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

by Richard Montanari

  Suddenly, there was a sound behind her. Heavy footsteps on a bare floor. Each step was punctuated with something that sounded like the screech of a wheel that needed oil.

  Clump, squeak, clump, squeak.

  Lilly couldn’t see a thing. The sounds drew closer.

  Clump, squeak, clump, squeak.

  Someone was walking across the dark room.

  Lilly felt her way, crawling through the blackness. She came across something that might have been a bed, or a large sofa. She crawled beneath it, and held her breath.

  Clump, squeak.

  | SEVENTY-SIX |

  | 1 : 52 AM |

  JESSICA STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF THE DINER. THE RAIN had backed off, but the sidewalk steamed. Watching a pair of sector cars troll up the street, she wished she could be in one of them, just a rookie again. There would be none of the weight, none of the responsibility. She glanced at her watch. They would never make it. She had never felt this angry or frustrated in her life.

  Byrne banged on the window, beckoning her inside. Jessica nearly jumped. She stepped inside the restaurant.

  All seven pieces of the puzzle were close to each other on the floor. Next to them was the SEPTA map. Byrne tapped a location on the map. “Here’s where we are in relation to the first four crime scenes.” He pointed to the triangle on the lower left. “Slide it up, Josh.”

  Bontrager slid the triangle northeast.

  “A lot of these problems combine two of the triangles to make a square, right?” Byrne asked.

  “Right,” Jessica said.

  “So, let’s assume for a second he is saving the real square for last.” North Philly had a lot of squares—Norris, Fotterall, Fairhill. The city at large had dozens. “If it’s a triangle, and it fits here, it can only be two places.” Byrne knelt down, picked up the map, circled two corner buildings with a felt tip pen. “These are the only two corner triangular buildings in this whole area. What do you think?”

  Jessica looked at the shapes as they related to the whole. It was a possibility. “I agree, if his next move is another triangle it would have to be one of these two.”

  Byrne shot to his feet. “Let’s move.”

  The eight detectives spilt into two groups of four. Seconds later, they sped off into the rain.

  THIS AREA OF JEFFERSON was blighted and bleak. There were only a few lights on in the scattered freestanding blocks of row houses. Gentrification came slowly to this part of the city, if at all. The block was dotted with boarded up structures, separated by weed-blotted lots, abandoned cars.

  At just after 2 AM, two teams pulled up to the address. Byrne checked the street number, then checked it again.

  It was a vacant lot. The overhead map showed a building, but there was no telling how old the photograph was. This had been a corner building, almost a perfect triangle. They hurried out of their vehicles, scanned the block, the nearby buildings, the empty parcel. And saw it. There, against a low stone wall, at the back of the lot, amid the debris and wild flowers sat a Chinese red lacquer box, decorated with gold dragons.

  Josh Bontrager hit the ground at a run. He bolted across the lot, opened the box.

  Byrne glanced at his watch. It was 2:02.

  Bontrager turned back, and the look on his face told them everything they needed to know. They were too late.

  The next piece of the tangram had been placed.

  | SEVENTY-SEVEN |

  | 2 : 13 AM |

  LILLY CRINGED IN THE DARKNESS. THE FOOTSTEPS HAD DRAWN TO within ten feet or so, and then stopped. She had no idea how much time had passed. Ten minutes, maybe more. She had held her breath as long as she could.

  Where had he gone? Had he left this room? Was he in the room with Claire? Had Lilly abandoned the girl and now something bad was happening to her? Unable to wait any longer, Lilly slowly crept out from beneath the bed, got to her feet. She did not know what she was walking into, but could not stay where she had been, just waiting for her terrible fate.

  She felt like a blind person. She took a few small steps, feeling the air in front of her. She reached something that felt like a mirror—smooth, cool to the touch.

  And that’s when the overhead lights came on.

  Lilly looked up. She was in an enormous room. The high ceiling was gilded, coffered, but covered in cobwebs. Overhead was a huge bronze chandelier missing half its bulbs.

