Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (116 page)

If you made your living as an investigator—any kind of investigator—you lived for the
gotcha
. For Jessica, as well as every detective she knew, the sun rose and set on
gotcha.
At times,
gotcha
was your hot meal, your good night’s sleep, your long passionate kiss. No one understood the need but a fellow investigator. If junkies could be detectives for one second, they would toss away that needle forever. There was no high like
gotcha.

Jessica wrapped her hand around her cup. The cocoa was cold. She looked back at the photographs.

Was the
gotcha
in one of these pictures?

22

Walt Brigham pulled onto the shoulder on Lincoln Drive, cut the engine, the headlights, still reeling from his farewell party at Finnigan’s Wake, still a bit overwhelmed at the big turnout.

This section of Fairmount Park was dark at this hour. Traffic was sparse. He rolled down his window, the frigid air somewhat reviving him. He could hear the water of the Wissahickon Creek flowing nearby.

Brigham had mailed the envelope before he had gotten on the road. He felt underhanded; almost criminal, sending it anonymously. He’d had no choice. It had taken him weeks to make the decision, and now he had. All of it—thirty-eight years as a cop—was behind him now. He was someone else.

He thought about the Annemarie DiCillo case. It seemed like only yesterday when he had gotten the call. He remembered pulling up to the stormy scene—right at this spot—getting out his umbrella, walking into the forest …

Within hours they had rounded up the usual suspects, the peepers, the pedophiles, the men who had recently been released from prison after having served time for violence against children, especially against young girls. No one stood out from the crowd. No one cracked, or rolled over on another suspect. Given their nature, their heightened fear of prison life, pedophiles were notoriously easy to turn. No one did.

A particularly vile miscreant named Joseph Barber had looked good for a while, but he had an alibi—albeit a
shaky
alibi—for the day of the murders in Fairmount Park. When Barber himself was murdered—stabbed to death with thirteen steak knives—Brigham had figured it was the story of a man being visited by his sins.

But something nagged Walt Brigham about the circumstances of Barber’s demise. Over the next five years, Brigham had tracked a number of suspected pedophiles, both in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Six of those men had been murdered, all with extreme prejudice, none of their cases solved. Granted, no one in any homicide unit anywhere really busted his hump trying to close a murder case when the victim was a scumbag who hurt children, but still the forensic data was collected and analyzed, the witness statements taken, the fingerprints run, the reports filed. Not a single suspect materialized.

Lavender,
he thought.
What was it about lavender?

In all, Walt Brigham found sixteen men murdered, all of them molesters, all of them questioned and released—or at least suspected—in a case involving a young girl.

It was crazy, but possible.

Someone was killing the suspects.

His theory never really gained any traction in the unit, so Walt Brigham had dropped it. Officially speaking. He had made highly detailed notes about it anyway. As little as he might have cared about these men, there was something about the job, the nature of being a homicide detective that compelled him to do so. Murder was murder. It was up to God to judge the victims, not Walter J. Brigham.

He turned his thoughts to Annemarie and Charlotte. They had stopped running through his dreams just a short time ago, but that didn’t mean the images didn’t haunt him. These days, when the calendar flipped from March to April, when he saw young girls in their springtime dresses, it all came back to him in a brutish, sensory overload—the smell of the woods, the sound of the rain, the way it looked like those two little girls were sleeping. Eyes closed, heads bowed. And then the nest.

The sick son of a bitch who did it had built a
nest
around them.

Walt Brigham felt the anger wrench inside him, a barbwire fist in his chest. He was getting close. He could feel it. Off the record, he had already been to Odense, a small town in Berks County. He’d gone several times. He had made inquiries, taken pictures, spoken to people. The trail to Annemarie and Charlotte’s killer led to Odense, Pennsylvania. Brigham had tasted the evil the moment he crossed into the village, like a bitter potion on his tongue.

Brigham got out of the car, walked across Lincoln Drive, continued through the barren trees until he reached the Wissahickon. The cold wind howled. He flipped up his collar, bunched his wool scarf.

This was where they had been found.

“I’m back, girls,” he said.

Brigham glanced up at the sky, at the raw gray moon in the blackness. He felt the undressed emotion of that night so long ago. He saw their white dresses in the police lights. He saw the sad, empty expressions on their faces.

“I just wanted you to know, you have me now,” he said. “Full time. Twenty-four seven. We’re gonna get him.”

He watched the water flow for a while, then walked back to the car, a sudden spring in his step, as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, as if the rest of his life had been suddenly mapped. He slipped inside, started the engine, cranked up the heater. He was just about to angle onto Lincoln Drive when he heard …
singing
?

No.

It wasn’t singing. It was more like a nursery rhyme. A nursery rhyme he knew very well. His blood froze in his veins.

“Here are maidens, young and fair,

Dancing in the summer air …”

Brigham looked into the rearview mirror. When he saw the eyes of the man in the backseat, he knew. This was the man for whom he had been searching a very long time.

