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

by Richard Montanari

  Fire investigators reported that the fire would have spread quickly enough through the old, mostly wood structure, but was accelerated by the explosion of the small oil furnace in the basement.

  Joseph Swann’s charred skeleton was found in the east wing of the attic. It appeared he tried to hang himself, but the ME’s office believed the fire had gotten to him first.

  His father, Karl Martin Swann, the Great Cygne, was found in his room on the third floor.

  In his hand was a beautiful mahogany wand.

  | ONE HUNDRED EIGHT |

  THEY LEFT THE CEMETERY AT NOON. EVE GALVEZ’S SERVICE HAD BEEN for family and coworkers only. Her family was small, but nearly a hundred people from the District Attorney’s office had shown up.

  JESSICA AND GRACIELLA stood near the river. It was only early September, but already the air whispered of the coming fall.

  “Did you know your mother well?” Graciella asked.

  “Not really,” Jessica said. “She died when I was five.”

  “Wow. Five. That’s pretty small.”

  “It is.”

  Graciella looked out over the river. “What do you remember most about her?”

  Jessica had to think about this. “I guess it would be her voice. She used to sing all the time. I remember that.”

  “What did she sing?”

  “All kinds of things. Whatever was popular on the radio, I guess.” The songs came back, found their place in Jessica’s heart. “What do you remember?”

  “My mom’s handwriting. She used to send things to my house. Birthdays, Christmas, Easter. I never opened the boxes. I was so mad at her. I didn’t even know her, but I hated her. Until the night she called me and explained everything. She was sixteen when she had me. I’m sixteen. Geez, I can’t imagine.”

  Jessica recalled the photographs in the photo cube at Eve’s apartment, the high-school shot of Eve in which she looked heavy. She had not been overweight. She had been pregnant.

  “When I hung up that night, after talking to my mom, I opened all the boxes she sent me. She sent me this.” Graciella held out a sterling silver pendant on a fine chain. It was an angel.

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “Thank you.” She slipped the pendant over her head, positioned the angel over her heart. “I wonder if you could take me someplace.”

  “Sure,” Jessica said. “Anywhere you want to go.”

  “I’d like to go where my mother was found.”

  Jessica looked at the young woman. She seemed to have matured in the past few days. Her hair was brushed, her skin impossibly clear. She wore a white cotton dress. She’d told Jessica she’d worn nothing but black for years. She said she’d never wear black again. Graciella had given the police a full statement about the last moments she had spent in Faerwood. She said that after she stepped onto the stage, and saw the Fire Grotto, she didn’t remember anything. All the video equipment had been destroyed in the fire. There was no record of what happened.

  “You sure that’s a good idea?” Jessica asked. “I mean, there’s not much there. It’s all been smoothed over. They’ve planted grass there.”

  Graciella nodded.

  “Plus, you’re supposed to meet with your uncle,” Jessica added.

  “My uncle. It sounds so weird,” Graciella said. “Can he meet us there? In the park?”

  “Sure,” Jessica said. “I’ll call.”

  They drove to Belmont Plateau in silence. Byrne followed in his own car.

  JESSICA AND BYRNE watched the young woman cross the street, step into the shallow woods. When she stepped out, Graciella turned to someone on Belmont Avenue, waved. Jessica and Byrne looked.

  Enrique Galvez stood next to his car. He wore a dark suit, his hair was trimmed and combed. He looked as nervous as Jessica felt, as fallen and needy as he had looked at the funeral.

  When Graciella approached, the two embraced tentatively—strangers, family, blood. They talked a long while.

  At noon, with an autumn moon already in the sky, Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano got into their cars, and headed to the city.

  “WOW. I’M FINALLY INSIDE Casa di Kevin.” They had stopped by Byrne’s apartment on the way to the Roundhouse. Incredibly, he asked her if she wanted to come in.

  “What are you talking about?” Byrne asked.

  “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Yes, you have.”

  “Kevin. Between the two of us, who would you trust on this?”

  Byrne looked at her, then out the window, onto Second Street. “You’ve never been here?”

  “No.”

  “Man.” He began to absently straighten up the place. When he was done, he got what he came home for—that being his service weapon and holster. “I have a date with Donna this Friday.”

  “I know.”

  Byrne looked coldcocked. “You know?”

  “I talk to Donna now and then.”

  “You talk to my wife?”

  “Well, technically, she’s your ex-wife. But yeah. Now and then. I mean, we don’t coffee klatch, Kevin. We’re not swapping Rachael Ray recipes.”

  Byrne drew a long, rhythmic breath.

  “What the hell was that?” Jessica asked.

  “What was what?”

  “That breath. That was yoga breathing.”

  “Yoga? I don’t think so.”

  “I took yoga classes after Sophie was born. I know yoga breathing.”

  Byrne said nothing.

  Jessica shook her head. “Kevin Byrne doing yoga.”

  Byrne looked at her. “How much do you want?”

  “A thousand dollars. Tens and twenties.”

  “Okay.”

  Jessica’s phone rang. She answered, took down the information. “We’re up,” she said. “We have a job. The boss wants us in.”

