Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (8 page)

After a few moments, he opened his eyes, made the sign of the cross, and started toward the steps.

O
N THE STREET more people had gathered, rubbernecking, drawn to the strobing police lights like moths to flame. Crime came often to this part of North Philly, but it never ceased to beguile and fascinate its residents.

Emerging from the crime scene house, Byrne and Jessica approached the witness who had found the body. Although the day was overcast, Jessica gulped the daylight like a starving woman, grateful to be out of that clammy tomb.

DeJohn Withers might have been forty or sixty; it was impossible to tell. He had no lower teeth, and only a few up top. He wore five or six flannel shirts and a pair of filthy cargo pants, each pocket bulging with some mysterious urban swag.

“How long I gotta stay here?” Withers asked.

“Got some pressing engagements, do you?” Byrne replied.

“I ain’t gotta talk to you. I did the right thing by doing my civic duty and now I get treated like some criminal.”

“Is this your house, sir?” Byrne asked, pointing to the crime scene house.

“No,” Withers said. “It is
not
.”

“Then you are guilty of breaking and entering.”

“I didn’t break nothin’.”

“But you entered.”

Withers tried to wrap his mind around the concept, as if breaking and entering, like country and western, were somehow inseparable. He remained silent.

“Now, I’m willing to overlook this serious crime if you answer a few questions for me,” Byrne said.

Withers looked at his shoes, defeated. Jessica noted that he had a ripped black high-top on his left foot and an Air Nike on his right.

“When did you find her?” Byrne asked.

Withers screwed up his face. He pushed up the sleeves of his multitude of shirts, revealing thin, scabby arms. “It look like I got a watch?”

“Was it light out, or was it dark out?” Byrne asked.

“Light.”

“Did you touch her?”

“What?”
Withers barked with true outrage. “I ain’t no goddamn pervert.”

“Just answer the question, Mr. Withers.”

Withers crossed his arms, waited a moment. “No. I didn’t.”

“Was anyone with you when you found her?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone else around here?”

Withers laughed, and Jessica caught a full blast of his breath. If you blended rotten mayonnaise and week-old egg salad, then tossed it with lighter fluid vinaigrette, it would have smelled a little bit better. “Who comes down
here
?”

It was a good question.

“Where do you live?” Byrne asked.

“I’m currently at The Four Seasons,” Withers replied.

Byrne suppressed a smile. He kept his pen an inch over the pad.

“I stay at My Brother’s House,” Withers added. “When they got room.”

“We may need to talk to you again.”

“I know, I know. Don’t leave town.”

“We’d appreciate it.”

“There a reward?”

“Only in heaven,” Byrne said.

“I ain’t
goin’
to heaven,” Withers said.

“Look into a transfer when you get to Purgatory,” Byrne said.

Withers scowled.

“When you bring him in to get his statement, I want him tossed and all of his things logged,” Byrne said to Davis. Interviews and witness statements were taken at the Roundhouse. Interviews of homeless folks were generally brief, due to the lice factor and the shoe-box proportions of the interview rooms.

Accordingly, Officer J. Davis looked Withers up and down. The frown on her face fairly screamed:
I have to touch this bag of disease?

“Get the shoes, too,” Byrne added.

Withers was just about to object when Byrne raised a hand, stopping him. “We’ll get you a new pair, Mr. Withers.”

“They better be good ones,” Withers said. “I do a lot of walkin’. I just got these broke in.”

Byrne turned to Jessica. “We can extend the canvass, but I’d say there’s a fairly good chance she didn’t live in the neighborhood,” he said, rhetorically. It was hard to believe anyone lived in these houses anymore, let alone a white family with a kid in a parochial school.

“She went to the Nazarene Academy,” Jessica said.

“How do you know?”

“The uniform.”

“What about it?”

“I still have mine in my closet,” Jessica said. “Nazarene is my alma mater.”

6

MONDAY, 10:55 AM

T
HE NAZARENE ACADEMY was the largest Catholic girls school in Philadelphia, with more than a thousand students in grades nine through twelve. Situated on a thirty-acre campus in Northeast Philadelphia, it was opened in 1928 and, since that time, had graduated a number of city luminaries—among them industry leaders, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and artists. The administration offices for five other diocesan schools were located at Nazarene.

When Jessica had attended the school, it was number one in the city, academically speaking, winning every citywide scholastic challenge it entered: those locally televised knockoffs of College Bowl where a group of orthodontically challenged fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds sit at bunting-draped tables and rattle off the differences between Etruscan and Greek vases, or delineate the time line of the Crimean War.

On the other hand, Nazarene had also come in dead last in every citywide athletic challenge it ever entered. An unbroken record, and one not likely to ever be shattered. Thus they were known, among young Philadelphians, to this very day, as the Spazarenes.

As Byrne and Jessica entered the main doors, the dark-varnished walls and crown molding, combined with the sweet, doughy aroma of institutional food, dragged Jessica back to ninth grade. Although she had always been a good student, and had rarely been in trouble—despite her cousin Angela’s many larcenous attempts—the rarefied air of the academic setting and the proximity to the principal’s office still filled Jessica with a vague, formless dread. She had a nine-millimeter pistol on her hip, she was nearly thirty years old, and she was scared to death. She imagined she always would be when she entered this formidable building.

They walked through the halls toward the main office just as class broke, spilling hundreds of tartan-clad girls into the corridors. The noise was deafening. Jessica had already been five eight and had weighed 125 in ninth grade—a stat she mercifully maintained to this day, give or take 5 pounds, mostly give. Back then she had been taller than 90 percent of her classmates. Now it seemed that half the girls were her height or taller.

