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

by Richard Montanari

  “Ah, Christ,” Brigham said. “They were the prettiest little girls you’ve ever seen.”

  All Kevin Byrne could do was put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  They stood that way for a long time.

  BYRNE LEFT THE bar, turned onto Third Street. He thought about Richie DiCillo. He wondered how many times Richie had held his service weapon in his hand, consumed by anger and rage and grief. Byrne wondered how close the man had come, knowing that if someone took his own daughter away, he would have to search far and wide for a reason to go on.

  As he reached his car he asked himself how long he was going to pretend it hadn’t happened. He had been lying to himself about it a lot lately. This night, the feelings had been strong.

  He had felt something when Walt Brigham hugged him. He saw dark things, had even smelled something. He would never admit any of this to anyone, not even to Jessica, with whom he had shared just about everything over the past few years. He had never smelled anything before, not as a component of his vague prescience.

  When he’d hugged Walt Brigham he smelled pine needles. And smoke.

  Byrne slipped behind the wheel, strapped in, put a Robert Johnson disk into the CD player, and drove into the night.

  Jesus, he thought.

  Pine needles and smoke.

  20

  Edgar Luna stumbled out of the Old House Tavern on Station Road, his gut full of Yuengling, his head full of bullshit. The same kind of refried bullshit his mother force-fed him the first eighteen years of his life: He was a loser. He’d never amount to anything. He was stupid. Just like his father.

  Every time he got within one lager of the limit, it all came flooding back.

  The wind pinwheeled up the nearly empty street, flapping his trousers, making his eyes water, giving him pause. He bunched his scarf around his face, and headed north into the gale.

  Edgar Luna was a small balding man, acne-scarred, long since delivered unto every malady of middle age—colitis, eczema, fungal toenails, gingivitis. He had just turned fifty-five.

  He was not drunk, but he was not all that far from it either. The new barmaid, Alyssa or Alicia or whatever the fuck her name was had shut him down for the tenth time. Who gave a shit? She was too old for him anyway. Edgar liked them younger. Much younger. Always had.

  The youngest—and the best—had been his niece Dina. Hell, she had to be, what, twenty-four now? Too old. By plenty.

  Edgar rounded the corner, onto Sycamore Street. His shabby bungalow greeted him. Before he could get his keys out of his pocket he heard a noise. He spun around a little unsteadily, rocking a bit on his heels. Behind him two figures stood silhouetted against the glow of the Christmas lights across the street. A tall man and a short man, both dressed in black. The tall one looked like a freak—close-cropped blond hair, clean-shaven, a little sissy looking if you asked Edgar Luna. The short one was built like a tank. One thing Edgar was sure of, they weren’t from Winterton. He’d never seen them before.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Edgar asked.

  “I am Malachi,” the tall man said.

  THEY HAD MADE the fifty-mile ride in less than one hour. They were now in the basement of an empty row house in North Philadelphia, in the center of a block of derelict row houses. There wasn’t a light for nearly a hundred feet in any direction. They had parked the van in an alleyway behind the block of houses.

  Roland had carefully selected the site. These structures were set for rehabilitation soon, and he knew that as soon as the weather allowed they would be pouring concrete in these basements. One of his flock worked for the construction company that was in charge of the concrete work.

  In the middle of the frigid basement room, Edgar Luna was naked, his clothes already burned, bound to an old wooden chair with duct tape. The floor was packed dirt, cold, but unfrozen. In the corner of the room, a pair of long handled shovels waited. Three kerosene lanterns lit the space.

  “Tell me about Fairmount Park,” Roland said.

  Luna glared at him.

  “Tell me about Fairmount Park,” Roland repeated. “April 1995.”

  It looked as though Edgar Luna was trying frantically to poke around his memory. There was no doubt that he had done many bad things in his life—reprehensible things for which he had known there might one day be a dark reckoning. That time had come.

  “Whatever the fuck you’re talking about, what … whatever this is about, you got the wrong man. I’m innocent.”

