Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (13 page)

The crown sits in the bag at my feet, and although I am not a fan of irony—irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves, according to Karl Kraus—it is no small mockery that the bag is from Bailey Banks & Biddle.

Cassiodorus believed the crown of thorns was placed upon Jesus’s head in order that all the thorns of the world might be gathered together and broken, but I don’t believe that to be true. The crown for Bethany is anything but broken.

Bethany Price gets out of school at two twenty. Some days she stops at a Dunkin’ Donuts for a hot chocolate and a cruller, sitting in a booth, reading a book by Pat Ballard or Lynne Murray, novelists who specialize in romances featuring larger women.

Bethany is heavier than the other girls, you see, and terribly self-conscious about it. She buys her Zaftique and Junonia brand items on the Internet, still uncomfortable shopping in the plus-size departments at Macy’s and Nordstrom, lest she be seen by her classmates. Unlike some of her thinner friends, she does not try to shorten the hem of her school uniform skirt.

It has been said that vanity blossoms but bears no fruit. Perhaps, but my girls sit at the school of Mary and therefore, despite their sins, will receive abundant grace.

Bethany does not know it, but she is perfect just the way she is.

Perfect.

Except for one thing.

And I will correct that.

11

MONDAY, 3:00 PM

T
HEY SPENT THE AFTERNOON recanvassing the route that Tessa Wells had walked to get to her bus stop in the morning. While a few of the houses yielded no response to their knocks, they spoke to a dozen people who were familiar with the Catholic schoolgirls who caught the bus on the corner. None recalled anything out of the ordinary on Friday, or any other day for that matter.

Then they caught a small break. As it often does, it came at the last stop. This time, at a ramshackle row house with olive-green awnings and a grimy brass door knocker in the shape of a moose head. The house was less than half a block from where Tessa Wells caught her school bus.

Byrne approached the door. Jessica hung back. After half a dozen knocks, they were about to move on when the door cracked an inch.

“Ain’t buying nothin’,” a man’s thin voice offered.

“Ain’t selling.” Byrne showed the man his badge.

“Whatcha want?”

“For starters, I want you to open the door more than an inch,” Byrne replied, as diplomatically as possible when one is on one’s fiftieth interview of the day.

The man closed the door, unhooked the chain, then opened it wide. He was in his seventies, dressed in plaid pajama bottoms and a garish mauve smoking jacket that may have been fashionable sometime during the Eisenhower administration. He wore unlaced broughams on his feet, no socks. His name was Charles Noone.

“We’re talking to everyone in the neighborhood, sir. Did you happen to see this girl on Friday?”

Byrne proffered a photograph of Tessa Wells, a copy of her high school portrait. The man fished a pair of off-the-rack bifocals out of his jacket pocket, then studied the photo for a few moments, adjusting his glasses up and down, back and forth. Jessica could see the price sticker still on the lower part of the right lens.

“Yeah. I seen her,” Noone said.

“Where?”

“She walked to the corner like every other day.”

“Where did you see her?”

The man pointed to the sidewalk, then swept a bony forefinger left to right. “She come up the street like always. I remember her because she always looks like she’s off somewheres.”

“Off?”

“Yeah. You know. Like off somewheres on her own planet. Eyes down, thinkin’ about stuff.”

“What else do you remember?” Byrne asked.

“Well, she stopped for a little while right in front of the window. Right about where that young lady is standing.”

Noone pointed to where Jessica stood.

“How long was she there?”

“Didn’t time her.”

Byrne took a deep breath, exhaled, his patience walking a tightrope, no net. “Approximately.”

“Dunno,” Noone said. He looked at the ceiling, eyes closed. Jessica noted that his fingers twitched. It appeared that Charles Noone was counting. If the number was more than ten, she wondered if he would be taking off his shoes. He looked back at Byrne. “Twenty seconds, maybe.”

“What did she do?”

“Do?”

“While she was in front of your house. What did she do?”

“She didn’t
do
nothin’.”

“She just stood there?”

“Well, she was lookin’ up the street at something. No, not exactly up the
street
. More like at the driveway next to the house.” Charles Noone pointed to his right, at the driveway that separated his house from the tavern on the corner.

“Just looking?”

“Yeah. Like she seen something interesting. Like she seen somebody she knows. She blushed, like. You know how young girls are.”

“Not really,” Byrne said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

At this, all body language changed, affected those little shifts that tell the parties involved they have entered a new phase of the conversation. Noone stepped back half an inch and tied the sash on his smoking jacket a little tighter, his shoulders stiffening slightly. Byrne shifted his weight onto his right foot, peered past the man into the gloom of his living room.

“I’m just saying,” Noone said. “She just kinda went red for a second is all.”

Byrne held the man’s gaze until the man had to look away. Jessica had only known Kevin Byrne for a few hours, but already she had seen the cold green fire of those eyes. Byrne moved on. Charles Noone wasn’t their man. “Did she say anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Noone replied, a new measure of respect in his voice.

“Did you see anybody in that driveway?”

“No, sir,” the man said. “I don’t have no window over there. Besides, it’s none of my business.”

Yeah, right,
Jessica thought.
Want to come down to the Roundhouse and explain why you watch young girls walk to school every day?

Byrne gave the man a card. Charles Noone promised to call if he remembered anything.

The building next to Noone’s house was an abandoned tavern called the Five Aces, a square, one-story brick-and-mortar blot on the cityscape that offered a driveway to both Nineteenth Street and Poplar Avenue.

They knocked on the door to the Five Aces, but there was no response. The building was boarded and tagged five sentiments deep in graffiti. They checked the doors and windows, all of which were well nailed and bolted from the outside. Whatever happened to Tessa had not happened in this building.

