Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (167 page)

“I like that one,” Jessica said. “Get here as fast as you can.”

“I’m on the way,” Byrne said. He headed toward his car. “One more question for you. Why is this ours again?”

Jessica took a second—a telling second that, between people who know each other well, spoke volumes. Then came the four words Byrne dreaded hearing.

“She was a runaway.”

| TWENTY-SIX |

T
HE FIRST THING SHE NOTICED WAS THAT THERE WERE A LOT OF FOREIGN
people. Foreign people as in Asian, Middle Eastern, African. Not foreign as in folks from three counties over.

The second thing she noticed was that this was, by far, the biggest room she had ever been in. It might have even been too big to classify as a room. It was more like a cathedral. The coffered ceilings had to be fifty feet high, maybe more, offering a dozen or so enormous hanging chandeliers, ringed by the tallest windows she had ever seen. The floors were marble, the hand railings looked like they were made of brass. At one end was a huge bronze statue called the
Angel of the Resurrection.

As train stations went, she thought, this was probably the Taj Mahal.

She sat on one of the long wooden benches for a while, watching the crowds come and go, listening to the announcements, to the variety of accents and languages, reading—but not really reading—one of the free newspapers. Politics, opinion, reviews, sex ads. Blah, blah, blah. Even the columns on music and movies bored the shit out of her. Which was rare.

Around two o’clock she walked the edges of the huge room a few times, passing by the shops, the ticket machines, the escalators down to the trains. She was still stunned by the scale of the place, still glancing upward every so often. She didn’t want to look like a tourist—or even worse, some hick runaway—but she couldn’t seem to help herself. The place was that amazing.

At one point she glanced over her shoulder. Three small Mennonite children, perhaps just off the train from Berks County, were looking at the ceiling, too. At least she wasn’t alone, she thought. Although, with her tight jeans, Ugg boots, and heavy eye makeup, she was just about the furthest thing from Mennonite she could imagine.

In her experience, the only other place she had ever been that compared to this train station was the King of Prussia mall, the place that had every single store you could imagine, along with a few extra. Burberry, Coach, Eddie Bauer, Louis Vuitton, Hermes. She had visited the mall once when she was about ten. Her aunt had taken her there as a birthday present, but she only came away with a pair of Gap jeans (she preferred Lucky Brand these days) and a bad stomach from something crappy they had eaten at the Ho-Lee Chow or Super Wok or Shang-High or whatever they called the fast-food Chinese restaurant. It was okay, though. Her family was far from rich. Gap was cool back then. Before they left the mall she had found a small discarded shopping bag from Versace and walked around with it at school for three weeks, carrying it like a funky purse. The haters hated, but she didn’t care.

According to the brochure she found on the train, the Thirtieth Street station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was 562,000 square feet. Located on Market Street, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth, it was one of the busiest intercity passenger facilities in the United States, the brochure went on to say, and it ranked behind only New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Union Station in its yearly volume of passengers. In the three previous years there had been 4.4 million people boarding trains in the Thirtieth Street terminal.

Millions,
she thought. You’d think there’d be one cute guy. She laughed. She didn’t feel like it—there was the rough equivalent of a ball of hot barbed wire in her stomach—but she laughed anyway. The last thing she was doing here was trying to meet cute guys. She was here for something else.

S
HE SAT AT ONE OF THE TABLES
in the food court, beneath a bright yellow Au Bon Pain umbrella. She tapped her pocket. She was almost broke. When she left the house she’d had sixty-one dollars and change. It seemed like enough money to get through at least a few days on the road.

Knock knock.
Reality calling.

She dreamed about food. An eight-slice pizza with onions, mushrooms, and red peppers. A double veggie-burger with onion rings. Her taste buds recalled a dish her aunt once made: potato gnocchi with pesto and roasted red potatoes.
God,
she was hungry. But out here there was a well-known equation: runaway = hungry.

It was a truth she had better get used to.