  “You are many things Mr. Luna,” Roland said. “Innocent is not one of them. Confess your sins and the Lord will show you mercy.”

  “I swear I don’t know—”

  “I, however, cannot.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Admit what you did to those girls in Fairmount Park in April 1995. The day it rained.”

  “Girls?” Edgar Luna asked. “1995? Rain?”

  “Surely you remember Dina Reyes.”

  The name shook him. He remembered. “What did she tell you?”

  Roland produced Dina’s letter. The sight of it made Edgar shrink.

  “She liked pink, Mr. Luna. But I expect you knew that.”

  “It was her mother, wasn’t it? That fucking bitch. What did she say?”

  “Dina Reyes ate a handful of pills and ended her sad and sorrowful existence, an existence you destroyed.”

  Edgar Luna suddenly seemed to realize that he would never leave this room. He struggled mightily against his bindings. The chair rocked, creaked, then fell over, crashing into a lamp. The lamp tipped and splashed kerosene onto Luna’s head, which suddenly caught fire. Flames slapped and licked up the right side of the man’s face. Luna screamed and slammed his head against the cold, packed dirt. Charles calmly walked over, struck out the fire. The acrid smell of kerosene and burned flesh and melted hair filled the confined space.

  Braving the stench, Roland got close to Edgar Luna’s ear.

  “How does it feel to be a captive, Mr. Luna?” he whispered. “To be at the mercy of someone? Isn’t this what you did to Dina Reyes? Brought her to the basement? Just like this?”

  It was important to Roland that these men understood exactly what they’d done, experienced the moment the way their victims had. Roland went to considerable lengths to re-create the fear.

  Charles righted the chair. Edgar Luna’s forehead, along with the right side of his scalp, was blistered and bubbled. A wide swath of hair was gone, replaced by a blackened, open sore.

  “He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked,” Roland began.

  “You can’t fucking do this, man,” Edgar hysterically screamed.

  Roland did not hear the words of anyone mortal. “He shall triumph over them. They shall be so utterly vanquished that their overthrow shall be final and fatal, and his deliverance complete and crowning.”

  “Wait!” Luna struggled against the tape. Charles took out the lavender handkerchief, and tied it around the man’s neck. He held him from behind.

  Roland Hannah set upon the man. Screams rose high into the night.

  Philadelphia slept.

  21

  Jessica lay in bed, her eyes wide open. Vincent was enjoying the sleep of the dead, as usual. She’d never known anybody who slept more deeply than her husband. For someone who saw just about every depravity a city had to offer, every night around midnight, he reconciled himself with the world, and drifted right off to sleep.

  Jessica had never been able to do that.

  She couldn’t sleep, and knew why. Actually, there were two reasons. One, the image in the story Father Greg had told her kept galloping around her mind: a man being torn in half by the Sun Maiden and the sorceress. Thanks for that one, Father Greg.

  The competing image was of Kristina Jakos, sitting on the riverbank like a battered doll on a little girl’s shelf.

  Twenty minutes later Jessica was at the dining room table, a mug of cocoa in front of her. She knew that chocolate contained caffeine, and that it woul
d probably keep her up a few more hours. She also knew that chocolate contained chocolate.

  She spread the Kristina Jakos crime-scene photographs on the table, put them in order, top to bottom: photographs of the road, the driveway, the front of the building, the abandoned cars, the back of the building, the slope to the riverbank, then poor Kristina herself. Looking at them top to bottom Jessica approximated the view of the scene as seen by the killer. She retraced his steps.

  Had it been dark when he posed the body? It must have been. Seeing as the man who had taken Kristina’s life did not commit suicide at the crime scene, or turn himself in, he had wanted to get away with his twisted crime.

  SUV? Truck? Van? A van would certainly make things easier for him.

  But why Kristina? Why the odd clothing and mutilation? Why the “moon” on her stomach?

  Jessica looked out the window at the ink-black night.

