Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (178 page)

“This is great,” she said, grabbing the sandwich. “Thanks.”

The man didn’t respond. He just winked.
Help yourself,
his eyes said.

For an older guy, he was kind of cool.

T
HE SANDWICH WAS DELICIOUS
. She wanted another one, or fries, or something, but she would never ask. Asking meant invitation. She’d been
there.

A few minutes later the man folded the paper, glanced at his watch, glanced at her. “At the risk of being terribly forward, may I ask your name?” he asked.

Lilly wiped her lips with a paper napkin, swallowed the last bite of the sandwich. She sat a little straighter in her chair. She had always done this when she was getting ready to lie. “It’s Lilly,” she said, a little surprised at how easily it rolled off her tongue now, as if she’d been saying it for years.

The man looked surprised and delighted. “I have a
daughter
named Lilly,” he said. “She’s only three months old.” He reached into his suit coat, pulled out a beautiful wallet. He opened it, took out a photograph.

“This is she.”

The picture was of the most adorable, apple-cheeked, blue-eyed baby she’d ever seen. “Oh my God! What a beautiful little girl.”

“Thank you. I would like to say she takes after her father, but I know this would be self-flattery.” He put the photograph away, looked at his watch. “Well, I’m afraid I must be off.” He stood, took his briefcase off the chair next to him. “Thank you
so
much for the chat. It was very nice to meet you.”

“You too.”

“And beware scary boys on street corners.”

“I will.”

With that the man gave her a slight bow, turned, and walked toward the Thirtieth Street entrance. In a moment, he was gone.

Lilly knew what she was going to do. Somehow, she wasn’t afraid.

He was a
father.

She got up from the table and ran across the station. She found him on the corner.

She told him everything.

| FORTY-SIX |

T
HE WHITE TENT SAT NEAR THE EDGE OF THE ROOF, SHIELDING THE MURDER
victim from the sun, and the prying eyes of the media hovering overhead like red-tail hawks. There were no fewer than thirty people on the roof: detectives, supervisors, crime-scene technicians, investigators from the medical examiner’s office. Photographs were taken, measurements recorded, surfaces dusted.

When Jessica and Byrne arrived, the other personnel deferred to them. This could only mean one thing. The homicide that had occurred here was clearly connected to their investigations.

When Jessica opened the flap on the plastic tent, she knew it to be true. She felt the gorge rise in her throat. In front of her was a girl, no more than seventeen, with long dark hair, deep hazel eyes. She wore a thin black sweater and blue jeans, a pair of sandals on her small feet. None of this made her much different from any of the other young murder victims Jessica had seen in her career. What set this girl apart, what tied her irrevocably to the case she and her partner were working on, was the manner in which she was killed.

Protruding from the girl’s chest and abdomen were seven steel swords.

J
ESSICA STARED
at the girl’s pallid face. It was clear that in life she had been exotically pretty, but here, on a blistering rooftop in North Philadelphia, drained of all her blood, she looked almost mummified.

The good news, for the investigators, was that according to the ME’s office this victim had been dead little more than twenty-four hours. It was the closest they had come to the Collector. This was no cold case. This time they could amass evidence unadulterated by time. The very scent and presence of the murderer lingered.

Jessica snapped on a pair of gloves, stepped closer to the body. She gently examined the girl’s hands. Her nails had recently been manicured and painted. The color was a deep red. Jessica looked at her own nails through the latex, and wondered if she and the victim had been sitting in a manicurist’s chair at the same time.

Even though she was seated, Jessica determined that the girl was about five-three, less than a hundred pounds. She sniffed the girl’s hair. It smelled of mint. It had been recently shampooed.

Nicci Malone stepped onto the roof, saw Jessica.

“We’ve got an ID,” Nicci said.

She handed Jessica an FBI printout. The girl’s name was Katja Dovic. She was seventeen. She had last been seen at her house in New Canaan, Connecticut, on June twenty-sixth.

Dr. Tom Weyrich approached.

“I take it this is not the primary scene,” Jessica said.

