Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (104 page)

Jessica took a few more photographs, stepped closer. She would not disturb the body until the medical examiner cleared the scene, but the sooner they got a better look, the sooner they could begin their investigation. While Byrne walked the perimeter of the parking lot, Jessica knelt next to the body.

The victim’s dress was clearly a few sizes too large for her slender frame. It was long-sleeved, had a removable lace collar, as well as knife pleats at the cuff. Unless Jessica had missed a new fashion trend—and that was a possibility—she didn’t see why this woman had been walking around Philadelphia, in winter, in such an outfit.

She looked at the woman’s hands. No rings. There were no obvious calluses either, no scars or healing cuts. This woman did not work with her hands, not in the manual labor sense. She had no visible tattoos.

Jessica moved a few steps back and took a picture of the victim in relation to the river. It was then that she noticed what looked like a drop of blood near the hem of the dress. A single drop. She crouched down, took out her pen, and lifted the front edge of the dress. What she saw caught her completely off guard.

“Oh, God.”

Jessica fell back on her heels, nearly toppling into the water. She grabbed at the earth, found purchase, sat down hard.

Having heard her cry out, Byrne and Calabro came running over.

“What is it?” Byrne asked.

Jessica wanted to tell them, but the words were logjammed in her throat. She had seen a lot in her time on the force—in fact, she really believed she could look at anything—and she was usually braced for the special horrors that came with working homicides. The sight of this dead young woman, her flesh already giving way to the elements, was bad enough. What Jessica saw when she lifted the victim’s dress was a geometric progression of the revulsion she felt.

Jessica took a moment, leaned forward, and once again picked up the dress’s hem. Byrne crouched down, angled his head. He immediately looked away. “Shit,” he said, standing up.
“Shit.”

In addition to having been strangled and left on a frozen riverbank, the victim’s feet had been amputated. And it looked to have been done recently. It was a precise and surgical amputation, just above the ankles. The wounds had been crudely cauterized, but the black and blue trauma from the excisions ran halfway up the victim’s pale, frozen legs.

Jessica glanced at the icy water below, then a few yards downstream. There were no body parts visible. She looked at Mike Calabro. He put his hands in his pockets, walked slowly back to the entrance of the crime scene. He was not a detective. He didn’t have to stay. Jessica thought she had seen tears welling in his eyes.

“Let me see if I can redline the ME’s office and CSU,” Byrne said. He pulled out his cell, took a few steps away. Jessica knew that every second that went by before the Crime Scene Unit secured the scene, precious evidence might be slipping away.

Jessica looked closely at what was most likely the murder weapon. The belt around the victim’s neck was about three inches wide, and appeared to be made of tightly woven nylon, not unlike the material used to manufacture a seat belt. She took a close-up photograph of the knot.

The wind churned, bringing a bitter chill. Jessica braced herself, waited it out. Before stepping away, she forced herself to look closely at the woman’s legs one more time. The cuts looked clean, as if done with a very sharp saw. For the young woman’s sake, Jessica hoped that it had been done postmortem. She looked back at the victim’s face. They were now linked, she and the dead woman. Jessica had worked a number of cases in her time in homicide, and she was forever connected to each of them. There would not come a time in her life when she would forget the way death fashioned them, the way they silently asked for justice.

Just after nine o’clock Dr. Thomas Weyrich arrived with his photographer, who immediately began snapping away. A few minutes later, Weyrich pronounced the young woman dead. The detectives were cleared to begin their investigation. They met at the top of the slope.

“Christ,” Weyrich said. “Merry Christmas, eh?”

“Yeah,” Byrne said.

Weyrich lit a Marlboro, hit it hard. He was a seasoned veteran of the Philadelphia medical examiner’s office. Even for him this was not a daily occurrence.

“She was strangled?” Jessica asked.

“At the very least,” Weyrich replied. He would not remove the nylon belt until he got the body back to the city. “There’s evidence of petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes. I won’t know more until I get her on the table.”

