Shutter Man (12 page)

The park was quiet. Byrne sat on the bench next to the small community garden.

He had found himself coming here more and more often lately, although he could not quite pinpoint why. There were times when the traffic was heavy on the side streets, which made it hard to think, but even then he found a way to step inside himself and visit the places he needed to visit.

Then there were times, like now, when the city was asleep, and the only sound was the wind rustling the leaves.

Woodman Park, he thought. He thought about the long road it had been for this green space to become what it was today.

He thought about the house that had once stood here. It had been a time of turmoil, a time of apprehension and fear. Perhaps he’d believed that he could save the place. Not the structure, but the very essence of this spot on earth.

Having been raised Roman Catholic, he knew he was supposed to believe in redemption. Little by little, through his time on the police force, witnessing the worst of human behavior, that belief had eroded. Recidivism for violent crime was at an all-time high. There seemed to be no redemption in the harsh solitude of prison life.

Were they going about it all wrong? Byrne knew it was not for him to say.

But now, sitting here in this beautiful space for which he had lobbied long and hard, a space that had arisen from the ashes of the chamber of horrors that once stood here, he felt, once again, that redemption was possible.

But redemption for whom?

He looked at the box next to him on the bench. The items inside brought him back to that day, the day Catriona Daugherty had been killed.

Over the nearly four decades, he had thought of her many times, thought of seeing her in the square that week, thought of her small form lying beneath the trees in Schuylkill River Park.

Byrne opened the box, looked at the .38 in the bright moonlight. He thought about the first time he had seen it, the day Dave Carmody had jumped on the Dumpster and taken it out of the wall behind the bricks. Byrne had known next to nothing about firearms at the time, but he knew it was a fearsome thing, a thing to be respected.

At this thought, a shadow came up on his left. He turned, looked.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I had a feeling I was going to see you.’

He had first met the cat under rather bizarre circumstances. They had both been standing next to the old house, unaware of the other’s presence. At that moment, the chimney began to crumble – having years earlier lost its tuck pointing – and a few bricks tumbled off the roof onto the cat’s head, knocking him cold.

Byrne had taken the cat – whom he immediately named Tuck – to a vet, and over the course of the next few weeks nursed him back to health. He supposed he knew early on that he didn’t own Tuck, nor was it the other way around. Tuck belonged to this place, even though the structure was long gone. Over the past six months, as Byrne visited this green space, the cat had shown up a few times.

Oddly enough, he seemed to know when Byrne most needed a friend.

Tuck jumped onto the bench, nuzzled Byrne’s leg.

‘Good to see you, buddy,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ve got something for you. I think you’re going to like it.’

When he knew he was going to come here to think, Byrne stopped at Ippolito’s Seafood on Dickinson Street and picked up a quarter-pound of sushi-grade tuna.

As he unwrapped the treat, Tuck jumped onto his right shoulder in anticipation. When Byrne put the paper on the bench, the cat was on it in a flash. He grabbed it, sprinted over to the hedges near the back of the lot and made short business of the fresh fish.

‘None for me, thanks,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ve already eaten.’

A few minutes later, the cat trotted to the edge of the lot, turned at the hedgerow, licked his lips one more time and disappeared into the darkness.

The night once again fell quiet.

Byrne thought of the last hours and minutes of Des Farren’s life, of his part in that day, the events that were set in place; of how the lifting of one’s hand in anger could echo across decades, and how, in those moments of madness, lives were forever changed.

Billy looked at the rows and rows of photographs, each one a patchwork of features: eyes, noses, mouths, ears, chins. On many of them – most, in fact – there was a name or a word, something that would help identify the subject of the picture, or clarify Billy’s relationship to the person.

On the wall dedicated to his first life there were three pictures of a man named Joseph Mula. Joseph Mula, in all three pictures, wore a white rayon smock and creased gray trousers. In each photograph there was a black Ace comb sticking out of the smock’s chest pocket. Joseph Mula had a crew cut, narrow shoulders and small hands.

