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

by Richard Montanari

  It was called TrueSew.

  THE GIRL BEHIND the counter was about nineteen, blond and delicately pretty, fragile. The music was some kind of Euro trance, volume low. Jessica showed the girl her ID.

  “What’s your name?” Jessica asked.

  “Sa’mantha,” the girl said. “With an apostrophe.”

  “And where would I put that apostrophe?”

  “After the first a.”

  Jessica wrote Samantha. “Got it. How long have you worked here?”

  “About two months. Almost three.”

  “Good job?”

  Sa’mantha shrugged. “It’s okay. Except for when we have to go through the stuff that people bring in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, some of it can be pretty skanky, right?”

  “Skanky how?”

  “Well, one time I actually found a moldy salami sandwich in the back pocket of a pair of overalls. I mean, okay, one, who puts a frickin’ sandwich in their pocket? No baggie, just the sandwich. And a salami sandwich at that.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Yuck squared. And, like, two, who doesn’t even bother to look in the pockets of something before they sell it or donate it? Who would do that? Makes you wonder what else this guy donated, if you know what I mean. Can you imagine?”

  Jessica could. She had seen her share.

  “And another time we found like a dozen dead mice at the bottom of this big box of clothes. Some of them were baby mice. I freaked. I don’t think I slept for a week.” Sa’mantha shuddered. “I may not sleep tonight. So glad I remembered that.”

  Jessica looked around the store. It looked totally disorganized. Clothes were piled on top of the circular racks. Some of the smaller items—shoes, hats, gloves, scarves—were still in cardboard boxes, scattered around the floor, prices written on the sides in black crayon. Jessica imagined that it was all part of a twenty-something Bohemian charm to which she no long subscribed. A pair of men browsed at the rear of the store.

  “What sort of things do you sell here?” Jessica asked.

  “All sorts,” Sa’mantha said. “Vintage, Goth, jock, military. Some Riley.”

  “What’s Riley?”

  “Riley is a line. I think they’re out of Hollywood. Or maybe that’s just the buzz. They take vintage and recycled stuff and embellish it. Skirts, jackets, jeans. Not really my scene, but kinda cool. Mostly for women, but I’ve seen some kid’s things.”

  “Embellish how?”

  “Ruffles, embroidery, things like that. Pretty much one-of-a-kind merch.”

  “I’d like to show you some pictures,” Jessica said. “Would that be okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Jessica opened an envelope, produced photocopies of the dresses found on Kristina Jakos and Tara Grendel, along with a picture of David Hornstrom, the one taken for his Roundhouse visitor ID.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  Sa’mantha looked at the photograph. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Jessica then put the photographs of the dresses on the counter. “Have you sold anything like these to anyone recently?”

  Sa’mantha scanned the pictures. She brought them into better light, took her time. “Not that I remember,” she said. “These are pretty sweet dresses, though. Outside of the Riley line, most of the stuff we get in here is pretty basic. Levi’s, Columbia Sportswear, old Nike and Adidas stuff. These dresses look like something out of like Jane Eyre or something.”

  “Who owns this store?”

  “My brother. But he’s not here right now.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Danny.”

  “Any apostrophes?”

  Sa’mantha smiled. “No,” she said. “Just regular old Danny.”

  “How long has he owned the place?”

  “Maybe two years. But my grandmother owned the place like forever before that. She still does, technically, I think. Loan-wise. She’s the one you want to talk to. In fact, she’ll be here later. She knows everything there is to know about vintage stuff.”

  The receipt for getting older, Jessica thought. She looked on the floor behind the counter, noticed a baby bounce chair. It had a toy bar across the front, one with brightly colored circus animals. Sa’mantha saw her looking at the chair.

  “That’s for my little boy,” she said. “He’s asleep in the back office now.”

  There was a sudden sadness to Sa’mantha’s voice. It sounded like her situation was a legal thing, not necessarily a matter of the heart. Not Jessica’s business, either.