They followed a group of three girls down the corridor to the principal’s office. As Jessica watched them, she sanded away the years. A dozen years earlier, the girl on the left, the one making a point a little too loudly, would have been Tina Mannarino. Tina was the first to get a French manicure, the first to sneak a pint of peach schnapps into a Christmas assembly. The stout one next to her, the one who rolled the top of her skirt to challenge the rule of hems being an inch from the floor when kneeling, would have been Judy Babcock. Last count, Judy, who was now Judy Pressman, had four daughters. So much for short skirts. Jessica would have been the girl on the right: a little too tall, too angular and thin, always listening, looking, observing, calculating, scared of everything, never showing it. Five parts attitude, one part steel.

The girls now carried MP3 players instead of Sony Walkmans. They listened to Christina Aguilera and 50 Cent instead of Bryan Adams and Boyz II Men. They mooned over Ashton Kutcher instead of Tom Cruise.

Okay, they probably
still
mooned over Tom Cruise.

Everything changes.

But nothing ever does.

In the principal’s office Jessica noted that not much had changed, either. The walls were still a bland, eggshell enamel, the air was still fragrant with a mixture of lavender and lemon Pledge.

They met the principal, Sister Veronique, a bird-like woman in her sixties, with quick blue eyes and even quicker movements. When Jessica had attended the school, the principal had been Sister Isolde. Sister Veronique might have been the older nun’s twin—sturdy, pale, with a low center of gravity. She moved with the surety of purpose that can only come from years of chasing down and disciplining young girls.

They introduced themselves and took seats in front of her desk.

“How can I help you?” Sister Veronique asked.

“I’m afraid we may have some troubling news about one of your students,” Byrne said.

Sister Veronique had grown up in the age of Vatican I. In those days the notion of trouble at a Catholic high school usually meant petty larceny, smoking, and drinking, maybe the occasional pregnancy. Now it was pointless to speculate.

Byrne handed her the Polaroid close-up of the girl’s face.

Sister Veronique glanced at the picture, then quickly averted her eyes and crossed herself.

“Do you recognize her?” Byrne asked.

Sister Veronique forced herself to look again at the photograph. “No. I’m afraid I don’t know her. But we have more than a thousand students. About three hundred are new this term.”

She took a moment, then leaned over and pressed a button on the intercom on her desk. “Would you ask Dr. Parkhurst to step into my office?”

Sister Veronique was clearly shaken. Her voice trembled slightly. “Is she . . . ?”

“Yes,” Byrne said. “She’s dead.”

Sister Veronique crossed herself again. “How did she . . . who would . . . why?” she managed.

“It’s early in the investigation, Sister.”

Jessica glanced around the office, which was pretty much as she remembered it. She felt the worn arms of the chair in which she sat, wondering how many girls had nervously perched in this chair over the past dozen years.

After a few moments, a man walked into the office.

“This is Dr. Brian Parkhurst,” Sister Veronique said. “He is our head guidance counselor.”

Brian Parkhurst was in his early thirties, a tall, slender man with fine features, close-cropped reddish gold hair, and the faint remnants of a faceful of childhood freckles. Conservatively dressed in a deep gray tweed sport coat, button-down blue oxford shirt, and shiny kilty-and-tassel loafers, he wore no wedding ring.

“These people are with the police,” Sister Veronique said.

“My name is Detective Byrne,” Byrne said. “This is my partner, Detective Balzano.”

Handshakes all around.

“How can I help you?” Parkhurst asked.

“You’re the guidance counselor here?”

“Yes,” Parkhurst said. “I’m also the school psychiatrist.”

“You’re an MD?”

“Yes.”

Byrne showed him the Polaroid.

“My God,” he said, the color draining from his face.

“Do you know her?” Byrne asked.

“Yes,” Parkhurst said. “It’s Tessa Wells.”

“We’re going to need to contact her family,” Byrne said.

“Of course.” Sister Veronique took another moment to compose herself, before turning to her computer and tapping a few keys. In a moment, Tessa Wells’s school records appeared on the screen, along with her personal data. Sister Veronique regarded the screen as if it were an obituary, then hit a key and started the laser printer in the corner of the room.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Byrne asked Brian Parkhurst.

Parkhurst paused. “I believe it was Thursday.”

“Thursday of last week?”

“Yes,” Parkhurst said. “She stopped by the office to discuss college applications.”

“What can you tell us about her, Dr. Parkhurst?”

Brian Parkhurst took a moment to organize his thoughts. “Well, she was very bright. A little on the quiet side.”

“A good student?”

“Very,” Parkhurst said. “Carried a 3.8 average if I’m not mistaken.”

“Was she in school Friday?”

Sister Veronique tapped a few keys. “No.”

“What time do classes start?”

“Seven fifty,” Parkhurst said.

“And what time do you let out?”

“Generally around two forty-five,” Sister Veronique said. “But intramural and extracurricular activities can sometimes keep students here until five and six o’clock.”

“Was she a member of any clubs?”

Sister Veronique tapped a few more keys. “She’s a member of the Baroque Ensemble. They’re a small classical chamber group. But they only meet every two weeks. There were no rehearsals last week.”

“Do they meet here on campus?”

“Yes,” Sister Veronique said.

Byrne turned his attention back to Dr. Parkhurst. “Anything else you can tell us?”

“Well, her father is pretty sick,” Parkhurst said. “Lung cancer, I believe.”

“Is he living at home?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“And her mother?”

“She’s deceased,” Parkhurst said.

Sister Veronique handed Byrne the printout listing Tessa Wells’s home address.

“Do you know who her friends were?” Byrne asked.

Brian Parkhurst again appeared to think carefully about this before answering. “Not . . . offhand,” Parkhurst said. “Let me ask around.”

The slight delay in Brian Parkhurst’s reply was not lost on Jessica—and if he was as good as she knew he was, it was not lost on Kevin Byrne, either.