Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (21 page)

As a rule, task forces were organized and authorized by the big bosses in the department, and always after an assessment of the political impact of the victims. Despite all the rhetoric regarding how all homicides are equal, manpower and resources are always made more readily available when the victims are important. If someone is knocking off drug dealers or gangbangers or streetwalkers, it’s one thing. If someone is killing Catholic schoolgirls, it’s quite another. Catholics vote.

By noon a good deal of the initial legwork and preliminary lab work had been rushed through the channels. The rosaries both girls held in death were identical, available at a dozen religious article retail stores in Philadelphia. Investigators were currently compiling a customer list. The missing beads were not found at either scene.

The preliminary report from the medical examiner’s office concluded that the killer had used a carbon bit drill to bore the hole in the hands of the victims, and that the bolt used to secure their hands together was also a common item, a four-inch galvanized carriage bolt available at any Home Depot, Lowe’s, or corner hardware store.

No fingerprints were found on either victim.

The cross on Tessa Wells’s forehead was of blue chalk. The lab had not yet concluded a type. There was trace evidence of the same material on the second victim’s forehead. In addition to the small William Blake print found on Tessa Wells, there was also an object found clasped between the hands of the other victim. It was a small segment of bone, approximately three inches in length. It appeared to be very sharp, and had not yet been identified by type or species. These two facts were not given to the media.

Neither was the fact that both victims were drugged. But now there was new evidence. In addition to the midazolam, the lab had confirmed the presence of an even more insidious drug. Both victims had a drug called Pavulon in their systems, a powerful paralytic that induced paralysis in the victim but did nothing for pain.

Reporters from the
Inquirer
and
The Daily News,
as well as the local television and radio stations, had so far been cautious about calling the murders the work of a serial killer, but there was no such restraint with
The Report,
the birdcage liner published out of two cramped rooms on Sansom Street.

WHO IS KILLING THE ROSARY GIRLS?
screamed the headline on their website.

The task force met in the common room on the first floor of the Roundhouse.

There were six detectives in all. In addition to Jessica and Byrne, there was Eric Chavez, Nick Palladino, Tony Park, and John Shepherd, the latter two detectives from the Special Investigations Unit.

Tony Park was Korean American, a longtime veteran of the Major Case Squad. The Auto Unit was part of Major Case, and Jessica had worked with Tony before. He was in his midforties, quick and intuitive, a family man. She had always known he would make his way to Homicide.

John Shepherd was an all-star point guard for Villanova in the early 1980s. Denzel-handsome and just graying around the temples, at an intimidating six eight he had his conservative suits custom tailored at Boyds on Chestnut Street. Jessica had never seen him without a tie.

Whenever a task force was assembled, the effort was made to staff it with detectives who brought a unique ability to the table. John Shepherd was good “in the room,” a seasoned and skilled interrogator. Tony Park was a wizard with databases—NCIC, AFIS, ACCURINT, PCBA. Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez were good on the street. Jessica wondered what she brought to the table, hoping it was something other than her gender. She knew she was a born organizer, good with coordinating, arranging, scheduling. She hoped this would be the opportunity to prove it.

Kevin Byrne headed the task force. Even though he was clearly the right person for the job, Byrne had told Jessica that it had taken every bit of his persuasive powers to get Ike Buchanan to give it to him. Byrne knew that it wasn’t any lack of confidence in his abilities, but rather that Ike Buchanan had to think about the bigger picture, that being the possibility of another firestorm of negative press if things, God forbid, went wrong the way they had in the Morris Blanchard case.

Ike Buchanan, as supervisor, would act as liaison to the big bosses, but Byrne would run the briefings and submit the status reports.

Byrne stood at the assignment desk as the team assembled, taking any available seat in the cramped space. Jessica thought Byrne looked a little shaky, a little burned around the cuffs. She had only known him a short while, but he hadn’t struck her as the kind of cop to get rattled in a situation like this. It had to be something else. He looked like a haunted man.

“We have more than thirty sets of partial prints from the Tessa Wells crime scene, none from the Bartram site,” Byrne began. “No hits yet. Neither victim has yielded any DNA in the form of semen or blood or saliva.”

