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

by Richard Montanari

  “Does he recall if anyone else was here at that time?”

  She spoke to her father again. He answered, his response more like a bark. “He says no. No other customers at that time.”

  “Does he recall if she came in with anyone?”

  She asked her father the new question. The man shook his head. He was clearly ready to blow.

  “No,” the woman said.

  Jessica was almost afraid to ask. She glanced at Byrne. He was smiling, looking out the window. She wasn’t going to get any help from him. Thanks, partner. “I’m sorry. Does that mean he doesn’t recall, or that she didn’t come in with anyone?”

  She spoke to the old man again. He answered with a burst of high-decibel, high-octave Vietnamese. Jessica didn’t speak Vietnamese, but she was willing to bet there was a few swear words in there. She figured the old man said Kristina came in alone, and that everyone should leave him alone.

  Jessica handed the woman a card, along with the standard request to call if she remembered anything. She turned to face the room. There were currently twenty or so people in the Laundromat—washing, loading, fluffing, folding. The surfaces of the folding tables were covered with clothing, magazines, soft drinks, baby carriers. Trying to lift any fingerprints from any of the myriad surfaces would be a complete waste of time.

  But they had their victim, alive, at a particular place and a particular time. From here they would begin a canvass of the immediate area, as well as determine the SEPTA route that stopped across the street. The laundry was a good ten blocks from Kristina Jakos’s new house, so there was no way she would have walked that distance in the cold, with her laundry. Unless she got a ride from someone, or took a cab, she would have taken the bus. Or would have intended to. Maybe the SEPTA driver would remember her.

  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  JOSH BONTRAGER CAUGHT up with them across from the Laundromat.

  The three detectives worked both sides of the street, showing Kristina’s picture to the street vendors, the shop owners, the local bike boys, the corner rats. The reaction, from both men and women alike, was the same. Pretty girl. Unfortunately, no one remembered seeing her coming out of the Laundromat a few days earlier, or any other day for that matter. By midafternoon they had spoken to everyone available—residents, store merchants, cabbies.

  Directly across from the Laundromat was a pair of row houses. They had spoken to the woman who lived in the row house on the left. She had been out of town for two weeks, had seen nothing. They had knocked on the door of the other row house, had gotten no answer. On the way back to the car Jessica noticed the curtains part slightly, then immediately close. They returned.

  Byrne knocked on the window. Hard. Eventually, a teenaged girl opened the door. Byrne showed her his ID.

  The girl was thin and pale, about seventeen; very nervous, it seemed, about talking to the police. Her sandy hair was lifeless. She wore a pair of well-worn brown corduroy overalls and scuffed beige sandals, pilled white socks. Her fingernails were chewed raw.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Byrne said. “We promise not to take up too much of your time.”

  Nothing. No response whatsoever.

  “Miss?”

  The girl looked at her feet. Her lips trembled slightly, but she said nothing. The moment drew out into discomfort.

  Josh Bontrager caught Byrne’s eye, lifted an eyebrow as if to ask if he could take a shot at this. Byrne nodded. Bontrager stepped forward.

  “Hi,” Bontrager said to the girl.

  The girl lifted her head slightly, but remained aloof and silent.

  Bontrager glanced beyond the girl, into the front room of the row house, then back. “Kannscht du Pennsilfaanisch Deitsch schwetzer?”

  The girl appeared stunned for a moment. She looked Josh Bontrager up and down, then smiled a thin smile and nodded.

  “English okay?” Bontrager asked.

  The girl put her hair behind her ears, suddenly conscious of her appearance. She leaned on the doorjamb. “Okay.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Emily,” she said softly. “Emily Miller.”

  Bontrager held out a picture of Kristina Jakos. “Have you ever seen this lady, Emily?”

  The girl scrutinized the picture for a few moments. “Yes. I’ve seen her.”

  “Where have you seen her?”

  Emily pointed. “She washes her clothes across the street. Sometimes she gets on the bus right here.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Emily shrugged. She chewed on a fingernail.

  Bontrager waited until the girl met his gaze once again. “It’s really important, Emily,” he said. “Really important. And there’s no rush here. You take your time.”

  A few seconds later: “I think it was maybe four or five days ago.”

  “At night?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was late.” She pointed toward the ceiling. “My room is right up there, overlooking the street.”

  “Was she with anyone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you see anyone else hanging around, see anyone watching her?”

  Emily thought for a few more moments. “I did see somebody. A man.”

  “Where was he?”

  Emily gestured to the sidewalk just in front of her house. “He walked past the window a few times. Back and forth.”

  “Did he wait right here at the bus stop?” Bontrager asked.

  “No,” she said, pointing to her left. “I think he stood in the alley. I figured he was trying to stay out of the wind. A couple of buses came and went. I don’t think he was waiting for the bus.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “White man,” she said. “At least, I think so.”

  Bontrager waited. “You’re not sure?”

  Emily Miller put her hands out, palms up. “It was in the dark. I couldn’t see too much.”

  “Did you notice if there were any vehicles parked close to the bus stop?” Bontrager asked.

  “There are always cars in the street. I didn’t notice.”