  Byrne glanced at his watch, back. “You go on ahead. I have a stop to make.”

  “Okay,” she said. “See you at the house.”

  | ONE HUNDRED NINE |

  THE MAN STOOD NEXT TO THE RUIN. HE SEEMED THINNER THAN THE last time Byrne had seen him. All around him were the bulky brick entrails of another urban casualty. The city had taken the wrecking ball to the abandoned building on Eighth Street.

  It was certainly no loss for North Philly. For Robert O’Riordan it was another story.

  Byrne wondered how long the man would haunt this place, how long it would be until Caitlin said it was okay for him to go home. Everyone said it gets easier with time, Byrne knew. It never gets easier, it just gets later.

  Byrne got out of his car, crossed the road. Robert O’Riordan saw him. At first, Byrne didn’t know how O’Riordan was going to react. After a few moments O’Riordan looked at the broken building, then back at Byrne. He nodded.

  Byrne walked up next to the man, stood with him, shoulder to shoulder. He didn’t know if Robert O’Riordan was a religious man, but Byrne handed him something, a prayer card from Eve Galvez’s service. O’Riordan took it. He held it in two hands.

  Although they had never met in life, Robert O’Riordan and Eve Galvez were bound by something that would forever transcend this place, something that memory and time could erode, but never erase. Something found in the very heart of mercy.

  And so Byrne and he stood, in silence, as the winds gathered leaves in vacant lots. Neither man spoke.

  Sometimes words were not enough, Kevin Byrne thought.

  Sometimes they were not even needed.

  | ABOUT THE AUTHOR |

  RICHARD MONTANARI is a novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and scores of other national and regional publications. He is the OLMA-winning author of the internationally acclaimed thrillers Merciless, The Skin Gods, The Rosary Girls, Kiss of Evil, Deviant Way, and The Violet Hour.

  ALSO BY | RICHARD MONTANARI

  Merciless

  The Skin Gods

  The Rosary Girl
s

  Kiss of Evil

  The Violet Hour

  Deviant Way

  Badlands is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Richard Montanari

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Montanari, Richard.

  Badlands : a novel of suspense / Richard Montanari.

  p. cm.

  1. Police—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 2. Homicide investigation—Fiction. 3. Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. 4. Code and cipher stories. I. Title.

  PS3563.05384B33 2008

  813'.54—dc22 2008025607

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50946-8

  v3.0

  Read on for an excerpt from Richard Montanari’s

  The Echo Man

  PROLOGUE

  For every light there is shadow. For every sound, silence. From the moment he got the call Detective Kevin Francis Byrne had a premonition this night would forever change his life, that he was headed to a place marked by a profound evil, leaving only darkness in its wake.

  “You ready?”

  Byrne glanced at Jimmy. Detective Jimmy Purify sat in the passenger seat of the bashed and battered department-issue Ford. He was just a few years older than Byrne, but something in the man’s eyes held deep wisdom, a hard-won experience that transcended time spent on the job and spoke instead of time earned. They’d known each other a long time, but this was their first full tour as partners.

  “I’m ready,” Byrne said.

  He wasn’t.

  They got out of the car and walked to the front entrance of the sprawling, well-tended Chestnut Hill mansion. Here, in this exclusive section of the northwest part of the city, there was history at every turn, a neighborhood designed at a time when Philadelphia was second only to London as the largest English-speaking city in the world.

  The first officer on the scene, a rookie named Timothy Meehan, stood inside the foyer, cloistered by coats and hats and scarves perfumed with age, just beyond the reach of the cold autumn wind cutting across the grounds.

  Byrne had been in Officer Meehan’s shoes a handful of years earlier and remembered well how he’d felt when detectives arrived, the tangle of envy and relief and admiration. Chances were slight that Meehan would one day do the job Byrne was about to do. It took a certain breed to stay in the trenches, especially in a city like Philly, and most uniformed cops, at least the smart ones, moved on.

  Byrne signed the crime-scene log and stepped into the warmth of the atrium, taking in the sights, the sounds, the smells. He would never again enter this scene for the first time, never again breathe an air so red with violence. Looking into the kitchen, he saw a blood-splattered killing room, scarlet murals on pebbled white tile, the torn flesh of the victim jigsawed on the floor.

  While Jimmy called for the medical examiner and crime-scene unit, Byrne walked to the end of the entrance hall. The officer standing there was a veteran patrolman, a man of fifty, a man content to live without ambition. At that moment Byrne envied him. The cop nodded toward the room on the other side of the corridor.

  And that was when Kevin Byrne heard the music.

  She sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room. The walls were covered with a forest-green silk; the floor with an exquisite burgundy Persian. The furniture was sturdy, in the Queen Anne style. The air smelled of jasmine and leather.

  Byrne knew the room had been cleared, but he scanned every inch of it anyway. In one corner stood an antique curio case with beveled glass doors, its shelves arrayed with small porcelain figurines. In another corner leaned a beautiful cello. Candlelight shimmered on its golden surface.

