Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (154 page)

Eve Galvez turned to look at her nearly empty apartment, a rush of icy melancholy overtaking her heart. She had once had so much.

She closed the door, locked the deadbolt, walked down the hallway. A few moments later she crossed the lobby, pushed through the glass doors, and stepped into the warm Philadelphia night.

For the last time.

| FIVE |

T
HE
F
ORENSIC
S
CIENCE
C
ENTER, COMMONLY REFERRED TO AS THE CRIME
lab, was located at Eighth and Poplar streets, just a few blocks from the Roundhouse. The 40,000-square-foot facility was responsible for analysis of all physical evidence collected by the PPD during the course of an investigation. In its various divisions, it performed analysis in three major categories: trace evidence, such as paint, fibers, or gunshot residue; biological evidence, including blood, semen, and hair; and miscellaneous evidence, such as fingerprints, documents, and footwear impressions.

The Philadelphia Police Department’s Criminalistics Unit maintained itself as a full-service facility, able to perform a wide variety of testing procedures.

Sergeant Helmut Rohmer was the reigning king of the document section. In his early thirties, Rohmer was a giant, standing about six-four, weighing in at 250 pounds, most of it muscle. He had short-cropped hair, dyed so blond it was almost white. On both arms were an elaborate web of tattoos—many of them a variation on red roses, white roses, and the name Rose. Vegetation and petals snaked around his huge biceps. At PPD functions—especially the Police Athletic League gatherings. Helmut Rohmer was big on PAL—no one had ever seen him with a person named Rose or Rosie or Rosemary, so the subject was scrupulously avoided. His standard outfit was black jeans, Doc Martens, and sleeveless black sweatshirts. Unless he had to go to court. Then it was a shiny, narrow-lapelled, navy-blue suit from around the time when REO Speedwagon dotted the charts.

No pocket protectors or dingy lab coats here—Helmut Rohmer looked like a roadie for Metallica, or a Frank Miller rendering of a Hell’s Angel. But when the sergeant spoke, he sounded like Johnny Mathis. He insisted you call him Hell, even going so far as signing his internal memos “From Hell.” No one dared argue or object.

“This is a fairly common edition of the
New Oxford,
” Hell said. “It’s available everywhere. I have the same edition at home.” The book sat on the gleaming stainless table, opened to the copyright page. “This particular publication was printed in the early seventies, but you can find it in just about any used-book store in the country, including college bookstores, Half Price Books, everywhere.”

“Is there any way to trace where it may have been purchased?” Jessica asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

The book’s cover had been dusted for prints. None were found. It would take a lot longer, and prove far more difficult, to check the pages themselves, seeing as there were more than fifteen hundred of them.

“What do you make of the Shiloh message?” Jessica asked.

Hell placed an index finger to his lips. Jessica noticed for the first time that his fingernails were well-manicured, their clear polish reflecting the overhead fluorescents in straight silvery lines. “Well, I ran
Shiloh
through the databases and the search engines. Nothing significant in the databases, but I did get hits on Google and Yahoo, of course. Lots of them. As in tons and tons.”

“Such as?” Jessica asked.

“Well, a lot of them had to do with that 1996 kid’s movie. It had Rod Steiger in it, and the guy who was in
In Cold Blood.
What was his name?”

“Robert Blake?” Jessica asked.

“No. The other guy in the movie. The light-haired guy. The con man who bounces the check for the suit.”

“Scott Wilson,” Byrne said.

“Right.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne, but he refused to look at her. It was a matter of pop-culture principle, she figured. Sometimes Kevin Byrne’s knowledge astounded her. On a bar bet, he once rattled off the entire discography of The Eagles, and Kevin Byrne didn’t even care too much for The Eagles. He was a Thin Lizzy, Corrs, Van Morrison man—not to mention his near-slavish devotion to old blues. On the other hand, she’d once caught him singing the first verse of “
La Vie en Rose
” at a crime scene. In French. Kevin Byrne did not speak French.

“Anyway,” Hell said. “This
Shiloh
movie was a little schmaltzy, but it was still kind of cute. Beagle-in-jeopardy type thing. We just rented it a few months ago. Scratchy DVD, froze up a few times. Drives me frickin’ nuts when that happens. Gotta go Blu-ray and soon. But my daughter loved it.”

