Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (140 page)

Ben Sharp got out of his van, left it idling. He slipped on a pair of wool gloves. “I don’t think anyone lives here anymore.”

“Did you know who lived here before?” Nicci asked.

“No,” he said. “Sorry.”

Jessica glanced at the house. There were two windows in the front, staring out like sinister eyes. There were no lights. “How did you know about this place?” she asked.

“We used to come here when we were kids. It was pretty spooky then.”

“Kinda spooky
now,
” Nicci said.

“There used to be a couple of big dogs on the property.”

“They ran loose?” Jessica asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Ben said, smiling. “That was the challenge.”

Jessica looked around the grounds, around the area near the porch. There were no chains, no water bowls, no paw prints in the snow. “And this was how long ago?”

“Oh, a
long
time ago,” Ben said. “Fifteen years.”

Good,
Jessica thought. When she’d been in uniform she’d done her time with big dogs. Every cop did.

“Well, we’ll let you get back to the shop,” Nicci said.

“Do you want me to wait for you?” Ben asked. “Show you the way back?”

“I think we can take it from here,” Jessica said. “We appreciate your help.”

Ben looked a little disappointed; perhaps because he felt like he might be part of a police investigation team now. “No problem.”

“And say thanks again to Nadine for us.”

“I will.”

A few moments later Ben slipped into his van, backed into the turnaround, and headed toward the road. In seconds his vehicle disappeared into the pines.

Jessica looked at Nicci. They both glanced toward the house.

It was still there.

THE PORCH WAS
stone; the front door was solid oak, formidable. On it was a rusted iron knocker. It looked older than the house.

Nicci knocked with her fist. Nothing. Jessica put an ear to the door. Silence. Nicci knocked one more time, this time using the knocker, the sound echoing for a moment on the old stone porch. No response.

The window to the right of the front door was thick with years of grunge. Jessica rubbed away some of the grime, cupped her hands to the glass. All she saw was the layer of grime on the inside. It was completely opaque. She couldn’t even tell if there were curtains or blinds behind the glass. The same was true of the window to the left of the door.

“So, what do you want to do?” Jessica asked.

Nicci looked toward the road, back at the house. She glanced at her watch. “What I
want
to do is get into a hot bubble bath with a glass of Pinot Noir. But here we are in Butter Churn, PA.”

“Should we call the sheriff ’s office?”

Nicci smiled. Jessica didn’t know the woman all that well, but she knew the smile. Every detective had that smile in their arsenal. “Not just yet.”

Nicci reached out, tried the doorknob. Locked tight. “Let me see if there’s another way in,” Nicci said. She jumped off the porch, headed around the side of the house.

For the first time that day, Jessica wondered if they weren’t wasting their time. There really wasn’t a single piece of direct evidence that linked Walt Brigham’s murder to this house.

Jessica pulled out her cell phone. She decided that she’d better call Vincent. She looked at the LCD readout. No bars. No signal. She put her phone away.

A few seconds later, Nicci returned. “I found an open door.”

“Where?” Jessica asked.

“Around back. It leads to the root cellar, I think. Maybe a storm cellar.”

“It was open?”

“Kinda.”

Jessica followed Nicci around the building. The land behind the structure led to a valley, which in turn led to the woods beyond. As they rounded the rear of the building, Jessica’s sense of isolation grew. She had thought for a moment there that she might like to live somewhere like this, away from the noise, the pollution, the crime. Now she wasn’t so sure.

They reached the entrance to the root cellar, a pair of heavy wooden doors built into the ground. It was crossbeamed with a four-by-four. They lifted the cross beam, set it aside, pulled open the doors.

Immediately the smell of mildew and wood rot reached their noses. There was a hint of something else, something animal.

“And they say police work isn’t glamorous,” Jessica said.

Nicci looked at Jessica. “Well?”

“After you, Auntie Em.”

Nicci clicked on her Maglite.
“Philly PD!”
she yelled into the black hole. No answer. She glanced back at Jessica, fully jazzed. “I love this
job.
”

Nicci took the lead. Jessica followed.

As more snowstorm clouds gathered over southeastern Pennsylvania, the two detectives descended into the frigid darkness of the cellar.

74

Roland felt the warm sun on his face. He heard the slap of the league ball against leather, smelled the deep redolence of neat’s-foot oil. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.

He was fifteen.

There had been ten of them that day, eleven including Charles. It was late April. They’d each had their favorite baseball player—Lenny Dykstra, Bobby Munoz, Kevin Jordan, and the retired Mike Schmidt among them. Half of them wore some homemade version of Mike Schmidt’s jersey.

They had played a pickup game in a field near Lincoln Drive, sneaking onto a ball diamond just a few hundred yards from the creek.

Roland looked over to the trees. He saw his stepsister Charlotte there, along with her friend Annemarie. Most of the time the two girls drove him and his friends crazy. Mostly they prattled and squeaked about nothing in the world that could possibly matter. But not always, not Charlotte. Charlotte was a special girl, as special as her twin brother Charles. Like Charles, her eyes were a robin’s-egg blue that shamed the springtime sky.

Charlotte and Annemarie. The two were inseparable. That day they stood in their sundresses, shimmering in the dazzling light. Charlotte wore lavender ribbons. It was a birthday party for them—they had been born on the same day, exactly two hours apart, Annemarie being the older of the two. They had met in the park when they were six, and now they had to have their party there.

At six o’clock they all heard the thunder, shortly followed by their mothers calling for them.

Roland had walked away. He picked up his mitt, and simply walked away, leaving Charlotte behind. He had left her for the devil that day, and since that day the devil had owned his soul.

