Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (159 page)

“Behold the Sword Box,” Swann began, looking directly into the lens, out at the world, into the hearts and minds of those who would soon see this and thus be tasked to solve his puzzle. “And behold the lovely Odette.”

He slipped the box’s front panel into place, secured it with a quartet of thumbscrews, then turned to the table next to him, the table bearing seven gleaming swords, all keened to a razor sharpness.

Moments later he drew the first sword. In the quietude of the basement the steel sang, finding each threshold, each doorway, each memory, a silver whisper floating through a maddening maze of dreams.

| TWELVE |

J
ESSICA WALKED INTO THE DINER AT 7:30 AM.
T
HE MORNING RUSH WAS
on. She edged her way to the back, found her partner. Byrne looked up from the
Inquirer.

“Did you sleep?” Byrne asked.

“Are you kidding?” Jessica sat down, took Byrne’s coffee, started drinking it. Byrne motioned to the waitress. She brought him a fresh cup.

Jessica looked her partner over. He looked even worse than she felt. He was wearing the same shirt and tie he had worn yesterday. She wondered if he’d even made it home. She doubted it. “Got a question for you,” she said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“What the hell happened yesterday?”

Byrne shrugged. When the waitress brought his coffee, he tore open a sugar packet, dumped it in. As a rule, Kevin Byrne didn’t take sugar in his coffee. If there was one thing you learned early on about your partner in this job, it was how they took their coffee.
He must be running on fumes,
Jessica thought.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “Probably better.”

Byrne shifted in his seat, winced, closed his eyes for a moment.

“Your sciatica acting up?” Jessica asked. When Byrne had been shot in the line of duty, almost three years earlier, he had survived a brain injury, had survived a lengthy coma, but his sciatica—a compression of the sciatic nerve that caused excruciating pain in the lower back and legs—persisted. It seemed to flare up twice a year. Byrne tried his Irish macho best to play it down.

“It aches a little,” he said. “I’m good.”

Jessica knew that, where Kevin Byrne was concerned,
a little
meant it was killing him. She sipped her coffee, picked up the menu. A scan of the first page told her she could get custard-baked French toast with a side order of Philadelphia scrapple. She called the waitress over, ordered.

“Is there anyone we can reach out to in the fire department?” Jessica asked.

“I already did,” Byrne said. “Mickey Dugan. He said he’d call as soon as they had something definite. You know Mickey?”

Jessica shook her head.

“Great guy. Got two boys in the Eagles training camp.
Two.
At the
same time.
Can you believe that?”

Jessica said that she could not. On the other hand, if it wasn’t boxing—specifically women’s boxing, along with the occasional Phillies or Eagles game—she lost all interest, sports-wise. Her husband maintained a rec room full of Flyers and Sixers memorabilia, but those two sports never got under her skin for some reason. “How about that?” she said. “Two boys. Same time.
Huh.
”

“Anyway,” Byrne said, reading her disinterest. “You want to know what happened yesterday? I’ll tell you. What happened yesterday was that an old, very eccentric, very troubled woman jumped out of a window. Simple as that.”

“And lucky us, we just happened to be there at the time.”

“Lucky us.”

“So you think she made these peculiar calls to Licenses & Inspections?”

“I’m not seeing any other explanation. She must have been lying to us.”

If you were a police officer, you accepted the fact that people lied all the time. It came with the job.
Wasn’t there, don’t know him, isn’t mine, doesn’t ring a bell, can’t recall.
On the other hand, given what Laura Somerville did, the woman was clearly disturbed in ways that far outweighed lying to the police.

“Any idea why she would do that?”

“Not a one,” Byrne said. “I’ve been in this business more than twenty years, and I can spot liars 99.9 percent of the time. She had me completely fooled.”

Jessica felt the same way. Cops with any time in on the street possessed a confidence—mostly warranted, sometimes even cocky—that they could detect bullshit from a block away. It’s a little unnerving to learn you were completely wrong about someone. “It makes you wonder what else she was lying about,” Jessica added.

