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

by Richard Montanari

  “Hey, Sarge,” Byrne said. “How are you?”

  “Like Rosie O’Donnell in a cold bubble bath.”

  “Okay,” Byrne said, not having the slightest idea what his boss meant. But he was fine with that. The visual image was enough to prevent any further inquiries. “What’s up?”

  A rhetorical question. In this job, if you were on day work, your boss didn’t call you after nine o’clock unless it was bad news.

  “We’ve got a body. Fairmount Park.”

  “We’re up on the wheel?” Byrne asked. The “wheel” was the roster of detectives. Whenever you got a new case, you went to the bottom, and steadily moved up the list until it was your turn again. Clearing all your cases before you got a new one was every detective’s dream. It never happened in Philly.

  “No,” Buchanan said. “I need you to back up Nicci and John.”

  Buchanan was talking about Detectives Nicolette Malone and John Shepherd. Whenever there was a large public crime scene, more than two detectives were called to the site.

  “Where?” Byrne replied, pulling out his notebook. He glanced at Jessica. She was listening, but not looking.

  Buchanan gave Byrne the location.

  THE EVENING WAS A steam bath. White heat shimmered off the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings. Lightning flashed in a deep indigo sky. No rain yet. Soon, though, the radio said. It was going to rain soon. They promised.

  Byrne put the car in reverse, then drove across the lot, turned onto Eighth Street. Jessica sighed. Their tour was over, but Philadelphia didn’t care.

  | FOURTEEN |

  FAIRMOUNT PARK WAS ONE OF THE LARGEST MUNICIPALLY OPERATED urban parks in the country, covering more than 9200 acres and including more than sixty-three neighborhoods and regional parks. Over the years it had seen its share of mayhem. When there are this many places to hide, there will be crime. Fairmount Park boasted more than 215 miles of winding bike trails.

  Jessica and Byrne pulled up onto Belmont Avenue, parked, exited the vehicle. They approached the crime scene, where there was already a flurry of activity. Detective John Shepherd greeted them. Shepherd was a twenty-year man in the homicide unit, soft-spoken, intuitive, as shrewd an investigator as anyone on the force. His specialty was interrogation. Watching him work a suspect in the room was a thing of beauty, almost a clinic. More than once Jessica had seen a half dozen young detectives bunched around the mirror looking into one of the interview rooms while John Shepherd was inside, working his magic. When Jessica had joined the unit, John Shepherd—who was tall and always classically attired, and who would have been a dead ringer for Denzel Washington, if not for his thrice-broken nose—was just going salt-and-pepper. Now his hair was pure silver. His receipt for experience.

  “What do we know?” Byrne asked.

  “We know it’s a human being,” Shepherd said. “And we know this human being was buried in a shallow grave, probably within the last sixth months or so. That’s about it.”

  “I take it there was no driver’s license or Social Security card sitting on top of the body?”

  “You take it right, Detective,” Shepherd said. “There’s some clothing, a pair of small size running shoes, so I’m guessing a woman, or perhaps an older teenage girl, but that’s purely conjecture on my part.”

  Jessica and Byrne walked to the site of the shallow grave. It was bathed in blue from the tripod police lights.

  Detective Nicci Malone walked up.

  “Hey,” Nicci said. Jessica and Byrne nodded.

  Nicolette Malone was in her early thirties, a third-generation Philly police officer. A compact and muscular five-five, she, like Jessica, had come to the job almost out of legacy. A few years on the street, a few more as a divisional detective, Nicci had advanced out of sheer willpower, and God help you if you insinuated she got this job because of her gender. Jessica had worked a few details with Nicci Malone and found her to be smart and resourceful, if not a little rash and hotheaded. They could have been twins.

  “Any ID?” Jessica asked.

  “Nothing yet,” Nicci replied.

  In the distance lightning flashed, thunder rumbled. The clouds over the city were pregnant with rain, ready to burst. The CSU team had sheets of plastic ready if needed to cover the body in the eventuality of a downpour.

