by Art Bourgeau
Felix saved her. They were now the only ones still at the table. He reached across and put a hand on her arm in a gesture that was both possessive and protective. It startled her. His hand felt almost exactly like her father's . . . when she was little he would do the same thing, put his hand on her arm just that way whenever she'd get upset, and when he did she'd know everything was all right. At least until the next time when he got mad at her and made her scared and miserable all over again . . . Felix's eyes, they were so like how she remembered her father's . . . she'd noticed it when they were introduced but it hadn't really registered until now . . .
"I don't know about you, but I haven't eaten. Would you stay and have dinner with me, or at least keep me company?" Looking at Carl he added, "The party will still be going on a while, won't it?"
Missy didn't bother to hear Carl's answer. He had made his bed. He was now a nonperson as far as she was concerned. Except, of course, for the payback.
"Good, we'll join you later," Felix was saying, and thereby taking matters out of her hands.
Felix was a pleasure, in control, on top of the situation. A regular Cyrus Wakefield, early edition. As she turned back and saw Carl and company walking away through the crowd, she thought, We won't be joining you—not now, not ever.
Tonight she had come to Lagniappe looking for Carl and some support, even comfort. Instead she had found, it seemed, something better. Something she had given up looking for . . .
A man to match her father.
CHAPTER 3
LAURA RAMSEY woke up with a start, heart pounding. Once again she had had the too familiar nightmare . . . She was on the operating table. Masked faces were looking down at her. She was conscious but unable to speak or move. One of the faces was saying, "It has spread; we're going to have to take more," and then they began to cut off her arms and legs . . .
Usually when she had this nightmare the sight of her cozy bedroom with its white walls and blue woodwork was enough to quiet her, to remind her that she was safe in the little house she loved so well. But not today. It took her a moment to realize why, and then she understood. It was the sound of the sirens. She took a ragged deep breath and pushed back the bedclothes. Tugging at the bottom of the white T-shirt she slept in, she crossed the room and opened the window.
Her bedroom faced onto narrow, tree-lined Emily Street. By leaning out her. window she could see nearby Front Street, the concrete pilings of the overhead section of I-95 and almost to the Delaware River beyond. From the way the police cars were racing down Front to Snyder under 1-95, and up Water Street on the other side, it looked like something big was developing. Laura pulled on a pair of corduroys, a bulky sweater, and stepped into a scuffed pair of Tony Lama cowboy boots. She stopped in the bathroom just long enough to run a comb through her hair, brush her teeth and put on a little lipstick and eyeliner. Downstairs she grabbed her tape recorder and purse and was out the door.
Neighbors were emptying from their houses and making their way toward Water Street and the screaming police cars. Rushing along with them, Laura once again felt the strong sense of neighborhood that had first attracted her to this section of South Philadelphia near the docks—a sense of belonging, even some mutual concern not possible for an apartment dweller.
She followed the crowd until they came to the normally deserted train depot between Water Street and Delaware Avenue, which now, ringed as it was by at least a dozen police cars, was far from deserted. Uniformed officers were busy trying to keep back a small but growing crowd.
Stopping at the rear of the crowd near a silver-and-white coffee truck already doing a brisk business, Laura found herself next to a long-haired young woman holding a baby in one hand and a cigarette in the other. On the back of the hand holding the cigarette she noticed a small flower tattoo.
"What's going on?" Laura said, out of breath and standing tiptoe to get a look over the crowd.
"Beats me. I just heard the sirens and come over. Probably found a body in there. Nothing else'd bring this many cops. The Mafia, somebody probably got smart with them and got killed for their trouble . . ."
"Who you kidding?" said a young woman in a tank top. "It ain't the Mafia, the Mafia don't work like that. They just shoot 'em and leave 'em on the street like the rest of the garbage that don't get picked up in this neighborhood. It's those missing kids. Their bodies are in there. Every last one of them. Mark my words . . ."