  “Odette.”

  Lilly spun around. An old man stood behind her. An ancient man, next to a portable oxygen unit. His skin was gray, stretched over a skeletal skull. He wore an old silken bathrobe, crusted with food, stained with urine.

  In the faint light, Lilly saw the deep red welt around his neck.

  She fainted.

  | SEVENTY-EIGHT |

  | 2 : 20 AM |

  FIVE DETECTIVES STOOD ON THE CORNER, BLANK-FACED. THE SIXTH DETECTIVE, Kevin Byrne, paced like a wild animal. There was no consoling him. EMS had arrived at the scene, as had an investigator from the medical examiner’s office. The girl was pronounced dead at 2:18. There had been no air in the red lacquer trunk. She had most likely suffocated.

  They had just over ninety minutes to find the next girl.

  Jessica took the laptop out and clicked on the killer’s GothOde web page. There were still only four performance videos on the page. The fifth video, the one with the killer in front of City Hall, had been deleted.

  “Anything?” Byrne asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “We have to think like he does,” Bontrager said. “We have to get inside his head. There’s one diamond, and one square left.”

  “I’m open to suggestions here,” Byrne said.

  The homicide division was an investigative unit that ran on interviews, forensic data, time inside an interrogation room. Everything was quantifiable, except the whims of a madman.

  Jessica refreshed the page, over and over again. Finally, there was change.

  “There’s another one,” she said.

  Everyone crowded around the laptop.

  THE GIRL IN THE SUB TRUNK

  The video opened with the same curtains as the first four videos.

  This time, center stage, was the Chinese red lacquer box covered with gold dragons. The box was on a pedestal. After a few moments the killer stepped into frame. He wore the same cutaway tuxedo, the same goatee, the same monocle. He stood no closer to the camera.

  “Behold the Sub Trunk,” he said. He gestured offstage. Moments later a teenage Asian-American girl stepped onto the stage, and then on top of the box. She reached down, picked up a large hoop of silken fabric. She looked terribly frightened. Her hands were shaking. “And behold the lovely Odette,” the man said.

  The killer walked offstage. The girl lifted the fabric to just beneath her chin. From off camera a shout could be heard.

  “One, two, three!”

  On three the girl lifted the hoop over her head, then immediately dropped it. It was now the killer standing on the trunk.

  Fade to black.

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the girl in the video was the girl they had just found in the box.

  Byrne raised Hell Rohmer on radio. “You watching this?” he asked.

  “I’m watching it.”

  “I want hard copies of that girl’s face in every sector car in East Division as fast as possible.”

  “You got it.”

  Byrne’s phone rang. He belted his handset, answered. It was David Sinclair.

  “I’m going to put you on speaker,” Byrne said. He put the cell phone on the hood of the car.

  “I got your e-mail,” Sinclair said. “I think I know what’s going on here.”

  “What is it?”

  “This is a pretty famous tangram. The puzzle is in the shape of a bird. A problem invented by Sang-hsia-k’o.”

  Byrne told Sinclair of the most recent crime scene. He left out the gruesome details.

  “Was this anywhere near the other buildings?”
/>   “Yes,” Byrne said. “Another corner building.”

  “Is it northwest of the Shiloh Street address?”

  “It is.”

  “East of Fifth?”

  “Just.”

  “So that makes five triangles.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this was the largest so far, so I’m thinking it is the central part of the problem.”

  Suddenly, the night fell quiet. For a few electrifying moments there was no music, no traffic, no barking dogs, just the sound of a distant barge on the river, just the buzz of the streetlamps overhead. Byrne looked at Jessica. Their eyes met in wordless understanding, and they knew.

  They were on the phone with the killer.

  The man who called himself David Sinclair was Mr. Ludo.

  Jessica walked quickly away, out of earshot. She opened her cell phone, dialed the communications unit. They would begin to triangulate this call.

