Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (18 page)

For his penance Byrne had gotten another half a dozen scathing articles out of Simon. For a year Simon had traveled with a Louisville Slugger in his car and an eye over his shoulder. Still did.

But all of that was ancient history.

There was a new wrinkle.

Simon had a pair of stringers he used from time to time, Temple University students who had the same notions about journalism that Simon had once held. They did research and the occasional stakeout, all for a pittance, usually just enough to keep them in iTunes downloads and X.

The one who had some potential, the one who could actually write, was Benedict Tsu. He called at ten after eleven.

“Simon Close.”

“It is Tsu.”

Simon wasn’t sure if it was an Asian thing or a college thing, but Benedict always called himself by his last name. “What’s up?”

“That place you asked about, the place on the waterfront?”

Tsu was talking about the dilapidated building under the Walt Whitman Bridge into which Kevin Byrne had mysteriously disappeared for a few hours earlier in the night. Simon had followed Byrne, but had to keep a discreet distance. When Simon had to leave to get to the Blue Horizon, he called Tsu and asked him to look into it. “What about it?”

“It’s called Deuces.”

“What’s Deuces?”

“It’s a crack house.”

Simon’s world began to spin. “A
crack house
?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Simon let the possibilities wash over him. The excitement was overwhelming.

“Thanks, Ben,” Simon said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Bukeqi.”

Simon clicked off, considered his good fortune.

Kevin Byrne was on the
pipe
.

Which meant that what had become a casual endeavor—following Byrne to get a story—would now become a grand obsession. Because, from time to time, Kevin Byrne had to score his drugs. Which meant that Kevin Byrne had a brand-new partner. Not a tall, sexy goddess with smoldering dark eyes and a freight-train right cross, but rather a skinny white boy from Northumberland.

A skinny white boy with a Nikon D100 camera and a Sigma 55-200mm DC zoom lens.

19

TUESDAY, 5:40 AM

J
ESSICA HUDDLED IN THE CORNER of a dank cellar, watching a young woman kneeling in prayer. The girl was about seventeen, blond, freckled, blue-eyed, and innocent.

The moonlight streaming through the small window cast brusque shadows across the rubble in the cellar, creating buttes and chasms amid the gloom.

When the girl was done praying, she sat down on the damp floor and produced a hypodermic needle and, without ceremony or preparation, stuck the needle in her arm.

“Wait!” Jessica screamed. She made her way quickly across the debris-strewn basement with relative ease, considering the shadow and the clutter. No barked shins, no stubbed toes. It was as if she floated. But by the time she reached the young woman, the young woman was already depressing the plunger.

You don’t have to do that,
Jessica said.

Yes I do,
the girl dream-replied.
You don’t understand
.

I
do
understand. You don’t need it.

But I do. There is a monster after me.

Jessica stood a few feet away from the girl. She saw that the girl was barefoot; her feet were red and raw and blistered. When Jessica looked back up—

The girl was Sophie. Or, more accurately, the young woman Sophie would become. Gone were her daughter’s roly-poly little body and chubby cheeks, replaced instead by a young woman’s curves: long legs, slender waist, a discernible bust beneath the ragged V-neck sweater with the Nazarene crest.

But it was the girl’s face that horrified Jessica. Sophie’s face was drawn and haggard, with dark violet smudges beneath her eyes.

Don’t, sweetie,
Jessica implored.
God, no
.

She looked again and saw that the girl’s hands were now bolted together and bleeding. Jessica tried to take a step forward but her feet seemed frozen to the ground, her legs leaden. She felt something at her breastbone. She looked down to see an angel pendant hanging around her neck.

Then, suddenly, a bell sounded. Loud and intrusive and insistent. It seemed to come from above. Jessica looked at the Sophie-girl. The drug was just taking hold of the girl’s nervous system, and as her eyes rolled back, her head tilted upward. Suddenly, there was no ceiling above them, no roof. Just the black sky. Jessica followed her gaze as the bell pounded through the firmament again. A sword of golden sunlight split the night clouds, catching the sterling silver of the pendant, blinding Jessica for a moment, until—

Jessica opened her eyes and sat upright, her heart rattling around in her chest. She looked at the window. Pitch black. It was the middle of the night and the phone was ringing. Only bad news made the trip at this hour.

Vincent?

Dad?

The phone rang a third time, offering no details, no comfort. She reached for it, disoriented, frightened, her hands shaking, her head still throbbing. She lifted the receiver.

“H-hello?”

“It’s Kevin.”

Kevin?
Jessica thought. Who the hell is Kevin? The only Kevin she knew was Kevin Bancroft, the weird kid who lived on Christian Street when she was growing up. Then it hit her.

Kevin.

The job.

“Yeah. Right. Okay. What’s up?”

“I think we should catch the girls at the bus stop.”

Greek. Maybe Turkish. Definitely some foreign language. She had no idea what these words meant.

“Can you hang on a sec?” she asked.

“Sure.”

Jessica sprinted to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face. The right side was still slightly swollen, but much less painful than it was last night, due to an hour of ice packs when she’d gotten home. Along with Patrick’s kiss, of course. The thought made her smile, the smile made her face hurt. It was a good hurt. She ran back to the phone, but before she could say anything, Byrne added:

“I think we’ll get more out of them there than we will at the school.”