  The phone behind the counter rang. Sa’mantha answered. When she turned her back, Jessica noticed a pair of red and green streaks in her blond hair. Somehow, it suited this young woman. After a few moments Sa’mantha hung up.

  “I like your hair,” Jessica said.

  “Thanks,” Sa’mantha said. “Kind of my Christmas groove. Probably time to change it.”

  Jessica gave Sa’mantha a pair of business cards. “Would you ask your grandmother to call me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “She loves intrigue.”

  “I’ll leave these photographs here, too. If you think of anything else, feel free to get in touch.”

  “Okay.”

  When Jessica turned to leave, she noticed that the two people who’d been at the back of the store had gone. No one had passed her going to the front door.

  “Do you have a back door here?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah,” Sa’mantha said.

  “You don’t have a problem with shoplifting?”

  Sa’mantha pointed to a small video monitor and VCR under the counter. Jessica hadn’t noticed them before. It showed an angle on the hallway leading to the rear entrance. “This used to be a jewelry store, believe it or not,” Sa’mantha said. “They left the cameras and everything. I’ve been watching those guys the whole time we were talking. Not to worry.”

  Jessica had to smile. Outflanked by a nineteen-year-old. You never knew about people.

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON Jessica had seen her share of Goth kids, grunge kids, hip-hop kids, rock and rollers, and homeless people, along with a contingent of Center City secretaries and receptionists looking for that Versace pearl in the oyster. She stopped at a small restaurant on Third, grabbed a quick sandwich, called in. Among the messages she had received was one from a thrift store on Second Street. Somehow the information that the second victim had been dressed in a vintage outfit had leaked to the press and it seemed that everyone who had ever even seen a thrift store was coming out of the woodwork.

  The unfortunate possibility existed that their killer had purchased these items online, or had picked them up in a thrift store in Chicago, or Denver, or San Diego. Or maybe he’d simply had them in a steamer trunk for the past forty or fifty years.

  She entered the tenth thrift store on her list, the Second Street location from which someone had called and left her a message. Jessica badged the young man at the register—a particularly alert looking kid in his early twenties. He had about him the wide-eyed, buzzy look of one two many Von Dutch energy drinks. Or maybe it was something a little more pharmaceutical. Even his spiky hair looked amped. She asked him if he had called the police, or knew who had. After looking everywhere but into Jessica’s eyes, the young man said he knew nothing about it. Jessica wrote the call off as another crank. The oddball calls were starting to pile up on this case. After the Kristina Jakos story hit the papers and the Internet they had gotten calls from pirates, elves, fairies—even from the ghost of someone who had died at Valley Forge.

  Jessica glanced around the long, narrow store. It was a clean, well-lit space. It smelled of a new coat of latex paint. In the front window was a step display of small appliances—toasters, blenders, coffeemakers, space heaters. Along the back wall were board games, vinyl LPs, a few framed art reproductions. To the right was furniture.

  Jessica made her way down the aisles to the women’s apparel. There were only fi
ve or six racks of clothing, but it all seemed to be clean and in decent shape, certainly organized, especially when compared to the inventory at TrueSew.

  When Jessica had attended Temple University, and the ripped designer jeans fad had been in its first blossom, she had frequented the Salvation Army and secondhand stores looking for just the right pair. She had probably tried on hundreds. On a rack in the middle of the store she saw a pair of black Gap jeans for $3.99. The right size, too. She had to stop herself.

  “Can I help you find anything?”

  Jessica turned to see the man asking the question. It was more than a little odd. He sounded like he worked at Nordstrom or Saks. She was not used to getting waited on in a thrift store.

  “My name is Detective Jessica Balzano.” She showed the man her ID.

  “Ah, yes.” The man was tall, well groomed, soft-spoken, manicured. He seemed out of place in a secondhand shop. “I am the one who called.” He extended his hand. “Welcome to the New Page Emporium. My name is Roland Hannah.”

