Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (39 page)

Jessica did the math in her head, counting back the days from the discovery of Bethany Price. It didn’t fit the pattern of observance.

“The majority of the mysteries are celebratory,” Father Corrio said. “They include the Annunciation, the baptism of Jesus, the Assumption, the resurrection of Christ. It is only the Sorrowful Mysteries that deal with suffering and death.”

“And there are only five Sorrowful Mysteries, right?” Jessica asked.

“Yes,” Father Corrio said. “But keep in mind that the rosary is not universally accepted. There are objectors.”

“How so?” Jessica asked.

“Well, there are those who find the rosary unecumenical.”

“Not sure what you mean,” Byrne said.

“The rosary celebrates Mary,” Father Corrio said. “It venerates the mother of God, and some believe that the Marian character of the prayer does not glorify Christ.”

“How does that apply to what we’re facing here?”

Father Corrio shrugged. “Perhaps the man you seek does not believe in the virginal state of Mary. Perhaps he is, in his own sick way, trying to return these girls to God in such a state.”

The thought sent a shudder through Jessica. If that was his motive, then when, and why, would he ever stop?

Jessica reached into her folio, held up the photographs of the insides of Bethany Price’s palms, the numbers 7 and 16.

“Do these numbers mean anything to you?” Jessica asked.

Father Corrio slipped on his bifocals, looked at the photos. It was apparent that the wounds caused by the drill through the young girl’s hands were disturbing to him.

“It could be many things,” Father Corrio said. “Nothing comes immediately to mind.”

“I checked page seven hundred sixteen in the Oxford Annotated Bible,” Jessica said. “It was in the middle of the book of Psalms. I read the text, but nothing jumped out.”

Father Corrio nodded, but remained silent. It was clear that the book of Psalms, in this context, didn’t strike a chord within him.

“What about a year? Does the year seven sixteen have any significance in the church that you know of?” Jessica asked.

Father Corrio smiled. “I minored in English, Jessica,” he said. “I’m afraid that history was not my best subject. Outside of knowing that Vatican One was convened in 1869, I’m not much good on dates.”

Jessica went through the scribbled notes she had taken the night before. She was running out of ideas.

“Did you happen to find a scapular on this girl by any chance?” Father Corrio asked.

Byrne went through his notes. A scapular was essentially two small, square pieces of woolen cloth connected to each other by two strings or bands. It was worn in such a way that, when the bands rested on the shoulders, one segment rested in the front, while the other rested in the back. Usually, scapulars were given as a gift for the first communion—a gift set that often included a rosary, a chalice-and-host pin, and a satin bag.

“Yes,” Byrne said. “She had a scapular around her neck when she was found.”

“Is it a brown scapular?”

Byrne scanned his notes again. “Yes.”

“You might want to look closely at it,” Father Corrio said.

Quite often, scapulars were encased in clear plastic to protect them, as was the one found on Bethany Price. Her scapular had already been dusted for prints. None had been found. “Why is that, Father?”

“Every year there is a feast of the Scapular, a day devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It is the anniversary of the day the Blessed Virgin appeared to Saint Simon Stock and presented him with a monk’s scapular. She told him that whoever wore it would not suffer eternal fire.”

“I don’t understand,” Byrne said. “Why is that relevant?”

Father Corrio said: “The Feast of the Scapular is celebrated on July 16th.”

T
HE SCAPULAR FOUND ON BETHANY PRICE was indeed a brown scapular, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Byrne phoned the lab and asked if they had opened the clear plastic case. They had not.

Byrne and Jessica headed back to the Roundhouse.

“You know, the possibility exists that we might not catch this guy,” Byrne said. “He might get to his fifth victim, then crawl back into the slime forever.”

The notion had crossed Jessica’s mind. She had been trying not to think about it. “You think that might happen?”

“I hope not,” Byrne said. “But I’ve been at this a while. I just want you to be prepared for the possibility.”