  “That’s okay,” Bontrager said with his big farm-boy smile. It worked magic on the girl. “That’s all we need for now. You did great.”

  Emily Miller colored slightly, remained silent. She wiggled her toes in her sandals.

  “I may need to speak to you again,” Bontrager added. “Would that be okay?”

  The girl nodded.

  “On behalf of my colleagues, and the entire Philadelphia Police Department, I would like to thank you very much for your time,” Bontrager said.

  Emily glanced from Jessica to Byrne, back to Bontrager. “You’re welcome.”

  “Ich winsch dir en hallich, frehlich, glicklich Nei Yaahr,” Bontrager said.

  Emily smiled, smoothed her hair. To Jessica, she looked rather smitten with Detective Joshua Bontrager. “Gott segen eich,” Emily replied.

  The girl closed the door. Bontrager put away his notebook, smoothed his tie. “Well,” he said. “Where to next?”

  “What language was that?” Jessica asked.

  “It was Pennsylvania Dutch. Which is mostly German.”

  “Why did you speak to her in Pennsylvania Dutch?” Byrne asked.

  “Well, for one thing, that girl was Amish.”

  Jessica glanced up at the front window. Emily Miller was watching them through the parted curtains. Somehow she had managed to quickly run a brush through her hair. So she was smitten after all.

  “How could you tell?” Byrne asked.

  Bontrager thought about his answer for a moment. “You know how you can look at someone on the street and just know they’re wrong?”

  Both Jessica and Byrne knew what he meant. It was a sixth sense wired into police officers worldwide. “Yeah.”

  “Same thing with Amish folks. You just know. Besides, I saw a pineapple quilt on the couch in the living room. I know Amish quilting.”

  �
�What is she doing in Philly?” Jessica asked.

  “Hard to say. She was wearing English clothes. She’s either left the church, or she’s on rumspringa.”

  “What is rumspringa?” Byrne asked.

  “Long story,” Bontrager said. “We’ll get to it later. Maybe over a buttermilk colada.”

  He winked and smiled. Jessica looked at Byrne.

  Score one for the Amish kid.

  AS THEY WALKED back to the car, Jessica ran the questions. Besides the obvious—who killed Kristina Jakos and why, three others loomed.

  One: Where was she between the time she left the All-City Launderette and the time she was placed on that riverbank?

  Two: Who called 911?

  Three: Who was standing across the street from the Laundromat?

  16

  The medical examiner’s office was on University Avenue. When Jessica and Byrne returned to the Roundhouse they had a message from Dr. Tom Weyrich. It was marked Urgent.

  They met in the main autopsy theater. It was Josh Bontrager’s first time. His face was the color of cigar ash.

  TOM WEYRICH WAS on the phone when Jessica, Byrne, and Bontrager arrived. He handed Jessica a folder, held up a finger. The folder contained the preliminary autopsy findings. Jessica scanned the report:

  The body is that of a normally developed white female measuring sixty-six inches and weighing 112 pounds. Her general appearance is consistent with the recorded age of twenty-four years. Livor mortis is present. Eyes are open.

  The irises are blue and corneas are cloudy. Petechial hemorrhaging is present in the conjuctiva bilaterally. There is a ligature mark on the neck below the mandible.

  Weyrich hung up the phone. Jessica handed him back the report. “So she was strangled,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And that was the cause of death?”

  “Yes,” Weyrich said. “But she was not strangled with the nylon belt found around her neck.”

  “So what was it?”

  “She was strangled by a much narrower ligature. A polypropylene rope. Definitely from behind.” Weyrich pointed to a photograph of the V-shaped ligature mark made at the back of the victim’s neck. “This is not high enough to indicate hanging. I believe it was done manually. The killer stood behind her as she sat, wrapped the ligature once around, and pulled up.”

  “What about the rope itself?”

  “At first I thought it was a standard three-strand polypropylene. But the lab has pulled a pair of fibers. One blue, one white. Presumptively it was of a type that has been treated to resist chemicals, probably floatable. There’s a good chance it is a swim-lane-type rope.”

  Jessica had never heard the term. “You mean the kind of rope they use in pools to separate the lanes?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Weyrich said. “It’s strong, made of a low-stretch fiber.”

  “So why was there another belt tied around her neck?” Jessica asked.

  “Can’t help you there. Perhaps to conceal the ligature mark for aesthetic reasons. Perhaps it means something. The lab has the belt now.”

  “Any word on it?”

  “It’s old.”

  “How old?”

  “Maybe forty or fifty years or so. The composition of the fibers has begun to break down due to use and age and weather. They are getting a lot of different substances from the fiber.”

  “Like what?

  “Sweat, blood, sugar, salt.”

  Byrne flicked a glance at Jessica.

  “Her nails are in pretty good shape,” Weyrich continued. “We’ve swabbed them anyway. No scratches or bruises.”

  “What about her feet?” Byrne asked. As of that morning, the missing body parts had not been recovered. The marine unit would be diving in the river near the crime scene later that day, but even with their sophisticated gear, it would be slow going. The water in the Schuylkill was frigid.

