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

by Richard Montanari

  In her time on the couch Eve had met all the Pams—clonazepam, diazepam, lorazepam, flurazepam. None helped. Pain—the kind of pain that begins where your childhood comes to a deadening halt—would not be salved. In the end, when night became morning, you stepped out of the shadows, ready or not.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I apologize for my crude language. It’s not very becoming.”

  He didn’t chastise or excuse her. She hadn’t expected him to. Instead, he glanced down at his lap, studied her chart, flipped a few pages. It was all there. It was one of the downsides to belonging to a healthcare system that logged every appointment, every prescription, every physical therapy session, every X-ray—ache, pain, complaint, theory, treatment.

  If she had learned anything it was that there were two groups of people you couldn’t con. Your doctor and your banker. Both knew the real balance.

  “Have you been thinking about Graciella?” he asked.

  Eve tried to maintain her focus, her emotions. She put her head back for a few moments, fighting tears, then felt the liquid warmth traverse her cheek to her chin, onto her neck, then on to the fabric of the wing chair. She wondered how many tears had rolled onto this chair, how many sorrowful rivers had flowed through its ticking. “No,” she lied.

  He put down his pen. “Tell me about the dream.”

  Eve plucked a few tissues from the box, dabbed her eyes. As she did this she covertly glanced at her watch. Wall clocks were scarce in a shrink’s office. They were at minute forty-eight of a fifty-minute session. Her doctor wanted to continue. On his dime.

  What was this about? Eve wondered. Shrinks never went over the time limit. There was always someone scheduled next, some teenager with an eating disorder, some frigid housewife, some jack-off artist who rode SEPTA looking for little girls in pleated plaid, some OCD who had to circle his house seven times every morning before work just to see if he had left the gas on or had remembered to comb his area-rug fringe a few hundred times.

  “Eve?” he repeated. “The dream?”

  It wasn’t a dream—she knew that, and he knew that. It was a nightmare, a lurid waking horror show that unspooled every night, every noon, every morning, dead center in her mind, her life.

  “What do you want to know about it?” she asked, stalling. She felt sick to her stomach.

  “I want to hear it all,” he said. “Tell me about the dream. Tell me about Mr. Ludo.”

  EVE GALVEZ LOOKED AT THE OUTFIT on her bed. Collectively, the jeans, cotton blazer, T-shirt, and Nikes represented one-fifth of her wardrobe. She traveled light these days, even though she was once addicted to clothes. And shoes. Back in the day her mailbox had been thick with fashion magazines, her closet impenetrable with suits, blazers, sweaters, blouses, skirts, coats, jeans, slacks, vests, jackets, dresses. Now there was room in her closet for all of her skeletons. And they needed plenty of room.

  In addition to her handful of outfits, Eve had one piece of jewelry she cared about, a bracelet she wore only at night. It was one of the few material things she cherished.

  This was her fifth apartment in two years, a spare, drafty, three-room affair in Northeast Philadelphia. She had one table, one chair, one bed, one dresser, no paintings or posters on the walls. Although she had a job, a duty, a litany of responsibilities to other people, she sometimes felt like a nomad, a woman unfettered by the shackles of urban life.

  Exhibit Number One: in the kitchen, four boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese that expired two years earlier. Every time she opened the cupboard she was reminded that she was relocating with food she would never eat.

  IN THE SHOWER she thought about her session with the shrink. She had told him about the dream—not all of it, she would never tell anybody all of it—but certainly more than she had intended. She wondered why. He was not any more insightful than the others, did not have a special sense that raised him above all of his colleagues in his field.

  And yet she had gone further than she ever had.

  Maybe she was making progress.

  She walks up a dark street. It is three o’clock in the morning. Eve knows precisely what time it is because she had glanced up the avenue—a dream-street that had no name or number—and saw the clock in the tower at City Hall.

  After a few blocks, the street grows gloomier, even more featureless and long-shadowed, like a vast, silent de Chirico painting. There are abandoned stores on either side of the street, shuttered diners that somehow have customers still at the counters, ice-covered in time, coffee cups poised halfway to their lips.

