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

by Richard Montanari

  Eve circled the block twice, out of caution, habit, training. She parked fifty feet from the gated driveway, killed the engine and headlights. She listened, waited, watched. Nothing moved on the street.

  Three fifty.

  Eve flipped open her cell phone, and before she could stop herself she pressed the number, speed-dialing it for the first time. It was a mistake, but she did it anyway. The line rang once, twice. Eve’s finger hovered over the red end button.

  A few seconds later, the phone on the other end clicked on. A lifetime went by.

  “Hi,” Eve finally said.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER Eve clicked off. She had said much more than she had intended, but she felt good, strong. Cleansed. She tapped her right front jeans pocket, where her courage lived. She took out the pill vial, shook out two Valium. She uncapped the pint of Wild Turkey, sipped from it, capped the bottle, looked around.

  This small section of Philadelphia had a neighborhood name, the way almost all sections of Philadelphia did, but this one wouldn’t come to her. It was a small enclave of old, hidden houses, just west of the Oak Lane Reservoir.

  She stepped out of the car, into the torrid, cloudless night. Philadelphia was quiet. Philadelphia dreamed.

  Eve crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk toward the corner, skirting the iron fence. Beyond the fence the huge house loomed in the darkness, its dormers rising into the sky like devil’s horns. Tortured trees obscured the walls.

  As she got closer she saw lights in the windows on the first floor. She reached a gate, pushed on it. It moaned. It was almost a human sound. She pushed again, slipped through.

  When she stepped onto the grounds, the feeling overwhelmed her. She felt it, smelled it. Evil dwelled here. Her heart raced.

  She slowly made her way through the tall grass, moving ever closer; the undergrowth, the bushes and weeds and wildflowers, seemed to grow around her. A large evergreen stood twenty feet from the house. She stepped behind it.

  The house was massive. It appeared to be a pastiche of architectural styles—Queen Anne, Italianate, Gothic revival. A half-round tower graced the right side. A room on the second floor appeared to be candlelit. Chalky shadows danced on the white sheer curtains. As she drew closer, Eve heard classical music.

  She took a few more steps, stopping fifteen feet from the dining room window. The drapes were open. Inside a dozen candles flickered. She could see the buffet and hutch and sideboard, all heavy antiques, all highly polished. On the walls were enormous oil paintings; hellish, Boschian scenes. There were also a pair of large portraits of a dark-haired man with sinister, intense eyes, a Van Dyck goatee. No one stirred.

  Eve circled the mansion to the east. There she found a small gazebo, a pair of stone benches covered in ivy; a rusted sundial stood guard on a weed-tufted path. As she rounded the back of the house she paused, listened. There was a sound, a low humming sound. Then a snick of metal on metal.

  What was it?

  She cocked her head, tuning to the noise. It wasn’t coming from the house or the garages to her right. For a moment it reminded her of the old elevators in the building where her father had once had his office. The sound seemed to rattle the ground beneath her feet.

  It stopped.

  The voice came from behind her.

  “Welcome to Faerwood.”

  Eve drew the Glock, spun around, the weapon leveled in front of her. A man stood in the small gazebo, about twenty feet away. He was in shadows, but Eve saw he wore a long coat. For a few endless moments he did not move or say another word.

  Eve slipped her finger inside the trigger guard. Before she could respond, a bright yellow light shimmered overhead. She glanced at the window on the second floor. It was barred. The curtains parted to reveal a silhouette, a girl with narrow shoulders and long hair. Eve looked back at the man.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked.

  The man stepped into the moonlight. He was not as big as she had expected. She had anticipated a hulking ogre. Instead, he was sleek and lithe, almost elegant. “Yes,” he answered.

  He slowly raised his right hand, palm upward, as if in blessing. In an instant there was a searing flash of flame and a cloud of white smoke.

  Eve fired. Round after round pierced the air, the loud reports echoing off the hard brick surface of the old house. She kept pulling the trigger until the magazine was empty.