  What kind of life is this? she wondered. She sat not fifteen feet from where her sweet little girl was sleeping, from where her beloved husband was sleeping, and she was looking at pictures of a dead woman in the middle of the night.

  Still, for all the danger and ugliness Jessica encountered, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. From the moment she’d entered the academy, all she had ever wanted to do was work homicides. And now she was. But the job began to eat you alive the moment you stepped onto the first floor of the Roundhouse.

  In Philadelphia, you got a job on Monday. You worked it, chasing down witnesses, interviewing suspects, compiling forensics. Just when you started to make progress, it was Thursday and you were up on the wheel again and another body fell. You had to move on it, because if you didn’t make an arrest within forty-eight hours, there was a good chance you might never make an arrest. Or so the theory went. So you dropped what you were doing—while still keeping an ear to all the calls you had out—and worked the new case. The next thing you knew it was next Tuesday, and another bloody corpse landed at your feet.

  If you made your living as an investigator—any kind of investigator—you lived for the gotcha. For Jessica, as well as every detective she knew, the sun rose and set on gotcha. At times, gotcha was your hot meal, your good night’s sleep, your long passionate kiss. No one understood the need but a fellow investigator. If junkies could be detectives for one second, they would toss away that needle forever. There was no high like gotcha.

  Jessica wrapped her hand around her cup. The cocoa was cold. She looked back at the photographs.

  Was the gotcha in one of these pictures?

  22

  Walt Brigham pulled onto the shoulder on Lincoln Drive, cut the engine, the headlights, still reeling from his farewell party at Finnigan’s Wake, still a bit overwhelmed at the big turnout.

  This section of Fairmount Park was dark at this hour. Traffic was sparse. He rolled down his window, the frigid air somewhat reviving him. He could hear the water of the Wissahickon Creek flowing nearby.

  Brigham had mailed the envelope before he had gotten on the road. He felt underhanded; almost criminal, sending it anonymously. He’d had no choice. It had taken him weeks to make the decision, and now he had. All of it—thirty-eight years as a cop—was behind him now. He was someone else.

  He thought about the Annemarie DiCillo case. It seemed like only yesterday when he had gotten the call. He remembered pulling up to the stormy scene—right at this spot—getting out his umbrella, walking into the forest …

  Within hours they had rounded up the usual suspects, the peepers, the pedophiles, the men who had recently been released from prison after having served time for violence against children, especially against young girls. No one stood out from the crowd. No one cracked, or rolled over on another suspect. Given their nature, their heightened fear of prison life, pedophiles were notoriously easy to turn. No one did.

  A particularly vile miscreant named Joseph Barber had looked good for a while, but he had an alibi—albeit a shaky alibi—for the day of the murders in Fairmount Park. When Barber himself was murdered—stabbed to death with thirteen steak knives—Brigham had figured it was the story of a man being visited by his sins.

  But something nagged Walt Brigham about the circumstances of Barber’s demise. Over the next five years, Brigham had tracked a number of suspected pedophiles, both in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Six of those men had been murdered, all with extreme prejudice, none of their cases solved. Granted, no one in any homicide unit anywhere really busted his hump trying to close a murder case when the victim was a scumbag who hurt children, but still the forensic data was collected and analyzed, the witness statements taken, the fingerprints run, the reports filed. Not a single suspect materialized.

  Lavender, he thought. What was it about lavender?

  In all, Walt Brigham found sixteen men murdered, all of them molesters, all of them questioned and released—or at least suspected—in a case involving a young girl.

  It was crazy, but possible.

  Someone was killing the suspects.

  His theory never really gained any traction in the unit, so Walt Brigham had dropped it. Officially speaking. He had made highly detailed notes about it anyway. As little as he might have cared about these men, there was something about the job, the nature of being a homicide detective that compelled him to do so. Murder was murder. It was up to God to judge the victims, not Walter J. Brigham.