But no face. Try as he might, Billy could not see the man’s face. Even though Joseph Mula had cut Billy’s hair every six weeks or so between the ages of five and ten, Billy could not remember anything about his face. Instead, he remembered the smells. Barbicide disinfectant, Aqua Velva, Brylcreem.

Above Billy’s headboard were three rows of photographs of family he’d never met, the extended clan Farren. For many years he scanned the old photographs, looking for himself in their faces. He once thought he recognized one of them as his aunt Bridget, only to learn that the woman in the picture had died ten years before he was born.

In this room, the only picture of his father, Daniel, was a clipping from an old newspaper article. Billy had cut out the eyes one night. He did not remember why.

His was a ghost world.

He’d once waved to himself in a mirror.

Over the years, Billy had met only a handful like him, those who had crossed over and returned, people who came back with an ability and a deficit, those who found a blank spot where something used to be.

When his second life began, he spent more than two years trying to regain his strength, a painful, exhausting regimen. During those years, often long into the night, he read everything he could get his hands on, spending many hours in the library selecting books.

As he came to understand the shadows, his face blindness, he read books on his condition, and was surprised to learn how many people had some degree of the affliction, including Dr Oliver Sacks and artist Chuck Close.

In the end, Billy found it far easier to be alone. He slept in the same room he had slept in as a boy, a cluttered warren beneath the tavern his parents had once operated. The echoes of all the people who had been patrons of The Stone, in its almost seventy years, were still present. Billy heard them in the night: the din of arguments, the clink of glasses raised in tribute, the tinkling of the bell over the front door signaling an arriving or departing customer.

Sean had moved out years ago, and now slept at the long-shuttered body shop on Wharton, a business once owned by their late uncle Patrick. Heavenly Body was no longer open to the public, but Sean sometimes did chop work for friends, and maintained a small, ever-changing fleet of stolen vehicles, all at some stage of repair and repainting.

Both Billy and Sean knew that there was a chance the black Acadia SUV had been identified, or soon would be. In the next few weeks they would chop it for parts. There was a recently repainted white Econoline van ready to go.

As Billy prepared to leave for the day, he stood before the large poster next to the door, as he always did. The reproduction was of a painting called
Deux hommes en pied
by the French painter Edgar Degas. Depicted in the painting, the title of which translated as ‘Two Men Walk’, were two men standing side by side. The man on the left was fully rendered. Perched on his left hand was a green parrot. The man on the right – despite the fact that his vest and coat were both painted in the impressionist style – had no face.

Some said that Degas never finished the painting, having just begun to sketch the man’s face. Others said he deliberately obliterated the man’s features.

Billy had never seen anything in his life to which he related more. It was how he saw the world, a blank and featureless place, obscured by bright light.

The painting was in a museum in Troyes, France. When all five lines were drawn, and the fever lifted, Billy intended to make the trip and stand in front of the painting. He wondered if, after all this time, just by virtue of the miracle that awaited him, the man on the right would have a face.

Maybe the face would be
his
face.

The Queen Memorial Library was a small branch of the Free Library located in the Landreth Apartments for senior citizens on Federal Street between 22nd and 23rd.

Billy sat, as he always did, at the table nearest the door, watching her.

Her name was Emily.

Emily was a graceful, pretty woman in her mid-twenties, with soft hair to her shoulders, the color of warm butterscotch. She had long, elegant fingers, a ready and genuine laugh.

For a long time Billy did not know she was legally blind.

One of her jobs at the library was checking books out for patrons, and that consisted mostly of swiping the item beneath the bar-code scanner, bagging the books and sending the customer off happy. Because the Queen Memorial was located in a senior center, a certain proportion of visitors had some visual problems, and therefore there was a section devoted to Braille, large-print and audiobook editions.