  The night fell still. Eve heard the beating of her heart, felt the horror of what she had just done. She knew she had hit him, dead center in his chest. Four rounds at least. She knew she had to run, but she also knew that she had come too far not to see this to the very end. She holstered her weapon, stepped cautiously to the gazebo. In the moonlight the gun smoke lingered, painting a white haze over this surreal scene. Eve peered over the railing.

  He was gone. There was no blood, no torn flesh, no body. It didn’t seem possible—it wasn’t possible—but the gazebo was empty.

  It all began to close in on her. The last two months of her life had been pure madness, a summons to the grave. She understood that now. She turned and ran through the tall weeds and grass.

  Moments later she reached the iron gate. She pulled on the handle. It wouldn’t budge. It seemed rusted shut. She looked around her, sweat streaming down her face, burning her eyes. Was this where she came in? She couldn’t remember. She had gotten turned around and she had lost her bearings. She pulled again on the gate. It finally moved. She might be able to squeeze through, she thought. She tried, ripping her jeans on the latch. She felt the tear of flesh on her right thigh. The pain was excruciating.

  One more hard pull, giving it everything she had. The gate swung free.

  And that’s when she felt the hand on her shoulder.

  Eve spun, saw his eyes. At first they flashed liquid silver, mercury in the moonlight, then all the fires of hell burned inside them. They were the eyes of her nightmare.

  As Eve Galvez reached for the Beretta in her ankle holster she heard the snap of breaking glass. Then came a strong chemical smell. In the instant before her world went black she knew it had all come to a close.

  Mr. Ludo.

  He had won the game.

  | EIGHT |

  THE DENISON WAS A TEN-STORY USHAPED APARTMENT BUILDING ON Locust Street in West Philadelphia, near Forty-third Street, not far from the main campus of the University of Pennsylvania. The building was an exhaust-ravaged bronze-colored brick, built in the 1930s, with a recently sandblasted white sandstone arched entrance and electric flambeaux flanking its glass front doors. The long flower beds leading up to the doorway were baked and cracked and arid, populated with wilting impatiens, dying salvia, dead begonias, spent lobelia.

  Like the old joke went: In Philly, in August, you couldn’t just fry an egg on the sidewalk, you could fry the chicken.

  Jessica and Byrne entered the building, crossed the lobby. It was five degrees cooler in here, which meant the temperature was a frigid eighty-five degrees or so. They had called the address in, checked the results against the roster of tenants in the lobby. Laura A. Somerville lived in apartment 1015. She did not have a police record or DMV record. In fact, she did not have a record of any kind.

  For some reason, Jessica expected Laura Somerville to be a middle-aged career woman, a real estate developer, perhaps a lawyer. When the woman opened the door, Jessica was surprised to find that Laura Somerville was a rather elegant older woman, probably in her late sixties: powdered and lightly perfumed, classically attired in pleated gray cotton slacks and white blouse. Silver-coiffed and graceful, she reminded Jessica of one of those women who had looked fifty at forty, but would look fifty the rest of her life. Lauren Bacall type.

  Jessica produced her ID and badge, introduced herself and Kevin.

  “Are you Laura A. Somerville?” Jessica asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Jessica said. “Would that be okay?”

  The woman put a hand to her thro
at. She looked at a point in space somewhere between the two detectives. Her eyes were a clear sapphire. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, ma’am,” Jessica said, hedging the truth. “Just a few routine questions.”

  The woman hesitated, then seemed to relax, the tension leaving her shoulders. She nodded, and without another word opened the door fully. She gestured them inside, closed the door behind them.

  The apartment was blessedly cool. Almost cold. Jessica wanted to spend the rest of the summer here. Maybe the rest of her life. It smelled of jasmine tea.

  “Can I get you something cold to drink?” the woman asked. “Soda? Lemonade?”

  “We’re fine, thanks,” Byrne said.

  Jessica glanced around the small, tastefully decorated apartment. It was a room full of older furniture. In one corner was a hutch full of sparkling figurines; the opposite wall held a long bookcase, crowded with books and boxes that appeared to contain games and jigsaw puzzles.

