The Stolen Ones (7 page)

Byrne sat alone in a booth at a Point Breeze dive, nursing his second Jim Beam. There were a number of cop bars he frequented, but some nights he just didn’t want the company, the shop talk.

He took out his phone, navigated over to the photo folder, began scrolling through the pictures he had taken that day, one after another. When he reached the last photo he began again at the beginning.

Thirty thousand in cash.

A handful of ugly photographs.

A page from the
Inquirer
.

For a moment Byrne had considered that Freitag had wrapped something delicate in the newspaper, stashed it in the box, then removed the item, leaving the paper behind. He rather quickly ruled this out because of how neatly folded the paper was.

No. Robert Freitag – and Byrne was all but certain it was Freitag who stashed the shoebox in the ceiling – had kept that page from the newspaper for a reason.

Because the newspaper page had been entered into evidence, Byrne had made copies, front and back, before leaving the Roundhouse.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the sheets, spread them on the table. There were a total of seven articles. A wolf-dog had been captured in Pennypack Park. An article about how Germantown Avenue draws history buffs. A piece about new condominiums in the Northeast. He was just about to read the second page when his phone rang.

He checked the number on the caller ID. It was his father. A little late for Paddy Byrne, but he was known to watch the fights on HBO. He clicked on. ‘Hey, Da.’

‘There’s a problem.’

Since Byrne had been a child, he had only heard this phrase from his father twice before. Once, when his father had a union meeting, a union meeting at which Padraig Byrne was up for election, an election he ultimately won. On the way to the union hall, though, in five feet of snow, the Pontiac was dead. The other time was when Byrne’s mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Three times in one life meant something bad. This was serious.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My blood pressure.’

Byrne knew it. He felt the cold shiver rise from his feet into his chest. He fished around in his pocket for his car keys. He considered which hospital would be closest to his father’s house. He couldn’t think of a single one. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘My blood pressure,’ his father repeated. ‘Something’s wrong with it.’

Oh, man
, Byrne thought. Besides himself, Padraig Byrne was the last person he knew who would even think about dealing with something like cholesterol or blood pressure, or anything that might have anything to do with good health. Unless he had to. Which reminded him that his yearly MRI was coming up soon.

Padraig Byrne had been a longshoreman all his working life, had survived on cheesesteaks, Tastykakes and Harp Lager. Health was a side issue. Like flood insurance.

‘What about it?’ Byrne asked.

‘It’s twenty-seven over eight.’

The numbers were all wrong. They didn’t even make sense. ‘
What?
’

‘My blood pressure is twenty-seven over eight,’ Padraig said. ‘I’m looking right at it.’

‘I don’t understand.’ There was a long pause, a silence that filled Byrne with dread. ‘Da?’

Mercifully, his father soon responded. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What’s my blood pressure supposed to be?’

The previous year Byrne had bought his father a top-of-the-line cuff blood pressure monitor, along with books on low-sodium cooking and the low-cholesterol diet. When Byrne took the blood pressure monitor out of the package, he had read the small brochure – printed in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French – about how to use the device, and what the readings should be, complete with an age and weight chart. Like all things medical, all things health-related, Byrne couldn’t remember a word or a single number. Now that it mattered.

‘I don’t know,’ Byrne said. ‘Are you sure about those numbers?’

‘Son,’ Padraig said, with a tone that suggested Byrne was still a child, still sitting deliriously naked in the small rubber pool behind their house on Reed Street. ‘Did I not say I was looking right at it?’

Byrne knew the tone. His father was sure about something, and would not be challenged. ‘Where are you?’

‘Where
am
I?’ his father asked. ‘I’m home. Where do you think I am? Miami?’

‘In the house. Where in the
house
?’

‘Ah, okay,’ Padraig said. ‘I’m in the kitchen. What’s the difference?’

‘Is the monitor plugged into the outlet next to the bowl on the sideboard?’

‘Where else?’

‘Da,’ Byrne said in relief, ‘that outlet is on a dimmer switch.’

Silence.

Then, from his father: ‘It is?’

The Irish
, Byrne thought. Sometimes he wondered how the Irish ever ran his city. ‘Yes. The outlet in the kitchen, the one next to the bowl. It’s on a dimmer. It’s the round switch in the hallway leading to the living room.’

‘A dimmer?’

‘Yep.’

‘Hang on.’

Byrne heard the phone being put down, his father scuffing across the kitchen. A full minute later he picked up the phone.

‘I have it plugged into the outlet next to the stove now. Hang on.’ Byrne heard the plastic rustle, then the cuff pump hold, deflate, hiss. ‘Let me see here. All right. It’s one hundred eighteen over eighty. Better?’

‘Better.’

‘Ah, okay,’ Padraig said. ‘Christ, am I stupid.’

‘No you’re not,’ Byrne said. ‘It could have happened to anyone.’