Laura pushed on into the crowd until she got to a uniformed cop. Behind him she could see unmarked Plymouth sedans and a blue-and-white van labeled "Crime Lab" scattered near a cul-de-sac with a freight ramp. Fishing in her purse she found her press credentials and flashed them at a young officer. He had a grim look on his face.
"Officer, what's happening?" she asked, hoping that the woman was wrong, that it wasn't a building full of bodies. He glanced at her credentials and stonewalled. "I don't know, ma'am. You'll have to ask the lieutenant about that——"
"Where is he?"
"Inside, ma'am."
All right, he was at least ten years younger than she was but she wished he would stop calling her "ma'am." It also was sort of corny, like an old TV show. Well, she wasn't here as a critic.
"Can I see him?"
"Soon as he comes out I'll tell him you're here . . ."
She turned away from the next "ma'am" and moved down the line. As she did she noted the tight, grim faces. From her experience it took a lot to affect a cop. Something really terrible must have gone down in that old depot.
She saw detectives come out of the building, all with handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths. As she stood there she felt a rough hand on her arm and turned to face a woman in her forties with short hair and hard eyes.
"You're that reporter, the one that lives over on Emily Street, right?"
There was an angry look on the woman's face, too, but unlike the police hers was not a controlled anger—it was the look of someone who was ready to blow and looking for a place to do it. For a moment Laura was intimidated by her ominous presence, but she pushed it to the back of her mind.
"That's right . . ."
"I thought so. Me and my husband, we saw you at Walt's having crabs. You were by yourself. The waitress told us who you were. You're going to write about this, aren't you? Somebody's got to do something about it."
"I don't know. What's going on?"
"They found a body in there, we think it's Terri DiFranco. You know, the latest missing girl. It's a sin. They ought to shoot the sonofabitch that did it."
Laura knew, all right. She had a collection of handbills from the neighborhood, all with pictures of missing teenage girls and reward offers. This Terri DiFranco was the latest. For months she had tried to interest her paper in doing a story on them but had gotten nowhere. Without bodies they were just runaways, she'd been told. They weren't news. No one was interested. Including the police.
Another paper, though, had done a piece on the missing girls as a fill-in on a slow newsday. That was last week, Saturday—the day she and Carl and the others had been talking about it at Lagniappe.
"How do you know what they found?"
Another woman, of similar stocky build and haircut but wearing glasses, chimed in, "Because Lennie Carnelli and his pal Mike knew her. They were laying outa school, playing hooky, and gonna spend the day in there. When they broke in they found her——"
A tall blonde in her late twenties interrupted. "I don't know if you know, but there's nine cops that live in the one and two hundred block of Mifflin. When they found her they ran up Mifflin looking for my Jim, both of them sick as dogs. But Jim's on days so I sent them across the street to Walt Kramer. He's the only one in the block on nights right now. And he went down to have a look. Sadie, that's his wife, called me later and told me that when he come back to call it in she'd never seen him look worse. She asked him what happened and he wouldn't say anything about it. But she did hear him call Louise Pipari, she's the DiFranco's neighbor, and tell her
to stay close because they might need her. When Sadie asked him again what happened all he'd say was if he got his hands on whoever did it he'd kill him himself."
"They ought to shoot the sonofabitch that did it," repeated the first woman.
"Shooting's too good for a bastard like that," said a woman in a red satin warm-up jacket. "I heard he tortured her. They ought to chain him up, right in the city hall courtyard, and cut his nuts off. And not with a knife, with a saw so it'd hurt more. Ever cut yourself with a saw? Hurts ten times worse. Isn't that right, Flora? That's what they ought to do, chain him up and saw his nuts off."
Flora was a shapeless woman with a gray complexion and wrinkled bags under her eyes. She wore a tattered cardigan and a dress that looked like it had been made from a mattress cover decorated with little blue flowers. She was clutching a handbill with a picture on it, and there were tears in her eyes as she stepped forward and handed Laura the crumpled handbill.
