Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (95 page)

“No idea,” Byrne said. “But why would he send us that movie of the baby being buried if he didn’t want us to find him in time? If he really wanted to punish Ian Whitestone that way, why not just let the baby die? Why not just leave his dead son on his doorstep?”

No one had a good answer to this.

“All the film murders were in bathrooms, right?” Byrne continued.

“Right. What about it?” Jessica asked.

“In
Witness,
the little Amish kid witnesses a murder,” Byrne replied.

“I’m not following,” Jessica said.

On the television monitor, Ian Whitestone was shown entering the train station. Byrne took out his weapon, checked the action. On the way to the door he said: “The victim in that movie has his throat cut in the bathroom of the Thirtieth Street station.”

79

T
HE
T
HIRTIETH
S
TREET
station was on the National Register of Historic Places. The eight-story, concrete-framed structure was built in 1934, and covered two full city blocks.

On this day, it was even more crowded than usual. More than three hundred extras, in full makeup and costume, milled around the main room, waiting for the sequence that would be shot in the North Waiting Room. In addition, another seventy-five crew members were there, including sound recordists, lighting technicians, cameramen, gaffers, and various production assistants.

Although the train schedules had not been interrupted, the production did have the main terminal for two hours. Passengers were being routed along a narrow rope corridor along the south wall.

When the police arrived, the camera was on a large crane, blocking out the intricate shot, tracking through the crowd of extras in the main room, then through the huge archway into the North Waiting Room, where it would find Will Parrish, standing beneath the large Karl Bitter bas-relief
Spirit of Transportation.
Maddeningly, for the detectives, all the extras were dressed the same. It was some sort of dream sequence that had them wearing long red monks’ robes and black face masks. When Jessica made her way to the North Waiting Room, she saw a stand-in for Will Parrish who wore a yellow rain slicker.

The detectives searched the men’s and ladies’ rooms, trying not to cause any undue alarm. They did not find Ian Whitestone. They did not find Nigel Butler.

Jessica called Terry Cahill on his cell phone, hoping he might be able to run interference with the production company. She got his voice mail.

B
YRNE AND
J
ESSICA
stood in the center of the enormous main room of the train station, near the information booth, in the shadow of the bronze angel sculpture.

“What the hell do we do?” Jessica asked, knowing the question was rhetorical. Byrne deferred to her judgment. From the moment they first met, he had treated her as an equal, and now that she was heading this task force, he did not pull the rank of experience. It was her call, and the look in his eyes said that he was behind her decision, whatever it may be.

There was only one choice. She might catch hell from the mayor, from the Department of Transportation, from Amtrak, SEPTA, and everyone else, but she had to do it. She spoke into her two-way radio. “Shut it down,” she said. “No one in or out.”

Before they could make a move, Byrne’s cell phone rang. It was Nick Palladino.

“What’s up, Nick?”

“We heard from the ME’s office. We’ve got dental on the body in the burning car.”

“What do we have?” Byrne asked.

“Well, the dental records didn’t match Nigel Butler’s,” Palladino said. “So Eric and I took a chance and rode up to Bala Cynwyd.”

Byrne took this in, one domino striking the next. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Yeah,” Palladino said. “The body in the car was Adam Kaslov.”

T
HE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
of the film was a woman named Joanna Young. Jessica found her near the food court, a cell phone in her hand, another cell phone to her ear, a crackling two-way clipped to her belt, and a long line of anxious people waiting to speak with her. She was not a happy camper.

“What is this all about?” Young demanded.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it at this time,” Jessica said. “But we really need to speak with Mr. Whitestone.”

“I’m afraid he left the set.”

“When?”

“He walked out about ten minutes ago.”

“Alone?”

“He left with one of the extras, and I really wish—”

“Which door?” Jessica asked.

“The Twenty-ninth Street entrance.”

“And you haven’t seen him since?”

“No,” she said. “But I hope he gets back soon. We’re losing about a thousand dollars a minute here.”