The possibility did not sit well with her. If this man was not caught, she knew that, for the rest of her career in the Homicide Unit, for the rest of her time in law enforcement, she would judge every case by what she would consider a failure.

Before Jessica could respond, Byrne’s cell phone rang. He answered. Within seconds, he closed the phone, reached into the backseat for the deck strobe light. He put it on the dash and lighted it.

“What’s up?” Jessica asked.

“They opened the scapular and dusted the inside,” he said. He slammed the gas pedal to the floor. “We’ve got a print.”

T
HEY WAITED ON A BENCH outside the print lab.

There are all kinds of waiting in police work. There’s the stakeout variety, the verdict variety. There’s the type of waiting when you show up in a municipal courtroom to testify in some bullshit DUI case at nine in the morning, only to get on the stand for two minutes at three in the afternoon, just in time to start your tour at four.

But waiting for a print to come up was the best and the worst waiting. You had evidence, but the longer it took, the more likely it was that you would not get a usable match.

Byrne and Jessica tried to get comfortable. There were a number of other things they could be doing in the meantime, but they were bound and determined to do none of them. Their main objective, at the moment, was to keep both blood pressure and pulse rate down.

“Can I ask you something?” Jessica asked.

“Sure.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it, I totally understand.”

Byrne looked at her, his green eyes nearly black. She had never seen a man look quite so exhausted.

“You want to know about Luther White,” he said.

“Well. Yeah,” Jessica said. Was she that transparent? “Kinda.”

Jessica had asked around. Detectives were protective of their own. The bits and pieces she had heard added up to a pretty crazy story. She figured she’d just ask.

“What do you want to know?” Byrne asked.

Every last detail.
“Whatever you want to tell me.”

Byrne slid down on the bench a little, arranged his weight. “I had been on the job about five years or so, in plain clothes for about two. There had been a series of rapes in West Philly. The doer’s MO was to hang out in the parking lots of places like motels, hospitals, office buildings. He’d strike in the middle of the night, usually between three and four in the morning.”

Jessica vaguely remembered. She was in ninth grade, and the story scared the hell out of her and her friends.

“The doer wore a nylon stocking over his face, rubber gloves, and he always wore a condom. Never left a hair, a fiber. Not a drop of fluid. We had nothing. Eight women over a three-month period and we had zero. The only description we had, other than the guy was white and somewhere between thirty and fifty, was that he had a tattoo on the front of his neck. An elaborate tattoo of an eagle that went all the way up to the base of his jaw. We interviewed every tat parlor between Pittsburgh and Atlantic City. Nothing.

“So one night I’m out with Jimmy. We had just taken down a suspect in Old City and were still suited up. We stopped for a quick one at this place called Deuces, out by Pier Eighty-four. We were just getting ready to leave when I see that a guy at one of the tables by the door is wearing a white turtleneck, pulled high. I don’t think anything of it right away, but as I walk out the door I turn around for some reason, and I see it. The tip of a tattoo peeking out over the top of the turtleneck. An eagle’s beak. Couldn’t have been more than a half-inch, right? It was him.”

“Did he see you?”

“
Oh
yeah,” Byrne said. “So me and Jimmy just leave. We huddle outside, right by this low stone wall that’s right next to the river, figuring we’d call it in, seeing as we just had a few and we didn’t want anything to get in the way of us putting this fucker away. This is before cell phones, so Jimmy heads to the car to call for backup. I decide I’m going to go stand next to the door, figuring, if this guy tries to leave, I’ll get the drop on him. But as soon as I turn around, there he is. And he’s got this twenty-two pointed right at my heart.”

“How did he make you?”

“No idea. But without a word, without hesitation, he unloads. Fired three shots, rapid succession. I took them all in the vest, but they knocked the wind out of me. His fourth shot grazed my forehead.” At this, Byrne fingered the scar over his right eye. “I went back, over the wall, into the river. I couldn’t breathe. The slugs had cracked two ribs, so I couldn’t even
try
to swim. I just started to sink to the bottom, like I was paralyzed. The water was cold as hell.”

“What happened to White?”