  “Her feet were amputated postmortem with a sharp serrated instrument. There is some shattering of the bone, so I don’t believe it was a surgical saw.” He pointed to an extreme close-up of the cut. “It’s more likely to have been a carpenter’s saw. We pulled some trace from the area. Lab believes it was wood fragments. Mahogany perhaps.”

  “So you’re saying that the saw was used in some sort of woodworking project before it was used on the victim?”

  “All preliminary, but that sounds about right.”

  “And none of this was done at the scene?”

  “Presumptively, no,” Weyrich said. “But she was definitely dead when it happened. Thank God.”

  Jessica made her notes, a little taken aback. A carpenter’s saw.

  “There’s more,” Weyrich said.

  There’s always more, Jessica thought. Whenever you step into the world of a psychopath, there is always more.

  Tom Weyrich pulled down the sheet. Kristina Jakos’s body was colorless. Her musculature was already breaking down. Jessica remembered how graceful and strong she had looked on the videotape at the church. How alive.

  “Look at this.” Weyrich indicated a spot on the victim’s abdomen, a glossy whitish area about the size of a fifty-cent piece.

  He flipped off the bright overhead light, picked up a handheld UV lamp, and switched it on. Jessica and Byrne immediately saw what he was talking about. There was a circle on the victim’s lower stomach, measuring about two inches in diameter. From her vantage point of a few feet away, it looked to Jessica to be an almost perfect disk.

  “What’s this?” Jessica asked.

  “It’s a mixture of semen and blood.”

  This changed everything. Byrne looked at Jessica; Jessica at Josh Bontrager. Bontrager’s face remained a bloodless gray.

  “She was sexually assaulted?” Jessica asked.

  “No,” Weyrich said. “There was no recent vaginal or anal penetration.”

  “You ran a rape kit?”

  Weyrich nodded. “It was negative.”

  “The killer ejaculated onto her?”

  “No again.” He picked up a lighted magnifying glass, handed it to Jessica. She leaned in, looked at the circle. And felt her stomach drop.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  While the image was an almost perfect circle, it was much more than that. So much more. The image was a highly detailed drawing of the moon.

  “This is a drawing?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Painted with semen and blood?”

  “Yes,” Weyrich said. “And the blood doesn’t belong to the victim.”

  “Oh this is just getting better and better,” Byrne said.

  “From the detail, it looks like it probably took hours to do,” Weyrich said. “We have a DNA report coming. It’s on the fast track. Find the guy, and we’ll match him to this and nail it shut.”

  “So this was painted painted? Like with a brush?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes. We lifted a few fibers from the area. The doer used an expensive sable brush. Our boy is an accomplished artist.”

  “A woodworking, swimming, psychopathic, masturbating artist,” Byrne offered, more or less to himself.

  “Lab has the fibers?”

  “Yes.”

  This was good. They would get the report on the brush hairs and perhaps trace the brush used.

  “Do we know if this ‘painting’ was done pre- or post?” Jessica asked.

  “I would say post,” Weyrich said, “but there’s no way to know for sure. That it’s so detailed, that there were no barbiturates in the victim’s system, leads me to believe it was done postmortem. She wasn’t drugged. No one can or would sit that still if they were conscious.”

  Jessica looked more closely at the drawing. It was a classic rendering of the man in the moon, similar to an old woodcut of a benevolent face staring down at the earth. She considered the process of painting this on a corpse. The painter posed his victim, more or less, in plain sight. He was bold. And clearly insane.

  JESSICA AND BYRNE sat in the parking lot
, more than a little stunned.

  “Please tell me this is a first for you,” Jessica said.

  “It’s a first.”

  “We’re looking for a guy who takes a woman off the street, strangles her, cuts off her feet, then takes hours to draw the moon on her stomach.”

  “Yep.”

  “In his own semen and blood.”

  “We don’t know for sure whose blood and semen it is yet,” Byrne said.

  “Thanks,” Jessica said. “I was just starting to think I had a handle on it. I was kind of hoping he jacked off, cut his own wrists, and eventually bled out.”

  “No such luck.”

  As they pulled out onto the street, four words ran through Jessica’s mind:

  Sweat, blood, sugar, salt.

  BACK AT THE Roundhouse, Jessica called SEPTA. After running a series of bureaucratic gauntlets, she finally spoke to the man who drove the night route that passed in front of the All-City Launderette. He confirmed that he had driven his route the night Kristina Jakos did her laundry, the last night anyone to whom they had spoken recalled seeing her alive. The driver specifically remembered not picking anyone up at that stop all week.

  Kristina Jakos had never made it onto the bus that night.

  While Byrne put together a list of thrift shops and secondhand clothing stores, Jessica scanned the preliminary lab reports. There were no fingerprints on Kristina Jakos’s neck. There was no blood on the scene other than the trace evidence found on the riverbank and on her clothing.

  Blood evidence, Jessica thought. Her mind went back to the moon “painting” on Kristina’s stomach. It gave her an idea. It was a long shot, but it was better than no shot. She picked up the phone and called the rectory at St. Seraphim. In short order she had Father Greg on the line.

  “How can I help you, Detective?” he asked.

  “I have a quick question,” she said. “Do you have a moment?”