Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (4 page)

A breeze brought exhaust fumes and something else. A paint smell. Kerosene, maybe. Beneath it, garbage and human sweat. A cat shrieked, then—

Quiet.

He was carrying her down a deserted street.

She could not scream. She could not move. He had injected her with a drug that made her limbs feel leaden and frail; her mind, thick with a gauzy gray fog.

For Tessa Wells, the world passed by in a churning rush of muted colors and glimpsed geometric shapes.

Time stalled. Froze. She opened her eyes.

They were inside. Descending wooden steps. The smell of urine and rotting lunch meat. She hadn’t eaten in a long time and the smell made her stomach lurch and a trickle of bile rise in her throat.

He placed her at the foot of a column, arranging her body and limbs as if she were some sort of doll.

He put something in her hands.

The rosary.

Time passed. Her mind swam away again. She opened her eyes once more as he touched her forehead. She could sense the cruciform shape he inscribed there.

My God, is he anointing me?

Suddenly, memories shimmered silver in her mind, a mercurial reflection of her childhood. She recalled—

—horseback riding in Chester County and the way the wind would sting my face and Christmas morning and the way Mom’s crystal captured the colored lights from the enormous tree Dad bought every year and Bing Crosby and that silly song about Hawaiian Christmas and its—

He stood in front of her, now, threading a huge needle. He spoke in a slow monotone—

Latin?

—as he tied a knot in the thick black thread and pulled it tight.

She knew she would not leave this place.

Who would take care of her father?

Holy Mary, mother of God . . .

He had made her pray in that small room for a long time. He had whispered the most horrible words in her ear. She had prayed for it to end.

Pray for us sinners . . .

He pushed her skirt up her thighs, then all the way to her waist. He dropped to his knees, spread her legs. The lower half of her body was completely paralyzed.

Please God, make it stop.

Now . . .

Make it stop.

And at the hour of our death . . .

Then, in this damp and decaying place, this earthly hell, she saw the steel drill bit glimmer, heard the whir of the motor, and knew her prayers were finally answered.

4

MONDAY, 6:50 AM

“C
OCOA PUFFS.”

The man glared at her, his mouth set in a tight yellow rictus. He was standing a few feet away, but Jessica could feel the danger radiate from him, could suddenly smell the bitter tang of her own terror.

As he held her in his unwavering stare, Jessica sensed the edge of the roof approaching behind her. She reached for her shoulder holster but, of course, it was empty. She rummaged her pockets. Left side: something that felt like a barrette, along with a pair of quarters. Right side: air. Great. On her way down she would be fully equipped to put her hair up and make a long-distance call.

Jessica decided to employ the one bludgeon she had used her entire life, the one fearsome device that had managed to get her into, and out of, most of her troubles. Her words. But instead of anything remotely clever or threatening, all she could manage was a wobbly:

“What?”

Again, the thug said: “Cocoa Puffs.”

The words seemed as incongruous as the setting: a dazzlingly bright day, a cloudless sky, white gulls forming a lazy ellipse overhead. It felt like it should be Sunday morning, but Jessica somehow knew it wasn’t. No Sunday morning could shoulder this much peril, nor conjure this much fear. No Sunday morning would find her on top of the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Philadelphia, with this terrifying gangster moving toward her.

Before Jessica could speak, the gang member repeated himself one last time. “I made you Cocoa Puffs, Mommy.”

Hello.

Mommy
?

Jessica slowly opened her eyes. Morning sunlight burrowed in from everywhere, slim yellow daggers that poked at her brain. It wasn’t a gangster at all. It was, instead, her three-year-old daughter Sophie, perched on her chest, her powder-blue nightie deepening the ruby glow of her cheeks, her face a soft pink eye in a hurricane of chestnut curls. Now, of course, it all made sense. Now Jessica understood the weight on her heart, and why the gruesome man in her nightmare had sounded a little bit like Elmo.

“Cocoa Puffs, honey?”

Sophie Balzano nodded.

“What about Cocoa Puffs?”

“I made you breakfess, Mommy.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh.”

“All by yourself?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Aren’t
you
a big girl.”

“I am.”

Jessica offered her sternest expression. “What did Mommy say about climbing on the cabinets?”

Sophie’s face went into a series of evasive maneuvers, attempting to conceive a story that might explain how she got the cereal out of the upper cabinets without climbing on the countertops. In the end, she just gave her mother a flash of the big browns and, as always, the discussion was over.

Jessica had to smile. She envisioned the Hiroshima that must be the kitchen. “Why did you make me breakfast?”

Sophie rolled her eyes. Wasn’t it
obvious
? “You need breakfess on your first day of school!”

“That’s true.”

“It’s the most ’portant meal of the day!”

Sophie was, of course, far too young to grasp the concept of work. Ever since her first foray into preschool—a pricey Center City facility called Educare—whenever her mother left the house for any extended period of time, for Sophie, it was
going to school.

As morning toed the threshold of consciousness, the fear began to melt away. Jessica wasn’t being held at bay by a criminal, a dream-scenario that had become all too familiar to her in the previous few months. She was in the arms of her beautiful baby. She was in her heavily mortgaged twin in Northeast Philadelphia; her heavily financed Jeep Cherokee was in the garage.

Safe.

Jessica reached over and clicked on the radio as Sophie gave her a big hug and a bigger kiss. “It’s getting late!” Sophie said, then slid off the bed and rocketed across the bedroom. “C’
mon,
Mommy!”

As Jessica watched her daughter disappear around the corner, she thought that, in her twenty-nine years, she had never been quite so grateful to greet the day; never so glad to be over the nightmare she began having the day she heard she would be moving to the Homicide Unit.