As he spoke, he placed pictures on the white board behind him. “The underlying signature here is a Catholic schoolgirl being taken right off the street. The killer puts a galvanized-steel bolt and nut through a drilled hole in the center of their hands. He is using a thick nylon thread—probably the sort used in sail making—and is sewing shut their vaginas. He is leaving a mark, in the shape of a cross, on their foreheads, made of a blue chalk. Both victims died of a broken neck.

“The first victim found was Tessa Wells. Her body was discovered in the basement of an abandoned house on Eighth and Jefferson. The second victim found, in a field at Bartram Gardens, had been dead for at least four days. In both instances, the doer wore nonporous gloves.

“Both victims were drugged with a short-acting benzodiazepine called midazolam, which is similar in effect to Rohypnol. In addition, there was a good amount of a drug called Pavulon. We have someone looking into the street availability of Pavulon now.”

“What does this Pavulon do?” Park asked.

Byrne scanned the ME’s report. “Pavulon is a paralytic. It produces skeletal muscle paralysis. Unfortunately, according to the report, for the victim, it has no effect at all on pain threshold.”

“So our boy stabbed and plunged with this midazolam, then injected the Pavulon after the victims were sedated,” John Shepherd said.

“That’s probably how it happened.”

“How available are these drugs?” Jessica asked.

“It seems that this Pavulon’s been around for a while,” Byrne said. “The background report says that it was used in a whole series of animal experiments. In the experiments, researchers thought that because the animal couldn’t move, it wasn’t in pain. They didn’t give them any analgesic or hypnotic. Turns out the animals were in agony. It seems the role of drugs like Pavulon in torture are well known by the NSA/CIA. The amount of psychic horror you could introduce is about as extreme as it gets.”

The implications of what Byrne was saying began to sink in, and it was chilling. Tessa Wells felt everything her killer was doing to her, but could not move.

“There is some street availability of Pavulon, but I think we need to look inside the medical community for a connection,” Byrne said. “Hospital workers, doctors, nurses, pharmacists.”

Byrne taped a pair of photos on the board.

“Our doer is also leaving an object on each victim,” he continued. “In the case of the first victim we found a small piece of bone. In the case of Tessa Wells, a small reproduction of a painting by William Blake.”

Byrne pointed to the two photos on the board, the images of the rosaries.

“The rosary found on the first victim had one set of ten beads—called a decade—missing. The typical rosary has five decades. Tessa Wells’s rosary had two decades missing. As much as we don’t want to do the math here, I think it’s obvious what’s happening. We have to shut this bad actor down, people.”

Byrne leaned against the wall, turned to Eric Chavez. Chavez was the primary on the Bartram Gardens homicide.

Chavez stood, flipped open his notebook, began. “The Bartram victim’s name was Nicole Taylor, seventeen, late of Callowhill Street in the Fairmount section. She was a student at Regina High School on Broad and CB Moore Avenue.

“The preliminary report from the ME’s office is that the cause of death was identical to Tessa Wells, that being a broken neck. As to the other signatures, which were identical as well, we’re running them through VICAP now. We’ll know about the blue chalky material on Tessa Wells’s forehead today. There were only trace amounts on Nicole’s forehead, due to exposure.

“The only recent bruising to the body was on Nicole’s left palm.” Chavez pointed to a photo taped to the white board, a close-up of Nicole’s left hand. “These cuts were made by pressure from her fingernails. Traces of her nail polish were found in the grooves.” Jessica looked at the photo, subconsciously digging her short fingernails into the fleshy part of her hand. There appeared to be half a dozen crescent-shaped indentations on Nicole’s palm, in no discernible pattern.

Jessica imagined the girl clenching her fist in fear. She banished the image. It was not the time for rage.

Eric Chavez proceeded to rebuild Nicole Taylor’s last day.