“How long has she been out here?” Byrne asked.

“I’d say at least forty-eight hours or so.”

“And her feet? Pre- or post?”

“I won’t know until I can examine the wounds, but based on how little blood there is on scene, I believe she was dead when she got here, and the amputation took place elsewhere. If she had been alive, she would’ve had to have been tied down, and I’m not seeing ligature marks on her legs.”

Jessica walked back to the riverbank. There were no footprints on the frozen ground near the river’s edge, no blood splatter or trail. A slight trickle of blood from the victim’s legs etched the mossy stone wall in a pair of thin, deep scarlet tendrils. Jessica looked directly across the river. The jetty was partially obscured from the expressway, which might explain why no one had called in a report of a woman sitting motionless on the frigid riverbank for two full days. The victim had gone unnoticed—or that was the truth Jessica wanted to believe. She
didn’t
want to believe the people of her city saw a woman sitting in the freezing cold and did nothing about it.

They needed to ID the young woman as soon as possible. They would begin a thorough grid search of the parking lot, the riverbank, and the area surrounding the structure—along with a canvass of nearby businesses and residences on both sides of the river—but with a carefully constructed crime scene such as this, it was unlikely they were going to find a discarded pocketbook with any ID in the vicinity.

Jessica crouched behind the victim. The way the body was positioned reminded her of a marionette whose strings had been cut, causing the puppet to simply collapse to the floor—arms and legs waiting to be reconnected, reanimated, brought back to life.

Jessica examined the woman’s fingernails. They were short, but clean and painted with a clear lacquer. They would examine the nails to see if there was any material beneath them, but with the naked eye it didn’t appear so. What it did tell the detectives was that this woman was not homeless, not indigent. Her skin and hair looked clean and well-groomed.

Which meant that there was somewhere this young woman was supposed to be. It meant that she was missed. It meant that there was a puzzle out there in Philadelphia, or beyond, to which this woman was the missing piece.

Mother. Daughter. Sister. Friend.

Victim.

5

The wind swirls off the river, curling along the frozen banks, bringing with it the deep secrets of the forest. In his mind, Moon draws the memory of this moment. He knows that, in the end, a memory is all you were left with.

Moon stands nearby, watching the man and the woman. They probe, they calculate, they write in their journals. The man is big and powerful. The woman is slender and pretty and clever.

Moon is clever, too.

The man and the woman may witness a great deal, but they cannot see what the moon sees. Each night the moon returns and tells Moon of its travels. Each night Moon paints a mind-picture. Each night a new story is told.

Moon glances up at the sky. The cold sun hides behind the clouds. He is invisible, too.

The man and woman go about their business—quick and clocklike and precise. They have found Karen. Soon they will find the red shoes, and this tale will be spun.

There are many more tales.

6

Jessica and Byrne stood near the road, waiting for the CSU van. Though only a few feet apart, each was adrift in their own thoughts about what they had just seen. Detective Bontrager was still dutifully guarding the north entrance to the property. Mike Calabro stood near the river, his back to the victim.

For the most part, the life of a homicide detective in a major urban area was about the investigation of garden-variety murders—gang slayings, domestics, bar fights that went one punch too far, robbery-homicides. Of course, these crimes were very personal and unique to the victims and their families, and a detective had to constantly remind himself of that fact. If you got complacent about the job, if you failed to take into account a person’s sense of grief or loss, it was time to quit. In Philadelphia, there were no divisional homicide squads. All suspicious deaths were investigated out of one office, the homicide unit at the Roundhouse. Eighty detectives, three shifts, seven days a week. Philly had more than one hundred neighborhoods, and many times, based on where the victim was found, an experienced detective could all but predict the circumstance, the motive, sometimes even the weapon. There was always a revelation, but very few surprises.

This day was different. It spoke of a special evil, a depth of brutality that Jessica and Byrne had rarely experienced.