“Jimmy took him down. Two to the chest.”

Jessica tried to wrap her mind around the images, the nightmare every cop has of facing down a two-time loser with a weapon.

“As I was sinking, I saw White hit the surface above me. I swear, before I went unconscious, we had a moment when were face-to-face under the water. Inches apart. It was dark, and it was freezing, but we locked eyes. We were both dying, and we knew it.”

“What happened next?”

“They fished me out, did CPR, the whole routine.”

“I heard that you . . .” For some reason Jessica found it hard to say the word.

“Drowned?”

“Well, yeah.
That
. Did you?”

“So they tell me.”

“Wow. How long were you, um . . .”

Byrne laughed. “Dead?”

“Sorry,” Jessica said. “I can safely say that I’ve never asked that question before.”

“Sixty seconds,” Byrne replied.

“Wow.”

Byrne looked over at Jessica. Her face was a press conference of questions.

Byrne smiled, asked: “You want to know if there were bright white lights and angels and golden trumpets and Roma Downey floating overhead, right?”

Jessica laughed. “I guess I do.”

“Well, there was no Roma Downey. But there was a long hallway with a door at the end. I just knew that I shouldn’t open the door. If I opened the door, I was never coming back.”

“You just knew?”

“I just knew. And for a long time, after I got back, whenever I got to a crime scene, especially the scene of a homicide, I got a . . . 
feeling
. The day after we found Deirdre Pettigrew’s body, I went back to Fairmount Park. I touched the bench in front of the bushes where she was found. I saw Pratt. I didn’t know his name, I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew it was him. I saw how
she
saw him.”

“You
saw
him?”

“Not in the visual sense. I just . . . knew.” It was clear that none of this was easy for him. “It happened a lot for a long time,” he said. “There was no explaining it. No predicting it. In fact, I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have to try and get it to stop.”

“How long were you IOD?”

“I was out for almost five months. Lots of rehab. That’s where I met my wife.”

“She was a physical therapist?”

“No, no. She was recovering from a torn Achilles tendon. I had actually met her years earlier in the old neighborhood, but we got reacquainted in the hospital. We hobbled up and down the hallways together. I’d say it was love at first Vicodin if it wasn’t such a bad joke.”

Jessica laughed anyway. “Did you ever get any kind of professional psychiatric help?”

“Oh, yeah. I did two years with the department shrink, on and off. Went through dream analysis. Even went to a few IANDS meetings.”

“IANDS?”

“International Association for Near Death Studies. Wasn’t for me.”

Jessica tried to take all this in. It was a lot. “So what’s it like now?”

“It doesn’t happen all that often these days. Kind of like a faraway TV signal. Morris Blanchard is proof that I can’t be sure anymore.”

Jessica could see that there was more to the story, but she felt as if she had pushed him enough.

“And, to answer your next question,” Byrne continued. “I can’t read minds, I can’t tell fortunes, I can’t see the future. No
Dead Zone
here. If I could see the future, believe me, I’d be at Philadelphia Park right now.”

Jessica laughed again. She was glad she had asked, but she was still a little spooked by it all. She had always been a little spooked by stories of clairvoyance and the like. When she read
The Shining
she slept with the lights on for a week.

She was just about to try one of her clumsy segues to another topic when Ike Buchanan came blasting out of the door to the print lab. His face was flushed, the veins on his neck pulsed. For the moment, his limp was gone.

“Got him,” Buchanan said, waving a computer readout.

Byrne and Jessica shot to their feet, fell into step beside him.

“Who is he?” Byrne asked.

“His name is Wilhelm Kreuz,” Buchanan said.

58

THURSDAY, 11:25 AM

A
CCORDING TO DMV RECORDS, Wilhelm Kreuz lived on Kensington Avenue. He worked as a parking lot attendant in North Philly. The strike force headed to the location in two vehicles. Four members of the SWAT team rode in a black van. Four of the six detectives on the task force followed in a department car: Byrne, Jessica, John Shepherd, and Eric Chavez.