Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (92 page)

Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez were staking out Butler’s office at Drexel. The university had told them that Professor Butler was out of town for three days, and could not be reached. Eric Chavez had used his charm to find out that Butler had allegedly gone camping in the Poconos. Ike Buchanan had already put in a call to the Monroe County sheriff’s office.

As they approached the door, Byrne and Jessica caught each other’s eye. If their suspicions were correct, they were standing in front of the Actor’s door. How would it play out? Hard? Easy? No door ever gave a clue. They drew their weapons, held them at their sides, glanced up and down the block.

Now was the time.

Byrne knocked on the door. Waited. No answer. He rang the bell, knocked again. Again, nothing.

They took a few steps back, looked at the house. Two windows upstairs. Both had white curtains drawn. The window to what was certainly the living room had matching curtains, slightly parted. Not enough to see in. The row house was in the middle of the block. If they wanted to go around back, they would have to walk all the way around. Byrne decided to knock again. Louder. He stepped back to the door.

That’s when they heard the shots. They came from inside the house. A large-caliber weapon. Three quick blasts that rattled the windows.

They would not need a search warrant after all.

Kevin Byrne slammed a shoulder into the door. Once, twice, three times. It splintered open on the fourth attempt. “Police!” he yelled. He rolled into the house, gun raised. Jessica called for backup on her two-way, then followed, Glock poised, ready.

To the left, a small living room and dining room. Mid-day dark. Empty. Ahead, a hallway to what was probably the kitchen. Stairs up and down to the left. Byrne met Jessica’s eyes. She would take the upstairs. Jessica let her eyes adjust. She scanned the floor in the living room and hallway. No blood. Outside, two sector cars screeched to a halt.

For the moment, the house was deathly quiet.

Then there was music. A piano. Heavy footsteps. Byrne and Jessica leveled their weapons toward the stairs. Sounds were coming from the basement. Two uniformed officers arrived at the door. Jessica instructed them to check upstairs. They drew their weapons, made their way up the steps. Jessica and Byrne began to descend the stairs into the basement.

The music became louder. Strings. The sound of waves on a beach.

Then came a voice.

“Is that the house?”
a boy asked.

“That’s it,”
a man answered.

A few moments of silence. A dog barked.

“Hey. I
knew
there was a dog,”
the boy said.

Before Jessica and Byrne could round the corner into the basement, they looked at each other. And understood. There had been no gunshots. It had been a movie. When they stepped into the dim basement, they saw that the film was
Road to Perdition.
The film was playing on a large plasma screen, running through a 5.1 Dolby system, the volume cranked very high. The gunfire was from the film. The windows had rattled courtesy of a very large subwoofer. On the screen, Tom Hanks and Tyler Hoechlin stood on a beach.

Butler had known they were coming. Butler had set this all up for their benefit. The Actor was not ready for his final curtain.

“Clear!” one of the uniforms shouted above them.

But the two detectives already knew that. Nigel Butler was gone.

The house was empty.

B
YRNE REWOUND THE
tape to the scene where Tom Hanks’s character—Michael Sullivan—kills the man he believes to be responsible for the murder of his wife and one of his sons. In the film, Sullivan shoots the man in a bathtub at a hotel.

The scene had been replaced with the murder of Seth Goldman.

S
IX DETECTIVES SCOURED
every inch of Nigel Butler’s row house. On the basement walls were even more head shots of Butler’s various stage roles: Shylock, Harold Hill, Jean Valjean.

They had issued a nationwide APB on Nigel Butler. State, county, local, and federal law enforcement agencies all had a photograph of the man, as well as a description and license plate of his car. Another six detectives fanned out across the Drexel campus.

In the basement was a wall of prerecorded videotapes, DVDs, and reels of sixteen-millimeter film. What they did not find were any video editing decks. No camcorder, no homemade videotapes, no evidence that Butler had spliced footage of the homicides into prerecorded tapes. Within an hour they would, with any luck, have a warrant to search the film department and all its offices at Drexel. Jessica was searching the basement when Byrne called her from the first floor. When she got upstairs and into the living room, she found Byrne by the bookshelf.