Nicole left her apartment building on Callowhill at approximately seven twenty on Thursday morning. She walked alone down Broad Street to Regina High School. She attended all her classes, then had lunch with her friend, Domini Dawson, in the cafeteria. At two twenty she left the school, walking south on Broad. She stopped in at the Hole World body-piercing salon. There, she looked at some jewelry. According to the owner, Irina Kaminsky, Nicole seemed happy, even chattier than usual. Ms. Kaminsky had done all of Nicole’s piercings and said that Nicole had her eye on a ruby nose stud, and was saving for it.

From the salon, Nicole continued up Broad Street to Girard Avenue, then over to Eighteenth Street, entering St. Joseph’s Hospital, where her mother worked as a housekeeping supervisor. Sharon Taylor told the detectives that her daughter was in particularly good spirits because one of her favorite musical groups, Sisters of Mercy, was playing the Trocadero Theatre on Friday night, and she had tickets to see them.

Mother and daughter shared a fruit cup in the cafeteria. They talked about the wedding of one of Nicole’s cousins, which was coming up in June, and the necessity of Nicole to “look like a lady.” It was an ongoing battle between the two, due to Nicole’s penchant for a Goth appearance.

Nicole kissed her mother, then left the hospital at approximately four o’clock, via the Girard Avenue exit.

At that point, Nicole Theresa Taylor simply vanished.

The next time anyone saw her, as far as the investigation could determine, was when the security guard at Bartram Gardens found her in the field of daffodils nearly four days later. Canvassing the area near the hospital was ongoing.

“Did her mother report her missing?” Jessica asked.

Chavez flipped through his notes. “The call came in at one twenty on Friday morning.”

“No one saw her after she walked out of the hospital?”

“No one,” Chavez said. “But there are surveillance cameras on the entrances and parking lot. The tapes are on the way here.”

“Boyfriends?” Shepherd asked.

“According to Sharon Taylor, her daughter had no current boyfriend,” Chavez said.

“What about her father?”

“Mr. Donald P. Taylor is a long-haul trucker, currently somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe.

“As soon as we’re done here, we’re going to visit the school and see if we can get a list of her circle of friends,” Chavez added.

There were no more immediate questions. Byrne walked forward.

“Most of you know Charlotte Summers,” Byrne said. “To those of you who don’t, Dr. Summers is a professor of criminal psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. From time to time she consults with the department in the area of profiling.”

Jessica knew Charlotte Summers by reputation only. Her most celebrated case had been the dead-on profiling of Floyd Lee Castle, a psychopath who had preyed upon prostitutes in and around Camden during the summer of 2001.

The fact that Charlotte Summers was already front and center told Jessica that this investigation had greatly broadened in the past few hours, and it might only be a matter of time until the FBI was called in to either assist with manpower or provide assistance in the forensic investigation. Everyone in the room wanted to get a solid lead before the suits showed up and took credit for everything.

Charlotte Summers stood and walked to the white board. In her late forties, she was elfin and slender, with pale blue eyes, a bobbed haircut. She wore a tasteful chalk-stripe suit, lavender silk blouse. “I know the temptation here is to assume that whoever we are looking for is a religious zealot of some sort,” Summers said. “There is no reason to think he isn’t. With one caveat. The inclination to think of zealots as impulsive or reckless is incorrect. This is a highly organized killer.

“Here’s what we know: He is taking his victims right off the street, holding them for a while, then taking them to a place where he kills them. These are high-risk abductions. Broad daylight, public places. There is no evidence of ligature bruising on their wrists or ankles.

“Wherever he takes them initially, he is not restraining or shackling them. Both victims were given a dose of midazolam, as well as the paralytic that facilitated the vaginal sewing. The sewing is being done premortem, so it’s clear that he wants them to be aware of what is happening to them. And to feel it.”

“What’s the significance of the hands?” Nick Palladino asked.

“Perhaps he is posing them to match some religious iconography. Some painting or sculpture on which he is fixated. The bolt might indicate an obsession with the stigmata, or the crucifixion itself. Whatever the significance, these specific acts have meaning. Usually, if you want someone dead, you walk up to them and strangle them or shoot them. The fact that our subject takes the time to do these things is, in and of itself, noteworthy.”

Byrne threw a glance at Jessica, which she read loud and clear. He wanted her to look into the religious symbol angle. She made a note.