Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (34 page)

Either way, he should probably make a backup copy of the photos, just to be safe.

He thought about the headline, huge type over a photo of Byrne walking out of that alley in Gray’s Ferry.

VIGILANTE COP?
would read the headline.

DETECTIVE IN DEATH ALLEY ON NIGHT OF MURDER!
would read the deck.
God,
he was good.

Simon walked over to the hall closet and fished out a clean CD-R.

When he closed the door and turned back to the room, something was different. Maybe not so much different as off-center. It was like the feeling you get when you have an inner-ear infection and your balance is just that little bit tipsy. He stood in the archway leading to his tiny living room, trying to pin down the feeling.

Everything seemed to be as he had left it. His PowerBook on the coffee table, his empty demitasse cup next to it. Enid purring on the throw rug near the heat register.

Maybe he was mistaken.

He looked at the floor.

He saw the shadow first, a shadow that mirrored his own. He knew enough about key lighting to know that you need two light sources to cast two shadows.

Behind him, there was only the small ceiling fixture.

Then he felt the hot breath on his neck, smelled the faint scent of peppermint.

He turned, his heart suddenly in his throat.

And stared straight into the eyes of the devil.

50

WEDNESDAY, 1:22 PM

B
YRNE HAD MADE A FEW STOPS before returning to the Roundhouse and briefing Ike Buchanan. He then arranged for one of his registered confidential informants to call him with the information about Brian Parkhurst’s whereabouts. Buchanan faxed the DA’s office and arranged for a search warrant of Parkhurst’s building.

Byrne called Jessica on her cell phone and found her at a café near her father’s house in South Philly. He swung by and picked her up. He briefed her at the Fourth District headquarters at Eleventh and Wharton.

T
HE BUILDING PARKHURST owned was a former florist shop on Sixty-first Street, itself converted from a spacious brick row house built in the 1950s. The stone-front structure was a few battered doors down from the Wheels of Soul clubhouse. The Wheels of Soul was an old and venerable motorcycle club. In the 1980s, when crack cocaine had hit Philly hard, it was the Wheels of Soul MC, as much as any law enforcement agency, that had kept the city from burning to the ground.

If Parkhurst was taking these girls somewhere for short periods of time, Jessica thought as they approached the property, this place would be ideal. There was a rear entrance large enough to pull a van or minivan partially inside.

When they arrived at the scene, they drove slowly behind the building. The rear entrance—a large, corrugated-steel door—was padlocked from the outside. They circled the block and parked on the street, under the El, about five addresses west of the location.

Two patrol cars met them. Two uniformed officers would cover the front; two, the rear.

“Ready?” Byrne asked.

Jessica felt a little shaky. She hoped it didn’t show. She said: “Let’s do it.”

B
YRNE AND JESSICA APPROACHED THE DOOR. The front windows were whitewashed, impossible to see through. Byrne slammed a fist into the door three times.

“Police! Search warrant!”

They waited five seconds. He pounded again. No response.

Byrne turned the handle, pushed on the door. It eased open.

The two detectives made eye contact. On a count, they rolled the jamb.

The front room was a mess. Drywall, paint cans, drop cloths, scaffolding. Nothing to the left. To the right, stairs leading up.

“Police! Search warrant!”
Byrne repeated.

Nothing.

Byrne pointed to the stairs. Jessica nodded. He would take the second floor. Byrne mounted the stairs.

Jessica worked her way to the rear of the building on the first floor, checking every alcove, every closet. The interior was half renovated. The hallway behind what was once a service counter was a skeleton of open studs, exposed wiring, plastic water lines, heat ducts.

Jessica stepped through a doorway, into what had once been the kitchen. The kitchen was gutted. No appliances. Recently drywalled and taped. Beneath the pasty smell of the drywall tape, there was something else. Onions. Jessica then saw a sawhorse in the corner of the room. On it sat a half-eaten take-out salad. Next to it was a full cup of coffee. She dipped a finger into the coffee. Ice cold.

She walked out of the kitchen, inched toward the room at the back of the row house. The door was only slightly ajar.

Drops of sweat rolled down her face, her neck, then laced her shoulders. The hallway was warm, stuffy, airless. The Kevlar vest felt confining and heavy. Jessica reached the door, took a deep breath. With her left foot she slowly edged the door open. She saw the right half of the room first. An old dinette chair on its side, a wooden toolbox. Smells greeted her. Stale cigarette smoke, freshly cut knotty pine. Beneath it was something ugly, something rank and feral.

She kicked the door open fully, turned into the small room, and immediately saw a figure. Instinctively she spun and pointed her weapon at the shape, silhouetted against the whitewashed windows in the rear.

But there was no threat.

Brian Parkhurst was hanging from an I-beam in the center of the room. His face was a purplish brown, swollen, his extremities distended, his black tongue lolling out of his mouth. An electrical wire was wrapped around his neck, digging deep into the flesh, then looped over a support beam overhead. Parkhurst was barefoot, shirtless. The sour smell of drying feces filled Jessica’s sinuses. She dry-heaved once, twice. She held her breath, cleared the rest of the room.

“Upstairs is clear!” Byrne yelled.

Jessica nearly jumped at the sound of his voice. She heard Byrne’s heavy boots on the stairs. “In here,” she yelled.

In seconds, Byrne entered the room. “Ah
fuck
.”

Jessica saw the look in Byrne’s eyes, read the headlines there. Another suicide. Just like the Morris Blanchard case. Another suspect hounded into taking his own life. She wanted to say something, but it was not her place, and not the time.

A diseased silence filled the room. They had been batted back to square one and both of them, in their own way, attempted to reconcile that fact with all they had contemplated on the way over.

