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

by Richard Montanari

  The next images passed in a blur: a club in Amsterdam, a backyard party in Midland Texas, an appearance at a county fair in Berea, Ohio, a performance for which his father was paid in rolls of quarters.

  Image after image, as the tape rolled on, showed a man whose skills and temperament were slowly eroding, a man whose mind was becoming an echoing hollow of horrors, a journeyman illusionist reduced to catalogue tricks: cigarette through a quarter, cut and restored rope, sympathetic cards.

  That is why, years earlier, Joseph added a postscript to the tape, a breathtaking coda filmed when his father was in his prime.

  The Seven Wonders was a tightly edited, graphic-rich version of a full-length routine his father had performed on a local-access cable channel in Shreveport. Joseph had cut the performance to the sounds of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” Hokey, he knew. He had once had thoughts of marketing the event on DVD someday, provided he could get back the rights.

  Swann watched for what was perhaps the five hundredth time, his heart racing.

  First was the Garden of Flowers, then the Girl Without a Middle, then the Drowning Girl, then the Girl in the Sword Box.

  “Watch this,” he said to Patricia. “Watch what happens next. This is the Girl in the Sub Tank. This is your part.”

  When the video was finished, Swann descended the stairs, crossed the great room, allowed himself a glass of sherry. He climbed back upstairs.

  “I have a few errands to run, but I will be back, and you and I will have dinner. Maybe we’ll even dress. Won’t that be fun?”

  The girl looked at him. Her velvet gaze was no longer soft. It amazed him again and again how quickly youth faded. He rolled the chair into the guest room and locked the door.

  MINUTES LATER, as he prepared to leave, he heard the girl scream. By the time he reached the foyer and slipped into his coat, the sound had receded to a distant echo. By the time he stepped onto the porch, it was only a memory.

  The day was bright and sunny, rich with birdsong. Swann singled out a voice. It was a yellow-throated warbler, another lost soul, asking its peculiar questions of the world.

  | TWENTY-FIVE |

  BYRNE WALKED TO HIS CAR, HIS HEART AND MIND ABUZZ WITH THE events of the past hour. He still really didn’t know what this lunch date with his wife was all about, but he wasn’t going to overanalyze it.

  Who was he kidding? Besides being one of his most annoying personality quirks, overanalyzing was pretty much what he did for a living.

  He took out his phone, fired it up, wincing immediately at the possibility of a dozen angry messages waiting for him. You were never supposed to be completely out of touch with the unit, even if you were off duty, especially if you had active investigations. But in this age of cellular communications, and all its attendant glitches, there was always an excuse.

  I couldn’t get a signal.

  My battery was low.

  I had it on Silent.

  As soon as the phone went through its boot-up process and found a tower, he got an e-mail. It was from Colleen. She’d sent him the photograph she’d taken in the lobby. It completed his day.

  Seconds later his phone rang. Byrne looked at the display. It was Jessica. Even her name looked pissed off. He flipped open the phone, went for bright and cheerful.

  “Hey!”

  “So now you turn your phone off?”

  Busted. “I’ll explain,” Byrne said. “Where are you?”

  “Shiloh Street.”

  “Shiloh Street?” Byrne was a little surprised, a lot intrigued. “Why?”

  “We’ve got a body. Female, mid-teens.”

  Shit. “Warm or cold?”

  “Cold,” Jessica said. “Been here for months.”

  “Inside the house?”

  “Yep.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Remember that rug in the basement?” Jessica asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “CSU rolled it up and found a hole cut into the floor. An access hole to the crawlspace.”

  “She was in the crawlspace?”

  “In the crawlspace.”

  “Any ID on the victim?”

  “I haven’t been able to confirm it, but my gut tells me we do.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She’s wearing the same jewelry as the girl whose picture we found in that Bible.”

  Byrne’s stomach, and mind, began to revolve. This was starting to reach deeper, and further, than he had imagined. And he had imagined something pretty bad. “Go on.”