  The woman was slender and elegant, in her late twenties. She had burnished russet hair down to her shoulders, eyes the color of soft copper. She wore a long black gown, sling-back heels, pearls. Her makeup was a bit garish—theatrical, some might say—but it flattered her delicate features, her lucent skin.

  When Byrne stepped fully into the room the woman looked his way, as if she had been expecting him, as if he might be a guest for Thanksgiving dinner, some discomfited cousin just in from Allentown or Ashtabula. But he was neither. He was there to arrest her.

  “Can you hear it?” the woman asked. Her voice was almost adolescent in its pitch and resonance.

  Byrne glanced at the crystal CD case resting on a small wooden easel atop the expensive stereo component. Chopin: Nocturne in G Major. Then he looked more closely at the cello. There was fresh blood on the strings and fingerboard, as well as on the bow lying on the floor. Afterward, she had played.

  The woman closed her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “The blue notes.”

  Byrne listened. He has never forgotten the melody, the way it both lifted and shattered his heart.

  Moments later the music stopped. Byrne waited for the last note to feather into silence. “I’m going to need you to stand up now, ma’am,” he said.

  When the woman opened her eyes Byrne felt something flicker in his chest. In his time on the streets of Philadelphia he had met all types of people, from soulless drug dealers, to oily con men, to smash-and-grab artists, to hopped-up joyriding kids. But never before had he encountered anyone so detached from the crime they had just committed. In her light-brown eyes Byrne saw demons caper from shadow to shadow.

  The woman rose, turned to the side, put her hands behind her back. Byrne took out his handcuffs, slipped them over her slender white wrists, and clicked them shut.

  She turned to face him. They stood in silence now, just a few inches apart, strangers not only to each other, but to this grim pageant and all that was to come.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  Byrne wanted to tell her that he understood. He wanted to say that we all have moments of rage, moments when the walls of sanity tremble and crack. He wanted to tell her that she would pay for her crime, probably for the rest of her life—perhaps even with her life—but that while she was in his care she would be treated with dignity and respect.

  He did not say these things. “My name is Detective Kevin Byrne,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.” It was November 1, 1990. Nothing has been right since.

  1

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24

  Can you hear it?

  Listen closely. There, beneath the clatter of the lane, beneath the ceaseless hum of man and machine, you will hear the sound of the slaughter, the screaming of peasants in the moment before death, the plea of an emperor with a sword at his throat.

  Can you hear it?

  Step onto hallowed ground, where madness has made the soil luxuriant with blood, and you will hear it: Nanjing, Thessaloniki, Warsaw.

  If you listen closely you will realize it is always there, never fully silenced, not by prayer, by law, by time. The history of the world, and its annals of crime, is the slow, sepulchral music of the dead.

  There.

  Can you hear it?

  I hear it. I am the one who walks in shadow, ears tuned to the night. I am the one who hides in rooms where murder is done, rooms that will never again be quieted, each corner now and forever sheltering a whispering ghost. I hear fingernails scratching granite walls, the drip of blood onto scarred tile, the hiss of air drawn into a mortal chest wound. Sometimes it all becomes too much, too loud, and I must let it out.

  I am the Echo Man.

  I hear it all.

  • • •

  On Sunday morning I rise early, shower, take my breakfast at home. I step onto the street. It is a glorious fall day. The sk
y is clear and crystalline blue, the air holds the faint smell of decaying leaves.

  As I walk down Pine Street I feel the weight of the three killing instruments at the small of my back. I study the eyes of passersby, or at least those who will meet my gaze. Every so often I pause, eavesdrop, gathering the sounds of the past. In Philadelphia, Death has lingered in so many places. I collect its spectral sounds the way some men collect fine art, or war souvenirs, or lovers.

  Like many who have toiled in the arts over the centuries my work has gone largely unnoticed. That is about to change. This will be my magnum opus, that by which all such works are judged forever. It has already begun.

  I turn up my collar and continue down the lane.

  Zig, zig, zig.

  I rattle through the crowded streets like a white skeleton.

  At just after eight a.m. I enter Fitler Square, finding the expected gathering—bicyclists, joggers, the homeless who have dragged themselves here from a nearby passageway. Some of these homeless creatures will not live through the winter. Soon I will hear their last breaths.

  I stand near the ram sculpture at the eastern end of the square, watching, waiting. Within minutes I see them, mother and daughter.

  They are just what I need.

  I walk across the square, sit on a bench, take out my newspaper, halve and quarter it. The killing instruments are uncomfortable at my back. I shift my weight as the sounds amass: the flap and squawk of pigeons congregating around a man eating a bagel, a taxi’s rude horn, the hard thump of a bass speaker. Looking at my watch, I see that time is short. Soon my mind will be full of screams and I will be unable to do what is necessary.

  I glance at the young mother and her baby, catch the woman’s eye, smile.

  “Good morning,” I say.

  The woman smiles back. “Hi.”

  The baby is in an expensive jogging stroller, the kind with a rainproof hood and mesh shopping basket beneath. I rise, cross the path, glance inside the pram. It’s a girl, dressed in a pink flannel one-piece and matching hat, swaddled in a snow-white blanket. Bright plastic stars dangle overhead.