The system would now go about its business. They would call the medical examiner’s office, the Crime Scene Unit. They would cut Parkhurst down, transport him to the ME’s office where they would perform an autopsy on him, pending notification of family. There would be a notice in the papers and a service at one of Philadelphia’s finer funeral homes, followed closely by interment on a grassy hillside.

And exactly what Brian Parkhurst knew, and what he had done, if anything, would forever be cast in darkness.

T
HEY MILLED AROUND THE HOMICIDE UNIT, loose aggies in an empty cigar box. There were always mixed feelings at times like these, when a suspect cheats the system with suicide. There would be no allocution, no admission of guilt, no punctuation. Just an endless Möbius strip of suspicion.

Byrne and Jessica sat at adjoining desks.

Jessica caught Byrne’s eye.

“What?” he asked.

“Say it.”

“Say what?”

“You don’t think it was Parkhurst, do you?”

Byrne didn’t answer right away. “I think he knew a hell of a lot more than he told us,” he said. “I think he was seeing Tessa Wells. I think he knew that he was going to do time for statutory rape, and that’s why he went into hiding. But do I think he murdered these three girls? No. I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because there wasn’t a single shred of physical evidence anywhere near him. Not one fiber, not one drop of fluid.”

The Crime Scene Unit had combed every square inch of both of Brian Parkhurst’s properties, yielding nothing. They had pinned a great deal of their suspicions on the possibility—actually, the certainty—that incriminating scientific evidence would be found in Parkhurst’s building. Everything they had hoped to find there simply did not exist. Detectives had interviewed everyone in the vicinity of his home and the building he was renovating, yielding nothing. They had yet to find his Ford Windstar.

“If he was bringing these girls to his house, someone would have seen something, heard something, right?” Byrne added, “If he was bringing them to the building on Sixty-first Street, we would have found
something
.”

When they had searched the building, they had discovered a number of items, including a box of miscellaneous hardware that contained an assortment of screws, nuts, and bolts, none of which precisely matched the bolts used on the three victims. There was also a chalk box, the carpenter’s tool used for snapping lines in the rough-framing stage of construction. The chalk inside was blue. They had sent a sample to the lab, to see if it matched the blue chalk found on the victims. Even if it did, carpenter’s chalk could be found at every construction site in the city, and in half the home remodelers’ toolboxes. Vincent had some in his toolbox in the garage.

“But what about his call to me?” Jessica asked. “What about telling me that there are ‘things we need to know’ about these girls?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Byrne said. “Maybe there
is
something that they all have in common. Something that we’re not seeing.”

“But what happened between the time he called me and this morning?”

“I don’t know.”

“Suicide doesn’t exactly fit the profile, does it?”

“No. It doesn’t.”

“Which means there’s a good chance that . . .”

They both knew what it meant. They sat mute for a while, the cacophony of the busy office flowing around them. There were at least a half dozen other homicides being investigated, and those detectives inched and plowed forward. Byrne and Jessica envied them.

There are things you need to know about these girls
.

If Brian Parkhurst was not their killer, then the possibility existed that the man they were looking for had murdered him. Perhaps for taking the spotlight. Perhaps for some reason that spoke to the basic pathology of his madness. Perhaps to prove to authorities that he was still out there.

Neither Jessica nor Byrne had as yet mentioned the similarity in the two “suicides,” but it permeated the air in the room like a noxious cloud.

“Okay,” Jessica broke the silence. “If Parkhurst was murdered by our doer, how did he know who he was?”

“Two ways,” Byrne said. “Either they knew each other, or he got his name off TV when he left the Roundhouse the other day.”

Score another one for the media, Jessica thought. They batted around the idea that Brian Parkhurst was another victim of the Rosary Killer for a while. But even if he was, it didn’t help them figure out what was coming next.

The time line, or lack of it, made the killer’s movements unpredictable.

“Our doer picks Nicole Taylor off the street on Thursday,” Jessica said. “He dumps her at Bartram Gardens on Friday, right around the time he picks up Tessa Wells, whom he holds until Monday. Why the lag time?”

“Good question,” Byrne said.

“Then Bethany Price was grabbed Tuesday afternoon, and our one and only witness saw her body dumped at the museum on Tuesday evening. There’s no cycle. No symmetry.”

“It’s almost like he doesn’t want to do these things on the weekend.”

“That may not be as far-fetched as you think,” Byrne said.

He got up, approached the white board, which was now covered in crime scene photos and notes.

“I don’t think our boy is motivated by the moon, the stars, voices, dogs named Sam, any of that shit,” Byrne said. “This guy has a plan. I say we learn his plan, we find him.”

Jessica glanced at her pile of library books. The answer was in there somewhere.

Eric Chavez entered the room, got Jessica’s attention. “Got a minute, Jess?”

“Sure.”

He held up a file folder. “There’s something you should see.”

“What is it?”

“We ran a background check on Bethany Price. Turns out she had a prior.”

Chavez handed her an arrest report. Bethany Price had been arrested as part of a drug sting operation about a year earlier, having been found with nearly a hundred hits of Benzedrine—the illicit diet pill of choice for overweight teenagers. It certainly had been when Jessica was in high school, and it remained so now.

Bethany pled out and received two hundred hours of community service and a year’s probation.

None of that was surprising. The reason Eric Chavez had brought it to Jessica’s attention was the fact that the arresting officer in the case was Detective Vincent Balzano.

Jessica absorbed this, considered the coincidence.

Vincent knew Bethany Price.

According to the sentencing report, it was Vincent who recommended the community service in lieu of jail time.

“Thanks, Eric,” Jessica said.