"She was a good girl," she said, "went to Mass every Sunday and never did anything wrong. She's Italian but she always call me her Polish grandmother. Sometimes she stop by after school to see me and tell me things and we would talk. But lately she too busy with this new boyfriend she has, and she don't stop by so much more. I tell her he's no good for her, he's too old, but she just laugh and tell me that grandmothers always say that."
The woman's face twisted up and the tears overflowed her eyes.
Laura saw that the picture on the handbill was poorly reproduced, as though it had been run off from a cheap copying machine, but the snapshot was clear enough to show a darkhaired, nubile beauty with a faintly sullen cast to her face. It occurred to her that if she'd ever had a child it would have been about the same age . . . "But we don't know for sure that it's her. It may not be her at all." True or not, she wanted to give the women some hope while they waited, but the hard-eyed looks she got back showed little gratitude. And Laura knew that with that one remark she had gone from being a neighborhood insider with an interesting job to an uptown outsider to whom doors would now be closed.
Anxious to turn away that image and keep the women talking, Laura pushed ahead: "What about this boyfriend you mentioned? What's his story?"
The woman in the satin warm-up jacket was the first to speak.
"She told Flora he was an undercover cop and drove a silver sports car, and that he was handsome and wore a beard and had dark glasses—"
"That's bull," said the blonde. "There's no undercover cop that lives in this neighborhood, and if he did he sure wouldn't be driving no silver sports car."
"That's what I said," agreed the woman in the warm-up jacket. "I said she made him up. You know how kids are."
"Maybe he just told her he was cop, trying to impress her," Laura said.
"What do you think about that, Flora?" said the woman in the warm-up jacket.
"His name's Peter, that's all I know, and he's real enough."
This from the old woman.
Laura looked at the picture again. Something in Terri DiFranco's expression, maybe it was her eyes or the stormy look on her young face, made her believe that Terri had been telling the truth. Yes . . . Peter was real.
She felt a touch on her arm and turned. It was the young cop who had been so formal a few minutes earlier.
"The lieutenant will see you now, ma'am," he said.
"We'll be right here," the woman told her. "Come back and tell us what you find out."
Laura handed the handbill back to the old woman, who refused to take it.
"No, you keep it. So you can tell us if it's her."
Laura nodded and turned to follow the officer.
He led her past the ring of cars to where a group of detectives were talking near the freight cul-de-sac.
"Here she is, lieutenant."
Laura immediately recognized the balding man in the blue blazer from softball games between the department and her paper. George Sloan. As the leader of Seven Squad, the homicide squad assigned to the city's trickier cases, his presence meant that whatever was inside the deserted depot was a considerable hot potato. As she came closer she noted that he looked sallow and drawn.
"God, George, you look like hell." And indeed he did.
"Thanks a bunch, Laura, I needed that. It's just a touch of flu," he said, managing a weak smile. "I didn't know Will had assigned you to the crime desk."
"He hasn't. I happen to live nearby and heard the sirens. You ought to take some aspirin and a slug of brandy and get into bed before that stuff kills you."
"I'd like to, believe me, but there's no time . . . I didn't know you lived around here."
"Yes, in the one hundred block of Emily Street . . . George, what the hell's going on here?"
"Looks like a rape-murder but we won't know for sure about the rape until the M.E. finishes his examination later today."
"Who is it?"
"Can't be sure until she's been identified by the next of kin."
"Is it a young girl, a teenager?"
"Yes . . . how did you know?"
"Is it this girl?" She showed him the handbill.
When he looked away she knew the answer but asked again, for the record. "Is it, George?"
"Like I said, we won't know for sure until she's identified, but it's possible."
From the way he said it, Laura felt sure the search was over for the family and friends of young Terri DiFranco. She took a deep breath and got on with it. "How did she die?" Her mind was filled with visions of a body with countless stab wounds, like so many rape victims one read about.
"Strangulation."
". . . Anything else?"