  “About an hour ago we got the Missing Person info, so we have a name, but the body is decomposed to the point where a visual ID isn’t possible. We’re going to have to get dental. Still, I think the clothes and jewelry are a slam.”

  “We have a COD?”

  “We won’t know that for a while, but I can make a fairly informed guess,” Jessica said.

  “What do you mean?”

  A moment’s hesitation. “You don’t want to know.”

  “It’s kinda my job.”

  Byrne heard his partner clear her throat. It was her usual stall. “She’s in pieces, Kevin. In boxes.”

  “Christ.”

  “There are three wooden boxes in the crawlspace, but there are only remains in two of them. One box is empty. The one in the middle. And they’re painted. Red, blue, and yellow.”

  “The same colors as those marks in the Bible.”

  “Yep.”

  Byrne closed his eyes, recalled the girl in the photograph. She looked so young, so vulnerable. He’d had hopes. Not great hopes, but hopes. “And this is ours?”

  “It is.”

  Byrne took out his notebook, noted the time. “Hit me.”

  “Presumptively, the victim’s name is Monica Louise Renzi,” Jessica said, spelling the first and last name. “She was sixteen. From Scranton. Missing for just over six months. Dino and Eric are on the way up just in case.”

  Jessica was talking about Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez, two experienced detectives from the homicide unit. “Okay.”

  “This is developing hard and fast, partner,” Jessica said. “Ike is down here, and word is that the captain is on his way. Nobody’s smoking and everyone’s buttoned up. Sarge said he called you three times.”

  Shit.

  “Which one are you going to use?” Jessica asked.

  Byrne had to think about it. He didn’t want to repeat himself. “I had my phone on silent.”

  “I like that one,” Jessica said. “Get here as fast as you can.”

  “I’m on the way,” Byrne said. He headed toward his car. “One more question for you. Why is this ours again?”

  Jessica took a second—a telling second that, between people who know each other well, spoke volumes. Then came the four words Byrne dreaded hearing.

  “She was a runaway.”

  | TWENTY-SIX |

  THE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED WAS THAT THERE WERE A LOT OF FOREIGN people. Foreign people as in Asian, Middle Eastern, African. Not foreign as in folks from three counties over.

  The second thing she noticed was that this was, by far, the biggest room she had ever been in. It might have even been too big to classify as a room. It was more like a cathedral. The coffered ceilings had to be fifty feet high, maybe more, offering a dozen or so enormous hanging chandeliers, ringed by the tallest windows she had ever seen. The floors were marble, the hand railings looked like they were made of brass. At one end was a huge bronze statue called the Angel of the Resurrection.

  As train stations went, she thought, this was probably the Taj Mahal.

  She sat on one of the long wooden benches for a while, watching the crowds come and go, listening to the announcements, to the variety of accents and languages, reading—but not really reading—one of the free newspapers. Politics, opinion, reviews, sex ads. Blah, blah, blah. Even the columns on music and movies bored the shit out of her. Which was rare.

  Around two o’clock she walked the edg
es of the huge room a few times, passing by the shops, the ticket machines, the escalators down to the trains. She was still stunned by the scale of the place, still glancing upward every so often. She didn’t want to look like a tourist—or even worse, some hick runaway—but she couldn’t seem to help herself. The place was that amazing.

  At one point she glanced over her shoulder. Three small Mennonite children, perhaps just off the train from Berks County, were looking at the ceiling, too. At least she wasn’t alone, she thought. Although, with her tight jeans, Ugg boots, and heavy eye makeup, she was just about the furthest thing from Mennonite she could imagine.