They stood in the driveway and looked up and down the street, as well as across the street. There were two row houses with a clear view of the driveway. They canvassed both. Neither tenant recalled seeing Tessa Wells.

On the way back to the Roundhouse, Jessica assembled the puzzle of Tessa Wells’s last morning.

At approximately six fifty on Friday morning, Tessa Wells left her house, walking to the bus stop. The route she took was the one she took always—down Twentieth to Poplar, over a block, then crossing to the other side of the street. At about 7:00
AM
she was seen in front of a row house at Nineteenth and Poplar, where she hesitated for a short while, perhaps seeing someone she knew in the driveway to a long-shuttered tavern.

On most mornings she met her friends from Nazarene. At about five minutes after seven, the bus would pick them up and take them to school.

But Friday morning, Tessa Wells did not meet with her friends. Friday morning, Tessa simply vanished.

Approximately seventy-two hours later her body was found in an abandoned row house in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, her neck broken, her hands mutilated, her body embracing a mockery of a Roman column.

Who had been in that driveway?

B
ACK AT THE ROUNDHOUSE, Byrne ran an NCIC and PCIC check on everyone they had encountered. Everyone of interest, that is. Frank Wells, DeJohn Withers, Brian Parkhurst, Charles Noone, Sean Brennan. The National Crime Information Center is a computerized index of criminal justice information available to federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies. The Philadelphia Crime Information Center was the local version.

Only Dr. Brian Parkhurst yielded results.

At the end of their tour they met with Ike Buchanan to give him a status report.

“Guess who has a sheet?” Byrne asked.

For some reason, Jessica didn’t have to give it too much thought. “Dr. Cologne?” she replied.

“You got it,” Byrne said. “Brian Allan Parkhurst,” he began, reading from the computer printout. “Thirty-five years old, single, currently residing on Larchwood Street in the Garden Court area. Got his BS at John Carroll University in Ohio, his MD at Penn.”

“What are the priors?” Buchanan asked. “Jaywalking?”

“You ready for this? Eight years ago he was charged with kidnapping. But it was no-billed.”

“Kidnapping?” Buchanan asked, a little incredulous.

“He was a counselor at a high school and it turns out he was having an affair with one of the seniors. They went away for a weekend without telling the girl’s parents, the parents called the police, and Dr. Parkhurst was picked up.”

“Why was it no-billed?”

“Lucky for the good doctor, the girl turned eighteen the day before they left, and claimed that she went along willingly. The DA had to drop all charges.”

“And where did this happen?” Buchanan asked.

“In Ohio. The Beaumont School.”

“What is the Beaumont School?”

“A Catholic girls school.”

Buchanan looked at Jessica, then at Byrne. He knew what they both were thinking.

“Let’s tread lightly on this,” Buchanan said. “Dating young girls is a long way from what was done to Tessa Wells. This is going to be a high-profile case, and I don’t want Monsignor Brass Balls up my ass for harassment.”

Buchanan was referring to Monsignor Terry Pacek, the very vocal, very telegenic, some would say militant spokesman for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Pacek oversaw all media relations concerning Philadelphia’s Catholic churches and schools. He had butted heads with the department many times during the Catholic priest sex scandal in 2002, usually coming out on top in the public relations battles. You didn’t want to go to war with Terry Pacek unless you had a full quiver.

Before Byrne could press the issue of shadowing Brian Parkhurst, his phone rang. It was Tom Weyrich.

“What’s up?” Byrne asked.

Weyrich said: “There’s something you better see.”

T
HE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE was a gray monolith on University Avenue. Of the six thousand or so cases of death that were reported in Philadelphia every year, nearly half required a postmortem, and all were performed in this building.

Byrne and Jessica entered the main autopsy theater at just after six o’clock. Tom Weyrich wore his apron and a look of deep concern. Tessa Wells was laid out on one of the stainless steel tables, her skin a pallid gray, the powder blue sheet pulled up to her shoulders.

“I’m ruling this a homicide,” Weyrich said, stating the obvious. “Spinal shock due to a transected cord.” Weyrich slipped an X-ray into a light board. “The transection occurred between C5 and C6.”

His initial assessment had been correct. Tessa Wells had died from a broken neck.

“At the scene?” Byrne asked.

“At the scene,” Weyrich said.

“Any bruising?” Byrne asked.

Weyrich returned to the body and indicated the two small contusions on Tessa Wells’s neck.

“This is where he grabbed her, then snapped her head to the right.”

“Anything usable?”

Weyrich shook his head. “The doer wore latex gloves.”

“What about the cross on her forehead?” The blue, chalky material on Tessa’s forehead was faint, but still visible.

“I’ve swabbed it,” Weyrich said. “It’s at the lab.”

“Any signs of a struggle? Defensive wounds?”

“None,” Weyrich said.

Byrne considered this. “If she was alive when she was brought into that basement, why was there no sign of a fight?” he asked. “Why weren’t her legs and thighs covered with cuts?”

“We found a small quantity of midazolam in her system.”

“What is that?” Byrne asked.

“Midazolam is similar to Rohypnol. We’re starting to see it show up on the streets more and more these days because it’s still colorless and odorless.”

Jessica knew, through Vincent, that the use of Rohypnol as a date rape drug was beginning to slack off due to the fact that it was now being formulated to turn blue when dropped into liquids, thereby tipping off the unsuspecting prey. But leave it to science to replace one horror with another.

“So you’re saying our doer slipped this midazolam into a drink?”

Weyrich shook his head. He lifted the hair on the right side of Tessa Wells’s neck. There was a small puncture wound. “She was injected with it. Small-bore needle.”