Play dead jbakb-4

by Richard Montanari

  In Kevin Byrne's mind he knew — a man standing at the bottom of the stairs… the city street quiet above him… the bright white cuff of a dress shirt… the sound of a silken cloth snapping in the still air… the image of the dead girl framed in the glass display case, the glisten of water leaking from her lips… the picture of an old man watching, applauding, his gnarled and feeble hands meeting in a noiseless clash — the unclean taste of a murderer's thoughts inside him. Byrne took a few steps back, his head reeling. He exhaled. The air was foul and bitter in his mouth. He spit on the floor.

  He took a moment to collect himself. The vision had visited him with a brutal clarity. It had been a while since the last one. Each time it happened he believed it would be the last time.

  Kevin Byrne was a man who could sometimes see things. Things he did not want to see.

  Years earlier he had been shot by a homicide suspect on the western bank of the Delaware River, in the shadow of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Although the bullet wound to his forehead was not life threatening, the impact forced him backwards, into the frigid water, where he had drifted downward, nearly unconscious, locked in a death battle with the suspect, who had just taken fire from Byrne's partner, the late Jimmy Purify. When they pulled Byrne from the river, he had to be resuscitated. According the report he read almost a year later, he had been dead for nearly one full minute. Like Caitlin, he had drowned. For years after, he found that he sometimes had the ability to "read" a crime scene. Not in any psychic sense. He could not lay hands on a weapon or a victim and get a crystal-clear snapshot of the doer.

  When he was shot a second time, this time far more seriously, the ability seemed to have disappeared, which was just fine with Kevin Byrne.

  Just over a year ago, it returned with a vengeance.

  Byrne never shared what he "saw" as investigative findings. To his bosses, to his fellow detectives, he couched his feelings as a hunch, an investigator's gut instinct.

  It's not about the victim, it's about the presentation.

  Byrne took time to regroup. In the old days he took the visions in stride. He was no longer the man he had been in those days. Too much blood had flowed through his city.

  He was just about to head down the stairs when a movement caught his eye, the motion of a silhouette next to the corner building across the street. Byrne stepped back, into the lengthening shadows of the hallway. He peered around the window casing and looked again.

  The man was standing in the vacant lot next to the crime-scene house, looking up at him, dressed in dark clothing, hands in pockets. Byrne recognized the man's posture, his bearing. He had seen it many times before.

  For a few long moments the two men stood looking at each other, acknowledging each other's role in this agonizing play, deferring, for the time being, to the cover of dusk.

  Minutes later, purposely taking his time, Byrne walked down the stairs, stepped out of the building, and crossed the street.

  Caitlin's father, Robert O'Riordan, was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  They sat in the parking lot at the Roundhouse, engine idling,windows up, AC maxed out to Burger King meat locker. The city was paying for the air conditioning, and they were going to use it.

  Kevin Byrne glanced over at his partner. Jessica had her eyes closed, her head back on the seat. It had been a long day for both, but as tired as Byrne was, he felt it was probably worse for Jessica than for him. All Byrne had to do was drive home, drag himself up two flights of stairs, open a bottle of Yuengling, flop onto the couch, and order a pizza.

  Jessica had to drive to the Northeast, pick up her daughter, make dinner for her family, put her daughter to bed, take a shower and then maybe, maybe, sleep would find her, just a few hours before she had to get up and start it all over again.

  Byrne didn't know how she did it. If she was a dental hygienist or paralegal it would be hard enough. Add the stresses and dangers of this job, and the demands had to be off the charts.

  Byrne checked the dashboard clock. It was just after 9:00 PM. He had lost track of how long they had been sitting there in the parking lot, not saying a word. His partner finally broke the silence.

  "I hate this part," Jessica said.

  "Me too."

  They were in the doldrums between clue and fact, between suspicion and reality, between idea and truth. Byrne was just about to further lament this fact aloud when his cell phone rang.

  Jessica turned to look at him, opened one eye. If she had opened two it would have been overtime. It was that late in the day. "Don't you ever turn that friggin' thing off?"

  "I thought I did."

  Byrne pulled out his phone, glanced at the caller ID, frowned, flipped it open. It was their boss. Jessica looked over again, both eyes open now. Byrne pointed a finger upward, at the windows of the Roundhouse, telling her all she needed to know. She closed her eyes again.

  "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 Faer- wood 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 past walks here, noiseless, unasked, alone.

  VIRGINIA WOODWARD CLOUD

  SIXTEEN

  In the years before darkness became his Mistress, and time became an abstract precis, 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.