  The four detectives stood at the edge of the grave. The body was partially decomposed. Jessica knew precious little about decomposition rates, despite her classes at Temple University, but she knew that a body that was not embalmed, buried six feet beneath the surface, in ordinary soil without a casket, took about ten years to decay fully into a skeleton.

  This grave was only three feet deep, no casket, which meant that the body was exposed to far more oxygen than usual, plus the effects of rain and surface insects.

  In Philadelphia, about three hundred bodies or sets of remains arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office each year as unknowns. Most were quickly identified, based on the fact that the victim had gone missing at some time within the previous year, often within just a few months. Other identifications took much longer, and called for a more specialized field of study. If needed, they would consult with a forensic anthropologist.

  “Who found the body?” Jessica asked.

  Nicci pointed to a man standing next to a sector car about twenty feet away on Belmont Avenue. Next to him sat a very nervous, very big dog. The dog, a German shepherd, was panting rapidly, straining against his collar and leash, wanting to get back to the scene.

  “The man said he was jogging,” Nicci said. She glanced at her notebook. “His name is Gerald Lester. He states that he came up onto the plateau and his dog all but dragged him to this area and started digging.”

  “The dog went down three feet?” Jessica asked.

  “No,” Nicci said. “But the man said that the dog used to be on the job in Richmond, Virginia. He said that his wife Leanne used to work the K-9 unit there, and that when the dog retired they adopted him. He said that Demetrius—that’s the pooch—was trained as a cadaver dog, and when he fixed on the quarry, and didn’t give it up, Lester realized something was awry. At that moment he pulled out his cell and called it in.”

  Jessica looked around the area. It was a popular spot in Fairmount Park. On the east side of the avenue there were a handful of softball fields and cross-country routes, as well as large open areas for picnics, family reunions, gatherings of all types. The Greek Picnic was held there every year. People came up here every day, often with their dogs, Frisbees, kites, footballs. Jessica wondered why, if this makeshift grave had been here for months, hadn’t another dog picked up the scent? Maybe they had, and were yanked back to the trail by their owners, figuring the dog was just jazzing a squirrel in the bushes. Or maybe—and Jessica figured this to be the case—a police-trained cadaver dog, being a special animal who could lead a human being across half a city to find a dead body, was the first of its kind to pass this way since the body had been buried. Jessica had seen cadaver dogs work. They do not give up on their game.

  “Do we have all of his information?” Nicci asked John Shepherd.

  “We do.”

  “Tell him we’ll be in touch.”

  “You got it.”

  Shepherd crossed the field as Jessica, Byrne, and Nicci Malone crouched at the edge of the grave. On the ground around the opening were a patchwork of blue plastic sheets. Battery-operated spotlights on tripods illuminated the scene at either end.

  The body was no taller than five-five or five-six. Partially clothed. The upper body had been partially skeletonized. Rotting denim pants, dark colored T-shirt. Sneakers appeared in relatively good shape.

  Byrne looked at Nicci, gestured toward the body. “May I?”

  “By all means, Detective,” Nicci said.

  Every detective in the homicide unit had a specialty, often more than one—interrogation, computers, street work, undercover, finances, surveillance. Among his many abilities, Kevin Byrne was very good at a crime
scene, and most investigators wisely and gratefully deferred to him.

  Byrne snapped on latex gloves, borrowed a large Maglite from one of the officers. He ran the beam of the flashlight slowly over the victim.

  Within seconds something flashed, something golden in color. Byrne knelt on the plastic, looked more closely.

  “Christ,” Byrne said.

  “What?”

  Byrne took a few moments, then leaned in farther. He took out a pair of pencils, chopstick style, and picked up something that appeared to be jewelry. He held it up to the light. It was a charm bracelet. Five charms dangled from a gold chain. Little golden angels.

  “What is it, Kevin?” Jessica asked.

  Byrne turned the bracelet over, looked behind the clasp. He shone the flashlight close on the metal. In an instant he went ashen. He dropped the bracelet into an evidence bag without a word.

  Jessica looked at her partner, at Nicci. It wasn’t often that Kevin Byrne got spooked, or found himself at a loss for words or actions. But Jessica could see that Byrne was taken aback. “What is it?” Jessica asked. “Have you seen this bracelet before?”