Jessica thought,
Daughter? Could this be the legendary Rose?
“I didn’t know you had a daughter, Hell,” she said, probing.

Hell beamed. In a flash, he had out his wallet, flipped open to a photograph of an adorable little blond girl sitting on a park bench, hugging the hell out of a black Labrador puppy.
Crushing
the puppy was more like it. Maybe the kid worked out with her dad.

“This is Donatella,” Hell said. “She is my heart.”

So much for Rose,
Jessica thought. “She’s a doll.”

Byrne looked at the picture, nodded, smiled. Despite the tough-cop pose, Jessica knew Kevin Byrne was complete mush around little girls. He carried at least four pictures of his daughter Colleen at all times.

Hell slipped the photo back into his wallet, trousered it. “Then there’s the Shiloh reference in the Bible, of course.”

“What’s that about?” Jessica asked.

“Well, if memory serves—and it quite often does—Shiloh was the name of a shrine that Moses built in the wilderness. Lots of wilderness in the Bible.” Hell flipped a few pages of his notebook. Jessica noticed that there were hand-drawn roses in the margins. “Then there’s the Civil War battle of Shiloh, which was also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing.”

Jessica glanced once again at her partner. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second largest city in the commonwealth, was three hundred miles west of Philly. Byrne shook his head, emphasizing to Jessica how little she knew about the Civil War, or American history in general.

“Not what you think,” Hell said, picking up on the exchange. “Shiloh is in western Tennessee. Nothing to do with Pittsburgh, PA.”

“Anything else pop up?” Jessica asked, anxious to move on.

“Nothing really jumped off the screen. I ran the numbers 4514 and got more than six million hits. Can you believe that? Six
million.
My first thought was that the four numbers could be the last part of a phone number.” Hell flipped through a few more of his notes. “I took the first three letters of Shiloh—S-H-I—and used them as a prefix, which is 744 on the phone. There is no Philly phone number using that designation. I widened the search to include area codes in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Ditto. It’s not a phone number.”

“But you think it was something we were supposed to find, right?” Jessica asked. This sort of thing was not the purview of CSU, but Hell was one of the brightest people Jessica knew. It never hurt to get a second, third, and fourth opinion.

Hell smiled. “Well, I’m no detective,” he began. He glanced at the photographs of the refrigerator and kitchen at the Second Street crime scene. “But if grilled under hot lights and deprived of
Dancing With the Stars
reruns, I would say we were
definitely
supposed to find this. I mean, Jeremiah Crosley? Puh-freakin’
-leeze.
It’s clever, but it’s not that clever. On the other hand, maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s just clever enough to be intriguing, but not so difficult that it would go over the heads of us big dumb cops.”

Jessica had, of course, considered this. They were supposed to find this Bible, and the message inside was the second part of the riddle.

“So I’m thinking this might be an address,” Hell said.

“A street address?” Jessica asked. “Here in Philly?”

“Yeah,” Hell said. “There’s a Shiloh Street here, you know.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne. Byrne shrugged. Apparently, he had never heard of it either. Philly was a small city in a lot of ways, but there were a hell of a lot streets. You could never know them all.

“Where is this Shiloh Street?” Jessica asked.

“North Philly,” Hell said. “Badlands.”

Of course, Jessica thought.

Hell typed a few keystrokes on his laptop. His big fingers nimbly flew across the keys. Seconds later Google Maps appeared on the screen. Hell entered the street address. Soon the image began to zoom in, stopping at a map view of North Philly. A few more keystrokes yielded a fairly tight picture of a handful of city blocks just south of Allegheny Avenue between Fourth and Fifth streets. Hell clicked on the small “+” sign in the corner. The image zoomed in again. A green arrow pointed at the triangular rooftop of a small corner building

“There it is,” Hell said. “Voy
-la.
4514 Shiloh Street.”

Hell tapped another key, switched to satellite view, which eliminated the street names, rendering a photographic image.

From the aerial view, the address appeared to be either a row house or a commercial space at the end of the block. Gray and ugly and undistinguished. No trees. Jessica rarely saw her city from above. This part looked so desolate her heart ached. She glanced at Byrne. “What do you think?”