Parked in the vacant lot across the road from the crime scene was a food-service truck. There was only one customer. The two detectives crossed Flat Rock Road, retrieving their notebooks. While Byrne interviewed the driver, Jessica spoke to the customer. He was in his twenties, dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, a black knit cap.

Jessica introduced herself, showed her badge. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

“Sure.” Pulling off his cap, his dark hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it aside.

“What’s your name?”

“Will,” he said. “Will Pedersen.”

“Where do you live?”

“Plymouth Valley.”

“Wow,” Jessica said. “Long way from home.”

He shrugged. “You go where the work is.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a brick mason.” He pointed over Jessica’s shoulder, at the new condominiums being constructed along the river about a block away. A few moments later Byrne finished with the driver. Jessica introduced Pedersen to him, continued.

“Do you work down here a lot?” Jessica asked.

“Almost every day.”

“Were you here yesterday?”

“No,” he said. “Too cold to mix. Boss called early and said bag it.”

“What about the day before yesterday?” Byrne asked.

“Yeah. We were here.”

“Did you get coffee about this time?”

“No,” Pedersen said. “It was earlier. Maybe seven o’clock or so.”

Byrne gestured to the crime scene. “Did you see anyone in this parking lot?”

Pedersen looked across the street, thought for a few moments. “Yeah. I did see someone.”

“Where?”

“Back by the end of the parking lot.”

“Man? Woman?”

“Man, I think. It was still kind of dark.”

“There was just the one person?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see a vehicle?”

“No. No cars,” he said. “None I noticed, anyway.”

The two abandoned vehicles were behind the building. They were not visible from the road. A third vehicle could have been back there.

“Where was he standing?” Byrne asked.

Pedersen pointed to a spot at the end of the lot, just above where the victim was found. “Right to the right of those trees.”

“Closer to the river, or closer to the building?”

“Closer to the river.”

“Can you describe this person you saw?”

“Not really. Like I said, it was still kind of dark and I couldn’t see too well. I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”

“Exactly where were you when you first saw him?” Jessica asked.

Pedersen pointed to an area a few feet away from where they stood.

“Did you get any closer?” Jessica asked.

“No.”

Jessica glanced toward the river. You could not see the victim from that vantage point. “How long were you here?” she asked.

Pedersen shrugged. “I don’t know. A minute or two. Had my Danish and coffee, walked back to the site to set up.”

“What was this person doing?” Byrne asked.

“Nothing, really.”

“He didn’t move from where you saw him? He didn’t walk down toward the river?”

“No,” Pedersen said. “But now that I think about it, it was a little weird.”

“Weird?” Jessica asked. “Weird how?”

“He was just standing there,” Pedersen said. “I think he was staring up at the moon.”

7

As they headed back to Center City, Jessica scrolled through the photographs on her digital camera, looking at each one on the small LCD screen. At that size, the young woman on the bank of the river looked like a doll posed in a miniature setting.

A doll,
Jessica thought. It was the first image she’d had when she saw the victim. The young woman looked like a porcelain doll on a shelf.

Jessica had given Will Pedersen a business card. The young man promised to call if he remembered anything else.

“What did you get from the driver?” Jessica asked.

Byrne glanced at his notebook. “The driver is one Reese Harris. Mr. Harris is thirty-three, lives in Queen Village. He said he hits Flat Rock Road three or four mornings a week, now that those condos are going up. He said he always parks with the open side of the truck facing away from the river. Keeps the wind off the merchandise. He said he didn’t see anything.”

Detective Joshua Bontrager, late of the Traffic Unit, armed with Vehicle Identification Numbers, was off to check on the two abandoned vehicles parked in the lot.

Jessica scrolled through a few more pictures, looked up at Byrne. “What do you think?”

Byrne ran a hand over his beard. “I think we have a sick son of a bitch running around Philly. I think we have to shut this fucker down fast.”

Leave it to Kevin Byrne to break the case down to the essentials, Jessica thought. “Full-blown nut job?” she asked.