To Roland, as with many people in the ministry, the devil was not an abstract. It was a real being, and could manifest itself in many forms.

He thought of the intervening years. He thought of how young he was when he opened the mission. He thought of Julianne Weber, about how she had been brutalized by a man named Joseph Barber, how Julianne’s mother had come to him. He had spoken to little Julianne. He thought about how he had confronted Joseph Barber in that North Philly hovel, the look in Barber’s eyes when the man knew he had come to earthly judgment, how the wrath of the Lord was imminent.

Thirteen knives,
Roland thought.
The devil’s number
.

Joseph Barber. Basil Spencer. Edgar Luna.

So many others.

Had they been innocent? No. Perhaps they had not been directly responsible for what had happened to Charlotte, but they had been the devil’s minions.

“There it is.” Sean pulled the vehicle to the side of the road. There was a sign amid the trees, next to a narrow snowbound lane. Sean got out of the van, cleaned the fresh snow from the sign.

WELCOME TO ODENSE

Roland lowered his window.

“There’s a wooden one-lane bridge a few hundred yards in,” Sean said. “I remember that it used to be in pretty bad shape. Might not even be
there
anymore. I think I should go take a look before we drive in.”

“Thank you, Brother Sean,” Roland said.

Sean pulled his wool cap tighter, knotted his scarf. “I’ll be right back.”

He walked down the lane—slow going in the calf-deep snow—and within moments disappeared into the storm.

Roland glanced at Charles.

Charles was wringing his hands, rocking in his seat. Roland put a hand on Charles’s big shoulder. It would not be long now.

Soon they would come face-to-face with Charlotte’s killer.

75

Byrne looked at the contents of the envelope—a handful of photographs, each with a notation scrawled along the bottom in ballpoint pen—but had no idea what any of it meant. He glanced again at the envelope itself. It was addressed to him, c/o the Police Department. Hand lettered, blocky style, black ink, no return, Philly postmark.

Byrne was at a desk in the duty room at the Roundhouse. The room was all but deserted. Anyone with anything to do on New Year’s Eve was out getting ready to do it.

There were six photographs: small Polaroid prints. Written along the bottom of each print was a series of numbers. The numbers looked familiar—they appeared to be those of PPD case files. It was the pictures themselves he could not understand. They were not official department photos.

One was a snapshot of a small lavender plush toy. It looked like a bear. Another was a picture of a girl’s barrette, also lavender. Yet another was a photograph of a small pair of socks. It has hard to tell the exact color, due to the slight overexposure of the print, but they looked to be lavender as well. There were three more photos, all of unrecognized objects that were each a shade of lavender.

Byrne scrutinized each photograph again. They were mostly closeups, so there was little context. Three of the objects were on carpeting, two on a hardwood floor, one on what appeared to be concrete. Byrne was writing down the numbers as Josh Bontrager came in, holding his coat.

“Just wanted to say Happy New Year, Kevin.” Bontrager crossed the room, shook Byrne’s hand. Josh Bontrager was a hand-shaker. In the past week or so, Byrne had probably shaken the young man’s hand thirty times.

“Same to you, Josh.”

“We’ll catch this guy next year. You’ll see.”

It was a little bit of country wit, Byrne supposed, but it came from the right place. “No doubt.” Byrne picked up the sheet with the case numbers on it. “Could you do me a favor before you leave?”

“Sure.”

“Could you get these files for me?”

Bontrager put down his coat. “I’m on it.”

Byrne turned back to the photographs. Each showed a lavender item, he saw again. A girl’s item. A barrette, a bear, a pair of socks with a small ribbon at the top.

What did it mean? Did the photos represent six victims? Were they killed because of the color lavender? Was it the signature of a serial killer?

Byrne glanced out the window. The storm was picking up. Soon the city would come to a halt. For the most part, police welcomed snowstorms. They tended to slow things down, smooth out arguments that often led to assaults, to homicides.

He looked back at the pictures in his hand. Whatever they represented had already happened. The fact that a child was involved—probably a young girl—did not bode well.

Byrne got up from his desk, walked through the corridors to the elevators, and waited for Josh.

76

The cellar was dank and musty. It was made up of one large room and three smaller ones. In the main section were a few wooden boxes stacked in one corner, a large steamer trunk. The other rooms were mostly empty. One had a boarded-up coal chute and bin. One had a long rotted shelving unit. On it were a few old one-gallon green glass jars, a pair of broken jugs. Tacked above were cracked leather bridles, along with an old leg-hold trap.

The steamer trunk was not padlocked, but the broad latch seemed to be rusted shut. Jessica found an iron bar nearby. She swung the bar. Three hits later, and the latch sprung. She and Nicci opened the trunk.

Across the top was an old bed sheet. They pulled it away. Beneath that were layers of magazines:
Life, Look, Woman’s Home Companion, Collier’s.
The smell of mildewed paper and moth cakes drifted up. Nicci shifted some of the magazines.

Beneath them was a leather binder, perhaps nine by twelve inches, veined and covered with a thin green layer of mold. Jessica opened it. There were only a handful of pages.

Jessica flipped to the first two pages. On the left was a yellowed news clipping from the
Inquirer,
a news item from April 1995, an article concerning the murder of two young girls in Fairmount Park. Annemarie DiCillo and Charlotte Waite. The illustration on the right was a crude pen and ink drawing of a pair of white swans in a nest.

Jessica’s pulse began to race. Walt Brigham had been right. This house—or more accurately the occupants of this house—had something to do with the murder of Annemarie and Charlotte. Walt had been closing in on the killer. He had been getting close and the killer had followed him into the park that night, to the precise spot the little girls had been murdered, and burned him to death.