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

by Richard Montanari

  BECAUSE IT WAS Christmas Eve, Jessica and Byrne were both on duty for only half a day. They probably could have fudged it out on the street, but there was always something to wrap up, some report to read or file.

  By the time Byrne entered the duty room, Josh Bontrager was already there. He had gotten three pastries and three coffees for them. Two creams, two sugars, a napkin, and a stirrer each—all laid out on the desk with geometric precision.

  “Good morning, Detective,” Bontrager said, smiling. His brow narrowed when he saw Byrne’s swollen face. “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I’m fine.” Byrne slipped off his coat. He was bone weary. “And it’s Kevin,” he said. “Please.” Byrne uncapped his coffee. He held it up. “Thanks.”

  “Sure,” Bontrager said. All business now. He flipped open his notebook. “I’m afraid I struck out with the Savage Garden CDs. The big stores carry it, but no one remembers anyone specifically asking for it in the last few months.”

  “It was worth a shot,” Byrne said. He took a bite of the pastry Josh Bontrager had bought. It was a nut roll. Very fresh.

  Bontrager nodded. “I’m not done yet. There are still the independent stores.”

  At that moment Jessica stormed into the duty room, sparks in her wake. Her eyes were blazing, her color was high. It wasn’t from the weather. She was not a happy detective.

  “What’s up?” Byrne asked.

  Jessica paced back and forth, the Italian invectives just beneath her breath. She finally slammed down her purse. Heads popped up over partitions around the duty room. “Channel Six caught me in the fucking parking lot.”

  “What did they ask?”

  “The usual fucking bullshit.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “The usual fucking bullshit.”

  Jessica related how they had cornered her before she could even get out of her car. Cameras shouldered, lights on, questions flying. The department really didn’t like detectives getting on camera unscheduled, but it always looked much worse seeing footage of a detective shielding their eyes and yelling “No comment.” It didn’t really inspire confidence. So she’d stopped and done her bit.

  “How does my hair look?” Jessica asked.

  Byrne took a step back. “Um, good.”

  Jessica threw both hands out. “God, what a silver-tongued devil you are! I swear I’m going to faint.”

  “What’d I say?” Byrne looked at Bontrager. Both men shrugged.

  “However my hair looks, I’ll bet it looks better than your face,” Jessica said. “Gonna tell me about it?”

  Byrne had iced his face down, cleaned it up. Nothing broken. It was slightly swollen, but the swelling was already starting to go down. He related the story of Matthew Clarke and their confrontation.

  “How far do you think he might take this?” Jessica asked.

  “I have no idea. Donna and Colleen are heading out of town for a week. At least that will be off my mind.”

  “Anything I can do?” Jessica and Bontrager said simultaneously.

  “I don’t think so,” Byrne said, looking at both of them, “but thanks.”

  Jessica picked up her messages, moved toward the door.

  “Where are you headed?” Byrne asked.

  “I’m off to the library,” Jessica said. “See if I can find this moon drawing.”

  “I’ll finish the list of secondhand clothes stores,” Byrne said. “Maybe we can find where he bought that dress.”

  Jessica held up her cell phone. “I’m mobile.”

  “Detective Balzano?” Bontrager asked.

  Jessica turned around, her face a twist of impatience. “What?”

  “Your hair looks very nice.”

  Jessica’s anger slid away. She smiled. “Thank you, Josh.”

  34

  The Free Library had a great number of books on the subject of the moon. Far too many to make any immediate sense of in a way that might help with the investigation.

  Before leaving the Roundhouse Jessica ran “moon” through NCIC, VICAP, and the other national law-enforcement databases. The bad news was that perps who used the moon as the basis for their MO tended to be compulsive killers. She had teamed the word with others—specifically “blood” and “semen”—and gotten nothing of use.

  With the help of a librarian Jessica selected a sampling of moon-related books from each section.

  Jessica sat behind two stacks in a private room on the first floor. First she browsed through the books that dealt with the moon in a scientific sense. There were books about how to observe the moon, books about exploring the moon, books about the physical characteristics of the moon, amateur astronomy, the Apollo missions, maps and atlases of the moon. Jessica had never been all that good with the sciences. She felt her attention waning, her eyes glazing over.

  She turned to the other stack. This one held more promise. These were books that dealt with the moon and folklore, as well as the iconology of the heavens.

  After skimming some of the introductions, and making notes, Jessica discovered that the moon seemed to be represented in folklore in five different phases: new, full, crescent, half, and gibbous, a state between half and full. The moon was prominent in tales from every country and culture, for as long as literature was recorded—Chinese, Egyptian, Arabic, Hindu, Nordic, African, Native American, European. Where there was myth and faith, there were tales about the moon.

  In religious folklore, some pictures of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary showed the moon as a crescent under her feet. In stories that present the crucifixion, it is shown as an eclipse placed on one side of the cross, while the sun is placed on the other.

  There were also a great number of Biblical references. In Revelations there was “a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown.” In Genesis: “God made the two great lights: the greater light to govern the day, the smaller light to govern the night, and the stars.”