“You’re not to going to believe this,” Byrne said. In his hand was a large, leatherette-bound photo album. He flipped to a page about halfway through the book.

Jessica took the photo album from him. What she saw nearly took her breath away. There were a dozen pages of photographs of the teenage Angelika Butler. In some she was standing alone: at a birthday party, at a park. In some she was with a young man. A boyfriend perhaps.

In almost all of the pictures, Angelika’s head had been replaced with a cutout photograph of a movie star—Bette Davis, Emily Watson, Jean Arthur, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly. The young man’s face had been defaced with what might have been a knife or an ice pick. Page after page, Angelika Butler—in the guise of Elizabeth Taylor, Jeanne Crain, Rhonda Fleming—stood next to a man whose face had been obliterated in a terrible rage. In some instances, there were rips in the page where the young man’s face once was.

“Kevin.” Jessica pointed to one picture, a picture where Angelika Butler wore the mask of a very young Joan Crawford, a picture where her defaced companion sat on a bench next to her.

In this picture, the man was wearing a shoulder holster.

72

H
OW LONG HAS
it been? I know to the hour. Three years, two weeks, one day, twenty-one hours. The landscape has changed. The topography of my heart has not. I think of the thousands and thousands of people who have passed by this place in the past three years, the thousands of dramas unfolding. Despite all our claims to the contrary, we really do not care about each other. I see it every day. We are all simply extras in the movie, not even worthy of a credit. If we have a line, perhaps, we will be remembered. If not, we take our meager pay and strive to be the lead in someone’s life.

Mostly, we fail. Remember your fifth kiss? The third time you made love? Of course not. Just the first. Just the last.

I glance at my watch. I pour the gasoline.

Act III.

I light the match.

I think of
Backdraft. Firestarter. Frequency. Ladder 49.

I think of Angelika.

73

B
Y ONE O’CLOCK
they had set up a situation room at the Roundhouse. Every piece of paper found in Nigel Butler’s house had been boxed and tagged and was currently being sifted through for an address, a telephone number, or anything else that might provide a lead as to where he might have gone. If there really was a cabin in the Poconos, there was no rental receipt found, no deed located, no pictures taken.

The lab had the photo albums and had reported that the glue used to affix the photographs of movie stars to the face of Angelika Butler was standard white craft glue, but what was surprising was that it was fresh. In some instances, according to the lab, the glue was still wet. Whoever had glued those pictures into the album had done so in the past forty-eight hours.

A
T ONE TEN,
the call for which they were both hoping and dreading came in. It was Nick Palladino. Jessica took the call, put him on the speakerphone.

“What’s up, Nick?”

“I think we found Nigel Butler.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s parked in his car. North Philly.”

“Where?”

“In the parking lot of an old gas station on Girard.”

Jessica glanced at Byrne. It was clear that he didn’t need to be told which gas station. He had been there once. He knew.

“Is he in custody?” Byrne asked.

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

Palladino took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. It seemed like a full minute passed before he answered. “He’s sitting behind the wheel of his car,” Palladino said.

A few more excruciating seconds passed. “Yeah? And?” Byrne asked.

“And the car is on fire.”

74

B
Y THE TIME
they arrived, the PFD had extinguished the fire. The acrid smell of burning vinyl and immolated flesh hung upon the already humid summer air, steaming the entire block with a thick redolence of unnatural death. The car was a blackened husk; the front tires were melted into the asphalt.

As they got closer, Jessica and Byrne could see that the figure behind the wheel was charred beyond recognition, its flesh still smoldering. The corpse’s hands were fused to the steering wheel. The blackened skull offered two empty caves where eyes once were. Smoke and greasy vapor rose from seared bone.

Four sector cars ringed the crime scene. A handful of uniformed officers directed traffic, kept the growing crowd away.

