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

by Richard Montanari

  Jessica tapped the photograph of Caitlin. “Did your brother know her?”

  “That girl? No. At least, I don’t think he did. I hope not.”

  “You hope not? Why do you say that?”

  “You came here to talk to him, so I figure you know his record, right?”

  “We do.”

  “So you know what I’m talking about.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said, trudging on. “So tell me, how did this girl come to be in possession of this magazine cover?”

  Francesca leaned back, crossed her arms, resting them on her swelling belly. Defensive, now. “I was reading the magazine, that’s all. We started talking. She said she decided to go home. She kinda talked me into it, too. So I wrote down my number and gave it to her. I thought maybe we could talk sometime.”

  Jessica tapped the magazine cover. “This is your number?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “What happened? Nothing. She just walked out.”

  “And you never saw her again?”

  Francesca looked out the window. In this light, Jessica saw her as a middle-aged woman, a woman with all her bad decisions behind her. “I saw her outside.”

  “Outside the station?”

  “Yeah. I called a friend of mine and he came to pick me up. On my way out I saw her. She was talking to a well-dressed man.”

  “A man? White, black?”

  “White.”

  “Well-dressed how?”

  “Not like in a suit, but nice. Expensive.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Not really. He had his back to me. It was dark.”

  “Did you see her get into a car or on a bus with this man?”

  “Yeah. She got into his car. I thought maybe he was her father.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “After that day at the Thirtieth Street station, did you ever see this girl again?”

  Francesca thought about this, weighing her answer. “No,” she said. “I never saw her again.”

  Jessica glanced at Byrne. He shook his head. No questions. She clicked her pen, put it away. They were done. For now. “We may need to talk to you again.”

  A shrug. “I’ll be here.”

  Jessica started to pack up to leave. “When are you due?”

  Francesca beamed. “They tell me December twentieth.”

  Jessica felt a pang of envy. A Christmas baby. Was there anything better than a Christmas baby? She and Vincent had been trying to get pregnant for the past year or so. There was a close call the previous winter, but no baby. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you.”

  They looked at each other for a few seconds in silence, two women at different ends of everything. Except motherhood.

  Jessica took out a business card, handed it to the young woman. “If you think of anything else that might help, please give me a call.”

  Francesca took the card, stood—with no small amount of difficulty—and made her way toward the ladies’ restroom door. At the door Francesca stopped, turned. “That girl?”

  “What about her?”

  A grave look veiled Francesca’s young face, a weariness far older than her years. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  Jessica could find no reason not to tell the truth. “Yes.”

  Francesca chipped at another nail for a moment. “Could you tell her family something for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell them … tell them I’m sorry for their grief.” Francesca placed a hand on her belly, a gesture of defiance to this angel of death who walked the streets, a gesture of defense. “Tell them it’s not their fault.”

  “I will.”

  Francesca nodded, perhaps thinking about the past, the future, realizing she had only the present. Without another word, she opened the door and stepped through.

  IGGY SANZ WAS NOT OUT of the woods yet, but whatever enthusiasm the detectives had on the way over the Ben Franklin Bridge had waned considerably by the time they made their way back. He had no real violence on his sheet. Both detectives were reasonably sure that Ignacio was telling the truth, perhaps for the first time in his life. He may have been a creep and a lowlife, but he was not a killer.

  They drove back to Philly.

  | FORTY |

  FOUR DETECTIVES MET IN THE DUTY ROOM OF THE HOMICIDE UNIT. The second tour had started a few hours earlier, and the last-out detectives had to find somewhere to talk. Desks in the unit were shared—you were lucky to get a drawer in a file cabinet these days. That cop-show myth about how every gold-badge detective had their own desk with a cheap vase with a flower in it and two or three framed photos of their kids was just that, a myth. The reality was, once a tour ended, the next group of detectives took over the desks, and if you were still working you had to find somewhere else fast. Theoretically, every detective cared about every other detective’s case, but Roundhouse reality was all about geography.

