Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (174 page)

Jessica glanced at Byrne, wondering if they would spend the rest of the day driving around Camden in ninety-degree heat, looking for a phantom.

“You’re saying you know where we can find your sister right now?” Jessica asked.

“Absolutely,” Iggy said. He smiled. Jessica immediately wished he hadn’t. In addition to the five-car pileup that was his dental work, she caught a blast of his breath: a combo of menthol cigarettes and deep fried hush puppies. “She’s standing right behind you.”

| THIRTY-NINE |

F
RANCESCA
S
ANZWAS THE GIRL THEY HAD SEEN AT THE FRONT COUNTER
. Standing closer to her, Jessica could now see she was not a mid-teenager, but rather eighteen or so. Coral lipstick, blue eye shadow. Street pretty. She was also four or five months pregnant.

Jessica told the young woman why they were there, giving her the bare minimum of details. Jessica then showed her a picture of Caitlin O’Riordan. While Byrne called in a request for Francesca Sanz’s wants and warrants, Jessica and the young woman sat across from each other in a booth.

“Have you ever met this girl?” Jessica asked.

Francesca scrutinized the photo for a few moments. “Yeah. I met her.”

“How do you know her?”

Francesca chipped at a nail. “We were friends.”

“You mean school friends? She was from the neighborhood? Something like that?”

“Nah. Not like that.”

Francesca did not elaborate. Jessica pressed. “Then like
what
?”

A hesitation. “We met at the train station.”

“Here in Camden?”

“Nah,” she said. “In Philly. That real big one.”

“Thirtieth Street?”

“Yeah.”

“When was this?”

“I don’t know. A couple of months ago, I guess.”

“A couple?”

“Yeah,” she said. Jessica noticed that the girl had a tattoo on her right wrist, a tattoo of a white dove. “You know. A couple. Maybe more.”

“I need you to be a little more specific about this, Francesca. It’s very important. Was it June? April?”

Silence.

“Could it have been May?”

“Yeah,” Francesca said. “You know. It could have been.” She did a little air math—counting something with her fingers in front of her face. “Yeah. May sounds right.”

“So you’re saying you met her at the Thirtieth Street station in May of this year?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Jessica said. “Why were you at the train station? Were you going somewhere, coming from somewhere?”

Francesca brewed an answer. “I was just getting something to eat.”

“Do you have friends in that part of Philly? Family?”

“No,” she said. “Not really.”

“So, let me get this straight,” Jessica said. “You went down to the river, crossed the Ben Franklin Bridge, made your way all the way across the city of Philadelphia, thirty or so blocks, just to get a hoagie and some Boardwalk fries? Is this what you’re saying?”

Francesca nodded, but she would not make eye contact with Jessica. “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth would be good.”

Another few seconds. Francesca tapped her long nails on the scuffed Formica. Finally: “I was on the street, okay?”

“You ran away from home?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Jessica said. She took a moment, giving the girl some space. “I’m not judging, I’m asking.”

“And I was using. I don’t do it no more, ’cause of the baby. But I had heard that kids used to hang around the station.”

“Runaways?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I figured I could hook up.”

Jessica put her notebook down. Francesca was starting to open up, and a cop making notes was intimidating. “Can I ask why you ran away from home?”

Francesca laughed a wintry laugh. She worried the edge of a table menu, peeling back the plastic. “I don’t know. Why does anyone run away?”

“There are a lot of possibilities,” Jessica said, knowing that there were really only a handful.

“My mother, right? My mother is
loca.
To this
day.
Her and her pipehead boyfriends. That house is hell. She found out I was pregnant and she hit me.”

“You were abused?”

Another laugh. This one laced with irony. “I’m from East Camden, okay? I was
born
abused.”

Jessica tapped the photograph of Caitlin. “Did your brother know her?”

“That girl? No. At least, I don’t think he did. I hope not.”

“You hope not? Why do you say that?”

“You came here to talk to him, so I figure you know his record, right?”

“We do.”

“So you know what I’m talking about.”