Weyrich shook his head. “No. Wherever she was killed she bled out, and was cleaned up. The hearts stops, that’s it. The dead don’t bleed.” He paused for a moment. Jessica knew him to be a man not given to hyperbole or arch comment. “And, as bad as that is, it gets worse.” He pointed to one of the slices in the girl’s sweater. “It looks like she was run through with these swords at the primary scene, they were removed, and reinserted here. This guy re-created the murder on this rooftop.”

Jessica tried to wrap her mind around the image of someone stabbing this girl with seven swords, removing them, transporting the body, and doing it all over again.

While Nicci went off to advise the other investigators on the ID, Byrne sidled silently next to Jessica. They stood this way while the mechanics of a murder investigation swirled around them.

“Why is he doing this, Kevin?”

“There’s a reason,” Byrne said. “There’s a pattern. It looks random, but it isn’t. We’ll find it, and we’ll fucking put him down.”

“Now there’s three girls. Three methods. Three different dump sites.”

“All in the Badlands, though. All runaways.”

Jessica shook her head. “How do we warn these kids when they don’t want to be found?”

There was no answer.

| FORTY-SEVEN |

L
ILLY HAD STARTED TALKING AND SHE JUST COULDN’T SEEM TO STOP
herself. When she stopped, she felt five pounds lighter. She also felt like crying. She probably did. She couldn’t remember. It was kind of a fog.

Lilly had expected one of two reactions from the man. She expected him either to turn on his heels and walk away from her, or call the police.

He did neither. Instead, he was silent for a few moments.

He said he would help her, but only if this was something she really wanted to do. He told her to sleep on it, but only for one night. He said the best decisions in life are made after waiting twenty-four hours, never longer. He then gave her one hundred dollars and his phone number. She promised to call him one way or another. She never broke a promise.

She went back to the hostel. It was as good a place as any.

Despite the early hour, despite the insanity of her day, for the first time in as long as she could remember, she put her head down on a pillow and fell fast asleep.

| FORTY-EIGHT |

J
ESSICA STOOD OUTSIDE
E
VE
G
ALVEZ’S APARTMENT
. I
T WAS A SMALL
suite on the third floor of a nondescript, blocky brick building on Bustleton Avenue.

She stepped inside, and almost turned the lights on. But then she thought that doing so might be disrespectful. The last time Eve left these rooms she had every intention of returning.

Jessica danced the beam of the flashlight around the space. There was a card table in the dining area, one folding chair, a loveseat in the living room, a pair of end tables. There were no prints or framed posters on the wall, no houseplants, no area rugs. Black fingerprint powder claimed every surface.

She stepped into the bedroom. There was a double bed on a frame, no footboard or headboard. There was a dresser, but no mirror. Jimmy Valentine was right. Eve was a Spartan. The nightstand next to the bed held a cheap lamp and what looked like a photo cube. Jessica glanced in the closet: a pair of dresses, a pair of skirts. Black and navy blue. A pair of white blouses. They’d all been taken off the hangers, searched, and carelessly replaced. Jessica reached inside, smoothed the clothing, more out of habit than anything else.

The entire apartment was tidy, almost sterile. It seemed that Eve Galvez didn’t so much live here as stay here.

Jessica crossed the bedroom, picked up the photo cube. There were pictures on all six sides. One photo showed a picture of Eve at five or so, standing next to her brother on a beach. There was another that had to be Eve’s mother. They had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. One looked like Eve in, perhaps, eleventh grade. She was heavier in this snapshot than the others. Jessica turned it over, looked again at all sides. There were no photographs of Eve’s father.

Out of habit, or training, or just nosiness that had at least something to do with her becoming a police officer to begin with, Jessica shook the cube. Something inside rattled. She shook it again. The rattle was louder. There
was
something inside.

It took a few moments, but she found the way to open it. Inside was a ball of tissue and a plastic object, perhaps two inches long by a half inch wide. Jessica put her flashlight beam on it.