  50

  Byrne interviewed three dancers at Stiletto. As pleasant as the detail was, he had learned nothing, except that exotic dancers can be upward of six feet tall. None of the young ladies remembered anyone paying particular attention to Kristina Jakos.

  Byrne decided to take another look at the Shawmont pump house.

  BEFORE HE GOT on Kelly Drive his cell phone rang. It was Tracy McGovern at the forensic lab.

  “We got a match on those bird feathers,” Tracy said.

  Byrne winced when he thought about the bird. God, he hated fucking up. “What is it?”

  “Ready for this?”

  “That sounds like a loaded question, Tracy,” Byrne said. “I’m not sure how to answer.”

  “The bird was a nightingale.”

  “A nightingale?” Byrne recalled the bird in the victim’s grasp. It was a small, ordinary looking bird, nothing special. For some reason he’d thought a nightingale would be exotic looking.

  “Yep. Luscinia megarhynchos, also known as the Rufous nightingale,” Tracy said. “And here’s the good part.”

  “Man, do I need a good part.”

  “Nightingales don’t live in North America.”

  “That’s the good part?”

  “It is. Here’s why. The nightingale is usually considered to be an English bird, but it can also be found in Spain, Portugal, Austria, and Africa. And here’s the even better news. Not so much for the bird, mind you, but for us. Nightingales don’t do very well in captivity. Ninety percent of those caught die within a month or so.”

  “Okay,” Byrne said. “So how does one of them end up in the hands of a murder victim in Philly?”

  “As well you may ask. Unless you bring one back from Europe yourself—and in this age of bird flu that would not be likely—there’s only one way to get one.”

  “And how is that?”

  “From a breeder of exotic birds. Nightingales have been known to survive in captivity if they’re bred. Hand-raised, if you will.”

  “Please tell me there’s a breeder in Philly.”

  “No, but there is one in Delaware. I called them, but they said they had not sold a nightingale, or bred one, in years. The owner said he would put together a list of breeders and importers and call back. I gave him your number.”

  “Good work, Tracy.” Byrne clicked off, then called Jessica’s voice mail, left her the information.

  A freezing rain began to fall as he turned onto Kelly Drive, a cloudy gray mist that painted the road with a patina of ice. For Kevin Byrne, at that moment, it felt like the winter would never end, and there were three months to go.

  Nightingales.

  BY THE TIME Byrne reached the Shawmont waterworks, the freezing rain had turned into a full-blown ice storm. In the few feet from his car to the slick stone steps of the abandoned pump house he got fairly soaked.

  Byrne stood in the huge open doorway, surveyed the main room of the waterworks. He was still stunned at the scale and sheer desolation of the building. He had lived in Philadelphia his entire life, but had never been there until this case. The site was so secluded—yet not too far from Center City—that he would bet many Philadelphians didn’t even know it was there.

  The wind swirled an eddy of rain into the building. Byrne stepped deeper into the gloom. He thought about the activity that had once taken place there, the commotion. A few generations of people had worked here, keeping the water flowing.

  Byrne touched the stone sill where Tara Grendel had been found—

  —and sees the shadow of the killer, bathed in black, positioning the woman, facing her toward the river … hears the sound of the nightingale as he puts it into her hands, hands rapidly taking on rigor … sees the killer stepping outside, glancing at the moon … hears the lilt of a nursery rhyme—

  —then stood back.

  Byrne took a few moments, trying to shake off the images, trying to make sense of them. He had imagined the first few lines of a children’s verse—it even seemed like a child’s voice—but he could not understand the words. Something about maidens.

  He walked the perimeter of the enormous space, training his Maglite on the pitted and rubbled floor. The crime-scene officers had taken detailed photographs, made scale drawings, combed it for evidence. They had found nothing significant. Byrne snapped off his flashlight. He decided to head back to the Roundhouse.

  Before he stepped outside he was overcome by another sensation, a dark and forbidding awareness, the feeling that someone was watching him. He wheeled around, looking into the corners of the enormous room.

  No one.

  Byrne cocked his head, listened. Just the rain, the wind.

