Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (166 page)

She signed, the leatherette notebook was whisked away, they finished their coffees. She then reached into her bag, pulled out a photo, showed it to Byrne.

“We’re redoing a house in Bryn Mawr. They want us to reupholster this couch. Isn’t it fabulous?”

Byrne looked at the picture. It was an antique red velvet backless couch, with one end raised. He had no idea how anyone could actually sit on it. “Where’s Cate Blanchett?”

Colleen laughed, signed, “You are
so
hip, Dad.”

“It’s called a fainting couch,” Donna said. “I think they paid about fourteen thousand dollars for it.”

“I understand the fainting part, then.”

“Look, I have to go check out some fabrics for it,” Donna said as they were getting ready to leave. “It’s just upstairs. Why don’t you come up with us? It will be fun.”

Fabrics. Fun.

“You know, as much as I would love to do this—you know me and fabrics—I really have to get back,” he said.

Byrne made eye contact with Colleen. Colleen’s eyes said that she knew he was talking about the Caitlin O’Riordan case. She gave a slight nod, meaning it was okay. She could not only read his lips like an expert, she could read his heart.

Byrne immediately felt bad about taking the rest of the day off. He’d head back to the Roundhouse from here. Either that or lie to his daughter. It was no contest.

“Oh all right, macho man,” Donna said. They left the bistro, stood in the fourth floor hallway, waiting for the elevator. Then, completely out of the blue, Donna kissed him. Not on the cheek. Not a two-peck Euro style kiss. It was a full-blown, let’s-get-a-room-sailor French kiss, the first in years.
Many
years. Donna pulled back, looked deep into his eyes. Kevin Byrne tumbled, teetered on the edge of saying something stupid, caught himself, then said it anyway.

“Yeah. Well. I didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “You?”

Donna shrugged. “I think one toe may have curled just a little, but that’s about it.”

They both laughed.

“We’ll walk you down,” she said.

Byrne, still reeling, watched his ex-wife and daughter step into the elevator ahead of him. They were the same height now. They looked so much alike that his heart ached. From behind, they were almost indistinguishable. Two women.

In the lobby, Colleen took out her digital camera, took a picture of Byrne and Donna.

Byrne hugged them both again, made his good-byes. Donna walked toward the elevators, cell phone out. Colleen lingered for a moment.

Byrne pushed through the huge doors, into the bright afternoon sun. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his lips. Donna’s lipstick glanced seductively back. For some reason he stopped, turned. Colleen was watching him. She was perfectly framed in the lobby’s square front window. She smiled her melancholy, teenage smile, held up her hand.

I love you, Dad,
she signed.

Byrne’s heart flew.

| TWENTY-THREE |

F
ROM THE MOMENT
J
ESSICA LOWERED HERSELF INTO THE CRAWLSPACE
she was confronted with the smell of old death. All around her she heard vermin scurrying through dry trash.

She thought of Eve Galvez in her shallow grave.

The crawlspace was at one time a storage area for whatever enterprises had occupied the first floor of the building. In the corners were dusty wooden crates, stacks of flattened and twined cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates.

Jessica Maglite around the corners. The crawlspace measured the approximate size of the building above, that being sixteen by twenty-five or so. Rusted iron pipes and commercial-gauge electrical wire ran overhead. To her left, near the front of the building, was a sanitary stack. Between the joists overhead a spider had spun a silken, silvery web, spanning the trusses. Small carcasses hung from its outer edges.

In the center of the crawlspace were three large wooden boxes.

The boxes were not aligned in a row. The center box was off to one side, forming, from Jessica’s perspective, a blocky letter
C.
Each cube measured about thirty inches, each a different color—one yellow, one blue, one red.

The three marks on the page of the Bible,
she thought.
The red, blue, and yellow squares.

She looked at the first box, the one painted yellow. She knew this one had been opened. There was a slight gap between the door on top and the sides, a gap of an inch or so. Jessica was concerned that the person who opened it had been Officer Caruso, a clear breach of procedure. In a situation such as this, all kinds of precautions could have, and should have, been taken.

