Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (115 page)

“Ever catch a lead?” Byrne asked.

Brigham shook his head. “Got close a few times. I think we interviewed everyone in the park that day. Must have got a hundred statements. No one ever came forward.”

“What happened to the other girl’s family?”

Brigham shrugged. “Moved away. Tried to track them down a few times. No luck.”

“What about the forensics?”

“Nothing. But that was back in the day. Plus there was that storm. It rained like crazy. Whatever might have been there was washed away.”

Byrne saw the deep pain and regret in Walt Brigham’s eyes. He understood, having a folder of the bad ones tucked away on the blind side of his heart himself. He waited a minute or so, tried to change the subject. “So, what’s in the fire for you, Walt?”

Brigham looked up, fixed Byrne with a stare he found a little unsettling. “I’m gonna get my license, Kevin.”

“Your license?” Byrne asked. “Your private investigator license?”

Brigham nodded. “I’m gonna start working the case on my own,” he said. He lowered his voice. “In fact, between you, me, and the barmaid, I’ve been working it off the books for a while now.”

“Annemarie’s case?” Byrne had not expected this. He’d thought he was going to hear about some fishing boat, some RV plans, or maybe that standard setup that all cops have about one day buying a bar somewhere tropical—somewhere bikini-clad nineteen-year-old girls went to party on spring break—the plan on which no one ever seemed to pull the pin.

“Yeah,” Brigham said. “I owe Richie. Hell, the city owes him. Think about it. His little girl is murdered on our beat and we don’t close it?” He slammed his glass on the bar, raised an accusatory finger to the world, to himself. “I mean, every year we pull the file, make a few notes, put it back. It ain’t fair, man. It ain’t fucking
fair
. She was just a kid.”

“Does Richie know your plans?” Byrne asked.

“No. I’ll tell him when the time is right.”

For a minute or so they fell silent, listening to the chatter, the music. When Byrne looked back at Brigham, he saw that far-off look again, the shine in his eyes.

“Ah, Christ,” Brigham said. “They were the prettiest little girls you’ve ever seen.”

All Kevin Byrne could do was put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

They stood that way for a long time.

BYRNE LEFT THE
bar, turned onto Third Street. He thought about Richie DiCillo. He wondered how many times Richie had held his service weapon in his hand, consumed by anger and rage and grief. Byrne wondered how close the man had come, knowing that if someone took his own daughter away, he would have to search far and wide for a reason to go on.

As he reached his car he asked himself how long he was going to pretend it hadn’t happened. He had been lying to himself about it a lot lately. This night, the feelings had been strong.

He had felt something when Walt Brigham hugged him. He saw dark things, had even smelled something. He would never admit any of this to anyone, not even to Jessica, with whom he had shared just about everything over the past few years. He had never smelled anything before, not as a component of his vague prescience.

When he’d hugged Walt Brigham he smelled pine needles. And smoke.

Byrne slipped behind the wheel, strapped in, put a Robert Johnson disk into the CD player, and drove into the night.

Jesus,
he thought.

Pine needles and smoke.

20

Edgar Luna stumbled out of the Old House Tavern on Station Road, his gut full of Yuengling, his head full of bullshit. The same kind of refried bullshit his mother force-fed him the first eighteen years of his life: He was a loser. He’d never amount to anything. He was stupid. Just like his father.

Every time he got within one lager of the limit, it all came flooding back.

The wind pinwheeled up the nearly empty street, flapping his trousers, making his eyes water, giving him pause. He bunched his scarf around his face, and headed north into the gale.

Edgar Luna was a small balding man, acne-scarred, long since delivered unto every malady of middle age—colitis, eczema, fungal toenails, gingivitis. He had just turned fifty-five.

He was not drunk, but he was not all that far from it either. The new barmaid, Alyssa or Alicia or whatever the fuck her name was had shut him down for the tenth time. Who gave a shit? She was too old for him anyway. Edgar liked them younger.
Much
younger. Always had.

The youngest—and the best—had been his niece Dina. Hell, she had to be, what, twenty-
four
now? Too old. By plenty.

Edgar rounded the corner, onto Sycamore Street. His shabby bungalow greeted him. Before he could get his keys out of his pocket he heard a noise. He spun around a little unsteadily, rocking a bit on his heels. Behind him two figures stood silhouetted against the glow of the Christmas lights across the street. A tall man and a short man, both dressed in black. The tall one looked like a freak—close-cropped blond hair, clean-shaven, a little sissy looking if you asked Edgar Luna. The short one was built like a tank. One thing Edgar was sure of, they weren’t from Winterton. He’d never seen them before.

“Who the fuck are
you
?” Edgar asked.

“I am Malachi,” the tall man said.

THEY HAD MADE
the fifty-mile ride in less than one hour. They were now in the basement of an empty row house in North Philadelphia, in the center of a block of derelict row houses. There wasn’t a light for nearly a hundred feet in any direction. They had parked the van in an alleyway behind the block of houses.

Roland had carefully selected the site. These structures were set for rehabilitation soon, and he knew that as soon as the weather allowed they would be pouring concrete in these basements. One of his flock worked for the construction company that was in charge of the concrete work.

In the middle of the frigid basement room, Edgar Luna was naked, his clothes already burned, bound to an old wooden chair with duct tape. The floor was packed dirt, cold, but unfrozen. In the corner of the room, a pair of long handled shovels waited. Three kerosene lanterns lit the space.