Initially Billy had begun visiting the library to spend time with a reference book on the collected works of Edgar Degas, specifically the page that held a color plate of
Deux hommes en pied.

One day, on a whim, he stopped at a florist on Federal and bought Emily a single white rose. He walked back and forth in front of the library for an hour, only to throw the rose in the trash and go home.

This happened three days in a row.

On the fourth day he hiked his courage, again bought a rose, entered the library, walked up to the counter and gave it to Emily.

‘This is for me?’ she’d asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How lovely.’ She sniffed the rose, smiled. ‘I adore white roses.’

This confused Billy. Before he could choke the words, he said, ‘How did…’

Emily laughed. Billy saw all of it. The small smile lines next to her mouth, the way her face lit up. Somehow her face was crystal clear to him.

‘How did I know it was a white rose?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Emily leaned in across the counter and whispered conspiratorially, ‘I’m not really blind, you see. It’s just a ruse to get sympathy and government benefits.’

Billy considered himself lucky that she couldn’t see the confusion that dashed across his face for a moment. She was kidding, of course.

‘I know by the fragrance,’ she added.

‘Different roses smell differently?’

‘Oh my, yes.’

Over the next few months, on Billy’s weekly visits, he would sit with her as she ate her lunch. She explained how, in general, roses with the best scents were darker colors, that they tended to have more petals, and those petals tended to have a downy texture. She explained how, to most people, a ‘rose’ fragrance was to be found on pink and red roses. One day he brought her a yellow rose, and she explained that there were notes of violets and lemon in the fragrance. Orange roses, she said, often smelled of fruit, and sometimes clove.

For more than three months, Billy did not miss a week.

It was here that he filled the hours between the money collections he and Sean made. Here was where he rediscovered Jack London and Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Here was where he learned the true nature of his condition. There were no cures here. There were just stories.

One day, at lunch, Emily surprised him. They were sitting on the stone bench near the library entrance.

‘I’m sure you have your pick of women,’ she’d said. ‘Why do you want to spend your time with a book mouse like me?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Handsome men get to pick and choose.’

Billy felt himself begin to redden. His face felt hot. ‘Why do you think I’m handsome?’

She touched his face, running her fingers on either side, from his forehead, lightly over his eyes, his cheekbones, to his lips and chin.

She sat back. ‘I can see you.’

They fell silent for a few moments. Billy watched her. He found himself not looking at her name tag, her ivory cardigan sweater and white blouse, or the way she would put her hair behind one ear. He actually saw her. He had no trouble recognizing her face. The sensation was odd and disorienting, the way he imagined it felt when a person with a hearing disability put in a hearing aid for the first time and heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Many times he’d waited for her across the street, and followed her as she made her way home with her white-tipped cane. She lived only two blocks away, on Oakford Street, but Billy never ceased to be amazed at how she did it. As often as he watched her walk home, he would park across the street from her row house and watch her windows, the soft shadows cast on the blinds. She had two cats, Oryx and Crake, and often left lights on for them.

On this day, Billy just watched her at the counter. They had a date for lunch the next day, and somehow he would find the courage to ask her.

Nail Island was a small nail salon and spa located across the street two doors west of Edwin Channing’s house. The white brick facade had two windows with hot-pink canvas awnings. The front windows boasted the salon’s services: manicures, pedicures, waxing, tinting.

When Byrne and Maria Caruso pulled up out front, Byrne noticed the surveillance camera above the front door, which was the reason for their visit. He looked across the street and tried to gauge the angle, wondering if the camera’s field of vision would include the area in front of Edwin Channing’s house.

When Maria had spoken to the owner of Nail Island, the woman told her that the camera was indeed hooked up to a DVR, and that the recordings were kept for a week.

With a little bit of luck, if the camera was operational, and the field of vision included the Channing house – or the area to the right or left – they might have something. Byrne felt his pulse quicken as he held open the door for Maria Caruso and stepped inside.

