Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (136 page)

“Well, I think one thing is obvious,” Nicci said. “Walt Brigham wasn’t a victim of some botched robbery. You don’t douse someone with gasoline and set them on fire to get their wallet.”

“So you think it was someone Walt Brigham put away?”

“I think that’s a good bet. We ran his arrests and convictions for the past fifteen years. Unfortunately, no firebugs in the group.”

“Anyone recently released from prison?”

“Not in the last six months. And I don’t see whoever did this waiting that long to get to the guy he blamed for putting them away, do you?”

No, Jessica thought. There was a high level of passion—insane as that passion might be—in what was done to Walt Brigham. “What about someone involved in his last case?” she asked.

“Doubt it. His last official case was a domestic. Wife bashed her husband with a crowbar. He’s dead, she’s in prison.”

Jessica knew what this meant. Because there were no eyewitnesses to Walt Brigham’s murder, and there was a dearth of forensics, they would have to begin at the beginning—everybody Walt Brigham had arrested, convicted, even ruffled, starting with his last case and moving backward. That narrowed the suspect pool down a few thousand.

“So, we’re off to Records?”

“I have a few more ideas before we bunker up with the paperwork,” Nicci said.

“Hit me.”

“I spoke with Walt Brigham’s widow. She said Walt kept a storage locker. If this was something personal—as in, nothing directly to do with the job—there might be something in there.”

“Anything to keep my face out of a file cabinet,” Jessica said. “How do we get in?”

Nicci held up a single key on a key ring, smiled. “I stopped by Marjorie Brigham’s house this morning.”

THE EASY MAX
Storage on Mifflin Street was a large, U-shaped, two-story facility that housed more than a hundred units of varying sizes. Some were heated, most were not. Unfortunately, Walt Brigham had not sprung for one of the heated units. It was like walking into a meat locker.

The space was about eight feet by ten feet, stacked nearly to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. The good news was that Walt Brigham was an organized man. All the boxes were of the same type and size—the kind you buy flat at office-supply stores—and most were labeled and dated.

They started at the back. There were three boxes dedicated to nothing but Christmas and birthday cards alone. Many of the cards were from Walt’s children, and as Jessica went through them she saw the years of their lives pass and, as the children got older, their grammar and penmanship improve. The teenage years were easy to spot, with just simple signatures of their names, not the gushy sentiments of childhood, as glittery handmade cards yielded to Hallmark. Another box contained only maps and travel brochures. It seemed that Walt and Marjorie Brigham were summer RV people, taking trips to Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Kentucky.

At the bottom of the box was on old piece of yellowed notebook paper. On it was a list that contained a dozen girls’ names—Melissa, Arlene, Rita, Elizabeth, Cynthia among them. They were all crossed out, except for the last one. The last name on the list was Roberta. Walt Brigham’s oldest daughter’s name was Roberta. Jessica realized what she was holding in her hand. It was a list of possible names for a young couple’s first child. She gently returned it to the box.

While Nicci looked through a few boxes of letters and household documents, Jessica sifted through a box of photographs. Weddings, birthday parties, graduations, police functions. Like always, whenever faced with rooting through the personal effects of a victim, you wanted to accrue as much information as possible, while at the same time preserving some degree of the victim’s privacy.

More boxes produced more photographs and mementos, all meticulously dated and catalogued. An incredibly young Walt Brigham at the police academy, a handsome Walt Brigham on his wedding day, dressed in a rather striking navy blue tuxedo. Pictures of Walt in uniform, Walt with his kids in Fairmount Park, Walt and Marjorie Brigham squinting at the camera on a beach somewhere, maybe Wildwood, their faces a deep pink that portended a painful sunburn that night.

What was she gleaning from all this? What she already suspected. Walt Brigham was no renegade cop. He was a family man who collected and cherished the touchstones of his life. Neither Jessica nor Nicci found anything yet to indicate why someone had so viciously taken his life.

They continued to look through the boxes of memories, interlopers in the forest of the dead.

65

The third victim found on the bank of the Schuylkill River was named Lisette Simon. She’d been forty-one, had lived with her husband in Upper Darby, had no children. She worked for a county mental-health facility in North Philadelphia.

Lisette Simon was just under forty-eight inches tall. Her husband Ruben was an attorney with a storefront legal firm in the Northeast. They would be interviewing him that afternoon.

Nick Palladino and Tony Park had returned from Norristown. No one at the Centre Theater had noticed anyone paying particular attention to Tara Grendel.

Despite the circulation and publication of her picture in all local and state media—broadcast and print alike—there was still no trace of Sa’mantha Fanning.

THE WHITEBOARD WAS
covered with photographs, notes, memos, a mosaic of disparate clues and blind alleys.

Byrne stood in front of it, as frustrated as he was impatient.