In addition to her rumbling stomach, there was something else she realized that she had better get ready to address. She was on the street, and she needed a street name. She glanced around the room, at the stalls near the doors that led to Thirtieth Street. She watched the people come and go. Every one of them had a name.

Everyone in the world was known by something, she thought. A name, a nickname, an epithet. An
identity.
What were you if you didn’t have a name?

Nothing.

Even worse, a number. A Social Security number. A prison number. You couldn’t sink much lower than that.

No one knew her here. That was both the good news and the bad news. The good news because she was completely anonymous. The bad news because there was no one she could rely upon, no one to call. She was on her own, a fallen pine cone in a lonely forest.

She watched the ebb and flow of humanity. It did not stop. Tall, fat, short, black, white, scary, normal. She remembered every face. She always had. When she was five years old, the doctors said she had an eidetic memory—the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects with extreme accuracy—and ever since she had never forgotten a face, or place, or photograph.

She noticed a guy at the end of the bench, a sailor with a canvas gym bag bursting at the seams sitting next to him like a dutiful beagle. Every so often he would look over at her, then look away, a flash of hot red guilt on his face. He could not have been more than twenty—kind of cute in his buzz cut and uniform—but she was younger, still bona fide jailbait. She smiled at him anyway, just to make it worse. After that, he got up and walked over to the food court. God, what a bitch she could be.

She glanced at the doors leading to the street. There was a booth selling gifts and flowers. An older couple, perhaps in their thirties, debated over a basket intended for a funeral ceremony. It seemed that the woman wanted to spend a lot of money, seeing as how the dearly departed was her cousin or second cousin, and how they had come all the way from Rochester. The man—a fat guy, a heart attack on a stick, as her aunt used to say—wanted to forget the whole thing. It seemed he was not a big fan of the deceased.

She watched them argue for a while, her eyes roaming the florist’s wares. Mylar balloons, ceramic knickknacks, crappy vases, a nice selection of flowers. And it came to her. Just like that. All things considered, as she perused the floral displays, she might have called herself Dahlia or Fern or Iris. Maybe even Daisy.

In the end it became a no-brainer. She may have been a runaway, but now she had a name.

She decided to call herself Lilly.

| TWENTY-SEVEN |

K
EVIN
B
YRNE CROUCHED IN THE CRAWLSPACE, HIS SCIATICA BESTING
the Vicodin in his system. It always did. At his height, just over six-three, he felt entombed by the damp, close walls.

Jessica was directing the scene out front.

Byrne looked at the three brightly colored boxes in front of him. Red. Yellow. Blue. Used-car lot pennant colors.
Happy
colors. The boxes—each had a small bronze doorknob and hinges—were closed now, but he had looked inside each. He wished he hadn’t, but he’d been thinking that same thought since the first time he walked onto the scene of a violent homicide on the first night he spent in uniform. That night it was a shotgun triple in Juniata. Brains on the wall, guts on the coffee table,
St. Elsewhere
on the blood-splattered TV. It never got better. A little easier sometimes, but never better.

The wooden boxes were covered in a layer of dust, disturbed only, he hoped, by the gloved hands of the two police officers who had been down here. Jessica and a uniformed officer named Maria Caruso.

Byrne studied the joints, the miters, the construction of these small coffins. They were expertly crafted. There was definitely a great deal of skill at work here.

In a few moments the crime scene unit would begin their collection of evidence in situ, then the victim would be transported to the medical examiner’s office. The techs were outside the building now, drinking cold coffee and chatting, waiting for Detective Kevin Byrne’s signal.

Byrne wasn’t ready yet.

He looked at the placement of the boxes. They were not in a line, but were not placed at random either. They were precisely organized, it seemed, edges all but touching in a staggered pattern. The first box, the yellow one, was closest to the wall on the north side. Byrne made note of this. This was the direction in which the body was facing. He was experienced enough to know that you never knew what might be important, what pathology lurked in the disturbed mind of a psychopathic killer. The second box, the red one, was staggered to the left. The third box, a shade of royal blue, was in line with the first.

