Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (41 page)

“I mean, gimme a gangbanger,” Nick went on. “Gimme a homeboy and his Mac-Ten, lighting up some other asshole over turf, over a short bag, over honor, code, whatever. I understand that shit. This?”

Everyone knew what he meant. It was so much easier when the motives hung on the exterior of the crime like a shingle. Greed was the easiest. Follow the green footprints.

Palladino was on a roll. “Payne and Washington got the squeal on that JBM banger in Gray’s Ferry the other night, right?” he continued. “Now I hear they found the shooter dead over on Erie. That’s the way I like it, nice and neat.”

Byrne shut his eyes for a second, opened them to a brand-new day.

John Shepherd came up the stairs. Byrne motioned to the waitress, Margaret. She brought John a Jim Beam, neat.

“The blood was all Kreuz’s,” Shepherd said. “The girl died from a broken neck. Just like the others.”

“And the blood in the cup?” Tony Park asked.

“That belonged to Kreuz. The ME thinks that, before he bled out, he was fed the blood through the straw.”

“He was fed his own blood,” Chavez said on the tail of a full body-shiver. It wasn’t a question; merely the stating of something too hard to comprehend.

“Yeah,” Shepherd replied.

“It’s official,” Chavez said. “I’ve seen it all.”

The six detectives absorbed this. The attendant horrors of the Rosary Killer case were growing exponentially.

“Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,” Jessica said.

Five sets of eyebrows raised. Everyone turned their head toward Jessica.

“I’ve been doing a lot of reading,” she said. “Holy Thursday was known as Maundy Thursday. This is the day of the Last Supper.”

“So this Kreuz was our doer’s Peter?” Palladino asked.

Jessica could only shrug. She had thought about it. The rest of the night would probably be spent tearing apart Wilhelm Kreuz’s life, looking for any connection that might turn into a lead.

“Did she have anything in her hands?” Byrne asked.

Shepherd nodded. He held up a photocopy of a digital photograph. The detectives gathered around the table. They took their turns examining the photo.

“What is it, a lottery ticket?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah,” Shepherd said.

“Oh, that’s fucking great,” Palladino said. He walked back to the window, hands in pocket.

“Prints?” Byrne asked.

Shepherd shook his head.

“Can we find out where this ticket was purchased?” Jessica asked.

“Got a call into the commission already,” Shepherd said. “We should hear from them anytime now.”

Jessica stared at the photo. Their killer had placed a Big 4 ticket into the hands of his most recent victim. Chances were good that it was not simply a taunt. Like the other objects, it was a clue as to where the next victim would be found.

The lottery number itself was obscured by blood.

Did this mean he was going to dump the body at a lottery agent’s location? There had to be hundreds. There was no way they could stake them all out.

“This guy’s luck is unbelievable,” Byrne said. “Four girls off the streets and not a single eyewitness. He’s smoke.”

“Do you think it’s luck, or that we just live in a city where no one gives a shit anymore?” Palladino asked.

“If I believed that, I’d take my twenty today and head to Miami Beach,” Tony Park said.

The other five detectives nodded.

At the Roundhouse, the task force had plotted out the abductions and the dump sites on a huge map. There was no clear pattern, no way to anticipate or discern the killer’s next move. They had already regressed to the basics—serial murderers start close to home. Their killer lived or worked in North Philly.

Square one.

B
YRNE WALKED JESSICA to her car.

They stood around for a short while, each rummaging for words. It was at times like these that Jessica wished she smoked. Her trainer at Frazier’s Gym would kill her for the very thought, but it didn’t stop her envying Byrne for the comfort he seemed to find in a Marlboro Light.

A barge lazily cruised up the river. Traffic moved in fits and starts. Philly lived, despite this madness, despite the grief and horror that had befallen these families.

“You know, no matter how this ends, it’s going to be ugly,” Byrne said.

Jessica knew this. She also knew that, before it was over, she would probably learn a large new truth about herself. She would probably uncover a dark recess of fear and rage and anguish that she would just as soon leave undiscovered. As much as she wanted to disbelieve it, she was going to emerge from the end of this passage a different person. She hadn’t planned on this when she agreed to take the job but, like a runaway train, she found herself speeding toward the chasm, and there was no way to stop.

PART
FOUR

59

GOOD FRIDAY, 10:00 AM

T
HE DRUG NEARLY TOOK OFF the top of her head.

The rush slammed into the back of her skull, ricocheted around for a while, in time to the music, then sawed at her neck in jagged up and down triangles, the way you might cut the lid off a pumpkin at Halloween.

“Righteous,” Lauren said.

Lauren Semanski was failing two of her six classes at Nazarene. If threatened with a gun, even after two years of algebra, she couldn’t tell you what the quadratic equation was. She wasn’t even sure the quadratic equation
was
algebra. Maybe it was geometry. And even though her family was Polish, she couldn’t point to Poland on a map. She tried once, landing her glitter-polished nail somewhere south of Lebanon. She had gotten five tickets in the past three months, both the digital clock and the VCR in her bedroom had been flashing 12:00 for nearly two years, and the one time she tried to bake a birthday cake for her little sister Caitlin, she had nearly burned down the house.

At sixteen, Lauren Semanski—and she might be the first to admit this—didn’t know a whole lot about a whole lot of things.

But she did know good meth.