  She comes to an intersection. A streetlight blinks red on all four sides. She sees a doll sitting in a fiddleback chair. It wears a ragged pink dress, soiled at the hem. It has dirty knees and elbows.

  Suddenly, Eve knows who she is, and what she has done. The doll is hers. It is a Crissy doll, her favorite when she was a child. She has run away from home. She has come to the city without any money or any plan.

  A shadow dances across the wall to her left. She turns to look, and sees a man approaching, fast. He moves as a gust of blistering wind, carved of smoke and moonlight.

  He is now behind her. She knows what he did to the others. She knows what he is going to do to her.

  “Venga aqui!” comes the booming voice from behind, inches from her ear.

  The fear, the sickness, blossoms inside her. She knows the familiar voice, and it forms a dark tornado in her heart. “Venga, Eve! Ahora!”

  She closes her eyes. The man spins her around, begins to violently shake her. He pushes her to the ground, but she does not hit the steaming asphalt. Instead she falls through it, tumbling through space, head over heels, freefall, the lights of the city a mad kaleidoscope in her mind.

  She crashes through a ceiling onto a filthy mattress. For a few blessed moments the world is silent. Soon she catches her breath, hears the sound of a young girl singing a familiar song in the next room. It is a Spanish lullaby, “A La Nanita Nana.”

  Seconds later, the door slams open. A bright orange light washes the room. An earsplitting siren rages through her head.

  And the real nightmare begins.

  Eve stepped out of the shower, toweled off, walked into her bedroom, opened the closet, took out the aluminum case. Inside, secured against the egg-crate foam lining, were four firearms. All the weapons were perfectly maintained, fully loaded. She selected a Glock 17, which she carried in a Chek-Mate security holster on her right hip, along with a Beretta 21, which she wore in an Apache ankle rig.

  She slipped into her outfit, buttoned her blazer, checked herself in the full-length mirror. She proclaimed herself ready. Just after 1 AM, she stepped into the hall.

  Eve Galvez turned to look at her nearly empty apartment, a rush of icy melancholy overtaking her heart. She had once had so much.

  She closed the door, locked the deadbolt, walked down the hallway. A few moments later she crossed the lobby, pushed through the glass doors, and stepped into the warm Philadelphia night.

  For the last time.

  | FIVE |

  THE FORENSIC SCIENCE CENTER, COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS THE CRIME lab, was located at Eighth and Poplar streets, just a few blocks from the Roundhouse. The 40,000-square-foot facility was responsible for analysis of all physical evidence collected by the PPD during the course of an investigation. In its various divisions, it performed analysis in three major categories: trace evidence, such as paint, fibers, or gunshot residue; biological evidence, including blood, semen, and hair; and miscellaneous evidence, such as fingerprints, documents, and footwear impressions.

  The Philadelphia Police Department’s Criminalistics Unit maintained itself as a full-service facility, able to perform a wide variety of testing procedures.

  Sergeant Helmut Rohmer was the reigning king of the document section. In his early thirties, Rohmer was a giant, standing about six-four, weighing in at 250 pounds, most of it muscle. He had short-cropped hair, dyed so blond it was almost white. On both arms were an elaborate
web of tattoos—many of them a variation on red roses, white roses, and the name Rose. Vegetation and petals snaked around his huge biceps. At PPD functions—especially the Police Athletic League gatherings. Helmut Rohmer was big on PAL—no one had ever seen him with a person named Rose or Rosie or Rosemary, so the subject was scrupulously avoided. His standard outfit was black jeans, Doc Martens, and sleeveless black sweatshirts. Unless he had to go to court. Then it was a shiny, narrow-lapelled, navy-blue suit from around the time when REO Speedwagon dotted the charts.

  No pocket protectors or dingy lab coats here—Helmut Rohmer looked like a roadie for Metallica, or a Frank Miller rendering of a Hell’s Angel. But when the sergeant spoke, he sounded like Johnny Mathis. He insisted you call him Hell, even going so far as signing his internal memos “From Hell.” No one dared argue or object.