He needed his partner.

They all knew that the Brigham case was going to get political. The department needed movement on the case, and they needed it now. The City of Philadelphia could not have its high-profile police officers at risk.

There was no denying that Jessica was one of the best detectives in the unit. Byrne did not know Nicci Malone that well, but she had a good reputation, and a ton of street cred, coming out of North detectives.

Two women. In a department as politically sensitive as the PPD, having two female detectives working a case in this bright a spotlight was smart.

Besides, Byrne thought, it might take some of the media attention away from the fact that there was a compulsive killer walking the streets.

THERE WAS NOW
full agreement that the pathology of the river killings was rooted in the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. But how were the victims being selected?

Chronologically Lisette Simon had been the first victim. She had been left on the bank of the Schuylkill in the Southwest.

The second victim had been Kristina Jakos, placed on the bank of the Schuylkill in Manayunk. The victim’s amputated feet were found on the Strawberry Mansion Bridge, which spans the river.

Victim number three was Tara Grendel, abducted from a Center City parking garage, murdered, then left on the bank of the Schuylkill, in Shawmont.

Was the killer leading them upriver?

Byrne marked the three crime scenes on a map. There was a long stretch of the river between the Southwest scene and the Manayunk scene, the two sites they believed represented the first two murders chronologically.

“Why the long stretch of river between dump sites?” Bontrager asked, reading Byrne’s thoughts.

Byrne ran his hand along the crooked length of the river. “Well, we can’t be sure there
isn’t
a body in here somewhere. But my guess is that there aren’t too many places to pull over and do what he had to do without being seen. Nobody really looks at the area beneath the Platt Bridge. The Flat Rock Road scene is shielded from the expressway and the road. The Shawmont pump house is totally secluded.”

It was true. As the river passed through the city, its banks were visible from many vantage points. Especially on Kelly Drive. Nearly all year that stretch was frequented by joggers, rowers, cyclists. There were places to pull over, but the road was rarely deserted. There was always traffic.

“So he was looking for privacy,” Bontrager said.

“Exactly,” Byrne said. “And enough time.”

Bontrager sat at a computer, maneuvered his way over to Google Maps. The further the river got from the city, the more secluded were its banks.

Byrne studied the satellite map. If the killer was leading them upriver, the question remained: To where? The distance between the Shawmont pump station and the headwaters of the Schuylkill River had to be nearly one hundred miles. There were lots of places to hide a body and not be seen.

And how was he choosing his victims? Tara had been an actress. Kristina had been a dancer. There was a connection there. Both had been performers. Entertainers. But the connection ended with Lisette. Lisette was a mental-health professional.

Age?

Tara had been twenty-eight. Kristina had been twenty-four. Lisette had been forty-one. Too much of a range.

Thumbelina. The Red Shoes. The Nightingale.

Nothing tied the women together. Nothing on the surface, at least. Except the fables.

The scant information on Sa’mantha Fanning did not lead them in any obvious direction. She was nineteen years old, unmarried, had a six-month-old son named Jamie. The boy’s father was a loser named Joel Radnor. He had a short sheet—a few drug possession charges, one simple assault, nothing else. He had been in Los Angeles for the past month.

“What if our guy is some kind of stage-door Johnny?” Bontrager asked.

It had crossed Byrne’s mind, even if he knew the theater angle was a long shot. These victims had not been chosen because they’d been acquainted with each other. They had not been selected because they’d frequented the same clinic, or church, or social club. They’d been chosen because they had fit the killer’s terribly warped story. They had answered a body type, a visage, a countenance that satisfied an ideal.

“Do we know if Lisette Simon did any kind of theater?” Byrne asked.

Bontrager got to his feet. “I’ll find out.” He left the duty room as Tony Park entered with a thicket of computer printouts in hand.

“This is everyone who Lisette Simon worked with at the mental-health clinic in the past six months,” Park said.

“How many names are in there?” Byrne asked.

“Four hundred sixty-six.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He’s the only one
not
in there.”

“Let’s see if we can’t whittle that down to males eighteen to fifty for starters.”

“You got it.”

An hour later they had the list reduced to a manageable ninety-seven names. They began the mind-numbing task of running a variety of checks—PDCH, PCIC, NCIC—on each of them.

Josh Bontrager spoke to Ruben Simon. Ruben’s late wife, Lisette, had never been involved with the theater.

66

The temperature had dropped a few more degrees and the storage locker was even more like a refrigerator. Jessica’s fingers were turning blue. As awkward as it made it to work with paper, she put her leather gloves on.

The last box she looked in had some water damage. It contained a single accordion folder. Inside were damp photocopies of files taken from the murder books of victims over the past twelve years or so. Jessica opened the folder to the most recent section.