Byrne came over the two-way. “Jess?”

“Yes?”

“I think you should see this.”

T
HE BIGGER OF
the two men’s rooms at the train station was a warren of large white-tiled rooms off the North Waiting Room. The sinks were in one room, the toilet stalls in another—a long row of stainless-steel doors with stalls on either side. What Byrne wanted Jessica to see was in the last stall on the left, inside the door. Scrawled at the bottom of the door was a series of numbers, separated by decimal points. And it looked to be written in blood.

“Did we get pictures of it?” Jessica asked.

“Yeah,” Byrne said.

Jessica snapped on a glove. The blood was still tacky. “This is recent.”

“CSU already has a sample on the way to the lab.”

“What are these numbers?” Byrne asked.

“It looks like an IP address,” Jessica answered.

“An IP address?” Byrne asked. “As in—”

“A website,” Jessica said. “He wants us to go to a website.”

80

I
N ANY FILM
of merit, any film made with pride, there is a moment, always in the third act, when the hero must act. In this moment, not long before the climax of the film, the story takes a turn.

I open the door, light the set. All but one of my actors is in place. I position the camera. Light floods Angelika’s face. She looks just like she used to. Young. Untouched by time.

Beautiful.

81

T
HE SCREEN WAS
black, blank, chillingly void of content.

“Are you sure we’re on the right website?” Byrne asked.

Mateo retyped the IP address into the address line of the web browser. The screen refreshed. Still black. “Nothing yet.”

Byrne and Jessica walked from the editing bay into the studio room at the AV Unit. In the 1980s, the large, high-ceilinged room in the basement of the Roundhouse was home to the taping of a local-access show called
Police Perspectives.
The ceiling still held a number of large spotlights.

The lab had rushed preliminary tests on the blood found at the train station. They had typed it A negative. A call to Ian Whitestone’s physician confirmed that A negative was Whitestone’s type. Although it was unlikely that Whitestone had suffered the same fate as the victim in
Witness
—had his jugular been cut, there would have been pools of blood—that he was injured was almost a certainty.

“Detectives,”
Mateo said.

Byrne and Jessica ran back into the editing bay. The screen now had three words on it. A title. White letters centered on black. Somehow, the image was even more unsettling than the blank screen. The screen read:

THE SKIN GODS

“What does it mean?” Jessica asked.

“I don’t know,” Mateo said. He turned to his laptop. He typed the words into the Google text box. Only a few hits. Nothing promising or revealing. Again, at imdb.com. Nothing.

“Do we know where it’s coming from?” Byrne asked.

“Working on it.”

Mateo got on the phone, trying to track down the ISP, the Internet service provider to which the website was registered.

Suddenly the image changed. Now they were looking at a blank wall. White plaster. Brightly lit. The floor was dusty, made of hardwood planks. There was no clue within the frame as to where this might be. There was no sound.

The camera then panned slightly to the right to reveal a young girl in a yellow teddy. She wore a hood. She was slight, pale, delicate. She stood close to the wall, not moving. Her posture spoke of fear. It was impossible to tell her age, but she appeared to be a young teenager.

“What is this?” Byrne asked.

“It looks like a live webcam shot,” Mateo said. “Not a high-resolution camera, though.”

A man walked onto the set, approaching the girl. He wore the costume of one of the extras of
The Palace—
a red monk’s robe and a full-face mask. He handed the girl something. It looked shiny, metallic. The girl held it for a few moments. The light was harsh, saturating the figures, bathing them in an eerie silver glow, so it was hard to see exactly what she was doing. She handed the item back to the man.

Within a few seconds, Kevin Byrne’s cell phone beeped. Everyone looked at him. It was the sound his phone made when he received a text message, not a phone call. His heart began to slam in his chest. Hands trembling, he took out his phone, navigated to the text message screen. Before he read it, he looked up, at the laptop. The man on the screen pulled the hood off the young girl.