  He stepped into the doorway, peered out. Through the thick gray mist, on the other side of the river, he saw a man standing on the riverbank, hands at his sides. The man seemed to be observing him. The figure was a few hundred feet away, and it was impossible to make out anything specific, except that a man in a dark coat was standing there, in a winter ice storm, and he was watching Byrne.

  Byrne stepped back into the building, out of sight, waited a few moments. He poked his head around the corner. The man was still there, standing motionless, studying the monstrous building on the eastern bank of the Schuylkill. For a second the small figure faded into and out of the landscape, lost in a sheet of water.

  Byrne receded into the darkness of the pump house. He got on his cell phone, called the unit. In seconds he told Nick Palladino to get down to the location, on the western bank of the Schuylkill, across from the Shawmont pump house, and bring the cavalry. If they were wrong, they were wrong. They would apologize to the man and all go about their day.

  But Byrne somehow knew he wasn’t wrong. The feeling was that strong.

  “Hang on a second, Nick.”

  Byrne kept the telephone connection open, waited a few moments, trying to calculate which bridge was nearest to his location, which bridge would get him to the other side of the Schuylkill fastest. He crossed the floor space, waited a moment in the huge arch, sprinted to his car, just as someone stepped out of a high portico on the north side of the building, just a few feet away, directly into his path. Byrne didn’t look at the man’s face. For the moment he couldn’t take his eyes off the small caliber weapon in the man’s hand. A weapon pointed at Byrne’s stomach.

  The man holding the gun was Matthew Clarke.

  “What are you doing?” Byrne screamed. “Get the fuck out of my way!”

  Clarke did not move. Byrne could smell the alcohol on the man’s breath. He could also see the gun shaking in the man’s hand. Never a good combination.

  “You’re going to come with me,” Clarke said.

  Over Clarke’s shoulder, through the thick haze of rain, Byrne could see the figure of a man still standing on the far riverbank. Byrne tried to mind-print the image. It was impossible. The man could be five eight or six feet. Twenty or fifty.

  “Give me the gun, Mr. Clarke,” Byr
ne said. “You’re obstructing an investigation. This is very serious.”

  The wind picked up, whipping off the river, bringing a mass of sleet with it. “I want you to take out your weapon, really slowly, and put it on the ground,” Clarke said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  Clarke cocked the pistol. His hand began to shake. “You do what I tell you.”

  Byrne saw the rage in the man’s eyes, the heat of madness. The detective slowly unbuttoned his coat, reached inside, removed his weapon with two fingers. He then ejected the magazine, threw it over his shoulder, into the river. He placed the gun on the ground. He was not about to leave behind a loaded weapon.

  “Let’s go.” Clarke pointed toward his car, which was parked near the train depot. “We’re going to take a ride.”

  “Mr. Clarke,” Byrne said, searching for the right tone of voice. He calculated his chances of making a move to disarm Clarke. Never good odds under the best of circumstances. “You don’t want to do this.”

  “I said, let’s go.”

  Clarke put the gun to Byrne’s right temple. Byrne closed his eyes. Colleen, he thought. Colleen.

  “We’re going to take a ride,” Clarke said. “You and me. If you don’t get in my car, I will kill you right here.”

  Byrne opened his eyes, turned his head. Across the river, the man was gone.

  “Mr. Clarke, this is the end of your life,” Byrne said. “You have no idea the world of shit you’ve just stepped into.”

  “Don’t say another word. Not one. Do you hear me?”

  Byrne nodded.

  Clarke stepped behind Byrne, put the gun’s barrel against the small of his back. “Let’s go,” he said once more. They walked to the car. “Do you know where we’re heading?”

  Byrne did. But he needed Clarke to say it out loud. “No,” he said.

  “We’re going to the Crystal Diner,” Clarke replied. “We’re going to the place where you killed my wife.”

  They reached the car. They slipped inside at the same moment—Byrne into the driver’s seat, Clarke directly behind him.