  Byrne stood up, turned away from the shallow grave. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

  When Jessica realized he wasn’t going to continue, she pressed. “Talk to me, Kevin. Where do you know this bracelet from?”

  Byrne’s green eyes were ebony in the moonlight.

  “I gave it to her.”

  | FIFTEEN |

  JOSEPH SWANN WATCHED THE EVENING NEWS. THEY HAD FOUND A BODY in a shallow grave in Fairmount Park. A helicopter hovered.

  Although it had been more than two months ago, Swann recalled the night he buried her as if it were yesterday. He recalled the cerulean sky that evening, the way the moon searched for him. Now, as then, he was a cipher, a man beyond even the reach of the heavens.

  He had stood on the west side of Belmont Plateau that night, deep in the bushes and trees, lost in the shadows. He patted the dirt, dumped the bagful of leaves and debris on top of the bare earth. The scene looked undisturbed. The perfect illusion.

  He recalled how he took off the gloves, slipped them into a plastic trash bag, how he later burned everything, including the thick plastic sheets that lined the trunk of the car, along with his clothing. It had been a shame to part with his bespoke suit, but it was a small price to pay. He had not been diligent about his visitors all this time to make a simple mistake. In fact, only one had ever gotten away. Sweet Cassandra.

  He thought about how he had discovered the woman on the Faerwood grounds that night. She had looked strong, but she also looked manic. She had fired her weapon at him while he was standing in the gazebo, the pergola long ago fitted with the counterweight elevator.

  As the police engaged their new mystery, Joseph Swann sipped his tea. He knew it was time to bear down.

  The Seven Wonders, he thought.

  The game is on.

  Minutes later, as he climbed the stairs, he reached into his shirt pocket. He had kept a memento of the dead woman, a small souvenir of their brief time together. A business card. Such a personal thing, he thought, yet something so aloof, something one gives away like a handshake, or a compliment:

  DETECTIVE GENEVIEVE GALVEZ

  SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS UNIT

  OFFICE OF THE PHILADELPHIA DISTRICT ATTORNEY

  II

  THE SINGING BOY

  The past walks here,

  noiseless, unasked, alone.

  —VIRGINIA WOODWARD CLOUD

  | SIXTEEN |

  IN THE YEARS BEFORE DARKNESS BECAME HIS MISTRESS, AND TIME BECAME an abstract précis, Karl Swann was a student of the masters.

  His art was magic.

  Born in 1928 to an upper-middle-class family in Hanau, twenty-five kilometers east of Frankfurt, Germany, Karl began his exploration of the dark arts at an early age. His father Martin, a retired army captain from Glasgow, Scotland, had parlayed a small military retirement into a thriving metals business after settling in the area following World War I. Martin married a local girl named Hannah Scholling.

  In 1936, when Karl was eight, his father took him to a performance at the Shuman Theater in Frankfurt, a show featuring a well-known magician named Alois Kassner. During this performance Kassner vanished an elephant.

  For three nights young Karl could not sleep thinking about the illusion. More than the trick, Karl considered the illusionist himself. He trembled at the thought of the mysterious, dark-haired man.

  Over the next year, Karl collected books on magic, as well as biographies of the great American, European, and Asian conjurers. To the dismay of his parents, and the detriment of his studies, this pursuit seemed to consume the boy.

  At the age of nine, he began to perform magic tricks at parties for his friends—cups and balls, vanishing silks, linking rings. Although his technique was not dazzling, his hands moved with competence and grace. Within a year he improved substantially, moving his act from the table to the parlor.

  As the rumblings of war in Europe began, Martin Swann, over the hysterical objections of his wife, decided to send their only son to live with distant relatives in America. At least until the clouds of conflict blew over.

  On October 4, 1938, Karl Swann boarded the USS Washington in Le Havre, France. His mother and father stood on the dock, waving good-bye. His mother cried, a white lace handkerchief in her hand, her rich burgundy cashmere coat in stark relief to the gray dawn. Martin Swann stood, shoulders square, eyes dry. It was how he had taught his son to face emotion, and he would not betray that lesson now.