The shop was long and narrow, with five nail stations on the right. There were two customers; one getting a manicure, one a pedicure. Both customers were women were in their thirties. A six-year-old girl sat at a vacant station, fully engrossed in an iPad.

‘Welcome to Nail Island.’

The woman was coming out of the back room, carrying a plastic tray of various polishes. She was African American, in her late thirties, very slender. She wore a hot-pink smock with the store’s logo, white jeans, white sandals. All of her nails, top to bottom, were painted a soft yellow.

‘My name is Alvita Francis,’ she said. ‘How may I be of assistance?’ She had a slight Caribbean accent.

Maria produced her ID. ‘My name is Detective Caruso. This is Detective Byrne. I believe we spoke on the phone the other day?’

‘Yes, of course. About the SafeCam.’

‘Yes.’

Alvita reached out a hand to Maria, palm up. ‘May I?’

Maria extended her right hand. Her nails were short. She wore no polish.

‘You have very pretty nails,’ Alvita said.

‘Thank you.’

‘You must be getting your B12.’

‘Greek yogurt is my life.’

‘I can make them look better,’ Alvita said.

‘You can?’

‘Lord, yes. Beautiful nails are
my
life.’

Long nails were not just an inconvenience for a female police officer, they were a potential hazard. Although there was no departmental policy regarding long nails, it was frowned upon, and almost always ruled out before the fact. Anything that might hinder or prevent you from drawing your service weapon was a bad idea.

Alvita glanced at Byrne. ‘I’m not liking
those
nails at all.’

Byrne looked at his hands. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘You ever get a manicure?’ she asked.

‘It’s on my bucket list.’

She reached over to the counter, pulled out two cards, handed them to Byrne and Maria. ‘Ten percent discount to PPD.’ She pointed to the woman at the third of three stations. ‘Mika could take you now if you like.’

‘Maybe some other time,’ Byrne said. ‘But thanks.’ He pocketed the card, pointed to the area above the front door, where the exterior camera was located.

‘May I ask why you have a camera?’ he said.

Both sculpted eyebrows went up. ‘You from Philly?’

‘Born and bred,’ Byrne said.

‘And you still ask people that question?’

‘Fair enough,’ Byrne said.

‘On the phone you said that you record to a DVR,’ Maria said. ‘Did I get that right?’

‘You did.’

‘Is that activated by a motion sensor, or is it on all the time?’

‘It’s on all the time,’ Alvita said. ‘When we’re closed, that is. Sometimes I just turn it off to save the hard disk space during business hours.’ She pointed to the camera on the wall opposite the register. ‘That one’s on twenty-four-seven. I keep the cash drawer empty and open and lighted when we’re closed, but you never know. They’re not criminals because they’re smart.’

‘And you’re saying you had the camera on and were recording on the night I asked you about?’ Maria asked.

‘Yes, ma’am. I closed up around eight o’clock that night, set the alarm and put the cameras on. Went to Cape May for the weekend.’

‘May we take a look at the footage?’

‘By all means.’

Alvita led them to the rear of the shop. On the way, the little girl looked up from her iPad, waved at Byrne.

The back room was piled high with boxes, hair dryers, stools and carts, manicure tables, plastic chairs, shampoo bowls. Somewhere in all this was a cluttered desk with a 21-inch iMac.

‘Please excuse all this,’ Alvita said. ‘I’ve been meaning to sort this from the time Whappy killed Phillup.’

Byrne and Maria exchanged a glance. Byrne figured that she meant a very long time. He didn’t ask who Whappy and Phillup were.

‘I took the liberty of cueing up the recording to about an hour before the time you said you were interested in,’ Alvita said.

‘We appreciate it,’ Maria said. She pointed at the chair. ‘May I?’

‘Please do,’ Alvita said.

Maria Caruso was part of the younger generation of detectives who had a deep understanding and interest in all things digital and high-tech. Byrne had come to it all on the slope of a nearly vertical learning curve.

