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

by Richard Montanari

  They reached the entrance to the root cellar, a pair of heavy wooden doors built into the ground. It was crossbeamed with a four-by-four. They lifted the cross beam, set it aside, pulled open the doors.

  Immediately the smell of mildew and wood rot reached their noses. There was a hint of something else, something animal.

  “And they say police work isn’t glamorous,” Jessica said.

  Nicci looked at Jessica. “Well?”

  “After you, Auntie Em.”

  Nicci clicked on her Maglite. “Philly PD!” she yelled into the black hole. No answer. She glanced back at Jessica, fully jazzed. “I love this job.”

  Nicci took the lead. Jessica followed.

  As more snowstorm clouds gathered over southeastern Pennsylvania, the two detectives descended into the frigid darkness of the cellar.

  74

  Roland felt the warm sun on his face. He heard the slap of the league ball against leather, smelled the deep redolence of neat’s-foot oil. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.

  He was fifteen.

  There had been ten of them that day, eleven including Charles. It was late April. They’d each had their favorite baseball player—Lenny Dykstra, Bobby Munoz, Kevin Jordan, and the retired Mike Schmidt among them. Half of them wore some homemade version of Mike Schmidt’s jersey.

  They had played a pickup game in a field near Lincoln Drive, sneaking onto a ball diamond just a few hundred yards from the creek.

  Roland looked over to the trees. He saw his stepsister Charlotte there, along with her friend Annemarie. Most of the time the two girls drove him and his friends crazy. Mostly they prattled and squeaked about nothing in the world that could possibly matter. But not always, not Charlotte. Charlotte was a special girl, as special as her twin brother Charles. Like Charles, her eyes were a robin’s-egg blue that shamed the springtime sky.

  Charlotte and Annemarie. The two were inseparable. That day they stood in their sundresses, shimmering in the dazzling light. Charlotte wore lavender ribbons. It was a birthday party for them—they had been born on the same day, exactly two hours apart, Annemarie being the older of the two. They had met in the park when they were six, and now they had to have their party there.

  At six o’clock they all heard the thunder, shortly followed by their mothers calling for them.

  Roland had walked away. He picked up his mitt, and simply walked away, leaving Charlotte behind. He had left her for the devil that day, and since that day the devil had owned his soul.

  To Roland, as with many people in the ministry, the devil was not an abstract. It was a real being, and could manifest itself in many forms.

  He thought of the intervening years. He thought of how young he was when he opened the mission. He thought of Julianne Weber, about how she had been brutalized by a man named Joseph Barber, how Julianne’s mother had come to him. He had spoken to little Julianne. He thought about how he had confronted Joseph Barber in that North Philly hovel, the look in Barber’s eyes when the man knew he had come to earthly judgment, how the wrath of the Lord was imminent.

  Thirteen knives, Roland thought. The devil’s number.

  Joseph Barber. Basil Spencer. Edgar Luna.

  So many others.

  Had they been innocent? No. Perhaps they had not been directly responsible for what had happened to Charlotte, but they had been the devil’s minions.

  “There it is.” Sean pulled the vehicle to the side of the road. There was a sign amid the trees, next to a narrow snowbound lane. Sean got out of the van, cleaned the fresh snow from the sign.

  WELCOME TO ODENSE

  Roland lowered his window.

  “There’s a wooden one-lane bridge a few hundred yards in,” Sean said. “I remember that it used to be in pretty bad shape. Might not even be there anymore. I think I should go take a look before we drive in.”

  “Thank you, Brother Sean,” Roland said.

  Sean pulled his wool cap tighter, knotted his scarf. “I’ll be right back.”

  He walked down the lane—slow going in the calf-deep snow—and within moments disappeared into the storm.

  Roland glanced at Charles.

  Charles was wringing his hands, rocking in his seat. Roland put a hand on Charles’s big shoulder. It would not be long now.

  Soon they would come face-to-face with Charlotte’s killer.