  “This is a fairly common edition of the New Oxford,” Hell said. “It’s available everywhere. I have the same edition at home.” The book sat on the gleaming stainless table, opened to the copyright page. “This particular publication was printed in the early seventies, but you can find it in just about any used-book store in the country, including college bookstores, Half Price Books, everywhere.”

  “Is there any way to trace where it may have been purchased?” Jessica asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  The book’s cover had been dusted for prints. None were found. It would take a lot longer, and prove far more difficult, to check the pages themselves, seeing as there were more than fifteen hundred of them.

  “What do you make of the Shiloh message?” Jessica asked.

  Hell placed an index finger to his lips. Jessica noticed for the first time that his fingernails were well-manicured, their clear polish reflecting the overhead fluorescents in straight silvery lines. “Well, I ran Shiloh through the databases and the search engines. Nothing significant in the databases, but I did get hits on Google and Yahoo, of course. Lots of them. As in tons and tons.”

  “Such as?” Jessica asked.

  “Well, a lot of them had to do with that 1996 kid’s movie. It had Rod Steiger in it, and the guy who was in In Cold Blood. What was his name?”

  “Robert Blake?” Jessica asked.

  “No. The other guy in the movie. The light-haired guy. The con man who bounces the check for the suit.”

  “Scott Wilson,” Byrne said.

  “Right.”

  Jessica glanced at Byrne, but he refused to look at her. It was a matter of pop-culture principle, she figured. Sometimes Kevin Byrne’s knowledge astounded her. On a bar bet, he once rattled off the entire discography of The Eagles, and Kevin Byrne didn’t even care too much for The Eagles. He was a Thin Lizzy, Corrs, Van Morrison man—not to mention his near-slavish devotion to old blues. On the other hand, she’d once caught him singing the first verse of “La Vie en Rose” at a crime scene. In French. Kevin Byrne did not speak French.

  “Anyway,” Hell said. “This Shiloh movie was a little schmaltzy, but it was still kind of cute. Beagle-in-jeopardy type thing. We just rented it a few months ago. Scratchy DVD, froze up a few times. Drives me frickin’ nuts when that happens. Gotta go Blu-ray and soon. But my daughter loved it.”

  Jessica thought, Daughter? Could this be the legendary Rose? “I didn’t know you had a daughter, Hell,” she said, probing.

  Hell beamed. In a flash, he had out his wallet, flipped open to a photograph of an adorable little blond girl sitting on a park bench, hugging the hell out of a black Labrador puppy. Crushing the puppy was more like it. Maybe the kid worked out with her dad.

  “This is Donatella,” Hell said. “She is my heart.”

  So much for Rose, Jessica thought. “She’s a doll.”

  Byrne looked at the picture, nodded, smiled. Despite the tough-cop pose, Jessica knew Kevin Byrne was complete mush around little girls. He carried at least four pictures of his daughter Colleen at all times.

  Hell slipped the photo back into his wallet, trousered it. “Then there’s the Shiloh reference in the Bible, of course.”

  “What’s that about?” Jessica asked.

  “Well, if memory serves—and it quite often does—Shiloh was the name of a shrine that Moses built in the wilderness. Lots of wilderness in the Bible.” Hell flipped a few pages of his notebook. Jessica noticed that there were hand-drawn roses in the margins. “Then there’s the Civil War battle of Shiloh, which was also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing.”

  Jessica glanced once again at her partner. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second largest city in the commonwealth, was three hundred miles west of Philly. Byrne shook his head, emphasizing to Jessica how little she knew about the Civil War, or American history in general.

  “Not what you think,” Hell said, picking up on the exchange. “Shiloh is in western Tennessee. Nothing to do with Pittsburgh, PA.”

  “Anything else pop up?” Jessica asked, anxious to move on.

  “Nothing really jumped off the screen. I ran the numbers 4514 and got more than six million hits. Can you believe that? Six million. My first thought was that the four numbers could be the last part of a phone number.” Hell flipped through a few more of his notes. “I took the first three letters of Shiloh—S-H-I—and used them as a prefix, which is 744 on the phone. There is no Philly phone number using that designation. I widened the search to include area codes in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Ditto. It’s not a phone number.”