“Like two spinning wheels at play …”

Fear lurched up Brigham’s spine. His weapon was under the seat. He’d had too much to drink. He’d never make it.

“Pretty maidens dance away.”

In those last moments many things became apparent to Detective Walter James Brigham. They settled upon him with a heightened clarity, like in those seconds before an electrical storm. He knew that Marjorie Morrison was indeed the love of his life. He knew that his father had been a good man, and that he had raised decent kids. He knew that Annemarie DiCillo and Charlotte Waite had been visited by true evil, that they had been followed into the forest and delivered unto the devil.

And Walt Brigham also knew that he had been right all along.

It had always been about the water.

23

The Health Harbor was a small gym and workout spa in Northern Liberties. Run by a former police sergeant out of the Twenty-fourth District, it had a limited membership, mostly cops, which meant you generally didn’t have to put up with the usual gym games. Plus, it had a boxing ring.

Jessica got there about 6
AM
, did her stretches, ran five miles on the treadmill while listening to Christmas music on her iPod.

At 7
AM,
her great uncle Vittorio arrived. Vittorio Giovanni was eighty-one, but still had the clear brown eyes Jessica remembered from her youth, the kind and knowing eyes that had swept Vittorio’s late wife Carmella off her feet one hot August night at the Feast of the Assumption festival. Even today those sparkling eyes said there was a much younger man still inside. Vittorio had once been a professional prizefighter. To this day he could not watch a televised boxing match sitting down.

For the past few years Vittorio had been Jessica’s manager and trainer. As a professional, Jessica had a record of 5-0, with four knockouts, her last bout televised on ESPN2. Vittorio had always said that whenever Jessica was ready to quit, he would support the decision and they would both walk away. Jessica wasn’t sure yet. What got her into the sport to begin with—the desire to lose weight after Sophie was born, along with the desire to be able to hold her own with the occasional violent suspect when necessary—had grown into something else: the need to fight the aging process with what was, hands down, the most brutal discipline there was.

Vittorio grabbed the pads, slowly slipped between the ropes. “You do your roadwork?” he asked. He refused to call it “cardio.”

“Yeah,” Jessica said. She was supposed to do six miles, but her over-thirty muscles were tired. Uncle Vittorio saw right through her.

“Tomorrow you do seven,” he said.

Jessica didn’t bother to deny it or to argue.

“Ready?” Vittorio slapped the pads together, held them up.

Jessica started slowly, jabbing at the pads, crossing with her right. As always, she fell into a rhythm, finding the zone. Her mind traveled from the sweaty confines of the gym, across town to the bank of the Schuylkill River, to the image of a dead young woman ceremoniously placed on the river’s edge.

As she picked up the pace, her anger built. She thought of the smiling Kristina Jakos, the trust the young woman might have had in her killer, the faith that she would not be harmed in anyway, that the next morning would dawn and she would be that much closer to her dreams. Jessica’s anger ignited and blossomed as she thought of the arrogance and brutality of the person they sought, the act of strangling a young woman and mutilating her body—

“Jess!”

Her uncle was shouting. Jessica stopped, the sweat pouring off her. She pawed it out of her eyes with the back of her glove, took a few steps back. The handful of other people in the gym stared at them.

“Time,”
her uncle said softly. He’d been here with her before.

How long had she been gone?

“Sorry,” Jessica said. She walked over to one corner, then another, then another, circling the ring, catching her breath. When she stopped, Vittorio made his way over to her. He dropped the pads, helped Jessica wiggle out of her gloves.

“Tough case?” he asked.

Her family knew her well. “Yeah,” she said. “Tough case.”

JESSICA SPENT THE
morning working the computers. She put a number of search strings into the various search engines. The results regarding amputation were meager, if incredibly gruesome. In medieval times it was not uncommon for a thief to lose a hand, or a Peeping Tom to lose an eye. Some religious sects still engaged in the practice. The Italian mob had been cutting up people for years, but they generally didn’t leave the bodies in public and in broad daylight. They usually hacked folks up in order to fit them into a bag or a box or a suitcase so they could dump them in a landfill. Usually in Jersey.

She ran across nothing like what was done to Kristina Jakos on that riverbank.

The swim-lane rope was available from a number of online merchants. From what she could determine, it was similar to standard polypropylene stranded rope, but treated to resist chemicals such as chlorine. It was used primarily to hold together a line of floats. The lab had not detected any trace of chlorine.

Locally, between marine-supply and pool-supply retailers in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware, there were dozens of dealers who carried this type of rope. The minute Jessica had the final report from the lab, detailing a type and model, she would get on the phone.

At just after eleven, Byrne came into the duty room. He had the 911 tape of the call-in of Kristina’s body.

THE AUDIO VISUAL
Unit of the PPD was located in the basement of the Roundhouse. Its main purview was to supply A/V equipment to the department as needed—cameras, video equipment, recording and surveillance devices—as well as monitor the local television and radio channels for important information the department could use.