“Sure,” Jessica replied, and she suddenly realized that he was talking about Tessa Wells’s friends.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty,” he said.

For a minute, she thought he meant twenty minutes. She glanced at the clock. Five forty. He
did
mean twenty minutes. Luckily, Paula Farinacci’s husband left for work in Camden by six, so she was up. Jessica could drop Sophie off at Paula’s and have just enough time for a shower. “Right,” Jessica said. “Okay. Great. No problem. See you then.”

She hung up, threw her legs over the side of the bed, ready for a nice, brisk nap.

Welcome to Homicide.

20

TUESDAY, 6:00 AM

B
YRNE HAD BEEN WAITING for her with a large coffee and a sesame seed bagel. The coffee was strong and hot, the bagel fresh.

Bless him.

Jessica hurried through the rain and slipped into the car, nodded a token greeting. To put it mildly, she was not a morning person, especially a six-o’clock-in-the-morning person. Her fondest hope was that she was wearing matching shoes.

They rode into the city in silence, Kevin Byrne respecting her space and waking ritual, realizing he had forced the shock of the new day upon her unceremoniously. He, on the other hand, looked wide-awake. A little ragged, but wide-eyed and alert.

Men had it
so
easy, Jessica thought. Clean shirt, shave in the car, a spritz of Binaca, a drop of Visine, ready for the day.

They made the ride to North Philly in short order. They parked near the corner of Nineteenth and Poplar. Byrne put on the radio at the half hour. The Tessa Wells story was mentioned.

With half an hour to wait, they hunkered down. Occasionally, Byrne flipped the ignition to start the wipers, the defrosters.

They tried to talk about the news, the weather, the job. The subtext kept bulling forward.

Daughters.

Tessa Wells was someone’s daughter.

This realization hardwired them both into the brutal soul of this crime. It might have been
their
child.

“S
HE’LL BE THREE NEXT MONTH,” Jessica said.

Jessica showed Byrne a picture of Sophie. He smiled. She
knew
he had a marshmallow center. “She looks like a handful.”

“Two hands,” Jessica said. “You know how it is when they’re that age. They look to you for everything.”

“Yeah.”

“You miss those days?”

“I
missed
those days,” Byrne said. “I was working double tours in those days.”

“How old is your daughter now?”

“She’s thirteen,” Byrne said.

“Uh-oh,” Jessica said.

“Uh-oh is an understatement.”

“So . . . she have a house full of Britney CDs?”

Byrne smiled again, thinly this time. “No.”

“
Oh
boy. Don’t tell me she’s into rap.”

Byrne spun his coffee a few times. “My daughter is deaf.”

“Oh my,” Jessica said, suddenly mortified. “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. Don’t be.”

“I mean . . . I just didn’t—”

“It’s okay. Really. She hates sympathy. And she’s a lot tougher than you and me combined.”

“What I meant was—”

“I know what you meant. My wife and I went through
years
of sorry. It’s a natural reaction,” Byrne said. “But to be quite honest, I’ve yet to meet a deaf person who thinks of herself as handicapped. Especially Colleen.”

Seeing as she had opened this line of questioning, Jessica figured she might as well continue. She did, gently. “Was she born deaf?”

Byrne nodded. “Yeah. It was something called Mondini dysplasia. Genetic disorder.”

Jessica’s mind turned to Sophie, dancing around the living room to some song on
Sesame Street
. Or the way Sophie would sing at the top of her lungs amid the bubbles in the tub. Like her mother, Sophie couldn’t tow a tune with a tractor, but she was earnest in the attempt. Jessica thought about her bright, healthy, beautiful little girl and considered how lucky she was.

They both fell silent. Byrne ran the wipers, the defroster. The windshield began to clear. The girls had yet not arrived at the corner. Traffic on Poplar was beginning to thicken.

“I watched her once,” Byrne said, sounding a little melancholy, as if he had not spoken of his daughter to anyone in a while. The longing was obvious. “I was supposed to pick her up at her deaf school, and I was a little early. So I pulled over to the side of the street to grab a smoke, read the paper.

“Anyway, I see this group of kids on the corner, maybe seven or eight of them. They’re twelve, thirteen years old. I’m not really paying them any mind. They’re all dressed like homeless people, right? Baggy pants, big shirts hanging out, untied sneakers. Suddenly I see Colleen standing there, leaning against the building, and it’s like I don’t know her. Like she’s some kid who kind of
resembles
Colleen.

“All of a sudden, I’m
really
interested in all the other kids. Who’s doing what, who’s holding what, who’s wearing, what, what their hands are doing, what’s in their pockets. It’s like I’m patting them all down from across the street.”

Byrne sipped his coffee, threw a glance at the corner. Still empty.

“So she’s holding her own with these older boys, smiling, yakking away in sign language, flipping her hair,” he continued. “And I’m thinking:
Jesus Christ. She’s flirting
. My little girl is flirting with these
boys
. My little girl who, just a few weeks ago, climbed into her Big Wheel and went pedaling down the street wearing her little yellow
I HAD A WILD TIME IN WILDWOOD
T-shirt is flirting with
boys
. I wanted to cap the horny little pricks right there.

“And then I watched one of them light a joint, and my fucking heart stops. I actually heard it wind down in my chest like a cheap watch. I’m ready to get out of the car with my cuffs in my hand when I realized what it would to do to Colleen, so I just watch.