The arson unit would tell them exactly what happened here eventually, at least in the physical sense. When the fire started.
How
the fire started. Whether an accelerant was used. The psychological canvas on which this had all been painted was going to take a lot longer to profile and analyze.

Byrne considered the boarded-up structure before him. He recalled the last time he had come here, the night they had found Angelika Butler’s body in the ladies’ room. He had been a different man then. He recalled how he and Phil Kessler had pulled into the lot, parking just about where Nigel Butler’s ruined shell of a car stood now. The man who had found the body—a homeless man who had teetered between running, in case he would be implicated, and staying, in case there was some sort of reward—had nervously pointed to the ladies’ room. Within minutes they had determined that this was probably just another overdose, another young life thrown to the wind.

Although he couldn’t swear to it, Byrne would bet that he had slept well that night. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

Angelika Butler had deserved every bit of his attention, just like Gracie Devlin. He had let Angelika down.

75

T
HE MOOD WAS
mixed at the Roundhouse. For what it was worth, the media was prepared to run with the story as a tale of a father’s revenge. Those in the Homicide Unit, however, knew they had not exactly triumphed in the closing of this case. This was not a shining moment in the 255-year history of the department.

But life, and death, went on.

Since the discovery of the car, there had been two new, unrelated homicides.

A
T SIX O’CLOCK
Jocelyn Post entered the duty room, six CSU evidence bags in hand. “We found something in the trash at that gas station you should see. These were in a plastic portfolio, stuffed into a Dumpster.”

Jocelyn arrayed the six bags on the table. In the bags were eleven-by-fourteens. They were the lobby cards—miniature movie posters originally designed for display in a movie theater’s lobby—to
Psycho, Fatal Attraction, Scarface, Les Diaboliques,
and
Road to Perdition.
In addition, there was the torn corner from what might have been a sixth card.

“Do you know what movie this one is from?” Jessica asked, holding up the sixth bag. The piece of glossy cardboard had a partial bar code on it.

“No idea,” Jocelyn said. “But I made a digital image and sent it to the lab.”

It was probably a movie that Nigel Butler never got to, Jessica thought. It was
hopefully
a movie that Nigel Butler never got to.

“Well, let’s follow up on it anyway,” Jessica said.

“You got it, Detective.”

B
Y SEVEN O’CLOCK,
preliminary reports had been written, detectives were filing out. There was none of the joy or elation at having brought a bad man to justice usually prevalent at a time like this. Everyone felt relief that this bizarre and ugly chapter was closed. Everyone just wanted a long, hot shower, and a long, cold drink. The six o’clock news had broadcast video footage of the burned and smoldering shell of the car at the North Philly gas station.
THE ACTOR’S FINAL PERFORMANCE?
the crawl asked.

Jessica got up, stretched. She felt as if she hadn’t slept in days. She probably hadn’t. She was so tired, she couldn’t remember. She walked over to Byrne’s desk.

“Buy you dinner?”

“Sure,” Byrne said. “What do you have a taste for?”

“I want something big and greasy and unhealthy,” Jessica said. “Something with a lot of breading and a carb count that has a comma.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Before they could gather their belongings and leave the room they heard a sound. A rapid, beeping sound. At first, no one paid much attention. This was the Roundhouse, after all, a building full of beepers, pagers, cell phones, PDAs. Something was always beeping, pinging, clicking, faxing, ringing.

Whatever it was, it beeped again.

“Where the hell is that coming from?” Jessica asked.

All the detectives in the room rechecked their cell phones, their pagers. No one had received a message.

Then, three more times in quick succession.
Beep-beep. Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

It was coming from inside a box of files on a desk. Jessica looked into the box. There, in an evidence bag on top, was Stephanie Chandler’s cell phone. The bottom of the LCD screen was flashing. At some point during the day, Stephanie had received a call.

Jessica opened the bag, retrieved the phone. It had already been processed by CSU, so there was no reason to wear gloves.

1
MISSED CALL
the readout proclaimed.