  If it’s my tour, my ass is entitled to the real estate.

  There was no whiteboard, no chalkboard. Just four detectives crammed into one of the alcoves off the main hallway. A dozen photographs graced one of the desks, a desk hastily cleared of coffee cups, éclairs, muffins.

  Jessica, Byrne, Josh Bontrager, and Josh’s partner Andre Curtis.

  Every homicide unit in the country had a detective who wore hats—homburgs, porkpies, Borsalinos—and Dre Curtis was PPD Homicide’s resident lid man. Finding the right hat for his mood was a ritual with him, but he only wore his hat in the elevator and corridors, never in the office. Jessica had once watched him take ten minutes to get the brim right on his beloved grey Rosellini Luauro fedora.

  Josh Bontrager was probably partnered with Dre Curtis for no other reason than that they could not have been more different. A kid who had grown up Amish in rural Pennsylvania, and a smooth-talking homeboy, a former gangbanger, from the Richard Allen Homes in North Philly. So far, they had been an effective team.

  Byrne let everyone settle in. He got their attention, then recapped both cases, including their visit to Laura Somerville’s apartment, and her suicide, and their visit with Iggy Sanz.

  “Do we have any forensics tying the two victims together?” Dre Curtis asked.

  “We do not,” Byrne said. “Not yet. But we just got the preliminary DNA results back on the remains found on Second Street. The heart in the specimen jar belonged to Monica Renzi.”

  Byrne held up a document. It was the activity log from the Caitlin O’Riordan file.

  “There are three interviews missing from the O’Riordan binder. These interviews were conducted by Detective Roarke on May third. We don’t have full names on these witnesses, just their street names—Daria, Govinda, and Starlight. It’s not much, but it’s an entry point.”

  “What about the detective’s notes?” Bontrager asked.

  “Missing,” Byrne said. “But just the notes for these three. The interviews are logged on the activity sheet, but there’s no paper for them.” He placed the activity log back into the binder. “All the runaway shelters in Philly have been notified and briefed.”

  Runaways from Philadelphia were handled by the divisional detectives. They were never called runaways officially. They were always referred to as missing persons. When a runaway was missing from another city, and it was reported to the police there, the information went on NCIC. Sometimes the information was posted to the FBI website.

  “Detective Park is collating FBI sheets on active runaways over the last year from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. He is also assembling reports of any DOA Jane Does from the past three years between the ages of twelve and twenty.”

  Byrne pulled up a city map on the computer screen. “Let’s go where runaways congregate.” he said. “The bus station, the train station, the malls, the parks, South Street. Let’s make sure we hit Penn Treaty Park.”

  Penn Treaty Park, w
here William Penn signed a peace treaty with the chief of the Lenape clan, was a small park on the western bank of the Delaware River in Fishtown. It was somewhat secluded, and therefore a popular destination for runaways and drug transactions.

  “Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that the kids who were on the streets six months ago have moved on or have gone home, but we all know there’s a network out there. Somebody saw these girls. They came into town and they never left.” Byrne looked up. “Any questions?”

  No one spoke.

  “We meet downstairs in an hour.”

  | FORTY-ONE |

  LILLY HAD SPENT THE NIGHT AT A CHEAP, NOISY PLACE THAT WAS REALLY nothing more than a hostel. It was only fifty dollars. A chunk of money to her, but not to her wallet, a wallet recently fattened by Mr. Mushroom Teeth.

  She was out of bed at 6:30 AM, courtesy of the traffic noise and the rolling boom boxes. Didn’t this place ever sleep? She supposed not.

  Welcome to the road, Lilly.

  THE GIRL FROM WISCONSIN had heavy metalwork in her lips, her nose, and ears. Her name was Tatiana. Or so she said. She had a foreign accent, so maybe it was her real name after all. She was hefty in the upper body, but had nice legs, legs wrapped in thick black tights.