  The killer spoke first.

  “In the world of magic, do you know what a flash is, Detective Byrne?”

  Byrne remained silent. He let the man continue.

  “A flash is where the audience has seen something it was not supposed to see. I know that I just flashed. You did not give me the address of the latest crime scene, so I could not have known it was the largest. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about just so you can buy some time to trace this call. If you do, I will kill the next girl now, while you’re listening.”

  “Okay.” Byrne thought of the man sitting across from him at the Magnolia Grill in Chester County. His anger built. He fought it. “What do you want?”

  There was no hesitation. “What does any puzzle master want? To be solved. But only by the best and the brightest. Are you the best and brightest?”

  Byrne had to keep the man talking. “Hardly. I’m just another flatfoot.”

  “I doubt that. A flatfoot wound not have seen the Jeremiah Crosley clue and followed it to the Girl Without a Middle.”

  Thunder rumbled above. A second later, Byrne heard the thunder on the cell phone. The killer was not in Atlanta. The killer was in North Philadelphia.

  “Did you see the clock tower?”

  “I did,” Byrne said. “Nice trick.”

  The man drew a short breath. There was a nerve here somewhere. Byrne had found it. The first crack.

  “Trick?”

  “Yeah,” Byrne said. “Like that stuff we used to see on the commercials during those late night horror movies. Remember those? The deck of cards that turn into all aces. The multiplying little foam bunnies. ‘Tricks anyone can do,’ the guy said. ‘Magic is easy, once you know the secret.’ I bought that cheap plastic wand that turns into a flower. It fell apart.”

  There was a long moment of hesitation. Good and bad. Good because Byrne was getting to the man. Bad because he was unpredictable. And he held all the cards.

  “And this is what you think I’ve done? A trick?”

  Byrne glanced at Jessica. She twirled a finger in the air. Keep him talking.

  “Pretty much.”

  “And yet you are there, and I am here. Between us, pretty maids all in a row.”

  “You have us there,” Byrne said. “No argument.”

  “The question is, can you solve the puzzle in time, Detective? Can you save the last two maidens?”

  The man’s composure was back.

  “Why don’t you just tell me where they are, and you and I can meet somewhere, work this out?” Byrne asked.

  “What, and give up show business?”

  Byrne heard a loud hiss, a crackle in the connection. The storm was moving in.

  Jessica took out her pad, wrote on it, dropped it on the car.

  It’s a land line. We have him.

  “By the way. You said the puzzle was a bird. What sort of bird?” Byrne asked.

  “The sort that can fly away,” the killer said. “Can you hang on for a second? I have to produce a flower.”

  The man laughed, and the line went dead.

  | SEVENTY-NINE |

  | 2 : 38 AM |

  THE ADDRESS WAS A SMALL, RUN-DOWN FLORIST ON FRANKFORD. A HALF dozen sector cars arrived at the same time. Four departmental cars, eight detectives, Jessica and Byrne among them. In less than a minute they flanked the stand-alone building. It was dark inside. When Jessica and Byrne went around back, they saw the back door wide open. With plenty of probable cause to enter, they did.

  Soon the small building was clear. No one was inside. The team stood down.

  In a small back room, which doubled as an office and a prep area, was a huge oak desk and an old style desk phone. The receiver was off the hook, lying on its side.

  Next to the phone, a flower.

  A white lily.

  THE OWNER OF THE SHOP, a man named Ernest Haas, looked like he was going to vibrate to death. Despite the number of ADT stickers on doors and windows—stickers he readily admitted he had color-copied and put on the windows, hoping they looked authentic enough to fool burglars—he had no security system, no cameras. They had rousted him and his wife in their small apartment over the shop. Ernest and Ruth Ann Haas had no idea what was going on just below them.

  The killer had simply picked the lock on the back door and used the phone. There were myriad prints on the receiver and glass doors that led to the cooler containing the lilies. They had been dusted and rushed back to the crime lab.