  75

  Byrne looked at the contents of the envelope—a handful of photographs, each with a notation scrawled along the bottom in ballpoint pen—but had no idea what any of it meant. He glanced again at the envelope itself. It was addressed to him, c/o the Police Department. Hand lettered, blocky style, black ink, no return, Philly postmark.

  Byrne was at a desk in the duty room at the Roundhouse. The room was all but deserted. Anyone with anything to do on New Year’s Eve was out getting ready to do it.

  There were six photographs: small Polaroid prints. Written along the bottom of each print was a series of numbers. The numbers looked familiar—they appeared to be those of PPD case files. It was the pictures themselves he could not understand. They were not official department photos.

  One was a snapshot of a small lavender plush toy. It looked like a bear. Another was a picture of a girl’s barrette, also lavender. Yet another was a photograph of a small pair of socks. It has hard to tell the exact color, due to the slight overexposure of the print, but they looked to be lavender as well. There were three more photos, all of unrecognized objects that were each a shade of lavender.

  Byrne scrutinized each photograph again. They were mostly closeups, so there was little context. Three of the objects were on carpeting, two on a hardwood floor, one on what appeared to be concrete. Byrne was writing down the numbers as Josh Bontrager came in, holding his coat.

  “Just wanted to say Happy New Year, Kevin.” Bontrager crossed the room, shook Byrne’s hand. Josh Bontrager was a hand-shaker. In the past week or so, Byrne had probably shaken the young man’s hand thirty times.

  “Same to you, Josh.”

  “We’ll catch this guy next year. You’ll see.”

  It was a little bit of country wit, Byrne supposed, but it came from the right place. “No doubt.” Byrne picked up the sheet with the case numbers on it. “Could you do me a favor before you leave?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you get these files for me?”

  Bontrager put down his coat. “I’m on it.”

  Byrne turned back to the photographs. Each showed a lavender item, he saw again. A girl’s item. A barrette, a bear, a pair of socks with a small ribbon at the top.

  What did it mean? Did the photos represent six victims? Were they killed because of the color lavender? Was it the signature of a serial killer?

  Byrne glanced out the window. The storm was picking up. Soon the city would come to a halt. For the most part, police welcomed snowstorms. They tended to slow things down, smooth out arguments that often led to assaults, to homicides.

  He looked back at the pictures in his hand. Whatever they represented had already happened. The fact that a child was involved—probably a young girl—did not bode well.

  Byrne got up from his desk, walked through the corridors to the elevators, and waited for Josh.

  76

  The cellar was dank and musty. It was made up of one large room and three smaller ones. In the main section were a few wooden boxes stacked in one corner, a large steamer trunk. The other rooms were mostly empty. One had a boarded-up coal chute and bin. One had a long rotted shelving unit. On it were a few old one-gallon green glass jars, a pair of broken jugs. Tacked above were cracked leather bridles, along with an old leg-hold trap.

  The steamer trunk was not padlocked, but the broad latch seemed to be rusted shut. Jessica found an iron bar nearby. She swung the bar. Three hits later, and the latch sprung. She and Nicci opened the trunk.

  Across the top was an old bed sheet. They pulled it away. Beneath that were layers of magazines: Life, Look, Woman’s Home C
ompanion, Collier’s. The smell of mildewed paper and moth cakes drifted up. Nicci shifted some of the magazines.

  Beneath them was a leather binder, perhaps nine by twelve inches, veined and covered with a thin green layer of mold. Jessica opened it. There were only a handful of pages.

  Jessica flipped to the first two pages. On the left was a yellowed news clipping from the Inquirer, a news item from April 1995, an article concerning the murder of two young girls in Fairmount Park. Annemarie DiCillo and Charlotte Waite. The illustration on the right was a crude pen and ink drawing of a pair of white swans in a nest.

  Jessica’s pulse began to race. Walt Brigham had been right. This house—or more accurately the occupants of this house—had something to do with the murder of Annemarie and Charlotte. Walt had been closing in on the killer. He had been getting close and the killer had followed him into the park that night, to the precise spot the little girls had been murdered, and burned him to death.