  They were all sitting in the back of a tricked-out Escalade. Lilly had met them near Reading Terminal Market. They asked her if she wanted to get high.

  Duh.

  “It was like God sneezed, grabbed a tissue with me in it, and threw us both away,” Tatiana said.

  They all looked at each other, four pairs of eyes meeting for a moment. They’d all had experience with really religious types. If you didn’t buy in, you tolerated, nodding your head, agreeing when it was possible. No one really knew what the hell Tatiana was talking about.

  After leaving the market they drove around the city for about an hour. The driver was a young Jamaican guy named Niles. He had amazing pot. Two-toke. Lilly was flying.

  “I mean, what are you supposed to do? You can’t apply for a job, because you can’t use your real name,” Tatiana said. “The only way to eat is to steal something or go on the game.”

  Lilly knew what she meant. The first time she had run away from home, at the ripe old age of twelve, she was gone for three weeks. The first few nights were great. She had a few dollars to party, met some cool kids. After that it was hell. She slept behind a grocery store on Wallace Avenue. She got up at 4 AM, just before the delivery trucks would roll in. She got day-old bread and brown vegetables from the Dumpster, half-smoked cigarettes from the gutter. Who says life on the road ain’t glamorous?

  Then one morning she woke up with a flashlight in her eyes. It was the cops.

  She refused to tell them her name. She refused to say anything. She spent four days in Juvie, and they had no choice but to let her go. The entire time, she didn’t say a single word. But they did fingerprint her and take a few pictures, so she knew that everything had changed there and then.

  This time it was different.

  She looked out the window. Because they had cruised for a while, she wasn’t quite sure where she was. It seemed like South Philly. She couldn’t be sure.

  “My dad is such a fucking Cro,” Tatiana said. “I swear to God, if I stayed around, I would have caught him chewing on his toenails one day.”

  Lilly assumed she meant “Cro-Magnon.” Who could tell with these people? She wasn’t from around these parts. She wasn’t insufferably hip.

  Niles fired up another joint, passed it back. It was time to start asking questions. Pretty soon these people would be circling Saturn.

  “Can I show you guys something?” Lilly asked.

  They all looked at her; stoned, wondering, waiting, as if to say, Why not?

  Lilly reached into her bag, pulled out the photo. It was pretty wrinkled by now. It was kind of fuzzy to begin with. She smoothed it out on the seat. “Anybody ever been here?”

  She passed the photo around. Everyone nodded at the sheer magnitude of the place. Nobody copped to knowing it.

  “Dude. Who lives here?” Thom asked. “The Addams Family?”

  Thom was from Akron, Ohio. He really was kind of cute—curly brown hair, long lashes, pug nose. He reminded her of Frodo, but without the big hairy feet. In another life she might have let him make a move on her.

  “I don’t know,” Lilly said, thinking that it might have been the first thing she’d said in a long time that wasn’t a lie. “I really don’t know.”

  FOR THE REST OF THE MORNING she hung out at the Greyhound Station at Tenth and Filbert. She bummed a cup of coffee from a pair of kids from Syracuse, smoked a little weed in an alley. She spent a half hour or so on the Net at a nearby cybercafe, until she was kicked out.

  She asked a lot of questions, showed the picture to everyone. Some of the kids were suspicious, as if Lilly were a narc.

  Through the course of the morning she talked to more than twenty street kids, swapping horror stories, triumphs, near misses, jail time, cops. Always the cops. If you were a runaway you knew all about cops.

  One girl she met—a runaway from Buffalo, a girl who called herself Starlight—told her of an experience she’d had in New York City. Starlight was a force of nature, all hands and hips and flying red hair when she told a tale, a story about how she was almost gang-raped. Lilly hoped for the best for her, didn’t expect it. Starlight said she’d been on the street in Philly since last Christmas.

  Lilly realized they all had a story of alienation or neglect or mistreatment, a fear of the future. To a person, they all had a saga of woe—abusive mothers, abusive fathers, abusive siblings, abusive life.