Today was her first day as a murder cop.

She hoped it would be the last day she had the dream.

Somehow, she doubted it.

Detective.

Even though she had spent nearly three years in the Auto Unit, and had carried a badge the entire time, she knew that it was the more select units of the department—Robbery, Narcotics, and Homicide—that carried the true prestige of that title.

As of today, she was one of the elite. One of the chosen. Of all the gold-badge detectives on the Philadelphia police force, those men and women in the Homicide Unit were looked upon as gods. You could aspire to no more lofty a law enforcement calling. While it was true that dead bodies showed up in the course of every kind of investigation, from robberies and burglaries, to drug deals gone bad, to domestic arguments that got out of hand, whenever a pulse could not be found, the divisional detectives picked up the phone and called Homicide.

As of today, she would speak for those who could no longer speak for themselves.

Detective.

“Y
OU WANT SOME of Mommy’s cereal?” Jessica asked. She was halfway through her huge bowl of Cocoa Puffs—Sophie had poured her nearly the entire box—which was rapidly turning into a sort of sugary, beige stucco.

“No sankoo,” Sophie said through a mouthful of cookie.

Sophie was sitting across from her at the kitchen table, vigorously coloring what appeared to be an orange, six-legged version of Shrek, making roundabout work of a hazelnut biscotti, her favorite.

“You sure?” Jessica asked. “It’s
really, really
good.”

“No sankoo.”

Damn, Jessica thought. The kid was as stubborn as she was. Whenever Sophie made up her mind about something, she was immovable. This, of course, was good news and bad news. Good news, because it meant that Jessica and Vincent Balzano’s little girl didn’t give up easily. Bad news, because Jessica could envision arguments with the teenaged Sophie Balzano that would make Desert Storm look like a sandbox fracas.

But now that she and Vincent were separated, Jessica wondered how it would affect Sophie in the long term. It was painfully clear that Sophie missed her daddy.

Jessica looked at the head of the table, where Sophie had set a place for Vincent. Granted, the silverware she selected was a small soup ladle and a fondue fork, but it was the effort that mattered. Over the past few months, whenever Sophie went about anything that involved a family setting—including her Saturday-afternoon tea parties in the backyard, soirees generally attended by her menagerie of stuffed bears, ducks, and giraffes—she had always set a place for her father. Sophie was old enough to know that the universe of her small family was upside down, but young enough to believe that little-girl magic just might make it better. It was one of the thousand reasons Jessica’s heart ached every day.

Jessica was just starting to formulate a plan for distracting Sophie so she could get to the sink with her salad bowl full of Cocoa muck when the phone rang. It was Jessica’s first cousin Angela. Angela Giovanni was a year younger, and was the closest thing to a sister Jessica had ever had.

“Hey, Homicide Detective Balzano,” Angela said.

“Hey, Angie.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Oh yeah. I got the full two hours.”

“You ready for the big day?”

“Not really.”

“Just wear your tailored armor, you’ll be fine,” Angela said.

“If you say so,” Jessica said. “It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

Jessica’s dread was so unfocused, so general in nature, she had a hard time putting a name to it. It really
did
feel like her first day of school. Kindergarten. “It’s just that this is the first thing in my life I’ve ever been afraid of.”

“Hey!” Angela began, revving up her optimism. “Who made it through college in three years?”

It was an old routine for the two of them, but Jessica didn’t mind. Not today. “Me.”

“Who passed the promotion exam on her first try?”

“Me.”

“And who kicked the living, screaming shit out of Ronnie Anselmo for copping a feel during
Beetlejuice
?”

“That would be me,” Jessica said, even though she remembered not really minding all that much. Ronnie Anselmo was pretty cute. Still, there was a principle.

“Damn straight. Our own little Calista Braveheart,” Angela said. “And remember what Grandma used to say:
Meglio un uovo oggi che una gallina domani
.”

Jessica flashed on her childhood, on holidays at her grandmother’s house on Christian Street in South Philly, on the aromas of garlic and basil and Asiago and roasting peppers. She recalled the way her grandmother would sit on her tiny front stoop in spring and summer, knitting needles in hand, the seemingly endless afghan spooling on the spotless cement, always green and white, the colors of the Philadelphia Eagles, spouting her witticisms to all who would listen. This one she used all the time.
Better an egg today than a chicken tomorrow
.

The conversation settled into a tennis match of family inquiries. Everyone was fine, more or less. Then, as expected, Angela said:

“You know, he’s been asking about you.”

Jessica knew exactly who Angela meant by
he
.

“Oh yeah?”

Patrick Farrell was an emergency room physician at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Angela worked as an RN. Patrick and Jessica had had a brief, if rather chaste affair before Jessica had gotten engaged to Vincent. She had met him one night when, as a uniformed cop, she brought a neighborhood boy into the ER, a kid who had blown off two fingers with an M-80. She and Patrick had casually dated for about a month.

Jessica was seeing Vincent at the time—himself a uniformed officer out of the Third District. When Vincent popped the question, and Patrick was faced with a commitment, Patrick had deferred. Now, with the separation, Jessica had asked herself somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion times if she had let the good one get away.

“He’s pining, Jess,” Angela said. Angela was the only person north of Mayberry who used words like
pining
. “Nothing more heartbreaking than a beautiful man in love.”

She was certainly right about the
beautiful
part. Patrick was that rare black Irish breed—dark hair, dark blue eyes, broad shoulders, dimples. Nobody ever looked better in a white lab coat.

“I’m a married woman, Angie.”