  Jessica considered the potent irony of it all.

  In death, Walt Brigham had led them to his killer’s house.

  In death, Walt Brigham might get his revenge.

  77

  The six case files were homicides. Each one of the victims had been male, all of them between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. Three of the men had been stabbed to death—one of them with a pair of garden shears. Two of the men had been bludgeoned, one run over by a large vehicle, possibly a van. All of them had been from Philadelphia. Four had been white, one black, one Asian. Three had been married, two divorced, one single.

  What they all had in common was that they had all been suspected, to some degree, of violence against young girls. All six were dead. And, it appeared, at the scene of their murders there had been some sort of lavender item. Socks, a barrette, plush toys.

  There wasn’t a single suspect in any of the cases.

  “Are these files tied to our killer?” Bontrager asked.

  Byrne had almost forgotten that Josh Bontrager was still in the room. The kid was quiet that way. Maybe it was out of respect. “I’m not sure,” Byrne said.

  “Do you want me to hang around, maybe follow up on some of them?”

  “No,” Byrne said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. Go have a good time.”

  After a few moments, Bontrager grabbed his coat and walked toward the door.

  “Josh,” Byrne said.

  Bontrager turned around, expectant. “Yeah?”

  Byrne pointed to the files. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” Bontrager held up two of the books by Hans Christian Andersen. “I’m going to read these tonight. I figure that if he’s going to do this again, a clue might be in here.”

  Some New Year’s Eve, Byrne thought. Reading fairy tales. “Good work.”

  “I thought I’d call you if I came up with something. Is that okay?”

  “Absolutely,” Byrne said. The kid was starting to remind Byrne of himself when he’d been new to the unit. An Amish version, but still similar. Byrne got up, put on his coat. “Hang on. I’ll walk you down.”

  “Cool,” Bontrager said. “Where are you headed?”

  In the case files, Byrne had looked at the investigating officers on each of the homicides. On all cases it had been Walter J. Brigham and John Longo. Byrne had looked up Longo. He had retired in 2001, and now lived in the Northeast.

  Byrne hit the button on the elevator. “I think I’ll take a ride to the Northeast.”

  JOHN LONGO LIVED in a well-tended town house in Torresdale. Byrne was greeted by Longo’s wife Denise, a slender, attractive woman in her early forties. She brought Byrne down to the basement workshop, a look of skepticism and slight suspicion behind her warm smile.

  The walls were covered with plaques and photos, half devoted to Longo in various locations, wearing various police gear. The other half were family pictures—weddings in a park, Atlantic City, somewhere tropical.

  Longo looked a few years older than his official PPD photograph, his dark hair now confettied with gray, but he was still trim and athletic. A few inches shorter than Byrne, a few years younger, Longo looked like he could still run down a suspect if he had to.

  After the standard who-do-you-know, who-have-you-worked-with dance, they finally got to the reason for Byrne’s visit. Something about Longo’s responses told Byrne that Longo had in some way expected this day to come.

  The six photographs were laid out on the workbench, a surface otherwise devoted to making wooden birdhouses.

  “Where did you get these?” Longo asked.

  “Honest answer?” Byrne asked.

  Longo nodded.

  “I thought you sent them.”

  “No.” Longo looked at the envelope, inside and out, flipped it over. “It wasn’t me. In fact, I was hoping to go the rest of my life without ever seeing anything like this again.”

  Byrne understood. There was plenty he himself didn’t want to ever see again. “How long were you on the job?”

  “Eighteen years,” Longo said. “Half a career for some guys. Way too long for others.” He studied one of the photographs closely. “I remember this. There have been many nights when I wished I didn’t.”

  The photograph was the one depicting the small plush bear.

  “That was taken at a crime scene?” Byrne asked.