It was a USB flash drive, the kind that plugs into a port on a computer. It was not labeled or marked in any way. Jessica saw the print powder on the cube, so she knew someone at CSU had touched this. She looked inside the cube again. The flash drive had been wrapped in the tissue. Jessica understood. Eve had hidden it in there and put in the tissue so it would not rattle. She had done this for the possibility of a moment just such as this.

Against her better judgment—in fact, against all the judgment she had—she slipped the flash drive into her pocket, and clicked off her flashlight.

Five minutes later, leaving the apartment virtually the way she had found it, she headed home.

A
N HOUR LATER
Jessica sat in the bathtub.

It was Saturday. Vincent had two days off. He had taken Sophie to visit his parents. They would be back Sunday afternoon.

The house had been ghostly quiet, so she had taken her iPod into the tub. When she’d gotten home she’d plugged Eve’s flash drive into her desktop computer, and found that there were a few dozen mp3s on it, mostly songs by artists of whom Jessica had never heard. She added some them to her iTunes library.

Her Glock sat on the edge of the sink, right next to the tumbler containing three inches of Wild Turkey.

Jessica turned the hot water on again. It was already almost scalding in the tub, but she couldn’t seem to get it hot enough. She wanted the memory of Katja Dovic, and Monica Renzi, and Caitlin O’Riordan to wash off. She felt as if she would never be clean again.

E
VE
G
ALVEZ’S MUSIC
was a mix of pop, salsa,
tejano, danzón—
a sort of old-time formal Cuban dance music—and something called
huayño.
Good stuff. New stuff.
Different
stuff. Jessica listened to a few songs by someone named Marisa Monte. She decided to add the rest of the songs to her iPod.

She got out of the tub, threw on her big fluffy robe and went into the small room off the kitchen they used as a computer room. And it was small. Room enough for a table, chair, and a G5 computer. She poured herself another inch, sat down, selected the flash drive. It was then that she noticed a folder she hadn’t seen, a folder labeled
vademecum.
She double-clicked it.

A few moments later, the screen displayed more than two hundred files. These were not system files, nor were they music files. They were Eve Galvez’s personal files. Jessica looked at the extensions. All of them were .jpg files. Graphics.

None of the files were named, just numbered, starting with one hundred.

Jessica clicked on the first file. She found that she was holding her breath as the hard drive turned, launching Preview, the default graphic display program she used on her computer. This was, after all, a picture of some kind, and she wasn’t all that sure it was something she wanted to see. Or should see.

A moment later, when the graphic showed up the screen, it was probably the last thing Jessica expected. It was the scanned image of a piece of paper, a yellowed, three-holed piece of notebook paper with blue lines, something akin to a leaf from a child’s school composition book. On it was a young woman’s back-slanted, loopy handwriting.

Jessica scrolled to the top of the file. When she saw the handwritten date, her heart began to race.

SEPTEMBER
3, 1988.

It was Eve Galvez’s diary.

| FORTY-NINE |

SEPTEMBER 3, 1988

I hide.

I hide because I know his anger. I hide because it took more than six months to heal the last time I saw this much rage in his eyes. The bones in my right arm, even now, tell me of a coming rainstorm. I hide because my mother cannot help me, not with her pills and her lovers; nor can my brother, my sweet brother who once stood up to him and paid so dearly. I hide because, not to hide, could very easily mean the end of me, the final punctuation of my short story.

I hear him in the foyer of the house, now, his huge boots on the quarry tile. He does not know about this secret place, this rabbit hole which has been my salvation so many times, this dusty sanctuary beneath the stairs. He does not know about this diary. If he ever found these words, I don’t know what he would do.

The drink has taken over his mind, and made it a house of red mirrors where he cannot see me. He can only see himself, his own monstrous face in the glass, reflected a thousand times over like some uncontrollable army.

I hear him walking up the stairs, just above me, calling my name. It won’t be long until he finds me. No secret can remain so forever.

I am afraid. I am afraid of Arturo Emmanuel Galvez. My father.

I may never make another entry in this journal.

And, dearest diary, if I do not, if I never speak to you again, I just wanted you to know why I do what I do.