Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (89 page)

A few seconds of static, then: “Goddamn FBI don’t respect nothin’.”

It sounded like Terry Cahill. No, it couldn’t be. Could it? If it was, she
had
to have heard him wrong. She exchanged a glance with Byrne. “Say
again
?”

More static. Then: “Goddamn FBI don’t respect nothin’.”

Jessica’s stomach dropped. The line was familiar to her. It was a phrase that Sonny Corleone says in
The Godfather.
She had seen the movie a thousand times. Terry Cahill wasn’t kidding around. Not at a time like this.

Terry Cahill was in
trouble.

“Where are you?” Jessica asked.

Silence.

“Agent Cahill,” Jessica said. “What is your twenty?”

Nothing. Dead, icy silence.

Then they heard the gunshot.

“Shots fired!” Jessica yelled into her two-way radio. Instantly she and Byrne had their weapons drawn. They looked up and down the street. No sign of Cahill. The rovers had a limited range. He couldn’t be far.

Within seconds an
officer needs assistance
call went out on the radio dispatch, and by the time Jessica and Byrne got to the corner of Twenty-third and Moore there were four sector cars already there, parked at all angles. The uniformed officers were out of their cars in a flash. They all looked to Jessica. She directed the perimeter as she and Byrne began to make their way down the alley that cut behind the stores, weapons drawn. There was no further communication from Cahill’s two-way.

When did he get here?
Jessica wondered.
Why didn’t he checked in with us?

They moved slowly down the alley. On either side of the passageway were windows, doorways, niches, alcoves. The Actor might have been in any one of them. Suddenly a window flew open. A pair of Hispanic boys, six or seven years old, probably drawn by the sound of the sirens, popped out their heads. They saw the weapons, and their expressions changed from surprise to fear to excitement.

“Please get back inside,” Byrne said. They immediately shut the window, drew the curtains.

Jessica and Byrne continued down the alley, every sound drawing their attention. Jessica fingered the volume on the rover with her free hand. Up. Down. Back up. Nothing.

They turned a corner, into a short lane that led to Point Breeze Avenue. And they saw him. Terry Cahill was sitting on the ground, his back to the brick wall. He was holding his right shoulder. He had been shot. There was blood beneath his fingers, scarlet spreading onto the sleeve of his white shirt. Jessica rushed over. Byrne called in their location, kept an eye out, scanning the windows and rooftops above them. The danger had not necessarily passed. Within a few seconds, four uniformed officers arrived, Underwood and Martinez among them. Byrne directed them.

“Talk to me, Terry,” Jessica said.

“I’m good,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s a flesh wound.” A slight amount of fresh blood tipped his fingers. The right side of Cahill’s face was starting to swell.

“Did you see his face?” Byrne asked.

Cahill shook his head. He was clearly in a world of pain.

Jessica communicated the information that the suspect was still at large into her two-way. She heard at least four or five more sirens approaching. You sent out an
officer needs assistance
call in this department, and everyone and his mother came.

But even with twenty cops combing the area, it became clear, after five minutes or so, that their suspect had slipped away. Again.

The Actor was in the wind.

B
Y THE TIME
Jessica and Byrne returned to the alley behind the market, Ike Buchanan and half a dozen detectives were on the scene. Paramedics were attending to Terry Cahill. One of the EMS techs found Jessica’s eyes, nodded. Cahill would be okay.

“There goes my shot at the PGA tour,” Cahill said as they loaded him onto a stretcher. “Want my statement now?”

“We’ll get it at the hospital,” Jessica said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Cahill nodded, winced in pain as they lifted the gurney. He looked at Jessica and Byrne. “Do me a favor, will you guys?”

“Name it, Terry,” Jessica said.

“Take this fucker down,” he said. “Hard.”

T
HE DETECTIVES MILLED
around the perimeter of the crime scene where Cahill had been shot. Although no one said it, they all felt like rookies, like a group of green recruits fresh out the academy. CSU had set up a perimeter of yellow tape and, as always, a crowd was gathering. Four CSU officers began to comb the area. Jessica and Byrne stood against the wall, lost in their thoughts.