Jessica eased open the lid. The hinges creaked, echoing off the hard walls. She angled the beam of her flashlight.

Inside was a thing of nightmares.

The partial, long-decayed corpse wore a spangled red sweater, big silver hoop earrings. Around the neck was a distinctive black opal necklace. Jessica had seen it before. She knew who this was. She might have known all along.

It was the girl in the photograph they had found in the Bible. The girl irretrievably connected to Caitlin O’Riordan.

The girl they were supposed to find.

| TWENTY-FOUR |

H
E HAD GIVEN THE GIRL A MUCH-NEEDED BATH, WASHED AND CONDITION
her hair, averting his eyes as much as he could and still do a proper job, lest the girl find him immodest or, even worse, lecherous.

He used a mint shampoo from Origins.

Restoration,
he had thought with a smile.
In which an object is restored to its original condition.

When they were finished, he wheeled her down the hall. She was still a little groggy. He had given her yet another Brisette, one of his crushable ampoules containing chloroform. In the 1970s his father had purchased hundreds of them from an English woman who worked as a midwife. Joseph knew all too well their effect.

“Are you comfortable, my love?”

She turned her head slowly, remained silent.

They entered an upstairs sewing room. It was one of Joseph’s favorite rooms. The wallpaper was a blowsy floral in water silk, papered from the skirting board up to the dado rail. But the room was much more than beautiful. It was magic. With the touch of a button, located behind the reproduction of William Beattie-Brown’s
Golden Highlands,
the eastern wall would rise and give onto a small parlor overlooking the rear of the property. The touch of another button, this one beneath the spy window overlooking the great room, would release a four-by-four trapdoor behind the divan. Swann had never found the need to use either.

He positioned her in front of the television and pressed the play button on the remote, starting the video.

“Attend, the Great Cygne,” Swann said.

He had transferred all the old film footage—there was precious little of it, reaching back to his father’s early performances in 1948—to videocassette years ago. The original 8 mm footage had been brittle, and he had found a company in South Philly that transferred old home movies to CD, DVD, and videocassette.

The first images were of his father as a very young man, perhaps twenty. An entertainer of German extraction, performing in New York City in the late 1940s. What courage it must have taken, Joseph often thought.

A quick cut found his father at about twenty-eight. He now sat at a nightclub table with five others. It was a static, high-angle shot. Vegas, late 1950s. The very best place at the one of the very best times in history. The Great Cygne performed some coin magic to a delighted crowd. He executed Four Coins to a Glass, the Flying Eagles, the Traveling Centavos. In a flourish he grabbed an ice bucket from a passing cart and presented a variation on Miser’s Dream.

The next images passed in a blur: a club in Amsterdam, a backyard party in Midland Texas, an appearance at a county fair in Berea, Ohio, a performance for which his father was paid in rolls of quarters.

Image after image, as the tape rolled on, showed a man whose skills and temperament were slowly eroding, a man whose mind was becoming an echoing hollow of horrors, a journeyman illusionist reduced to catalogue tricks: cigarette through a quarter, cut and restored rope, sympathetic cards.

That is why, years earlier, Joseph added a postscript to the tape, a breathtaking coda filmed when his father was in his prime.

The Seven Wonders was a tightly edited, graphic-rich version of a full-length routine his father had performed on a local-access cable channel in Shreveport. Joseph had cut the performance to the sounds of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” Hokey, he knew. He had once had thoughts of marketing the event on DVD someday, provided he could get back the rights.

Swann watched for what was perhaps the five hundredth time, his heart racing.

First was the Garden of Flowers, then the Girl Without a Middle, then the Drowning Girl, then the Girl in the Sword Box.

“Watch this,” he said to Patricia. “Watch what happens next. This is the Girl in the Sub Tank. This is your part.”

When the video was finished, Swann descended the stairs, crossed the great room, allowed himself a glass of sherry. He climbed back upstairs.

“I have a few errands to run, but I will be back, and you and I will have dinner. Maybe we’ll even dress. Won’t that be fun?”

