. Because the Schuylkill was not a working river—almost all commercial traffic navigated the Delaware River—there were few docks as such, but occasionally there were small stone jetties, the infrequent narrow floating pier. As they reached the end of the asphalt, they saw the victim’s head, then her shoulders, then her body.

  “Ah, God,” Byrne said.

  She was a young blond woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Perched on a short stone dock, her eyes were wide open. It looked like she was just sitting at the river’s edge, watching it flow.

  In life there was no doubt she had been very pretty. Now her face was a ghastly and pallid gray, her bloodless skin already beginning to split and crack from the ravages of the wind. Her nearly black tongue lolled to the side of her mouth. She wore no coat, no gloves, no hat, only a long dusty-rose-colored dress. It looked to be very old, suggesting a time long gone. It hung below her feet, nearly touching the water. It appeared that she had been there for a while. There was some decomposition, but not nearly as much as there would have been if the weather had been warm. Still, the smell of decaying flesh hung heavy in the air, even ten feet away.

  Around the young woman’s neck was a nylon belt, knotted in the back.

  Jessica could see that some exposed parts of the victim’s body were covered in a thin layer of ice, giving the corpse a surreal, artificial gloss. It had rained the day before, then the temperature had plummeted.

  Jessica took a few more photographs, stepped closer. She would not disturb the body until the medical examiner cleared the scene, but the sooner they got a better look, the sooner they could begin their investigation. While Byrne walked the perimeter of the parking lot, Jessica knelt next to the body.

  The victim’s dress was clearly a few sizes too large for her slender frame. It was long-sleeved, had a removable lace collar, as well as knife pleats at the cuff. Unless Jessica had missed a new fashion trend—and that was a possibility—she didn’t see why this woman had been walking around Philadelphia, in winter, in such an outfit.

  She looked at the woman’s hands. No rings. There were no obvious calluses either, no scars or healing cuts. This woman did not work with her hands, not in the manual labor sense. She had no visible tattoos.

  Jessica moved a few steps back and took a picture of the victim in relation to the river. It was then that she noticed what looked like a drop of blood near the hem of the dress. A single drop. She crouched down, took out her pen, and lifte
d the front edge of the dress. What she saw caught her completely off guard.

  “Oh, God.”

  Jessica fell back on her heels, nearly toppling into the water. She grabbed at the earth, found purchase, sat down hard.

  Having heard her cry out, Byrne and Calabro came running over.

  “What is it?” Byrne asked.

  Jessica wanted to tell them, but the words were logjammed in her throat. She had seen a lot in her time on the force—in fact, she really believed she could look at anything—and she was usually braced for the special horrors that came with working homicides. The sight of this dead young woman, her flesh already giving way to the elements, was bad enough. What Jessica saw when she lifted the victim’s dress was a geometric progression of the revulsion she felt.

  Jessica took a moment, leaned forward, and once again picked up the dress’s hem. Byrne crouched down, angled his head. He immediately looked away. “Shit,” he said, standing up. “Shit.”

  In addition to having been strangled and left on a frozen riverbank, the victim’s feet had been amputated. And it looked to have been done recently. It was a precise and surgical amputation, just above the ankles. The wounds had been crudely cauterized, but the black and blue trauma from the excisions ran halfway up the victim’s pale, frozen legs.

  Jessica glanced at the icy water below, then a few yards downstream. There were no body parts visible. She looked at Mike Calabro. He put his hands in his pockets, walked slowly back to the entrance of the crime scene. He was not a detective. He didn’t have to stay. Jessica thought she had seen tears welling in his eyes.

  “Let me see if I can redline the ME’s office and CSU,” Byrne said. He pulled out his cell, took a few steps away. Jessica knew that every second that went by before the Crime Scene Unit secured the scene, precious evidence might be slipping away.

  Jessica looked closely at what was most likely the murder weapon. The belt around the victim’s neck was about three inches wide, and appeared to be made of tightly woven nylon, not unlike the material used to manufacture a seat belt. She took a close-up photograph of the knot.

  The wind churned, bringing a bitter chill. Jessica braced herself, waited it out. Before stepping away, she forced herself to look closely at the woman’s legs one more time. The cuts looked clean, as if done with a very sharp saw. For the young woman’s sake, Jessica hoped that it had been done postmortem. She looked back at the victim’s face. They were now linked, she and the dead woman. Jessica had worked a number of cases in her time in homicide, and she was forever connected to each of them. There would not come a time in her life when she would forget the way death fashioned them, the way they silently asked for justice.

  Just after nine o’clock Dr. Thomas Weyrich arrived with his photographer, who immediately began snapping away. A few minutes later, Weyrich pronounced the young woman dead. The detectives were cleared to begin their investigation. They met at the top of the slope.

  “Christ,” Weyrich said. “Merry Christmas, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Byrne said.

  Weyrich lit a Marlboro, hit it hard. He was a seasoned veteran of the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Even for him this was not a daily occurrence.

  “She was strangled?” Jessica asked.

  “At the very least,” Weyrich replied. He would not remove the nylon belt until he got the body back to the city. “There’s evidence of petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes. I won’t know more until I get her on the table.”

  “How long has she been out here?” Byrne asked.