“Okay,” Jessica said, trudging on. “So tell me, how did this girl come to be in possession of this magazine cover?”

Francesca leaned back, crossed her arms, resting them on her swelling belly. Defensive, now. “I was reading the magazine, that’s all. We started talking. She said she decided to go home. She kinda talked me into it, too. So I wrote down my number and gave it to her. I thought maybe we could talk sometime.”

Jessica tapped the magazine cover. “This is your number?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened after that?”

“What happened? Nothing. She just walked out.”

“And you never saw her again?”

Francesca looked out the window. In this light, Jessica saw her as a middle-aged woman, a woman with all her bad decisions behind her. “I saw her outside.”

“Outside the station?”

“Yeah. I called a friend of mine and he came to pick me up. On my way out I saw her. She was talking to a well-dressed man.”

“A man? White, black?”

“White.”

“Well-dressed how?”

“Not like in a suit, but nice. Expensive.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Not really. He had his back to me. It was dark.”

“Did you see her get into a car or on a bus with this man?”

“Yeah. She got into his car. I thought maybe he was her father.”

“Do you remember what kind of car?”

“No. Sorry.”

“After that day at the Thirtieth Street station, did you ever see this girl again?”

Francesca thought about this, weighing her answer. “No,” she said. “I never saw her again.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne. He shook his head. No questions. She clicked her pen, put it away. They were done. For now. “We may need to talk to you again.”

A shrug. “I’ll be here.”

Jessica started to pack up to leave. “When are you due?”

Francesca beamed. “They tell me December twentieth.”

Jessica felt a pang of envy. A Christmas baby. Was there anything better than a Christmas baby? She and Vincent had been trying to get pregnant for the past year or so. There was a close call the previous winter, but no baby. “Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds in silence, two women at different ends of everything. Except motherhood.

Jessica took out a business card, handed it to the young woman. “If you think of anything else that might help, please give me a call.”

Francesca took the card, stood—with no small amount of difficulty—and made her way toward the ladies’ restroom door. At the door Francesca stopped, turned. “That girl?”

“What about her?”

A grave look veiled Francesca’s young face, a weariness far older than her years. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Jessica could find no reason not to tell the truth. “Yes.”

Francesca chipped at another nail for a moment. “Could you tell her family something for me?”

“Sure.”

“Tell them … tell them I’m sorry for their grief.” Francesca placed a hand on her belly, a gesture of defiance to this angel of death who walked the streets, a gesture of defense. “Tell them it’s not their fault.”

“I will.”

Francesca nodded, perhaps thinking about the past, the future, realizing she had only the present. Without another word, she opened the door and stepped through.

I
GGY
S
ANZ WAS NOT OUT
of the woods yet, but whatever enthusiasm the detectives had on the way over the Ben Franklin Bridge had waned considerably by the time they made their way back. He had no real violence on his sheet. Both detectives were reasonably sure that Ignacio was telling the truth, perhaps for the first time in his life. He may have been a creep and a lowlife, but he was not a killer.

They drove back to Philly.

| FORTY |

F
OUR DETECTIVES MET IN THE DUTY ROOM OF THE HOMICIDE UNIT
. The second tour had started a few hours earlier, and the last-out detectives had to find somewhere to talk. Desks in the unit were shared—you were lucky to get a drawer in a file cabinet these days. That cop-show myth about how every gold-badge detective had their own desk with a cheap vase with a flower in it and two or three framed photos of their kids was just that, a myth. The reality was, once a tour ended, the next group of detectives took over the desks, and if you were still working you had to find somewhere else fast. Theoretically, every detective cared about every other detective’s case, but Roundhouse reality was all about geography.

If it’s my tour, my ass is entitled to the real estate.

There was no whiteboard, no chalkboard. Just four detectives crammed into one of the alcoves off the main hallway. A dozen photographs graced one of the desks, a desk hastily cleared of coffee cups, éclairs, muffins.

Jessica, Byrne, Josh Bontrager, and Josh’s partner Andre Curtis.