Byrne said this, but at the moment he could not think of a single person.

They said their goodbyes, entreating each other, as always, to be safe.

Byrne called for another drink.

Luther walked down the narrow lane between two buildings on Frankford Avenue, reached into the pocket of his overcoat, extracted a ring of keys. He looked both ways down the short passageway and, seeing himself alone and unobserved, headed down the three steps. He slipped the key into the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside.

He could not turn on a light because there was no electricity in this three-room basement apartment, a flat he had rented two years earlier, paying two years’ rent – plus security deposit – in advance, in cash. He knew that this was not the way real estate transactions were generally conducted, but he had long ago learned the power of cash. The building’s owner did not hesitate a second before shaking on the deal.

Luther knew this man conducted deals such as this in many parts of the city. He had followed him for two weeks, observing the man offering and accepting white envelopes on street corners, in diners, and between car windows in indoor parking lots. Luther requested that no lease or paperwork exist on this transaction.

The man was more than happy to oblige.

There was no furniture in the apartment, and thus nothing to trip over, so Luther only needed a small LED flashlight to negotiate his way to the small closet that contained the water heater. Or, more accurately, had at one time contained the water heater.

He opened the door to the closet, stepped inside, closed the door behind him. Overhead was a large vent, once used as a cold-air return. Luther took the vent out of the ceiling. He grabbed the iron bar he had installed years earlier and pulled himself into the crawlspace. Once there he replaced the grill and tapped it into place.

Few people knew about the vast network of catacombs beneath the city of Philadelphia, and how they were all interconnected with the nearly three thousand miles of sewer lines, some more than twenty-four feet in diameter. As a young boy, Luther had mind-printed the intricate and venous corridors that allowed him to move through the city undetected. It was in this place he felt most at home.

In many ways, it was the only home he’d ever had.

At some points, in North Philadelphia, the tunnels were more than thirty feet below the surface of the roads. Down there, Luther could tell when it was raining. He could tell when traffic was heavy, when it was dusk or dawn, when the air above was suffused with fog.

There were dangers here, but Luther knew where to hide. Only twice, when Philadelphia fell victim to sudden rainstorms had he been caught off guard by a flash flood that had been channeled through the storm sewers to the Delaware River.

He walked down a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, beneath Grant Avenue, sidestepping the thin river of rainwater flowing over the old cobblestones. He slipped through an opening into a catacomb that was just beneath a building that once housed a massive commercial kitchen. Even these many years after the last meals had been prepared, the air smelled of onions and animal fat. Beneath that, the sickly-sweet smell of spun sugar.

He walked the long black hallway, beneath the ceaseless hum of the expressway far overhead. When he came to the main door he removed his shoes, as silence here was paramount. He gently opened the door and stepped into the brightly lit room.

He sat for a while on the edge of the bed, marveling, as always, at the miracle of it all. He did not know anything about love – indeed, he wouldn’t know how to differentiate it from any of the other emotions other people felt – but he knew peace, and that was what he called love.

When Byrne returned home, at just after one, he took off his suit coat and tie, poured himself a short whiskey. He turned off the lights, opened the blinds, and positioned a chair in front of the window overlooking the street.

He thought about Robert Freitag.

According to some people, probably most people, Freitag was a man of small consequence. When Byrne was a young cop he would probably have thought so, as well. But if his more than two decades in homicide had taught him anything it was that there was no glamour in death, that we were all peers in the morgue.

In life there were people who were wealthier than Robert Freitag, people who were taller, stronger, better looking, certainly more powerful. Byrne believed that to care about anybody, any murder victim, you had to care about them all. Yes, some cases were higher profile than others, mostly due to media exposure, or political pressure put on the department. At some point Byrne began to resist that pressure, even to push back against it.

The Robert Freitags of the world deserved his best effort. The man certainly received the killer’s best.

But if Freitag was such a nobody, why was he such a somebody to the man who took his life? The crime was too vicious, too staged, to be random.

He took the Polaroid out of his shirt pocket, held it in the dark. He ran his finger over the glossy surface, thought about the fear Freitag must have felt in those final moments. Byrne wondered how long it had been since he himself had been truly afraid. Working the Line Squad in homicide was not about putting yourself in danger on a daily basis, although he’d been injured too many times to make that a hard and fast rule.

He supposed the only things he feared now were for his daughter’s safety, and not just growing old, but growing old alone.

Byrne drained his glass, poured himself another inch. He glanced out the window, at the traffic moving up his street. He had taken to doing this of late, speculating as to where these people were going, wondering if the person he sought was passing just beneath his sill.

He looked at his watch, angling the face toward the streetlamp. Even though he knew his father was asleep, he thought about calling him. It was too late. And although he had been putting it off for a long time, he knew it was probably time to move a little closer to where his father lived. There were no guarantees in this life, no warranties. They had X amount of years left together, and nobody knew what that number was.