Granted, Terry Cahill was a federal agent, and quite often there was an intense rivalry between agencies, but he was nonetheless a law enforcement officer working a case in Philadelphia. The grim faces and steely looks on all concerned spoke to the outrage. You don’t shoot a cop in Philadelphia.

After a few minutes, Jocelyn Post, a veteran of CSU, held up a pair of tongs, smiling from ear to ear. Between the tips was a spent bullet.

“
Oh
yes,” she said. “Come to Mama J.”

Although they had found the discharged slug that had hit Terry Cahill in the shoulder, it was not always easy to determine the caliber and type of bullet when it had been fired, especially if the lead had struck a brick wall, which it had in this case.

Nonetheless, this was very good news. Anytime a piece of physical evidence was found—something that could be tested, analyzed, photographed, dusted, traced—it was a step forward.

“We’ve got the slug,” Jessica said, knowing that this was a baby step in the investigation, happy to have the lead nonetheless. “It’s a start.”

“I think we can do better than that,” Byrne said.

“What do you mean?”

“Look.”

Byrne crouched down, picked up a metal rib from a broken umbrella lying in a pile of trash. He lifted the edge of plastic garbage bag. There, next to the Dumpster, partially hidden, was a small-caliber handgun. A banged-up, cheap black .25. It looked like the same weapon they had seen in the
Fatal Attraction
video.

This was no baby step.

They had the Actor’s gun.

64

T
HE VIDEOTAPE FOUND
in Cap-Haitien was a French film, released in 1955. The title was
Les Diaboliques.
In it, Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot—who portray the wife and former mistress of a thoroughly rotten man played by Paul Meurisse—murder Meurisse by drowning him in a bathtub. Like the rest of the Actor’s masterpieces, this tape had a re-created murder replacing the original crime.

In this version of
Les Diaboliques,
a barely glimpsed man in a dark satin jacket with a dragon embroidered on the back pushes a man beneath the surface of the water in a grungy bathroom. Again, a bathroom.

Victim number four.

T
HERE WAS A
clean print on the gun, a .25 ACP Raven manufactured by Phoenix Arms, a popular junk gun on the streets. You could pick up a Raven .25 anywhere in the city for under a hundred dollars. If the shooter was in the system, they would soon have a match.

There had been no slug recovered at the Erin Halliwell scene, so they would not know for certain if this weapon was used to kill her, even though the ME’s office had presumptively concluded that her single wound was consistent with a small-caliber weapon.

Firearms had already determined that the Raven .25 was the gun used to shoot Terry Cahill.

As they had thought, the cell phone attached to the videocassette belonged to Stephanie Chandler. Although the SIM card was still active, everything else had been erased. There were no calendar entries, no address book listings, no text or e-mail messages, no logs of calls made or received. There were no fingerprints.

C
AHILL GAVE HIS
statement while getting patched up at Jefferson. The wound was a flesh wound, and he was expected to be released within a few hours. In the ER waiting room, half a dozen FBI agents congregated, giving a visiting Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne their backs. Nobody could have prevented what happened to Cahill, but tightly knit squads never looked at it that way. According the suits, the PPD had fucked up, and one of their own was now in the hospital.

In his official statement, Cahill said that he had been in South Philly when he had received the call from Eric Chavez. He had then monitored the channel and heard that the suspect was perhaps in the area of Twenty-third and McClellan. He had begun a search of the alleyways behind the storefronts when his assailant had come up behind him, put the gun to the back of his head, and forced him to say the lines from
The Godfather
into the two-way radio. When the suspect reached for Cahill’s weapon, Cahill knew he had to make his move. They struggled, and the assailant punched him twice—once in the small of the back, once on the right side of his face—then the suspect’s gun discharged. The suspect then fled down the alley, leaving his weapon behind.

A brief canvass of the area near the shooting yielded little. No one had seen or heard a thing. But now the police had a firearm, and that opened up a broad avenue of investigation to them. Guns, like people, had a history.