  In front of the burgundy leather nailhead couch was an oak coffee table covered with magazines. Not covered exactly, Jessica realized, but tiled with magazines. Geometrically precise. Ten magazines, all opened, perfectly arranged, parallel and squared to each other. Two rows: five up, five below. Jessica looked at them a little more closely and discovered they were all crossword puzzle magazines. A pen lay on top of each, crossing the rectangle of off-white paper and black ink at a precise forty-five-degree angle. Ten magazines, ten pens.

  “Wow,” Jessica began. “You must be a serious crossword puzzle fan.”

  The woman waved a delicate, long-fingered hand. “Way beyond fan, I’m afraid,” she said. She crossed the space, eased herself onto the couch. Jessica noticed that the woman’s nails were done in the French manicure style. “Beyond addiction, even.”

  “Beyond addiction?” Jessica asked. As a police officer she had encountered every kind of addict there was—drugs, booze, sex, gambling, porn, food. She didn’t know what the next level could be.

  The woman nodded. “You see, the word ‘addiction’ hints at a cure.”

  Jessica smiled. She stepped closer, and now saw that the magazines were published in what appeared to be ten different languages. All the puzzles were at some stage of completion.

  Jessica was stunned. Who does this?

  She glanced over at her partner, and noticed that Byrne seemed captivated by an elaborate display of brightly colored boxes on the bookshelves.

  “I see you are intrigued with my collection,” the woman said to Byrne. “It is not very extensive, but it is well-balanced.”

  “I feel like a kid in here.”

  Laura Somerville smiled. “As George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.’ ”

  Men and games, Jessica thought. Her husband Vincent—a fellow PPD detective working out of Narcotics Field Unit North—was exactly the same way.

  “What is this?” Byrne held up a beautiful white box. About six inches square, it appeared to be carved ivory. Whatever it was, it was old and delicate, probably a collectible.

  The woman crossed the room, gently took the box from Byrne’s big hands—in a manner suggesting that it was both rare and expensive—and put it down on a sideboard.

  “This is called a tangram puzzle,” she said.

  Byrne nodded. “Never heard of it.”

  “It is quite intriguing,” the woman said. “One of my passions.” She reached over, turned up a small latch on the box, and gently opened it to reveal seven small, intricately carved pieces of ivory, seven geometric shapes snugly tucked inside: five triangles of varying sizes, one square, one rhombus. Or maybe it was a parallelogram. Jessica hadn’t done all that well in geometry.

  “It’s about three thousand years old,” she said. “The puzzle,” she added with a wink. “Not this edition.”

  “It’s Chinese?” Byrne asked.

  “The origin of the puzzle itself is in some doubt,” she continued. “It is most likely Chinese, although many Oriental games were really invented in Europe, then credited to the Orient in an attempt to make them seem more exotic.”

  “It’s a jigsaw?”

  “No, it’s what’s known as a rearrangement puzzle,” the woman said. “Rearrangement puzzles go back to Loculus Archimedes in the third century B.C. Or thereabouts.” She took one of the pieces from the box, held it up to the light. The ivory triangle shimmered small rainbows across the room. “This particular set was purchased at the Portobello Road market in London,” she added. “By an old suitor.”

  Jessica saw a pastel glow rise in the woman’s cheeks. Old suitors sometimes did that to a woman’s memory.

  “What’s the point of the exercise?” Byrne asked.

  Jessica had to smile. Kevin Byrne was an endgame kind of guy. Jessica was all about the rules. It was one of the reasons they clicked as partners.

  “The point of the puzzle is to solve it, young man,” Laura Somerville said. “To rearrange the pieces to match a diagram.”

  Byrne grinned broadly. “Okay,” he said. “I’m game.”

  The woman stared at Byrne for a moment, as if she had just been challenged. The word game seemed to bring her alive. “Are you?”