  There were tales where the moon was feminine, tales where the moon was masculine. In Lithuanian folklore, the moon was the husband, the sun was the wife, and the Earth was their child. One tale from British folklore held that if you were robbed three days after a full moon, the thief would be quickly caught.

  Jessica’s head spun with the images and the concepts. Within two hours, she had five pages of notes.

  The last book she opened was dedicated to illustrations of the moon. Woodcuts, etchings, watercolors, oils, charcoal. She found illustrations by Galileo from Sidereus Nuncius. There were a number of tarot illustrations.

  Nothing looked like the drawing found on Kristina Jakos.

  Still, something told Jessica that there was a distinct possibility that the pathology of the man they sought was rooted in some kind of folklore, perhaps the type Father Greg had described to her.

  Jessica checked out a half dozen books.

  As she exited the library she glanced at the winter sky. She wondered if Kristina Jakos’s killer was waiting for the moon.

  AS JESSICA CROSSED the parking lot, her mind alive with images of witches, goblins, fairy princesses, and ogres, she found it hard to believe that this stuff hadn’t scared the living hell out of her when she’d been small. She remembered reading some of the shorter fairy tales to Sophie when her daughter had been three and four, but none of them seemed as bizarre and violent as some of the stories she had run across in these books. She had never given it much thought, but some of the tales were downright lurid.

  Halfway across the parking lot, before she reached her car, she sensed someone approaching from her right. Fast. Her instincts told her it was trouble. She spun quickly, her right hand instinctively throwing back the hem of her coat.

  It was Father Greg.

  Calm down, Jess. It’s not the big, bad wolf. Just an orthodox priest.

  “Well, hello,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here and all that.”

  “Hello there.”

  “I hope I
didn’t scare you.”

  “You didn’t,” she lied.

  Jessica glanced down. Father Greg had a book in his hands. Incredibly, it looked like a volume of fairy tales.

  “Actually, I was going to call you later today,” he said.

  “Really? Why is that?”

  “Well, since we spoke, I kind of got the bug about all this,” he said. He held up the book. “As you might imagine, folk tales and fables aren’t really big in the church. We have a whole lot of hard-to-believe stuff already.”

  Jessica smiled. “Roman Catholics have their share.”

  “I was going to search through these stories and see if I could find a ‘moon’ reference for you.”

  “That’s kind of you, but it’s not necessary.”

  “It’s really no problem at all,” Father Greg said. “I love to read.” He nodded at a vehicle, a late-model van parked nearby. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I’ve got my car.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Well, I’m off to the world of snowmen and ugly ducklings,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

  “That would be good,” Jessica said. “Thanks.”

  He walked to the van, opened the door, and turned back to Jessica. “Perfect night for it, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Father Greg smiled. “It’s going to be a Christmas moon.”

  35

  When Jessica got back to the Roundhouse, before she could get her coat off and sit down, her phone rang. The duty officer in the lobby of the Roundhouse told her that someone was on the way up to see her. A few minutes later a uniformed officer entered with Will Pedersen, the brick mason from the Manayunk crime scene. This time Pedersen was dressed in a three-button blazer and jeans. His hair was neatly combed, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses.

  He shook hands with both Jessica and Byrne.

  “What can we do for you?” Jessica asked.

  “Well, you had said that if I remembered anything else, I should get in touch.”

  “That’s correct,” Jessica said.

  “I was thinking about that morning. The morning we met in Manayunk?”

  “What about it?”

  “Like I said, I’ve been down there a lot lately. I’m pretty familiar with all the buildings. The more I thought about it, the more I realized something was different.”

  “Different?” Jessica asked. “Different how?”

  “Well, with the graffiti.”

  “The graffiti? On the warehouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?”

  “Okay,” Pedersen said. “I used to be a bit of a tagger, right? Ran with the skateboard boys in my teenage years.” He seemed a bit reluctant to talk about this, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

  “I think the statute of limitations may have run out on that,” Jessica said.

  Pedersen smiled. “Okay. I’m still kind of a fan though, you know? With all the murals and things around town, I’m always looking, taking pictures.”

  The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program had started in 1984 as a plan to eliminate destructive graffiti in the poorer neighborhoods. In its effort, the city reached out to graffiti writers in an attempt redirect their creative urges into making murals. Philadelphia had hundreds, if not thousands, of murals.

  “Okay,” Jessica said. “What does this have to do with the building on Flat Rock?”

  “Well, you know how you see something every day? I mean, you see it, but you don’t really look at it closely?”

  “Sure.”

  “I was wondering,” Pedersen said. “Did you take pictures of the south side of the building by any chance?”

  Jessica sorted through the photographs on her desk. She found a picture of the south side of the warehouse. “What about it?”

  Pedersen pointed to an area on the right side of the wall, next to a large red and blue gang tag. With the naked eye it looked like a small white smudge.

  “See this here? That was not there two days before I met you guys.”

  “So you’re saying it might have been painted the morning the body was put on the riverbank?” Byrne asked.

  “Maybe. The only reason I noticed it was because it was white. It kind of stands out.”