W
HEN THE TAPE
of
Les Diaboliques
was ready to be screened, ten detectives assembled in the studio room of the AV unit. The French-language film ran 122 minutes. At the point where Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot drown Paul Meurisse, there is a crash edit. When the film changes over to the new footage, the new scene is a filthy bathroom—grimy ceiling, peeling plaster, filthy rags on the floor, stacked magazines next to dirty toilet. A bare-bulb fixture next to the sink casts a dim, sickly light. A large figure on the right side of the screen holds the thrashing victim underwater with clearly powerful hands.

The camera shot is stationary, meaning that the camera was most likely on a tripod, or perched on something. To date there had been no evidence of a second suspect.

When the victim stops thrashing, his body floats to the surface of the dirty water. The camera is then picked up and moved in for a close-up. It was there that Mateo Fuentes froze the image.

“Jesus Christ,” Byrne said.

All eyes turned to him. “What, you know him?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah,” Byrne said. “I know him.”

D
ARRYL
P
ORTER’S APARTMENT
above the X Bar was as sleazy and ugly as the man. All the windows were painted shut, and the hot sun on the glass gave the cramped space a cloying, dog-kennel smell.

There was an old avocado-colored sleeper couch covered with a filthy bedspread, a pair of stained armchairs. The floor, tables, and shelves were covered with water-stained magazines and newspapers. The sink offered a month of dirty dishes and at least five species of scavenging insects.

On one of the bookshelves over the TV were three sealed DVD copies of
Philadelphia Skin.

Darryl Porter was in his bathtub, fully clothed, fully dead. The filthy bathwater had shriveled and leached Porter’s skin a cement-gray color. His bowels had released into the water, and the stench in the confines of the small bathroom was overpowering. A pair of rats had already begun to seek out the gas-bloated corpse.

The Actor had now claimed four lives, or at least four of which they were aware. He was getting bolder. It was a classic escalation, and no one could predict what was coming next.

As the CSU set up to process yet another crime scene, Jessica and Byrne stood in front of the X Bar. They both looked shell-shocked. It was a moment where the horrors were flying fast and fleet and words were hard to come by.
Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques
—what the hell was coming next?

Jessica’s cell phone rang, bringing with it the answer.

“This is Detective Balzano.”

The call was from Sergeant Nate Rice, head of the Firearms Unit. He had two pieces of news for the task force. One was that the gun recovered from the scene behind the Haitian market was very likely the same make and model as the gun on the
Fatal Attraction
videotape. The second piece of news was a lot harder to digest. Sergeant Rice had just spoken to the fingerprint lab. They had a match. He gave Jessica the name.

“What?”
Jessica asked. She knew she had heard Rice correctly, but her brain was not prepared to process the data.

“I said the same thing,” Rice replied. “But it’s a ten-point match.”

A ten-point match, police were fond of saying, was name, address, Social Security number, and high school picture. If you had a ten-point, you had your man.

“And?” Jessica asked.

“And there’s no doubt about it. The print on the gun belongs to Julian Matisse.”

65

W
HEN
F
AITH
C
HANDLER
had shown up at the hotel, he knew it was the beginning of the end.

It was Faith who had called him. Called to tell him the news. Called to ask for more money. It was now only a matter of time until all the pieces began to fall into place for the police, and everything would be exposed.

He stood, naked, considering himself in the mirror. His mother stared back, her sad, liquid eyes judging the man he’d become. He brushed his hair, gently, using the beautiful brush Ian had bought for him at Fortnum & Mason, the exclusive British department store.

Don’t make me give you the brush.

He heard activity outside the door to his hotel room. It sounded like the man who came around each day at this time to replenish the mini-bar. Seth looked at the dozen empty bottles scattered around the small table near the window. He was barely drunk. He had two bottles left. He could use more.

He pulled the tape out of the cassette housing, allowing it to pool on the floor at his feet. Next to the bed were already a dozen empty cassettes, their plastic hulls stacked like crystalline bones.