  In her experience, the only other place she had ever been that compared to this train station was the King of Prussia mall, the place that had every single store you could imagine, along with a few extra. Burberry, Coach, Eddie Bauer, Louis Vuitton, Hermes. She had visited the mall once when she was about ten. Her aunt had taken her there as a birthday present, but she only came away with a pair of Gap jeans (she preferred Lucky Brand these days) and a bad stomach from something crappy they had eaten at the Ho-Lee Chow or Super Wok or Shang-High or whatever they called the fast-food Chinese restaurant. It was okay, though. Her family was far from rich. Gap was cool back then. Before they left the mall she had found a small discarded shopping bag from Versace and walked around with it at school for three weeks, carrying it like a funky purse. The haters hated, but she didn’t care.

  According to the brochure she found on the train, the Thirtieth Street station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was 562,000 square feet. Located on Market Street, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth, it was one of the busiest intercity passenger facilities in the United States, the brochure went on to say, and it ranked behind only New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Union Station in its yearly volume of passengers. In the three previous years there had been 4.4 million people boarding trains in the Thirtieth Street terminal.

  Millions, she thought. You’d think there’d be one cute guy. She laughed. She didn’t feel like it—there was the rough equivalent of a ball of hot barbed wire in her stomach—but she laughed anyway. The last thing she was doing here was trying to meet cute guys. She was here for something else.

  SHE SAT AT ONE OF THE TABLES in the food court, beneath a bright yellow Au Bon Pain umbrella. She tapped her pocket. She was almost broke. When she left the house she’d had sixty-one dollars and change. It seemed like enough money to get through at least a few days on the road.

  Knock knock. Reality calling.

  She dreamed about food. An eight-slice pizza with onions, mushrooms, and red peppers. A double veggie-burger with onion rings. Her taste buds recalled a dish her aunt once made: potato gnocchi with pesto and roasted red potatoes. God, she was hungry. But out here there was a well-known equation: runaway = hungry.

  It was a truth she had better get used to.

  In addition to her rumbling stomach, there was something else she realized that she had better get ready to address. She was on the street, and she needed a street name. She glanced around the room, at the stalls near the doors that led to Thirtieth Street. She watched the people come and go. Every one of them had a name.

  Everyone in the world was known by something, she thought. A name, a nickname, an epithet. An identity. What were you if you didn’t have a name?

  Nothing.

  Even worse, a number. A Social Security number. A prison number. You couldn’t sink much lower than that.

  No one knew her here. That was both the good news and the bad news. The good news because she was completely anonymous. The bad news because there was no one she could rely upon, no one to call. She was on her own, a fallen pine cone in a lonely forest.

  She watched the ebb and flow of humanity. It did not stop. Tall, fat, short, black, white, scary, normal. She remembered every face. She always had. When she was five years old, the doctors said she had an eidetic memory—the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects with extreme accuracy—and ever since she had never forgotten a face, or place, or photograph.

  She noticed a guy at the end of the bench, a sailor with a canvas gym bag bursting at the seams sitting next to him like a dutiful beagle. Every so often he would look over at her, then look away, a flash of hot red guilt on his face. He could not have been more than twenty—kind of cute in his buzz cut and uniform—but she was younger, still bona fide jailbait. She smiled at him anyway, just to make it worse. After that, he got up and walked over to the food court. God, what a bitch she could be.

  She glanced at the doors leading to the street. There was a booth selling gifts and flowers. An older couple, perhaps in their thirties, debated over a basket intended for a funeral ceremony. It seemed that the woman wanted to spend a lot of money, seeing as how the dearly departed was her cousin or second cousin, and how they had come all the way from Rochester. The man—a fat guy, a heart attack on a stick, as her aunt used to say—wanted to forget the whole thing. It seemed he was not a big fan of the deceased.

  She watched them argue for a while, her eyes roaming the florist’s wares. Mylar balloons, ceramic knickknacks, crappy vases, a nice selection of flowers. And it came to her. Just like that. All things considered, as she perused the floral displays, she might have called herself Dahlia or Fern or Iris. Maybe even Daisy.

  In the end it became a no-brainer. She may have been a runaway, but now she had a name.