“Krypto
nite
.” She dropped the tooter on the coffee table, leaned back against the couch. She felt like howling. She glanced around the room. Wiggers everywhere. Someone cranked up the music. Sounded like Billy Corgan. Pumpkins were old-school cool. Zwan sucked.

“Low-
rent
!” Jeff yelled, barely audible above the music, using his stupid nickname for her, ignoring her wishes for the millionth time. He air-guitared a few choice licks, drooling on his Mars Volta T-shirt, grinning like a hyena.

God, what a queer,
Lauren thought.
Cute, but geek-a-roni.
“Gotta jet,” she yelled.

“Naw, come
on,
Lo.” He held out the tooter to her, like she hadn’t already snorted an entire Rite-Aid.

“I can’t.” She was supposed to be at the grocery store. She was supposed to be picking up a cherry glaze for the stupid Easter ham. As if she needed food. Who needed food? No one she knew. Still, she had to fly. “She’ll kill me if I forget to go to the store.”

Jeff made a face, then bent over the glass coffee table and ripped a line. He was gone. She was hoping for a kiss good-bye, but when he leaned back from the table, she saw his eyes.

North.

Lauren stood, gathered her purse and her umbrella. She looked around the obstacle course of bodies, reposing in various states of hyper-consciousness. The windows were blacked out with construction paper. All the lamps held red lightbulbs.

She’d be back later.

Jeff had enough for all tweak-end
long
.

She stepped into the street, her Ray-Bans firmly in place. It was still raining—would it ever stop?—but even the overcast sky was a little too bright for her. Besides, she dug the way the sunglasses made her look. Sometimes, she wore them at night. Sometimes, she wore them to bed.

She cleared her throat, swallowed. The burn of the meth at the back of her throat gave her a second charge.

She was
way
too gakked to go home. Anyway, it was Baghdad there these days. She didn’t need the grief.

She pulled out her Nokia, trying to think of an excuse she could use. All she needed was an hour or so to come down. Car trouble? Seeing as the VW was in the shop, that wouldn’t fly. Sick friend? Please, Lo. Grandma B would ask for notes from the doctors at this point. What hadn’t she used for a while? Not much. She had been at Jeff’s maybe four days a week for the past month. Late almost every day.

I know,
she thought.
I’ve got it.

Sorry, Grams. I can’t make it home for lunch. I’ve been kidnapped.

Ha-ha. Like she’d give a shit.

Ever since Lauren’s parents had done the real crash test dummy scene last year, she had been living with the living dead.

Fuck it. She’d go deal with it.

She window-shopped a little, lifting the sunglasses to see. The ’Bans were cool and all, but
man
were they dark.

She cut across the parking lot behind the stores at the corner of her street, steeling herself for the onslaught that was her grandmother.

“Hi, Lauren!” someone yelled.

She turned around. Who called her? She glanced around the lot. She didn’t see anyone, just a handful of cars, a couple of vans. She tried to place the voice, couldn’t.

“Hello?” she said.

Silence.

She backtracked between a van and a beer delivery truck. She took off her sunglasses, looked around, turning 360.

The next thing she knew, there was a hand over her mouth. At first she thought it was Jeff, but even Jeff wouldn’t take a joke this far. This was
so
not funny. She struggled to get herself free, but whoever was playing this (not at all) hilarious joke on her was strong. Really strong.

She felt a needle in her left arm.

Huh?
Oh, that’s it, fucker,
she thought.

She was just about to go Vin Diesel on this guy when, instead, her legs wobbled, and she fell against the van. She tried to stay alert as she slid to the ground. Something was happening to her and she wanted to catalogue everything in her mind. When the cops busted this fucker—and bust this fucker they most assuredly would—she was going to be the best witness ever. First of all, he smelled clean. A little too clean if you asked her. Plus, he had on rubber gloves.

Not a good sign,
CSI
-wise.

The weakness made its way up to her stomach, her chest, her throat.

Fight it, Lauren.

She had taken her first drink at the age of nine, when her older cousin Gretchen had slipped her a wine cooler at the Fourth of July fireworks at Boat House Row. It was love at first buzz. Since that day she had ingested every substance known to humankind and a few that may have only been known to extraterrestrials. She could handle whatever was in that needle. The world going wah-wah pedal and rubbery around the edges was old shit. She once drove home from AC while she was one-eyed drunk on Jack and nursing a three-day amp.

She blanked.

She came back.

Now she was on her back in the van. Or was it an SUV? Either way, they were moving. Fast. Her head was swimming, but it wasn’t a
good
swimming. It was like that
three in the morning and I shouldn’t have done the X and the Nardil
swimming.

She was cold. She pulled the sheet over her. It wasn’t really a sheet. It was a shirt or a coat or something.

From the far reaches of her consciousness, she heard her cell phone ring. She heard it chime its stupid Korn ring tone and it was just in her pocket and all she had to do was answer it like she had a billion other times and tell her grandmother to call the fucking cops and this guy would be
so
busted.

But she couldn’t move. Her arms felt like they weighed a ton.

The phone rang again. He reached over and began wiggling the phone from her jeans pocket. Her jeans were tight and he was having a hard time getting the phone out.
Good
. She wanted to grab his arm, to stop him, but she seemed to be moving in slow motion. He worked the Nokia out of her pocket, slowly, keeping the other hand on the wheel, every so often glancing back at the road.