Byrne put the Polaroid back into a shirt pocket, killed the whiskey, walked into the bedroom. He lay down on the bed, closed his eyes, just for a few moments.

Soon, the day overtook him, and he was fast asleep.

In his dream he walked down a long black hallway, followed by the sound of hard soled shoes on a wet stone. Every time he turned to see who was following him, there was no one there.

But still, as before, the smell of wet straw.

Jessica’s only class of the day was Criminal Law. It started at 6:45 a.m., and lasted one hour. This time, she was ready for it. She had gotten up at just after five, made lunch for Sophie and Carlos, made sure Vincent was alive and well and awake, and gotten in a twenty-minute run up Reed Street to Fourth, down to Dickinson, then back to Moyamensing.

In the cold drizzle the run was exhilarating.

Now, sitting in the classroom – her final lecture on the subject – she was wide awake, and ready for anything.

For the first time in a long time she felt she could do this.

The four men whose fingerprints were lifted from the photographs they’d found in Robert Freitag’s ceiling – the four dead men – were all small-time criminals, each having met their demise as the result of consorting with the wrong people. Two of the men were killed during the commission of a felony – one during a robbery attempt at a gas station in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; one during a home invasion in Fort Lauderdale. The remaining two men died in prison – one in Coyote Ridge Correctional Facility in Washington State, and the other in Los Lunas in New Mexico. According to their records, none of the four men had been in the same institution at the same time, nor was any connection to Robert Freitag established. Besides the fact that the most recent of these deaths occurred in 1989, and was unlikely to be reinvestigated, all four cases were well out of the jurisdiction of the Philadelphia Police Department.

Jessica put all this data into the Freitag case’s ever-growing binder, moving it, for the moment, to a back burner.

At just after nine the fax came in. If Jessica had learned anything in her time on the job, it was that things take longer than they do. Karen Jacobs, who promised to get this information to them the previous day, wrote an apologetic note on the cover sheet of the fax.

It was what it was. The wheels turned at their own pace.

Jessica began to skim the two-page fax, which included Robert Freitag’s resume and job application to CycleLife, when she spotted Byrne crossing the duty room, two large Starbucks cups in hand.

‘There is a special place for you in heaven,’ she said.

‘I’ve got about three hundred thousand years in Purgatory to do first,’ Byrne said. ‘But thanks.’

Jessica opened her coffee to cool. She glanced at the assignment desk, back. ‘Still no case?’

‘I checked the sheet. Two shootings in South Philly, a stabbing in Nicetown. All three vics hanging on.’

One of the oldest axioms in homicide was that a murder was just an aggravated assault gone wrong. Until a suspicious death happened, the cases belonged to the divisional detectives.

Still, every time a phone rang, every detective – or at least those near the top of the wheel – looked toward the center of the room.

Jessica sipped her coffee, crossed the duty room, made a copy of the fax. She returned, handed one of the copies to Byrne. They both scanned the resume.

‘Like the woman said, before Robert worked for CycleLife he worked for Aetna as an accounts manager, then before that he worked for Merck.’

‘All healthcare related,’ Byrne said.

‘He graduated from West Philadelphia High School, then got an associate’s degree in Medical Assisting at Community College of Philadelphia.’

‘More healthcare.’

‘Interesting,’ Jessica said, tapping the bottom of the first page. ‘There’s a four-year gap from nineteen ninety-two to ’ninety-six.’

‘There’s nothing there.’

‘Nothing,’ Jessica said. ‘Don’t people usually put something down, figuring their potential employer is going to ask? Something like “traveled in South America to find myself” or “took time off when kids were small”?’

‘Well, we know he didn’t
do
time,’ Byrne said. ‘He wasn’t trying to leave a stint in Graterford off his CV.’

‘Have we put in a call to this cousin of his?’

‘I called the lawyer this morning,’ Byrne said. ‘Nothing back yet.’

‘And I’m not seeing where this guy would have made enough money to stash thirty-one grand in a shoebox.’ Jessica flipped a page, looked at the second sheet. She sat upright. ‘Look at this. The name and address he put in for Emergency Contact.’

Byrne glanced at the bottom of the page. ‘J. C. Delacroix.’ He looked at Jessica. ‘JCD.’

‘As in JCD 10K.’

‘Or 10E.’

Byrne rolled his chair over to a computer terminal, punched in the information. A few seconds later he turned the monitor. He had looked up the address on Google Maps. It was the second to last house in a block of row houses in Brewerytown.

‘I don’t think this address has a 10E. I’m going with 10K, as in ten grand,’ Byrne said. ‘Let’s go see what J. C. Delacroix has to say about it.’

As they got ready to leave, Jessica glanced back at Robert Freitag’s resume, at the missing entry spanning 1992 to 1996, wondering:
What happened during those four years?