Every homicide unit in the country had a detective who wore hats—homburgs, porkpies, Borsalinos—and Dre Curtis was PPD Homicide’s resident lid man. Finding the right hat for his mood was a ritual with him, but he only wore his hat in the elevator and corridors, never in the office. Jessica had once watched him take ten minutes to get the brim right on his beloved grey Rosellini Luauro fedora.

Josh Bontrager was probably partnered with Dre Curtis for no other reason than that they could not have been more different. A kid who had grown up Amish in rural Pennsylvania, and a smooth-talking homeboy, a former gangbanger, from the Richard Allen Homes in North Philly. So far, they had been an effective team.

Byrne let everyone settle in. He got their attention, then recapped both cases, including their visit to Laura Somerville’s apartment, and her suicide, and their visit with Iggy Sanz.

“Do we have any forensics tying the two victims together?” Dre Curtis asked.

“We do not,” Byrne said. “Not yet. But we just got the preliminary DNA results back on the remains found on Second Street. The heart in the specimen jar belonged to Monica Renzi.”

Byrne held up a document. It was the activity log from the Caitlin O’Riordan file.

“There are three interviews missing from the O’Riordan binder. These interviews were conducted by Detective Roarke on May third. We don’t have full names on these witnesses, just their street names—Daria, Govinda, and Starlight. It’s not much, but it’s an entry point.”

“What about the detective’s notes?” Bontrager asked.

“Missing,” Byrne said. “But just the notes for these three. The interviews are logged on the activity sheet, but there’s no paper for them.” He placed the activity log back into the binder. “All the runaway shelters in Philly have been notified and briefed.”

Runaways
from
Philadelphia were handled by the divisional detectives. They were never called runaways officially. They were always referred to as missing persons. When a runaway was missing from another city, and it was reported to the police there, the information went on NCIC. Sometimes the information was posted to the FBI website.

“Detective Park is collating FBI sheets on active runaways over the last year from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Ohio. He is also assembling reports of any DOA Jane Does from the past three years between the ages of twelve and twenty.”

Byrne pulled up a city map on the computer screen. “Let’s go where runaways congregate.” he said. “The bus station, the train station, the malls, the parks, South Street. Let’s make sure we hit Penn Treaty Park.”

Penn Treaty Park, where William Penn signed a peace treaty with the chief of the Lenape clan, was a small park on the western bank of the Delaware River in Fishtown. It was somewhat secluded, and therefore a popular destination for runaways and drug transactions.

“Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that the kids who were on the streets six months ago have moved on or have gone home, but we all know there’s a network out there. Somebody saw these girls. They came into town and they never left.” Byrne looked up. “Any questions?”

No one spoke.

“We meet downstairs in an hour.”

| FORTY-ONE |

L
ILLY HAD SPENT THE NIGHT AT A CHEAP, NOISY PLACE THAT WAS REALLY
nothing more than a hostel. It was only fifty dollars. A chunk of money to her, but not to her wallet, a wallet recently fattened by Mr. Mushroom Teeth.

She was out of bed at 6:30
AM
, courtesy of the traffic noise and the rolling boom boxes. Didn’t this place ever
sleep
? She supposed not.

Welcome to the road, Lilly.

T
HE GIRL FROM
W
ISCONSIN
had heavy metalwork in her lips, her nose, and ears. Her name was Tatiana. Or so she said. She had a foreign accent, so maybe it was her real name after all. She was hefty in the upper body, but had nice legs, legs wrapped in thick black tights.

They were all sitting in the back of a tricked-out Escalade. Lilly had met them near Reading Terminal Market. They asked her if she wanted to get high.

Duh.

“It was like God sneezed, grabbed a tissue with me in it, and threw us both away,” Tatiana said.

They all looked at each other, four pairs of eyes meeting for a moment. They’d all had experience with really religious types. If you didn’t buy in, you tolerated, nodding your head, agreeing when it was possible. No one really knew what the hell Tatiana was talking about.

After leaving the market they drove around the city for about an hour. The driver was a young Jamaican guy named Niles. He had amazing pot. Two-toke. Lilly was flying.