  As the ship set to sea, the two silhouettes painted a frozen montage in Karl’s mind; his fragile, beautiful mother, his stoic father. It would be how he always remembered them, for he never saw them alive again.

  | PHILADELPHIA 1938 |

  THE KENSINGTON SECTION OF PHILADELPHIA was a near northeast working class part of the city, bordering the neighborhoods of Fishtown, Port Richmond, Juniata, and Frankford.

  In November 1938 Karl Swann came to live with his distant cousins Nicholas and Vera Ehrlinger. They lived in a narrow row house on Emerald Street. Both of his cousins worked at Craftex Mills. Karl attended Saint Joan of Arc School.

  In the late 1930s Philadelphia was a rich and vibrant community for magic and magicians. There were chapters of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, the Society of American Magicians, The Yogi Club, the Houdini Club—an enclave dedicated to preserving the memory of Harry Houdini.

  A week after his tenth birthday Karl took the streetcar to Center City with his cousin Nicholas. They were on a mission to locate a tablecloth for Thanksgiving dinner. Karl marveled at the Christmas decorations and displays near Rittenhouse Square. When they reached Thirteenth and Walnut, Nicholas kept walking, but Karl stopped, captivated by the one-sheet poster in the window of Kanter’s Magic. Kanter’s was the premier magic emporium in Philadelphia, its clientele an amalgam of amateur and professional magicians.

  The poster in the window—a bright and bizarre display of doves and grinning harpies—was for a show due to arrive in two weeks, a show the likes of which Karl had never imagined. The star of the show was a man named Harry Blackstone.

  FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS Karl took on every odd job he could. He delivered newspapers, shined shoes, washed automobiles. He finally saved enough money. Three days before the show he went to the theater, and bought his ticket. He spent the next two nights in bed, looking at the voucher in the moonlight.

  At last the day arrived.

  From his seat in the balcony Karl watched the incredible spectacle unfold. He watched a stunning illusion called the Sepoy Mutiny, a piece of magical theater in which Blackstone was captured by Arabs, strapped to the mouth of a cannon and blown to bits. At more than one performance of this fantastic illusion women had been known to faint, or run screaming from the theater. The fainthearted who fled never got to see that, moments after the cannon fire, the executioner would pull off his turban and
beard, only to reveal that it was Blackstone himself!

  In another illusion Blackstone passed lighted lightbulbs right through a woman, each pass eliciting shocked gasps from the transfixed audience.

  But nothing surpassed Blackstone’s version of sawing a woman in half. In Blackstone’s rendering, called the Lumbersaw, a woman was strapped facedown on a table, and a large buzz saw ran right through her middle. When Karl saw the illusion it brought tears to his eyes. Not for the woman—of course, she was just fine—but for the power of the ruse. In Blackstone’s gifted hands it was a level beyond enchantment, beyond even theater. For Karl Swann, it had reached the level of true magic. Blackstone had done the impossible.

  IN THE SUMMER of his fourteenth year, Karl Swann spent every Saturday afternoon at Kanter’s, pestering the owner, Mike Kanter, demanding to see every trick beneath the glass. One day Karl wandered behind the store, into what looked and sounded like a machine shop. It was a brass works. He saw a man at a workbench. The man noticed him.

  “You should not be here,” the man said.

  “You are the man who makes the Nickels to Dimes?” The Nickels to Dimes illusion was one where the magician places a stack of nickels on the table, all the while pattering about inflation and the costs of things these days. He passes his hand over the stack, and they turn into dimes.

  The man spun on his stool, crossed his arms. “I am.”

  “I saw the trick today,” Karl said.

  The man stroked his chin. “And you want to know how it is done.”

  “No.”

  The man raised a single eyebrow. “And why is that? All boys want to know how magic is done. Why not you?”

  “Because I know how it is done. It is not that clever.”

  The man laughed.

  “I will work for you,” Karl said. “I can sweep. I can run errands.”