  Before leaving the Jefferson Street scene Byrne had contacted the communications unit. The phone number “David Sinclair” had given him was a disposable cell phone. Untraceable. Byrne had also given Tony Park the information on Sinclair’s publisher. Park was tracking it down now.

  JESSICA AND BYRNE STOOD on the corner of Frankford and Lehigh. Byrne’s cell rang. It was Hell Rohmer.

  “I’ve been monitoring the GothOde page. There have been another four hundred viewings of the last video. This thing has gone viral. There’ve also been a few comments, mostly nutcases. What’s new, eh? I’m not sure this one guy who posted is any different, but he responded to the ‘here’s a clue’ line.”

  “What was it?”

  “The commenter on the page wrote ‘Begichev and Geltser? Swan Lake? This guy rox!’ It was signed phillybadbwoi. I looked it up. He was right. Begichev and Geltser collaborated with Tchaikovsky on Swan Lake. And the lead part in the ballet?”

  “What about it?” Byrne asked.

  “Her name is Odette.”

  AT 2:50, IKE BUCHANAN’S CAR drove up in front of the florist shop.

  Arthur Lake stepped out. He had a handful of e-mail printouts.

  “I’ve contacted a number of my colleagues,” Lake said. “The man in the video is known by reputation to some of my contemporaries here in Philadelphia. I’ve only been in the city about five years. I’m afraid I’d never heard of him.”

  “What did you learn?”

  “Well, for one, as I suspected, this is someone mimicking the look and style of another man who performed in the fifties and sixties. That magician himself would be much, much older now.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Not his real name. I have a call in to a man who might know. Onstage he went by the Great Cygne.”

  The man pronounced the word seen-yeh.

  “And this older magician was from Philly?” Byrne asked.

  “I believe so, although I could not find any specific information on that.”

  Lake handed Byrne a faded color image of a tall, slender man in a cutaway tuxedo. “This is the only photo I could find. It was downloaded from a German website.”

  Byrne reached into the car. He took out a pair of photos he found in Laura Somerville’s strongbox and compared them to the downloaded photograph. They were identical.

  “Rumor was that the Great Cygne was a little unstable,” Lake said. “And that he was pretty much shunned by the community at large.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Years ago he invented an illusion called ‘Th
e Singing Boy’ and sold it to a number of top magicians—claiming exclusivity to each of them—for a great deal of money. When word got out, he was persona non grata in magic circles. No one really saw him after that, I gather.”

  “The Great Cygne. Can you spell that for me?” Byrne asked.

  The man did. It hit Byrne like a sledgehammer.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Lake continued, “in French, the word cygne means—”

  “Swan,” Byrne said.

  Swan Lake. The puzzle is in the shape of a bird.

  “He’s building a swan.”

  | EIGHTY |

  | 2 : 55 AM |

  LILLY SAT IN A CHAIR IN THE CANDLELIT ROOM. THE OLD MAN STROKED her hair, his fingers ice cold. A few moments earlier she had heard something loud—it might have been a slamming door or a backfire—but she dared not ask about it.

  She had never been more frightened in her life.

  When she looked up at the old man, he was staring at her.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  The man looked at her as if she were crazy. He put his shoulders back, lifted his chin. “I am the Great Cygne.”

  “You called me a name before. What was it?”

  “Odette, of course.”

  “And what is this place?”

  Another incredulous look. “This is Faerwood.”

  “Do you live here?”

  The old man got a faraway look. For a moment it appeared as if he might be falling asleep. Then he told Lilly an incredible story.

  He told her that his real name was Karl Swann, and that he was once a world-renowned magician, student of the masters, mentor to the greats. He told her that many years ago he’d had a mishap during one of his stage illusions, and accidentally hanged himself. He told her that his son, Joseph, had kept him in this room for more than twenty years, but now he was much better, and was ready to perform all over the world again. He told her that this night would be the Great Cygne’s greatest triumph, something called the Fire Grotto.