The girl looked at him. Her velvet gaze was no longer soft. It amazed him again and again how quickly youth faded. He rolled the chair into the guest room and locked the door.

M
INUTES LATER
, as he prepared to leave, he heard the girl scream. By the time he reached the foyer and slipped into his coat, the sound had receded to a distant echo. By the time he stepped onto the porch, it was only a memory.

The day was bright and sunny, rich with birdsong. Swann singled out a voice. It was a yellow-throated warbler, another lost soul, asking its peculiar questions of the world.

| TWENTY-FIVE |

B
YRNE WALKED TO HIS CAR, HIS HEART AND MIND ABUZZ WITH THE
events of the past hour. He still really didn’t know what this lunch date with his wife was all about, but he wasn’t going to overanalyze it.

Who was he kidding? Besides being one of his most annoying personality quirks, overanalyzing was pretty much what he did for a living.

He took out his phone, fired it up, wincing immediately at the possibility of a dozen angry messages waiting for him. You were never supposed to be completely out of touch with the unit, even if you were off duty, especially if you had active investigations. But in this age of cellular communications, and all its attendant glitches, there was always an excuse.

I couldn’t get a signal.

My battery was low.

I had it on Silent.

As soon as the phone went through its boot-up process and found a tower, he got an e-mail. It was from Colleen. She’d sent him the photograph she’d taken in the lobby. It completed his day.

Seconds later his phone rang. Byrne looked at the display. It was Jessica. Even her name looked pissed off. He flipped open the phone, went for bright and cheerful.

“Hey!”

“So
now
you turn your phone off?”

Busted. “I’ll explain,” Byrne said. “Where are you?”

“Shiloh Street.”

“Shiloh Street?” Byrne was a little surprised, a lot intrigued. “Why?”

“We’ve got a body. Female, mid-teens.”

Shit.
“Warm or cold?”

“Cold,” Jessica said. “Been here for months.”

“Inside the house?”

“Yep.”

“Where was she?”

“Remember that rug in the basement?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah.”

“CSU rolled it up and found a hole cut into the floor. An access hole to the crawlspace.”

“She was in the crawlspace?”

“In the crawlspace.”

“Any ID on the victim?”

“I haven’t been able to confirm it, but my gut tells me we do.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s wearing the same jewelry as the girl whose picture we found in that Bible.”

Byrne’s stomach, and mind, began to revolve. This was starting to reach deeper, and further, than he had imagined. And he had imagined something pretty bad. “Go on.”

“About an hour ago we got the Missing Person info, so we have a name, but the body is decomposed to the point where a visual ID isn’t possible. We’re going to have to get dental. Still, I think the clothes and jewelry are a slam.”

“We have a COD?”

“We won’t know that for a while, but I can make a fairly informed guess,” Jessica said.

“What do you mean?”

A moment’s hesitation. “You don’t want to know.”

“It’s kinda my job.”

Byrne heard his partner clear her throat. It was her usual stall. “She’s in pieces, Kevin. In boxes.”

“Christ.”

“There are three wooden boxes in the crawlspace, but there are only remains in two of them. One box is empty. The one in the middle. And they’re painted. Red, blue, and yellow.”

“The same colors as those marks in the Bible.”

“Yep.”

Byrne closed his eyes, recalled the girl in the photograph. She looked so young, so vulnerable. He’d had hopes. Not great hopes, but hopes. “And this is ours?”

“It is.”

Byrne took out his notebook, noted the time. “Hit me.”

“Presumptively, the victim’s name is Monica Louise Renzi,” Jessica said, spelling the first and last name. “She was sixteen. From Scranton. Missing for just over six months. Dino and Eric are on the way up just in case.”

Jessica was talking about Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez, two experienced detectives from the homicide unit. “Okay.”

“This is developing hard and fast, partner,” Jessica said. “Ike is down here, and word is that the captain is on his way. Nobody’s smoking and everyone’s buttoned up. Sarge said he called you three times.”

Shit.

“Which one are you going to use?” Jessica asked.

Byrne had to think about it. He didn’t want to repeat himself. “I had my phone on silent.”