  “I’d say at least forty-eight hours or so.”

  “And her feet? Pre- or post?”

  “I won’t know until I can examine the wounds, but based on how little blood there is on scene, I believe she was dead when she got here, and the amputation took place elsewhere. If she had been alive, she would’ve had to have been tied down, and I’m not seeing ligature marks on her legs.”

  Jessica walked back to the riverbank. There were no footprints on the frozen ground near the river’s edge, no blood splatter or trail. A slight trickle of blood from the victim’s legs etched the mossy stone wall in a pair of thin, deep scarlet tendrils. Jessica looked directly across the river. The jetty was partially obscured from the expressway, which might explain why no one had called in a report of a woman sitting motionless on the frigid riverbank for two full days. The victim had gone unnoticed—or that was the truth Jessica wanted to believe. She didn’t want to believe the people of her city saw a woman sitting in the freezing cold and did nothing about it.

  They needed to ID the young woman as soon as possible. They would begin a thorough grid search of the parking lot, the riverbank, and the area surrounding the structure—along with a canvass of nearby businesses and residences on both sides of the river—but with a carefully constructed crime scene such as this, it was unlikely they were going to find a discarded pocketbook with any ID in the vicinity.

  Jessica crouched behind the victim. The way the body was positioned reminded her of a marionette whose strings had been cut, causing the puppet to simply collapse to the floor—arms and legs waiting to be reconnected, reanimated, brought back to life.

  Jessica examined the woman’s fingernails. They were short, but clean and painted with a clear lacquer. They would examine the nails to see if there was any material beneath them, but with the naked eye it didn’t appear so. What it did tell the detectives was that this woman was not homeless, not indigent. Her skin and hair looked clean and well-groomed.

  Which meant that there was somewhere this young woman was supposed to be. It meant that she was missed. It meant that there was a puzzle out there in Philadelphia, or beyond, to which this woman was the missing piece.

  Mother. Daughter. Sister. Friend.

  Victim.

  5

  The wind swirls off the river, curling along the frozen banks, bringing with it the deep secrets of the forest. In his mind, Moon draws the memory of this moment. He knows that, in the end, a memory is all you were left with.

  Moon stands nearby, watching the man and the woman. They probe, they calculate, they write in their journals. The man is big and powerful. The woman is slender and pretty and clever.

  Moon is clever, too.

  The man and the woman may witness a great deal, but they cannot see what the moon sees. Each night the moon returns and tells Moon of its travels. Each night Moon paints a mind-picture. Each night a new story is told.

  Moon glances up at the sky. The cold sun hides behind the clouds. He is invisible, too.

  The man and woman go about their business—quick and clocklike and precise. They have found Karen. Soon they will find the red shoes, and this tale will be spun.

  There are many more tales.

  6

  Jessica and Byrne stood near the road, waiting for the CSU van. Though only a few feet apart, each was adrift in their own thoughts about what they had just seen. Detective Bontrager was still dutifully guarding the north entrance to the property. Mike Calabro stood near the river, his back to the victim.

  For the most part, the life of a homicide detective in a major urban area was about the investigation of garden-variety murders—gang slayings, domestics, bar fights that went one punch too far, robbery-homicides. Of course, these crimes were very personal and unique to the victims and their families, and a detective had to constantly remind himself of that fact. If you got complacent about the job, if you failed to take into account a person’s sense of grief or loss, it was time to quit. In Philadelphia, there were no divisional homicide squads. All suspicious deaths were investigated out of one office, the homicide unit at the Roundhouse. Eighty detectives, three shifts, seven days a week. Philly had more than one hundred neighborhoods, and many times, based on where the victim was found, an experienced detective could all but predict the circumstance, the motive, sometimes even the weapon. There was always a revelation, but very few surprises.

  This day was different. It spoke of a special
evil, a depth of brutality that Jessica and Byrne had rarely experienced.

  Parked in the vacant lot across the road from the crime scene was a food-service truck. There was only one customer. The two detectives crossed Flat Rock Road, retrieving their notebooks. While Byrne interviewed the driver, Jessica spoke to the customer. He was in his twenties, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, a black knit cap.

  Jessica introduced herself, showed her badge. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure.” Pulling off his cap, his dark hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it aside.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Will,” he said. “Will Pedersen.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Plymouth Valley.”

  “Wow,” Jessica said. “Long way from home.”

  He shrugged. “You go where the work is.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a brick mason.” He pointed over Jessica’s shoulder, at the new condominiums being constructed along the river about a block away. A few moments later Byrne finished with the driver. Jessica introduced Pedersen to him, continued.

  “Do you work down here a lot?” Jessica asked.

  “Almost every day.”

  “Were you here yesterday?”

  “No,” he said. “Too cold to mix. Boss called early and said bag it.”

  “What about the day before yesterday?” Byrne asked.

  “Yeah. We were here.”

  “Did you get coffee about this time?”

  “No,” Pedersen said. “It was earlier. Maybe seven o’clock or so.”

  Byrne gestured to the crime scene. “Did you see anyone in this parking lot?”

  Pedersen looked across the street, thought for a few moments. “Yeah. I did see someone.”

  “Where?”

  “Back by the end of the parking lot.”