  Jessica glanced at the photo. The picture had been taken with a digital camera, at a fairly high resolution. The print, however, was small. She would send her camera down to the AV unit and have them make an enlargement from the original file.

  “Do you think it might be important?” Pedersen asked.

  “It might,” Jessica said. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll give you a call if we need to speak to you again.”

  When Pedersen left, Jessica got on the phone to CSU. They would dispatch a tech to collect a paint sample from the building.

  Twenty minutes later, an enlarged version of the JPEG file was printed and sitting on Jessica’s desk. She and Byrne looked at it. The painted image on the wall was a larger, cruder version of the one found on Kristina Jakos’s abdomen.

  The killer had not only posed his victim on the bank of the river, but he had taken the time to tag the wall behind him with a symbol, a symbol meant to be seen.

  Jessica had wondered if the telltale gotcha was in one of the crime-scene pictures.

  Maybe it was.

  WHILE WAITING FOR the lab report on the paint, Jessica’s phone rang again. So much for the Christmas break. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. Death goes on.

  She punched the button, answered. “Homicide, Detective Balzano.”

  “Detective, this is PO Valentine, I work out of the Ninety-second.”

  Part of the Ninety-second District bordered the Schuylkill River. “What’s up, Officer Valentine?”

  “We’re on the Strawberry Mansion Bridge right now. We found something you should see.”

  “Found something?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When you’re in homicide, the call is usually about a somebody, not a something. “What is it, Officer Valentine?”

  Valentine hesitated a moment. It was telling. “Well, Sergeant Majette asked me to give you a call. He says you should get down here right away.”

  36

  The Strawberry Mansion Bridge was built in 1897. It was one of the first steel bridges in the country, spanning the Schuylkill River between Strawberry Mansion and Fairmount Park.

  This day, traffic was stopped at both ends. Jessica, Byrne, and Bontrager had to walk to the center of the bridge, where a pair of patrol officers met them.

  Two boys, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, stood near the officers. The boys seemed a vibrating combination of fear and excitement.

  On the north side of the bridge was something covered in a white plastic evidence sheet. Officer Lindsey Valentine approached Jessica. She was about twenty-four, bright-eyed, fit.

  “What do we have?” Jessica asked.

  Officer Valentine hesitated a moment. She may have worked out of the Ninety-second, but whatever was under the plastic had unnerved her a little. “Citizen called this in about a half hour ago. These two young men came across it while crossing the bridge.”

  Officer Valentine lifted the plastic. On the sidewalk was a pair of shoes. They were women’s shoes, deep crimson in color, approximately size seven. Ordinary in all ways, except these red shoes had a pair of severed feet in them.

  Jessica looked up, met Byrne’s gaze.

  “The boys found this?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Officer Valentine waved the boys over. The boys were white kids, just on the tip of hip-hop style. Mall rats with attitudes, but not right at this moment. Now they looked a little traumatized.

  “We were just looking at them,” the taller one said.

  “Did you see who put them here?” Byrne asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you
touch them?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Did you see anyone around them when you were walking up?” Byrne asked.

  “No, sir,” they said together, shaking their heads for emphasis. “We were here for like a minute or something and then a car stopped and told us to get away. They called the police after that.”

  Byrne glanced at Officer Valentine. “Who placed the call?”

  Officer Valentine pointed to a new Chevrolet parked about twenty feet from the circle of crime-scene tape. A fortyish man in a business suit and topcoat stood next to it. Byrne held up a finger to him. The man nodded.

  “Why did you stay here after the police were called?” Byrne asked the boys.

  The two boys shrugged in unison.

  Byrne turned to Officer Valentine. “Do we have their information?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay,” Byrne said. “You guys can go. We may want to talk to you again, though.”

  “What’s going to happen to them?” the smaller boy asked, pointing to the body parts.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” Byrne asked.

  “Yeah,” the bigger one said. “Are you going to take them with you?”

  “Yes,” Byrne said. “We’re going to take them with us.”

  “How come?”

  “How come? Because this is evidence of a serious crime.”

  Both boys looked crestfallen. “Okay,” said the smaller boy.

  “Why?” Byrne asked. “Did you want to put them on eBay?”

  He looked up. “Can you do that?”

  Byrne pointed to the far side of the bridge. “Go home,” he said. “Right now. Go home, or I swear to God I’ll arrest your whole family.”

  The boys ran.

  “Jesus,” Byrne said. “Fucking eBay.”

  Jessica knew what he meant. She could not imagine herself at eleven years old, coming across a pair of severed feet on a bridge, and not freaking out. For these kids it was like an episode of CSI. Or some video game.

  Byrne talked to the 911-caller while the frigid waters of the Schuylkill River flowed beneath. Jessica glanced at Officer Valentine. It was a strange moment, the two of them standing over what was certainly the severed remains of Kristina Jakos. Jessica recalled her own days in uniform, times when a detective would show up at a homicide she had secured. She remembered looking at the detective in those days with a small measure of envy and awe. She wondered if Officer Lindsey Valentine looked at her that way.