  “Yes.” Longo crossed the room, opened a cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich. He held up the bottle, and raised an eyebrow questioningly. Byrne nodded. Longo poured them both a drink, handed a glass to Byrne.

  “It was the last case I worked,” Longo said.

  “This was North Philly, right?” Byrne knew all this. He just needed it to sync.

  “Badlands. We were on this prick. Hard. For months. Name was Joseph Barber. Had him in for questioning twice for a series of rapes of young girls, couldn’t hold him. Then he did it again. Got a tip he was holed up in an old drug house near Fifth and Cambria.” Longo drained his drink. “He was dead when we got there. Thirteen knives in his body.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “Yeah.” Longo cleared his throat. This was not easy for him. He poured himself another drink. “Steak knives. Cheap. The kind you might get at a flea market. Untraceable.”

  “Was the case ever closed?” Byrne knew the answer to this, too. He wanted to keep Longo talking.

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Did you follow it?”

  “I didn’t want to. Walt stuck with it for a while. He tried to make a case that Joseph Barber was killed by some sort of vigilante. Never got any traction.” Longo pointed to the photograph on the workbench. “I looked at that lavender bear on the floor, and knew I was finished. I’ve never looked back.”

  “Any idea who the bear belonged to?” Byrne asked.

  Longo shook his head. “When the evidence was cleared and the property released, I showed it to the little girl’s parents.”

  “These were the parents of Barber’s last victim?”

  “Yeah. They said they had never seen it before. Like I said, Barber was a serial child rapist. I didn’t want to think how and where he might have gotten it.”

  “What was Barber’s last victim’s name?”

  “Julianne.” Longo’s voice cracked. Byrne arranged a few tools on the bench, waited. “Julianne Weber.”

  “Did you ever follow up?”

  He nodded. “A few years ago I drove by their house, parked across the street. I saw Julianne as she left for school. She looked okay—at least, to the world she looked okay—but I could see that sadness in her every step.”

  Byrne could see that this conversation was nearing a close. He gathered the photos, his coat and gloves. “I’m sorry about Walt. He was a good man.”

  “He was the job,” Longo said. “I couldn’t make it to the party. I didn’t even—” The emotion took over for a few moments. “I was in San Diego. My daughter had a little girl. My first grandchild.”

  “Congratulations,” Byrne said. As soon as the word left his li
ps—although heartfelt—it sounded empty. Longo drained his glass. Byrne followed suit, stood, slipped on his coat.

  “This is the part where people usually say ‘If there’s anything else I can do, please don’t hesitate to call,’ ” Longo said. “Right?”

  “I guess it is,” Byrne replied.

  “Do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Hesitate.”

  Byrne smiled. “Okay.”

  As Byrne turned to leave, Longo put a hand on his arm. “There is something else.”

  “Okay.”

  “Walt said I was probably seeing things at the time, but I was convinced.”

  Byrne folded his hands, waited.

  “The pattern of the knives,” Longo said. “The wounds on Joseph Barber’s chest.”

  “What about them?”

  “I wasn’t sure until I saw the postmortem photos. But I’m positive the wounds spelled out a C.”

  “The letter C?”

  Longo nodded, poured himself another drink. He sat down at his workbench. The conversation was now officially over.

  Byrne thanked him again. On the way up, he saw that Denise Longo had been standing at the top of the stairs. She saw him to the door. She was much cooler to him than she had been when he’d arrived.

  While his car was warming up, Byrne looked at the photograph. There was probably going to be a lavender-bear sort of case in his future, probably his near future. He wondered if he, like John Longo, would have the courage to walk away.

  78

  Jessica searched every inch of the trunk, flipped through every magazine. There was nothing else. She found a few yellowed recipes, a few McCall’s patterns. She found a box of small paper-wrapped demitasse cups. The newspaper wrapping was dated March 22, 1950. She turned back to the portfolio.

  Tucked into the back of the binder was a page bearing a number of horrific drawings—hangings, mutilations, disembowelings, dismemberments—childlike in their scrawl, extremely disturbing in their content.