  “But you think it was something we were supposed to find, right?” Jessica asked. This sort of thing was not the purview of CSU, but Hell was one of the brightest people Jessica knew. It never hurt to get a second, third, and fourth opinion.

  Hell smiled. “Well, I’m no detective,” he began. He glanced at the photographs of the refrigerator and kitchen at the Second Street crime scene. “But if grilled under hot lights and deprived of Dancing With the Stars reruns, I would say we were definitely supposed to find this. I mean, Jeremiah Crosley? Puh-freakin’-leeze. It’s clever, but it’s not that clever. On the other hand, maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s just clever enough to be intriguing, but not so difficult that it would go over the heads of us big dumb cops.”

  Jessica had, of course, considered this. They were supposed to find this Bible, and the message inside was the second part of the riddle.

  “So I’m thinking this might be an address,” Hell said.

  “A street address?” Jessica asked. “Here in Philly?”

  “Yeah,” Hell said. “There’s a Shiloh Street here, you know.”

  Jessica glanced at Byrne. Byrne shrugged. Apparently, he had never heard of it either. Philly was a small city in a lot of ways, but there were a hell of a lot streets. You could never know them all.

  “Where is this Shiloh Street?” Jessica asked.

  “North Philly,” Hell said. “Badlands.”

  Of course, Jessica thought.

  Hell typed a few keystrokes on his laptop. His big fingers nimbly flew across the keys. Seconds later Google Maps appeared on the screen. Hell entered the street address. Soon the image began to zoom in, stopping at a map view of North Philly. A few more keystrokes yielded a fairly tight picture of a handful of city blocks just south of Allegheny Avenue between Fourth and Fifth streets. Hell clicked on the small “+” sign in the corner. The image zoomed in again. A green arrow pointed at the triangular rooftop of a small corner building

  “There it is,” Hell said. “Voy-la. 4514 Shiloh Street.”

  Hell tapped another key, switched to satellite view, which eliminated the street names, rendering a photographic image.

  From the aerial view, the address appeared to be either a row house or a commercial space at the end of the block. Gray and ugly and undistinguished. No trees. Jessica rarely saw her city from above. This part looked so desolate her heart ached. She glanced at Byrne. “What do you think?”

  Byrne scanned the image, his deep-green eyes roaming the surface of the monitor. “I think we’re being worked. I hate bei
ng worked.”

  Hell gently closed the book, then opened it again, flipping open just the front cover. “I ran a hair dryer over the inside front endpaper,” he said. “Many times people will open a book with their fingers on the outside, and right thumb on the inside. If the front cover was wiped down—and I believe it was—maybe they forgot to—”

  Hell stopped talking. His eyes fixed on a slight bump in the lower left-hand corner of the inside front cover, a right angle that lifted an edge.

  “What have we here?” Hell said.

  He opened a drawer, removed a gleaming pair of stainless steel tweezers, clicked them three times. It seemed like a ritual.

  “What is it?” Byrne asked.

  “Hang on.”

  Hell wielded the tweezers like a heart surgeon. He grabbed the endpaper, began to slowly strip it back. Soon, it became apparent that there was something underneath. It appeared that someone had already peeled back the endpaper, inserted something, then re-glued it.

  Hell took a deep breath, exhaled, continued to peel back the endpaper. Beneath it was a thin piece of cardboard. Hell gently removed it with the tweezers, put it on the table. It was a white rectangle, about three inches by five inches. The paper had a watermark on it. Hell flipped it over.

  The cardboard rectangle was a color photograph. A picture of a teenage girl.

  Jessica felt the temperature in the room jump a few degrees, along with the level of anxiety. The mysteries were starting to progress geometrically.

  The girl in the picture was white, somewhat overweight, about sixteen. She had long auburn hair, brown eyes, a small cleft in her chin. The photo appeared to be a printout of a digital picture. She wore a red sweater with sequins along the neckline, large hoop earrings, and a striking onyx teardrop pendant necklace.

  Hell spun in place, twice, both fists raised in anger, his huge rubber-soled boots squeaking on the tile. “I didn’t think to look. I hate that, man,” he said, calmly, even as a fiery crimson rose from his neck onto his face like the column in a cheap thermometer.