  They had no idea how bad life could get.

  “HEY,” THE KID SAID.

  Lilly turned around but not too quickly. They were standing near the corner of Ninth and Filbert, outside the BigK.

  The kid was a street rat. Lilly didn’t like the looks of him. Tall and skinny, dirty blond hair, greasy skin, red Tony Hawk T-shirt. Skate-board grunge had never been her thing. She ignored him, glanced at her watch. A few moments passed. He didn’t leave.

  “I said hey, bitch.”

  Here we go, Lilly thought. Fucking boys. She’d been here before, of course, stuck on a street corner, harassed by some punk. They all had a line they thought was magic, a smile they felt God-given. Then it turned ugly. But it was always on her turf, her hometown. This was an alien landscape.

  She tensed, glanced over her shoulder. She was less than a block from the bus station. She could make it back inside in a few seconds. She was that fast. But there was a principle at work here. She wasn’t about to be run off the street by some low-rent spod. She turned to face him.

  “I’m sorry, what did you call me?”

  The kid smirked, took a step closer. Lilly now saw that he was not all that skinny after all. He was muscular. “I think you heard me, Snow White.”

  He grabbed her arm. She tried to wrestle free. She couldn’t. He was strong.

  “Let go of me!”

  He laughed. “Or what?”

  Lilly planted her left foot, shifted her weight. It was a familiar move. She tried to knee him but he turned, blocking it. He laughed again.

  “Damn, girl. Why would you want to go and do something like that?” The kid grabbed her other wrist. “You don’t want to make me mad.”

  “I said let go of me!”

  Lilly tried to break free. She could not.

  The kid glanced up the alley, smiled again. He was going to drag her up there. She couldn’t let him do that.

  But before he could make a move a shadow fell across the sidewalk. They both turned. There was a man standing there. He seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was in his thirties, maybe, wearing a dark blue suit and a burgundy tie.

  What was this about?

  “I think you should leave,” the man said, soft-spoken, authoritative. Lilly’s head spun with this weird development. The board boy let go of her arms. She backed up a few steps, but s
he didn’t run.

  “I’m sorry,” the kid said, turning fully to deal with the man. “Are you addressing me?”

  “I am.”

  The kid planted himself. He racked his shoulders. “What did you say? I mean, you know, exactly.”

  “Exactly?” the man asked. “Would you like that verbatim? Or would you like me to distill the essence?”

  The kid smirked, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence behind it.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I believe the young lady would like you to leave.”

  The kid laughed. Psycho shrill. “And who are you, her father?”

  The man smiled. Lilly felt a little charge run through her. It wasn’t that the guy was so good-looking or anything, but there was something about that smile that said she had nothing to worry about.

  “Just a friend.”

  “Well, I’m gonna fuck you up, friend-o. I’m gonna fuck you up big time. This is my corner.”

  The man made a move, a quick shift of his right hand, almost too fast to see. To Lilly it was a like a bird had flown between them, flapped its wings, then flown away. Time stood still for a few seconds. Then, in the next instant, Lilly felt a rush of warm air.

  She glanced first at the man. He was still standing there, hands at his sides, his blue eyes sparkling in the afternoon sun, his expression unreadable. She then looked at the kid, and saw something she never expected to see, something horrifying.

  The kid’s face was on fire. But just for a second. Lilly instantly smelled singed flesh and burnt hair.

  “What … what the fuck, man!” The kid recoiled, his hands to his face. He took five or six steps backward, out into the street. A car almost hit him. When he pulled his hands away Lilly could see that his face was bright pink.

  “What the fuck did you do to me?” the kid yelled. “What did you do?”

  “I asked you to leave,” the man said.

  The kid pulled a bandanna from his back pocket, began to blot his face. His nose was runny, his eyes were tearing up. Lilly noticed that his eyelashes were gone.