Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (47 page)

“Bottom of the basement stairs,” she said, resigned. “There’s a flashlight on the dining room table. But don’t think that we—”

“Mommy!” from upstairs.

Patrick took off his raincoat. “I’ll check the panel, then I’m gone. I promise.”

Patrick grabbed the flashlight and headed to the basement.

Jessica shuffled her way to the steps in the sudden darkness. She headed upstairs, entered Sophie’s room.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Jessica said, sitting on the edge of the bed. Sophie’s face looked tiny and round and frightened in the gloom. “Do you want to come downstairs with Mommy?”

Sophie shook her head.

“You sure?”

Sophie nodded. “Is Daddy here?”

“No, honey,” Jessica said, her heart sinking. “Mommy’s . . . Mommy’s going to get some candles, okay? You like candles.”

Sophie nodded again.

Jessica left the bedroom. She opened the linen closet next to the bathroom, felt her way through the box that held the hotel soaps and sample shampoos and conditioners. She remembered when she used to take long, luxurious bubble baths with scented candles scattered around the bathroom, back in the stone age of her marriage. Sometimes Vincent would join her. Somehow it seemed like someone else’s life at the moment. She found a pair of sandalwood candles. She took them out of the box, returned to Sophie’s room.

Of course, there were no matches.

“I’ll be right back.”

She went downstairs to the kitchen, her eyes somewhat adjusted to the dark. She rummaged in the junk drawer for some book matches. She found a pack. Matches from her wedding. She could feel the gold embossed
JESSICA AND VINCENT
on the glossy cover. Just what she needed. If she believed in such things, she might imagine that there was a conspiracy afoot to drag her into some deep depression. She turned to head back upstairs when there was a slash of lightning and the sound of shattering glass.

She jumped at the impact. A branch had finally snapped off the dying maple next to the house and smashed in the window in the back door.

“Oh, this just gets better and better,” Jessica said. The rain swept into the kitchen. There was broken glass everywhere. “Son of a
bitch
.”

She got out a plastic trash bag from under the sink and some pushpins from the kitchen corkboard. Fighting the wind and gusting rain, she tacked the bag around the opening in the door, trying not to cut herself on the shards that remained.

What the hell was next?

She looked down the stairs into the basement, saw the Maglite beam dancing about the gloom.

She grabbed the matches and headed into the dining room. She looked through the drawers in the hutch, found a variety of candles. She lit half a dozen or so, placing them around the dining room and the living room. She headed back upstairs and lit the two candles in Sophie’s room.

“Better?” she asked.

“Better,” Sophie said.

Jessica reached out, dried Sophie’s cheeks. “The lights will be on in a little while. Okay?”

Sophie nodded, thoroughly unconvinced.

Jessica looked around the room. The candles did a fairly good job of exorcising the shadow monsters. She tweaked Sophie’s nose, got a minor giggle. She just got to the top of the stairs when the phone rang.

Jessica stepped into her bedroom, answered.

“Hello?”

She was met with an unearthly howl and hiss. Through it, barely: “It’s John Shepherd.”

He sounded as if he was on the moon. “I can barely hear you. What’s up?”

“You there?”

“Yes.”

The phone line crackled. “We just heard from the hospital,” he said.

“Say again?” Jessica said. The connection was horrible.

“Want me to call on your cell?”

“Okay,” Jessica said. Then she remembered. The cell was in the car. The car was in the garage. “No, that’s okay. Go ahead.”

“We just got a report back on what Lauren Semanski had in her hand.”

Something about Lauren Semanski.
“Okay.”

“It was part of a ballpoint pen.”

“A what?”

“She had a broken ballpoint pen in her hand,” Shepherd shouted. “From St. Joseph’s.”

Jessica heard this clearly enough. She didn’t want to. “What do you mean?”

“It had the St. Joseph’s logo and address on it. The pen is from the hospital.”

Her heart grew cold in her chest. It couldn’t be true. “Are you sure?”

“No doubt about it,” Shepherd said. His voice was breaking up. “Listen . . . the surveillance team lost Farrell . . . Roosevelt is flooded all the way to—”

Quiet.

“John?”

Nothing. The phone line was dead. Jessica toggled the button on the phone. “Hello?”

She was met with a thick black silence.

Jessica hung up, stepped over to the hallway closet. She glanced down the stairs. Patrick was still in the basement.

She reached inside the closet, onto the top shelf, her mind spinning.

He’s been asking about you,
Angela had said.

She slipped the Glock out of the holster.

I was on my way to my sister’s house in Manayunk,
Patrick had said, not twenty feet from Bethany Price’s still-warm body.

She checked the weapon’s magazine. It was full.

His doctor came to see him yesterday,
Agnes Pinsky had said.

She slammed the magazine home, chambered a round. And began to descend the stairs.

T
HE WIND CONTINUED TO BAY outside, trembling the windowpanes in their cracked glazing.

“Patrick?”

No response.

She reached the bottom of the stairs, padded across the living room, opened the drawer in the hutch, grabbed the old flashlight. She pushed the switch. Dead. Of course. Thanks, Vincent.

She closed the drawer.

Louder:
“Patrick?”

Silence.

This was getting out of control really fast. She wasn’t going into the cellar without light. No way.