  Byrne blushed a little. It was the Irish curse. Get cornered or challenged, you went red. Even the toughest of the tough.

  Jessica wanted to get down to business, but Kevin Byrne was better at gauging when someone was ready to talk. This woman was not a threat. She was, instead, a cog in the wheel of an investigation. They had time. And it was about sixty-five degrees in here.

  “I am,” Byrne said.

  Laura Somerville reached into a drawer, removed a black velvet mat, placed it on the dining room table. She then carefully arranged the ivory tangram pieces on it. She handled them as if they were the bones of saints.

  One square, five triangles, one parallelogram.

  Laura then retrieved a tall book from a shelf. It was beautifully bound, thick. “This is a book of games,” she said. “It includes a history and collection of tangram. The author lives in Chester County.” She flipped through the three hundred or so pages. Page after page had a dozen silhouettes of geometrically shaped items on them—buildings, animals, people, flowers. She stopped at a page near the middle. “For instance, here is a page of problems created by Chien-Yun Chi in about 1855. It is a page of tools and household items.”

  “All of these shapes are made from just these seven pieces?” Byrne asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.” Byrne glanced at the diagram, studied it for a few moments.

  She tapped a diagram at the bottom of the page. “This problem is a wedding drinking cup.”

  Byrne glanced at Laura Somerville, then at the carved ivory pieces. “May I?”

  “Oh, by all means,” she said.

  “I’ll be careful,” Byrne said. For a big man, he was cautious, precise. Meticulous in his actions. When called for.

  Byrne picked up the square and one of the large triangles. He stared at them closely, perhaps gauging their size and shape, their relationship to each other, his eyes darting from the diagram to the remaining pieces on the velvet.

  He placed the big square on the velvet, the triangle to the right of it. He stared at the arrangement for a few seconds, then turned the triangle. He grasped two of the smaller triangles, held them over the emerging shape. He placed them on the table, moved them. He repeated this three or four times, his eyes roaming the geography of the puzzle.

  A few minutes later, he was done. Jessica looked at both the diagram in the book and the arranged ivory pieces on the table. They were identical.

  “Very impressive,” Laura said.

  “Was this a tough one?” Byrne asked.

  “Tough enough.”

  Byrne beamed. He looked like a kid who had just hit a stand-up triple.

  Jessica cleared her throat. “Right, well,” she said. “Way to go, partner.” It was time to get down
to business. If they didn’t, Kevin Byrne would probably play with the puzzle all day.

  Laura Somerville hesitated a moment, then gestured to the chairs in the living room. “Please. Sit down,” she said.

  “This won’t take too long,” Jessica said. She took out her notebook, clicked a pen. “How long have you lived at this address?”

  “Six years come October.”

  “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you know a young woman named Caitlin O’Riordan?”

  The woman asked Jessica to repeat the name. She did. Laura Somerville seemed to think about it for a moment. “I’m sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Jessica took out the photograph, handed it to the woman. “This is Caitlin,” she said. “Do you recognize her?”

  The woman took the photograph from Jessica, slipped on a pair of rose-tinted bifocals, examined the picture in the bright sunlight streaming through the window overlooking Locust Street. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I do not.”

  Jessica put the photograph away. “Are you familiar with a building at 4514 Shiloh Street?”

  “Shiloh Street?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I’ve never heard of it. Where is it?”

  “North Philly.”

  “No,” the woman said. “Sorry.”

  Jessica and Byrne exchanged a glance. “You’re saying you’re not familiar with the building?”

  The woman looked from Jessica, to Byrne, back to Jessica. “Can you please tell me what this is all about?”

  Jessica gave the woman a brief account.

  For more than a few seconds, the woman stared at Jessica in what seemed like shocked disbelief. “You’re saying the young woman was murdered? The young woman in the photograph?”

  “Yes,” Jessica said. “And I’m afraid there is a connection to this building.” Jessica held up the faxed document. “According to the Department of Licenses and Inspections, a series of calls have been placed from your telephone number regarding the building at 4514 Shiloh Street.”