“Oh my God,” Jessica said.

Byrne looked at his phone. Everything he had ever feared in life was contained in those five letters:

CBOAO.

82

S
HE HAD KNOWN
silence all her life. The notion, the very concept of sound, was an abstract to her, but one she imagined fully. Sound was color.

To a lot of deaf people, silence was black.

To her, silence was white. An endless sheet of cloud white, rippling toward infinity. Sound, as she imagined it, was a beautiful rainbow against a pure white background.

When she first saw him, at the bus stop near Rittenhouse Square, she had thought he was pleasant looking, a little goofy, perhaps. He was reading from the
Handshape Dictionary,
trying to form the alphabet. She had wondered why he was trying to learn ASL—he either had a deaf relative or was trying to romance a deaf girl—but she hadn’t asked.

When she had seen him again at Logan Circle, he had been helpful, carrying her packages toward the SEPTA station.

And then he had pushed her into the trunk of his car.

What this man had not counted on was her discipline. Without discipline, those who work with fewer than five senses would go mad. She knew that. All her deaf friends knew that. It was discipline that helped her overcome her fear of rejection from the hearing world. It was discipline that helped her live up to the high expectations her parents had for her. It was discipline that would get her through this. If this man thought she had never experienced anything as frightening as his strange and ugly game, he clearly didn’t know any deaf girls.

Her father would be coming for her. He had never let her down. Ever.

So she waited. In discipline. In hope.

In silence.

83

T
HE BROADCAST WAS
coming from a cell phone data transfer. Mateo brought a laptop up to the duty room, jacked into the Internet. He believed the setup was a web camera linked to a laptop, then routed out through a cell phone. It made it much harder to trace, because—unlike a landline, which was tied to a permanent address—the cell phone signal needed to be triangulated between cell phone towers.

Within minutes a request for a court order to trace the cell phone was faxed to the district attorney’s office. Ordinarily, something like this would take hours. Not today. Paul DiCarlo personally ran it from his office at 1421 Arch Street to the top floor of the Criminal Justice Center, where Judge Liam McManus signed it. Ten minutes after that the Homicide Unit was on the phone with the cell phone company’s security division.

Detective Tony Park was the go-to man in the unit when it came to things digital, things cellular. One of the few Korean American detectives on the force, a family man in his late forties, Tony Park was a calming influence on all those around him. Today that aspect of his personality, as much as his electronic expertise, was crucial. The unit was about to blow.

Park spoke on a landline and conveyed the progress of the trace to the roomful of anxious detectives. “They’re running it through a tracing matrix now,” Park said.

“Have they got a lock yet?” Jessica asked.

“Not yet.”

Byrne paced the room like a caged animal. A dozen detectives lingered in or near the duty room, waiting for the word, waiting for a direction. There was no comforting or appeasing Byrne. All these men and women had families. It could just as easily be them.

“We have movement,” Mateo said, pointing to the laptop screen. The detectives crowded around him.

On screen, the man in the monk’s robe dragged another person into the frame. It was Ian Whitestone. He was wearing the blue jacket. He looked drugged. His head lolled on his shoulders. There was no visible blood on his face or hands.

Whitestone fell against the wall next to Colleen. The tableau was sickening in the harsh white light. Jessica wondered who else might be watching this, if this madman had disseminated the web address to the media, to the Internet at large.

The figure in the monk’s robe then walked toward the camera and turned the lens. The image was choppy, grained by the lack of resolution and quick movement. When the image settled, it was on a double bed, surrounded by two cheap nightstands and table lamps.

“It’s the movie,” Byrne said, his voice cracking. “He’s re-creating the movie.”

With sickening clarity, Jessica recognized the setup. It was a re-creation of the motel room in
Philadelphia Skin.
The Actor was going to reshoot
Philadelphia Skin
with Colleen Byrne in the role of Angelika Butler.

They had to find him.

“They’ve got the tower,” Park said. “It covers part of North Philly.”