  She decided to call herself Lilly.

  | TWENTY-SEVEN |

  KEVIN BYRNE CROUCHED IN THE CRAWLSPACE, HIS SCIATICA BESTING the Vicodin in his system. It always did. At his height, just over six-three, he felt entombed by the damp, close walls.

  Jessica was directing the scene out front.

  Byrne looked at the three brightly colored boxes in front of him. Red. Yellow. Blue. Used-car lot pennant colors. Happy colors. The boxes—each had a small bronze doorknob and hinges—were closed now, but he had looked inside each. He wished he hadn’t, but he’d been thinking that same thought since the first time he walked onto the scene of a violent homicide on the first night he spent in uniform. That night it was a shotgun triple in Juniata. Brains on the wall, guts on the coffee table, St. Elsewhere on the blood-splattered TV. It never got better. A little easier sometimes, but never better.

  The wooden boxes were covered in a layer of dust, disturbed only, he hoped, by the gloved hands of the two police officers who had been down here. Jessica and a uniformed officer named Maria Caruso.

  Byrne studied the joints, the miters, the construction of these small coffins. They were expertly crafted. There was definitely a great deal of skill at work here.

  In a few moments the crime scene unit would begin their collection of evidence in situ, then the victim would be transported to the medical examiner’s office. The techs were outside the building now, drinking cold coffee and chatting, waiting for Detective Kevin Byrne’s signal.

  Byrne wasn’t ready yet.

  He looked at the placement of the boxes. They were not in a line, but were not placed at random either. They were precisely organized, it seemed, edges all but touching in a staggered pattern. The first box, the yellow one, was closest to the wall on the north side. Byrne made note of this. This was the direction in which the body was facing. He was experienced enough to know that you never knew what might be important, what pathology lurked in the disturbed mind of a psychopathic killer. The second box, the red one, was staggered to the left. The third box, a shade of royal blue, was in line with the first.

  He examined the hardpack earth around the base of the wooden cubes. There were no obvious scrape marks indicating the boxes had been dragged. Earlier he had slipped a few gloved fingers under one corner of one of the boxes, tried to lift it. The box was not light. This meant that whoever had brought these boxes down here probably had to duckwalk them across the expanse. That took strength.

  One thing was certain: This was not the primary crime scene. The victim had bled out long before she w
as put into these boxes and moved into this crawlspace. As far as he could tell, there was a small amount of dried blood in the boxes themselves, and none on the floor.

  Before coming down, Byrne had borrowed a measuring tape from one of the techs, and measured the opening cut into the floor, then the size of the boxes. The opening was about two inches larger than the boxes in all directions.

  Had the opening existed, and then the killer built the boxes to fit? Or was it the other way around? Or was it a lucky coincidence? Byrne doubted it. There were few coincidences in his line of work.

  Byrne shifted his weight. His legs were killing him. He tried to straighten them, but he could not stand up more than a few inches, and he wasn’t about to kneel down on a dirt floor. This was a relatively new suit. He tried steadying himself on the yellow box and—

  —senses the killer coming in from the back. He brings down the boxes one at a time. He has a truck, or a van. He did not assemble the boxes here. They are heavy, cumbersome, but he manages. He has been here before, many times, knew about the access door, knew he would not be discovered. Why?

  He brings the girl down in pieces, no middle, the middle is empty, no heart, heartless. He arranges the boxes, meticulous and precise in this dank and confined tomb. She is a runaway, his first? Second? Tenth? He has done this before, has collected a child of the night, long fingers, a man’s clever hands on a box of bones, the smoke of a funeral pyre, light my fire …

  Byrne rocked back on his heels, sat down hard. His head throbbed.

  The headaches were returning.

  WHEN BYRNE EMERGED from the building he pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in a trash can. He saw Jessica across the street, leaning against her car, arms crossed. She tapped a finger on her bicep. She looked wired, manic. She wore a pair of amber Serengeti sunglasses.