Byrne scanned the image, his deep-green eyes roaming the surface of the monitor. “I think we’re being worked. I hate being worked.”

Hell gently closed the book, then opened it again, flipping open just the front cover. “I ran a hair dryer over the inside front endpaper,” he said. “Many times people will open a book with their fingers on the outside, and right thumb on the inside. If the front cover was wiped down—and I believe it was—maybe they forgot to—”

Hell stopped talking. His eyes fixed on a slight bump in the lower left-hand corner of the inside front cover, a right angle that lifted an edge.

“What have we
here
?” Hell said.

He opened a drawer, removed a gleaming pair of stainless steel tweezers, clicked them three times. It seemed like a ritual.

“What is it?” Byrne asked.

“Hang on.”

Hell wielded the tweezers like a heart surgeon. He grabbed the endpaper, began to slowly strip it back. Soon, it became apparent that there was something underneath. It appeared that someone had already peeled back the endpaper, inserted something, then re-glued it.

Hell took a deep breath, exhaled, continued to peel back the endpaper. Beneath it was a thin piece of cardboard. Hell gently removed it with the tweezers, put it on the table. It was a white rectangle, about three inches by five inches. The paper had a watermark on it. Hell flipped it over.

The cardboard rectangle was a color photograph. A picture of a teenage girl.

Jessica felt the temperature in the room jump a few degrees, along with the level of anxiety. The mysteries were starting to progress geometrically.

The girl in the picture was white, somewhat overweight, about sixteen. She had long auburn hair, brown eyes, a small cleft in her chin. The photo appeared to be a printout of a digital picture. She wore a red sweater with sequins along the neckline, large hoop earrings, and a striking onyx teardrop pendant necklace.

Hell spun in place, twice, both fists raised in anger, his huge rubber-soled boots squeaking on the tile. “I didn’t think to look. I hate that, man,” he said, calmly, even as a fiery crimson rose from his neck onto his face like the column in a cheap thermometer.

“No harm no foul,” Byrne said. “We have it now.”

“Yeah, well, I am still upset. I am really,
really
upset.”

Jessica and Byrne had dealt with Hell Rohmer on a number of cases. It was best to wait out moments like this. Eventually, he calmed down, his face cooling to a hot pink.

“Can we get a copy of this?” Byrne finally asked. It was rhetorical, but it was the best way to go.

Hell stared at the Bible, as if the suspect might jump out of the binding, like a figure in a child’s pop-up book, and he could choke him to death. It was well-known in the department that you didn’t fuck with Helmut Rohmer’s psyche. A few seconds later he snapped out of it. “A copy? Oh yeah. Absolutely.”

Hell put the photograph in a clear evidence bag, walked it over to the color copying machine. He punched a few buttons—hard—then waited, hands on hips, for the photocopy to emerge, adrift in that place where frustrated criminalists go. A few seconds later, the page presented itself. Hell handed it to Jessica.

Jessica looked closely at the image. The girl in the photograph was not Caitlin O’Riordan. She was someone new. A person who stared out at the world with an innocence that begged for experience. Jessica was overcome by the feeling that this girl never got the chance.

Jessica put the photocopy of the photograph in her portfolio. “Thanks,” she said. “Keep us in the loop, okay?”

Hell didn’t respond. He was gone, adrift on the tangents of hard evidence, juddering with anger. Criminalists didn’t like to be played any more than detectives did. Hell Rohmer even less than most.

Ten minutes later Detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne headed to 4514 Shiloh Street, the photograph of the auburn-haired girl on the car seat between them, like a silent passenger.

| SIX |

A
NOTHER
N
ORTH
P
HILLY HELLHOLE; A GRIM AND DECAYING THREE
story building, the corner structure in a block of five.

At the entrance to the left of the Shiloh Street address was a memorial. There were memorials all over North Philly, commemorations of the departed. Some were a simple spray painted “RIP” above the victim’s name or nickname. Others were elaborate, highly detailed portraits of the victim, many times in a benevolent pose, sometimes flashing a gang signal, sometimes two or three times actual scale. Almost all honored victims of street violence.