"From the looks of things, he didn't torture her, just raped and strangled her."
Laura was glad crime wasn't her beat. Now, though, by accident of circumstances, it was.
"Do you think she knew her attacker?"
"Difficult to say. There's evidence the attack was premeditated, but whether it was meant for her personally or she was an unlucky, random victim we don't know yet. But this may be our first break . . ."
"What do you mean?"
"Up to now we've had to carry these girls on the books as missing persons because there've been no bodies." He pointed to the handbill. "This one, Terri DiFranco, she's the latest. If the body in there proves to be her it could help break this case."
"You think there's a serial killer loose in South Philly?"
Sloan dodged it. "We don't know that."
She tried another tack. "You mentioned some evidence a minute ago. What kind?"
"The way the room is set up."
"What do you mean?"
"The room she was killed in was picked in advance and decorated like a love nest. Her body's in the center, there are damned candles all around. Weird."
"And he lured her there to rape and kill her?"
"Could be."
"Then how could you say you don't know if it's a serial killer? Girls disappear. You find the body of one of them in some sort of love nest. What else could it be?"
"Someone she knew, a boyfriend—"
"George," she said, grabbing his arm, "while I was waiting to see you I got to talking with the neighbors. One of them, an elderly lady, said she was a good friend of this girl . . . of Terri's, and she was telling me about a boyfriend, an older boyfriend named Peter. She didn't know his last name, but Terri had told her he was a cop. An undercover cop."
"We've already heard about this boyfriend from people who knew her. So far we haven't been able to locate him."
"What about him being a cop? Have you checked that out?"
"Yes, Laura, we're not all asleep here. We checked, and we feel sure there's no truth to him being an officer. It's common for a rapist to pose as a cop, happens all the time. That's often how they get their victims to go with them. But it usually happens quick. They see their victim, get her in the car and do it. But we know that Terri was seeing this guy for at least a month. That much we're sure of from the missing person's inv
estigation. If he was going to do this why'd he wait a month? Doesn't sound right."
"Any ideas?"
"You asking as a reporter or a friend from our ball games?"
"Does it make such a difference?"
"It does, because now we're getting into speculation. You're new to this beat. There are some rules. It wouldn't help if you printed a bunch of speculation. Just get people stirred up, cause a lot of problems . . ."
Laura looked at the crowd behind the police line and understood what he was saying. The angry crowd could turn ugly.
"A real hot potato, right?"
"The hottest . . . otherwise why do you think I can recite chapter and verse from a bunch of missing persons reports? I've been living with these cases, just waiting for an excuse to wade in."
"I'm asking, George, as the worst left fielder you ever struck out." She even allowed herself a demure smile.
"All right, all right. I'll try to trust you. One possibility is the guy might have been trying to impress her. Say he was a security guard somewhere. They have badges, handcuffs. They know enough cop lingo to fool a teenager. It wouldn't be hard for him to pass himself off as a cop. Of course, that's just one possibility . .
"Meaning?"
"Enough with the Lois Lane. I've already told you too much."
Laura was looking at the building. "George, take me inside. I want to see it—"
"No, you don't. Believe me—you don't."
"I need to see it, George. How else can I write about it?"
Sloan sighed, turned to one of the other detectives. "Rafferty, let me have your bottle."
Rafferty reached inside his jacket and handed him a small bottle that he then offered to Laura. "Here, take this."
"What is it?"
"Men's cologne. When we get inside it's going to smell real bad. Hold this under your nose and sniff. It'll help. A little."
As he turned to lead her in she suddenly wasn't so gung-ho. What the hell was she doing? Her beat was rock stars and art shows and openings . . . not rape and murder. Well, she'd complained long and sometimes loud to her boss that she was tired of that stuff. So suck it in, girl, fish or cut bait, and whatever other awful mixed metaphor you can think of . . .Sloan looked over his shoulder. She swallowed hard and followed him as he led her away from the cul-de-sac and around the building.