“Tell me about Fairmount Park,” Roland said.

Luna glared at him.

“Tell me about Fairmount Park,” Roland repeated. “April 1995.”

It looked as though Edgar Luna was trying frantically to poke around his memory. There was no doubt that he had done many bad things in his life—reprehensible things for which he had known there might one day be a dark reckoning. That time had come.

“Whatever the fuck you’re talking about, what … whatever this is about, you got the wrong man. I’m innocent.”

“You are many things Mr. Luna,” Roland said. “Innocent is not one of them. Confess your sins and the Lord will show you mercy.”

“I swear I don’t know—”

“I, however, cannot.”

“You’re
crazy
.”

“Admit what you did to those girls in Fairmount Park in April 1995. The day it rained.”

“Girls?”
Edgar Luna asked.
“1995? Rain?”

“Surely you remember Dina Reyes.”

The name shook him. He remembered. “What did she tell you?”

Roland produced Dina’s letter. The sight of it made Edgar shrink.

“She liked pink, Mr. Luna. But I expect you knew that.”

“It was her mother, wasn’t it? That fucking
bitch.
What did she say?”

“Dina Reyes ate a handful of pills and ended her sad and sorrowful existence, an existence you destroyed.”

Edgar Luna suddenly seemed to realize that he would never leave this room. He struggled mightily against his bindings. The chair rocked, creaked, then fell over, crashing into a lamp. The lamp tipped and splashed kerosene onto Luna’s head, which suddenly caught fire. Flames slapped and licked up the right side of the man’s face. Luna screamed and slammed his head against the cold, packed dirt. Charles calmly walked over, struck out the fire. The acrid smell of kerosene and burned flesh and melted hair filled the confined space.

Braving the stench, Roland got close to Edgar Luna’s ear.

“How does it feel to be a captive, Mr. Luna?” he whispered. “To be at the mercy of someone? Isn’t this what you did to Dina Reyes? Brought her to the basement? Just like this?”

It was important to Roland that these men understood exactly what they’d done, experienced the moment the way their victims had. Roland went to considerable lengths to re-create the fear.

Charles righted the chair. Edgar Luna’s forehead, along with the right side of his scalp, was blistered and bubbled. A wide swath of hair was gone, replaced by a blackened, open sore.

“He shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked,” Roland began.

“You can’t fucking
do
this, man,” Edgar hysterically screamed.

Roland did not hear the words of anyone mortal. “He shall triumph over them. They shall be so utterly vanquished that their overthrow shall be final and fatal, and his deliverance complete and crowning.”

“Wait!” Luna struggled against the tape. Charles took out the lavender handkerchief, and tied it around the man’s neck. He held him from behind.

Roland Hannah set upon the man. Screams rose high into the night.

Philadelphia slept.

21

Jessica lay in bed, her eyes wide open. Vincent was enjoying the sleep of the dead, as usual. She’d never known anybody who slept more deeply than her husband. For someone who saw just about every depravity a city had to offer, every night around midnight, he reconciled himself with the world, and drifted right off to sleep.

Jessica had never been able to do that.

She couldn’t sleep, and knew why. Actually, there were two reasons. One, the image in the story Father Greg had told her kept galloping around her mind: a man being torn in half by the Sun Maiden and the sorceress.
Thanks for that one, Father Greg.

The competing image was of Kristina Jakos, sitting on the riverbank like a battered doll on a little girl’s shelf.

Twenty minutes later Jessica was at the dining room table, a mug of cocoa in front of her. She knew that chocolate contained caffeine, and that it would probably keep her up a few more hours. She also knew that chocolate contained chocolate.

She spread the Kristina Jakos crime-scene photographs on the table, put them in order, top to bottom: photographs of the road, the driveway, the front of the building, the abandoned cars, the back of the building, the slope to the riverbank, then poor Kristina herself. Looking at them top to bottom Jessica approximated the view of the scene as seen by the killer. She retraced his steps.

Had it been dark when he posed the body? It must have been. Seeing as the man who had taken Kristina’s life did not commit suicide at the crime scene, or turn himself in, he had wanted to get away with his twisted crime.

SUV? Truck? Van? A van would certainly make things easier for him.

But why Kristina? Why the odd clothing and mutilation? Why the “moon” on her stomach?

Jessica looked out the window at the ink-black night.

What kind of life is this? she wondered. She sat not fifteen feet from where her sweet little girl was sleeping, from where her beloved husband was sleeping, and she was looking at pictures of a dead woman in the middle of the night.

Still, for all the danger and ugliness Jessica encountered, she couldn’t imagine doing anything else. From the moment she’d entered the academy, all she had ever wanted to do was work homicides. And now she was. But the job began to eat you alive the moment you stepped onto the first floor of the Roundhouse.

In Philadelphia, you got a job on Monday. You worked it, chasing down witnesses, interviewing suspects, compiling forensics. Just when you started to make progress, it was Thursday and you were up on the wheel again and another body fell. You had to move on it, because if you didn’t make an arrest within forty-eight hours, there was a good chance you might never make an arrest. Or so the theory went. So you dropped what you were doing—while still keeping an ear to all the calls you had out—and worked the new case. The next thing you knew it was next Tuesday, and another bloody corpse landed at your feet.