‘I will leave you to your business,’ Alvita said. ‘Call me if you need anything.’

She pushed through the beads, and stepped back into the salon.

Maria sat at the desk, took the mouse in hand. She navigated to the period just preceding the medical examiner’s estimate of Edwin Channing’s time of death. She hit play. The screen revealed the area beneath the Nail Island entrance, along with the cars and sidewalks on the other side of the street. The Channing house was out of frame to the left.

On the upper right-hand side of the screen was visible the vacant lot to the right of the Channing house and, in the distance, a small portion of the next street over.

Cars passed. A few pedestrians crossed the frame. A man walking his dogs. No one seemed to be paying much attention to Edwin Channing’s residence.

At 11.25, a vehicle crossed the frame, right to left, on the far side of the street. It was a large late-model SUV, dark blue or black. As it moved out of frame, the vehicle came to a halt, the field illuminated by the brake lights. It appeared to have stopped just in front of the Channing house. Only a portion of the rear bumper was visible.

For the next two minutes it did not move. No one crossed the camera’s field of vision on foot.

At 11.28, the brake lights flared again, and then disappeared in darkness. The only lights now were the street lights.

At 11.30, a dark SUV rolled to a stop at the very top of the frame on the right, parking on the next street over, just on the other side of the vacant lot.

‘It looks like the same vehicle,’ Maria said.

‘Yes, it does,’ Byrne replied.

A minute later, the driver door opened and two ghostlike shadows moved from the SUV, across the vacant lot, in the direction of the Channing house. The time code said 11.32. The two detectives watched the recording wordlessly, as the occasional car passed in the foreground. Maria put the recording on double speed.

At 12.16, the two shadows returned. The SUV started, and the headlights cut through the gloom with an ethereal yellow glow.

‘Can we run that back?’ Byrne asked.

Maria grabbed the scrubber bar, moved it slightly left. A few seconds later, the two shadows again crossed the vacant lot, approached the car.

‘Stop it there for a second.’

Maria hit pause. Byrne knew she was thinking the same thing he was thinking.

Were these the men they were looking for?

Were these two cold-blooded killers?

‘Could you ask Alvita if there is any way we can get a hard copy of this?’ Byrne asked.

‘Sure.’

While Maria walked into the salon, Byrne sat at the desk. He took out his phone, snapped a picture of the screen, looked at the photo. It was grainy, but not significantly worse than what was on the recording.

He rewound the recording. He paused it at the moment the SUV passed by the store. There was a good deal of motion blur, and the darkened windows prevented him seeing into the vehicle, but one thing was discernible. The left-rear fender was dented.

Maria stepped into the back room.

‘Alvita said there might be a way to do it, but her only printer is up front.’

‘That’s okay,’ Byrne said. ‘With her permission, let’s get someone from the AV unit out here to make a copy of this footage, bracketing it by thirty minutes either side.’

‘You got it.’

While Maria Caruso headed back to the Roundhouse, Byrne spent the next hour canvassing the neighborhood with the blurry photograph of the old woman he’d gotten via email from Anne-Marie Beaudry. No one recognized her.

The night before, he had sent the photo by email to Perry Kershaw, who said not only did he not recognize the woman, but he now wasn’t sure he’d actually seen her. Byrne put the so-called lead in a mental compartment he used for coincidence, and moved on.

He spent the next few hours walking around the blocks that surrounded the Channing scene. Using Edwin Channing’s house as ground zero, he made ever-widening concentric circles, looking for exterior surveillance cameras.

Just because a homeowner or commercial establishment had surveillance cameras didn’t mean they were available or willing to sign up for the SafeCam project. Far from it. It was only common sense to realize that people had at least as much to hide as they were willing to share. Probably far more.

In all, Byrne counted nine cameras within a four-block radius, cameras that were not signed up to SafeCam. He stopped at all the locations. Four were residences, with no answer at the door. One turned out to be a dummy camera. Three of the business cameras did not have any recording devices hooked up.