She backed her way to the stairs, then made her way up as silently as she could. She would take Sophie and some blankets, bundle her up to the attic, and lock the door. Sophie would be miserable, but she would be safe. Jessica knew she had to get control of herself, and the situation. She would lock Sophie in, get to her cell phone, and call for backup.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “It’s okay.”

She picked up Sophie, held her tight. Sophie shivered. Her teeth chattered.

In the flickering candlelight, Jessica thought she was seeing things. She
had
to be mistaken. She picked up a candle, held it close.

She wasn’t mistaken. There, on Sophie’s forehead, was a cross made of blue chalk.

The killer wasn’t in the house.

The killer was in the
room
.

71

FRIDAY, 9:25 PM

B
YRNE PULLED OFF ROOSEVELT BOULEVARD. The street was flooded. His head pounded, the images came roaring through, one after the other: a demented slaughterhouse of a slide show.

The killer was stalking Jessica and her daughter.

Byrne had looked at the lottery ticket the killer had put in Kristi Hamilton’s hands and not seen it at first. None of them had. When the lab uncovered the number, it became clear. The clue was not the lottery agent. The clue was the number.

The lab had determined that the Big 4 number the killer had chosen was 9–7–0–0.

The address of St. Katherine Church rectory was 9700 Frankford Avenue.

Jessica had been close. The Rosary Killer had defaced the door at St. Katherine three years ago and had fully intended to end his madness there tonight. He intended to take Lauren Semanski to the church and fulfill the final of the five Sorrowful Mysteries on the altar there.

The crucifixion.

That Lauren had fought back and escaped only delayed him. When Byrne had touched the broken ballpoint pen in Lauren’s hand, he knew where the killer was ultimately headed, and who would be his final victim. He had immediately called the Eighth District, which had dispatched a half a dozen officers to the church and a pair of patrol cars to Jessica’s house.

Byrne’s only hope was that they were not too late.

T
HE STREETLIGHTS WERE OUT, as were the traffic lights. Accordingly, as always when things like this happened, everyone in Philly forgot how to drive. Byrne took out his cell phone and called Jessica again. He got a busy signal. He tried her cell phone. It rang five times, then switched over to her voice mail.

Come on, Jess.

He pulled over to the side of the road, closed his eyes. To anyone who had never experienced the exacting pain of a rampant migraine, there could be no explanation rich enough. The lights of the oncoming cars seared his eyes. Between the flashes, he saw the bodies. Not the chalk outlines of the crime scene after the sanitization of investigation, but rather the human beings.

Tessa Wells having her arms and legs positioned around the pillar.

Nicole Taylor being laid to rest in the field of bright flowers.

Bethany Price and her crown of razors.

Kristi Hamilton soaked with blood.

Their eyes were open, questioning, pleading.

Pleading with
him
.

The fifth body was not clear to him at all, but he knew enough to shake him to the bottom of his soul.

The fifth body was just a little girl.

72

FRIDAY, 9:35 PM

J
ESSICA SLAMMED SHUT the bedroom door. Locked it. She had to begin with the immediate area. She searched beneath the bed, behind the curtains, in the closet, her weapon out front.

Empty.

Somehow Patrick had gotten upstairs and made the sign of the cross on Sophie’s forehead. She had tried to ask Sophie a gentle question about it, but her little girl seemed traumatized.

The idea made Jessica as sick as it did enraged. But at the moment, rage was her enemy. Her life was under siege.

She sat back down on the bed.

“You have to listen to Mommy, okay?”

Sophie stared, as if she was in shock.

“Sweetie? Listen to Mommy.”

Silence from her daughter.

“Mommy is going to make up a bed in the closet, okay? Like camping. Okay?”

Sophie had no reaction.

Jessica scrambled over to the closet. She pushed everything to the back, yanked the bedclothes off the bed, and created a makeshift bed. It broke her heart to have to do this, but she had no choice. She pulled everything else out of the closet and tossed it on the floor, everything that might cause Sophie harm. She lifted her daughter out of the bed, fighting her own tears of fury and terror.

She kissed Sophie, then closed the closet door. She turned the church key, pocketed it. She grabbed her weapon, and exited the room.

A
LL THE CANDLES SHE HAD LIGHTED in the house were blown out. The wind howled outside, but in the house it was deathly quiet. It was an intoxicating dark, a dark that seemed to consume everything it touched. Jessica saw everything she knew to be there in her mind, not with her eyes. As she moved down the stairs, she considered the layout of the living room. The table, the chairs, the hutch, the armoire that held the TV and the audio and video equipment, the love seats. It was all so familiar and all so foreign at the same moment. Each shadow held a monster; each outline, a threat.

She had qualified at the range every year she had been a cop, had taken the tactical, live-fire training course. But it was never supposed to be
her
house,
her
refuge from the insane world outside. This was the place where her little girl played. Now it had become a battleground.

When she touched the last step, she realized what she was doing. She was leaving Sophie alone upstairs. Had she really cleared the entire floor? Had she looked everywhere? Had she eliminated every possibility of threat?

“Patrick?” she said. Her voice sounded weak, plaintive.

No answer.

Cold sweat latticed her back and shoulders, trickling to her waist.

Then, loud, but not loud enough to frighten Sophie: “Listen. Patrick. I’ve got my weapon in my hand. I’m not fucking around. I need to see you out here right now. We go downtown, we work this out. Don’t do this to me.”