  He turned his thoughts to Annemarie and Charlotte. They had stopped running through his dreams just a short time ago, but that didn’t mean the images didn’t haunt him. These days, when the calendar flipped from March to April, when he saw young girls in their springtime dresses, it all came back to him in a brutish, sensory overload—the smell of the woods, the sound of the rain, the way it looked like those two little girls were sleeping. Eyes closed, heads bowed. And then the nest.

  The sick son of a bitch who did it had built a nest around them.

  Walt Brigham felt the anger wrench inside him, a barbwire fist in his chest. He was getting close. He could feel it. Off the record, he had already been to Odense, a small town in Berks County. He’d gone several times. He had made inquiries, taken pictures, spoken to people. The trail to Annemarie and Charlotte’s killer led to Odense, Pennsylvania. Brigham had tasted the evil the moment he crossed into the village, like a bitter potion on his tongue.

  Brigham got out of the car, walked across Lincoln Drive, continued through the barren trees until he reached the Wissahickon. The cold wind howled. He flipped up his collar, bunched his wool scarf.

  This was where they had been found.

  “I’m back, girls,” he said.

  Brigham glanced up at the sky, at the raw gray moon in the blackness. He felt the undressed emotion of that night so long ago. He saw their white dresses in the police lights. He saw the sad, empty expressions on their faces.

  “I just wanted you to know, you have me now,” he said. “Full time. Twenty-four seven. We’re gonna get him.”

  He watched the water flow for a while, then walked back to the car, a sudden spring in his step, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if the rest of his life had been suddenly mapped. He slipped inside, started the engine, cranked up the heater. He was just about to angle onto Lincoln Drive when he heard …singing?

  No.

  It wasn’t singing. It was more like a nursery rhyme. A nursery rhyme he knew very well. His blood froze in his veins.

  “Here are maidens, young and fair,

  Dancing in the summer air …”

  Brigham looked into the rearview mirror. When he saw the eyes of the man in the backseat, he knew. This was the man for whom he had been searching a very long time.

  “Like two spinning wheels at play …”

  Fear lurched up Brigham’s spine. His weapon was under the seat. He’d had too much to drink. He’d never make it.

  “Pretty maidens dance away.”

  In those last moments many things became apparent to Detective Walter James Bri
gham. They settled upon him with a heightened clarity, like in those seconds before an electrical storm. He knew that Marjorie Morrison was indeed the love of his life. He knew that his father had been a good man, and that he had raised decent kids. He knew that Annemarie DiCillo and Charlotte Waite had been visited by true evil, that they had been followed into the forest and delivered unto the devil.

  And Walt Brigham also knew that he had been right all along.

  It had always been about the water.

  23

  The Health Harbor was a small gym and workout spa in Northern Liberties. Run by a former police sergeant out of the Twenty-fourth District, it had a limited membership, mostly cops, which meant you generally didn’t have to put up with the usual gym games. Plus, it had a boxing ring.

  Jessica got there about 6 AM, did her stretches, ran five miles on the treadmill while listening to Christmas music on her iPod.

  At 7 AM, her great uncle Vittorio arrived. Vittorio Giovanni was eighty-one, but still had the clear brown eyes Jessica remembered from her youth, the kind and knowing eyes that had swept Vittorio’s late wife Carmella off her feet one hot August night at the Feast of the Assumption festival. Even today those sparkling eyes said there was a much younger man still inside. Vittorio had once been a professional prizefighter. To this day he could not watch a televised boxing match sitting down.

  For the past few years Vittorio had been Jessica’s manager and trainer. As a professional, Jessica had a record of 5-0, with four knockouts, her last bout televised on ESPN2. Vittorio had always said that whenever Jessica was ready to quit, he would support the decision and they would both walk away. Jessica wasn’t sure yet. What got her into the sport to begin with—the desire to lose weight after Sophie was born, along with the desire to be able to hold her own with the occasional violent suspect when necessary—had grown into something else: the need to fight the aging process with what was, hands down, the most brutal discipline there was.