He examined the hardpack earth around the base of the wooden cubes. There were no obvious scrape marks indicating the boxes had been dragged. Earlier he had slipped a few gloved fingers under one corner of one of the boxes, tried to lift it. The box was not light. This meant that whoever had brought these boxes down here probably had to duckwalk them across the expanse. That took strength.

One thing was certain: This was not the primary crime scene. The victim had bled out long before she was put into these boxes and moved into this crawlspace. As far as he could tell, there was a small amount of dried blood in the boxes themselves, and none on the floor.

Before coming down, Byrne had borrowed a measuring tape from one of the techs, and measured the opening cut into the floor, then the size of the boxes. The opening was about two inches larger than the boxes in all directions.

Had the opening existed, and then the killer built the boxes to fit? Or was it the other way around? Or was it a lucky coincidence? Byrne doubted it. There were few coincidences in his line of work.

Byrne shifted his weight. His legs were killing him. He tried to straighten them, but he could not stand up more than a few inches, and he wasn’t about to kneel down on a dirt floor. This was a relatively new suit. He tried steadying himself on the yellow box and—

—
senses the killer coming in from the back. He brings down the boxes one at a time. He has a truck, or a van. He did not assemble the boxes here. They are heavy, cumbersome, but he manages. He has been here before, many times, knew about the access door, knew he would not be discovered. Why?

He brings the girl down in pieces, no middle, the middle is empty, no heart, heartless. He arranges the boxes, meticulous and precise in this dank and confined tomb. She is a runaway, his first? Second? Tenth? He has done this before, has collected a child of the night, long fingers, a man’s clever hands on a box of bones, the smoke of a funeral pyre, light my fire …

Byrne rocked back on his heels, sat down hard. His head throbbed.

The headaches were returning.

W
HEN
B
YRNE EMERGED
from the building he pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in a trash can. He saw Jessica across the street, leaning against her car, arms crossed. She tapped a finger on her bicep. She looked wired, manic. She wore a pair of amber Serengeti sunglasses.

Before coming out of the crawlspace, Byrne had dry-swallowed a pair of Vicodin, his last two. He’d have to make a call.

The outside air was a mélange of acrid exhaust fumes and the rich tang of barbecue.

Still no rain.

“What do you think?” Jessica asked.

Byrne shrugged, stalling. His head seemed ready to implode. “Did you talk to the officer who discovered the victim?”

“I did.”

“Do you think she contaminated the scene in any way?”

Jessica shook her head. “No. She’s sharp. She’s young, but she knows what she’s doing.”

Byrne glanced back at the building. “So, why this place? Why here?”

“Good question.”

They were being led around North Philadelphia. There was no doubt about that, and few things made detectives angrier. Except, perhaps, having a murderer go underground and never get caught.

Who would do such a thing? After the killer’s rage had died, after the fire went out, why not dispose of the remains in plastic bags, or dump them in the river? Hell, Philadelphia had two very usable rivers for such purposes. Not to mention Wissahickon Creek. The PPD fished bodies, and parts of bodies, out of the rivers all the time.

Byrne had run into dismemberment a few times when the victim was killed by one of the various mobs in Philly—the Italians, the Colombians, the Mexicans, the Jamaicans. When it came to hyper-violent gangland homicide, all styles were served in the City of Brotherly Love.

But this had nothing to do with the mob.

Two runaways. One drowned, one dismembered.

Was there enough to tie this to the murder of Caitlin O’Riordan? They were a long way from getting any forensic details—hair, fibers, blood evidence, fingerprints—but the phone call to the CIU hotline and the cryptic clue in the Bible could not be ignored.

“This is one killer.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Byrne said, playing devil’s advocate.

Jessica uncrossed her arms, recrossed them. Now she tapped both forefingers on both biceps. “Yeah, well. I know we’re in the Badlands, partner, but this is beyond the pale. Way beyond.” She took off her sunglasses, tossed them into the car. “That was Monica Renzi’s heart. You know it and I know it. The DNA’s going to match. It’s going to hit the papers, and then hell will break its subterranean bonds.”