At two o’clock, he found one that did.

Four blocks east of Nail Island was a small convenience grocery called Sadik Food King. It was run by a Turkish couple named Joe and Fatma Sadik.

When Byrne walked in, he was greeted by a symphony of aromas, not the least of which was from a brass samovar of strong black coffee. He was also greeted by Joe Sadik. Sadik was in his late forties, a wiry, neat man with a firm handshake and a ready smile. He wore a cream-colored dress shirt and a cocoa bow tie.

Byrne explained what he was looking for, without giving any details on the circumstances. He also gave Joe Sadik the time frame.

Unlike the setup at Nail Island, the Sadiks – having been robbed many times – had invested in high-quality cameras, and subscribed to a cloud service that stored their surveillance recordings off site.

They met in an office in the back of the store.

‘Why did you decide on this service?’ Byrne asked.

Sadik became animated. He spoke with expressive eyes and hands. ‘Twice we get robbed, and they took not only the tape machine, but the cameras themselves.’ He pointed at the ceiling above the heavily fortified back door. There was a smoked glass dome there. ‘Now it’s a little harder to spot, and definitely harder to steal. And if they do steal the camera, they won’t get the video.’

At this, Joe’s wife Fatma, a petite woman dressed in a burgundy pantsuit, came into the room with an orange tray. On it was a pair of small cups of steaming black coffee.

‘Thank you,’ Byrne said. He sipped the coffee. It was strong and flavorful.

On the screen, the surveillance video lurched forward. Cars passed, people passed, the sun cast long shadows, then set altogether. As the image glowed beneath the street lamps, a familiar vehicle crossed the frame.

‘Wait,’ Byrne said. ‘Can we go back?’

Joe Sadik hit pause. He backed up the recording.

As the recording inched forward, cars passed in starts and fits. At the 9.55 mark, a black SUV entered from the left side of the frame, stopped at the corner. A black SUV with a dented left-rear fender. The license plate was not visible in the frame, but the badge was. It was a GMC Acadia. Byrne called it in.

When he’d completed the call, he turned back to Joe Sadik.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s let it play.’

Sadik hit play. On screen, the vehicle pulled up across the street, parked in front of the U-Cash-It store. A few seconds later, the driver and passenger got out. Without prompting, Joe Sadik hit pause.

Although the light level was low, and the vantage was a high angle and across four lanes, Byrne could see that the occupants of the SUV were white males, late twenties to mid-thirties. They both wore black leather jackets. The passenger had long hair, nearly to his shoulders. The driver, who sported wraparound sunglasses, had close-cropped hair. Both wore what looked to be fingerless black gloves.

‘Okay?’ Sadik asked.

‘Okay,’ Byrne said.

Sadik hit play.

Onscreen, the one with the longer hair held open the door of the U-Cash-It, and the driver walked in. The second man followed.

‘Is there any way to print this out?’

Sadik was on his feet in a flash. ‘We have this technology.’

The U-Cash-It store was a renovated and fortified brick row house, next to a phone and pager store. Renovated was probably the wrong word. The first floor was gutted, dry-walled and painted. That was it. There was a counter that spanned the width of the space, a U-Cash-It sign on the far wall – a garish red and yellow, with a fist holding bright green cash, and a lightning bolt forming the center of the U – but nothing else except for a small two-way mirror, and a pair of cameras in the far corners.

Byrne had never been in a more stark and uninviting commercial establishment.

Then again, if you found yourself needing to cash checks at these rates, you weren’t here to socialize.

If the interior was uninviting, the man standing behind the counter was even more so. In his late twenties, he stood maybe six-two, two-forty. Shaved head, a pair of iron loops in his right ear, two of the most intricate sleeve tattoos Byrne had ever seen. Not to mention a gaudy neck tattoo. Apparently his arms and neck were where his sense of color and composition lay, such as it was.