“Yes it does.”

“Yeah, well,” Jessica began, her thoughts ricocheting around the events of the past twenty-four hours. “I’d still love to get back up there and poke around.”

She knew that Byrne understood what she meant. He’d like to poke around Laura Somerville’s apartment, too, but today the job was Caitlin O’Riordan. She deserved their full attention.

What was most distressing for Jessica was that Caitlin O’Riordan’s murder had been recorded as just another Philadelphia homicide statistic.

The truth was, in Philadelphia, something like twenty-five percent of shooting victims had pending court cases. In the microclimate of North Philly it was probably higher. Because of the national attention to the city’s homicide rate, some people believed Philadelphia was a dangerous place. Factually, for the most part, the people doing the shooting and the people being shot tended to overlap. If you didn’t live in that small dangerous world, you were not particularly at risk.

But these were, for the most part, the handgun statistics. There was less to go on when it came to drowning victims. Especially drowning victims found on dry land. Jessica had read the most recent FBI report on crime statistics in America. Drowning as a cause of homicide was almost nonexistent.

The waitress brought Jessica’s French toast and scrapple. It was a monstrous portion. Jessica drizzled the plate with maple syrup, then artfully dusted the French toast with a generous sprinkling of sugar. She dug in. Nirvana. She’d have to remember this dish at this diner. Nothing like seven thousand calories, all sugar and cholesterol, to give you a boost.

“How can you eat that?” Byrne asked, a dour look on his face.

Jessica wiped her lips, set her napkin down, sipped her coffee. “What?”

“That … that
scrapple.
”

“It’s good. I’ve been eating it my whole life.”

“Yeah, well, do you want to know what’s in it?”

Scrapple was the absolute last step in the dismantling of a pig: foreheads, elbows, kneecaps, shins, with a little cayenne and sage thrown in for flavor. Jessica knew this, but she just didn’t need to hear at 7:30
AM.
“Absolutely not.”

“Well, suffice it to say the root word here is
scrap,
okay?”

“Point taken, Detective.” With this she sopped the last of the syrup with the last square inch of French toast, topping it with the last dollop of scrapple, then made a dramatic flourish of placing it in her mouth, chewing it with delirious delight. Byrne shook his head and went back to his wheat toast.

A few minutes later Jessica finished her coffee, grabbed the check, and asked, “Where do you want to start?”

“We never did get to recanvass Eighth Street.”

Jessica slipped out of the booth. “Let’s roll.”

T
HEY SPENT THE ENTIRE MORNING
canvassing near the Eighth Street crime scene, learning nothing new. Not much was expected. They spent the afternoon walking every inch of the building in which Caitlin O’Riordan’s body was found.

AT 7:00
PM
Byrne walked to the block of row houses across the street. The second and third floors of this building were still occupied. The aromas of frying meats and boiling vegetables reminded Byrne they had not stopped for dinner.

At the top of the stairwell he looked across the street at the corner building. The beam of Jessica’s flashlight in the gathering gloom cut across the empty space, strobing in the blackness.

Byrne scanned the street, the block. He considered the scenario when Caitlin had been brought to this terrible place. Her killer had chosen this spot well in advance. This was a special place. For some reason. It meant something to him. Most likely he had come in the middle of the night.

A few streets away a sector car’s siren suddenly burst to life. Byrne started at the noise. He hadn’t realized the street had gone so quiet, hadn’t realized the only sound was the beating of his heart.

Time to call it a night.

Byrne reached up to close the window, and the vision all but exploded in his mind. As his fingertips touched the cracked and puttied surface of the sash he knew—knew in a way with which he had been both cursed and blessed since an incident many years earlier, an attack by a homicide suspect that had left him dead for a full minute, a void in his memory that imbued him with a vague second sight—that Caitlin O’Riordan’s killer had stood in this very spot.

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 |

T
HEY SAT IN THE PARKING LOT AT THE
R
OUNDHOUSE, 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.