Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (180 page)

“A Cheerio.”

At first Jessica thought she hadn’t heard him right, then soon realized she had. She nodded. She knew what he meant, knew where this was going. Cheerios were the universal toddler pacifiers. Cheerios were baby crack.

“One Cheerio was sitting on this shitty, Astroturf porch, and Tommy Delgado can’t take his eyes off it. Now, keep in mind, here was a man who had seen it all. Two tours in Nam, twenty-five plus on the job. A few minutes later he walks to the back of the building, crying his eyes out. I checked on him, just to make sure he didn’t have his piece out, but there he was, just sitting on this bench, sobbing. Broke my heart, but I didn’t approach him.

“That one thing snapped him in half, Jess. One Cheerio. He was never the same after that.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

Byrne took a few moments, shrugged. “He worked another few years, took his thirty. But he was just sleepwalking the job, you know? Bringing up the rear, hauling water.”

They fell silent for a full minute.

“When did it all go to crap, Kevin?”

Byrne had his ideas on this. “I think it was when boxes of pasta went from sixteen ounces to twelve ounces and nobody told us.”

Jessica looked fallen. “They did?”

Byrne nodded.

“Son of a
bitch.
No wonder I’m always hungry.”

Byrne glanced at his watch. “Want to get some breakfast?”

Jessica looked at the black, star-dotted sky. “At night?”

“Coffee first.” He helped Jessica to her feet, and marched her into the kitchen.

| FIFTY-FOUR |

L
ILLY WALKED THE STREETS
. H
ER STOMACH RUMBLED
. S
HE HAD NEVER
been this exhausted in her life. And still she walked. Spruce, Walnut, Locust, Sansom, Chestnut, Market. Up and down and across. She lingered for a while on Rittenhouse Square. She watched the city yawn and stretch and come awake. She watched the medical personnel arriving at Jefferson, the delivery trucks bringing the day’s news, the day’s bagels; she watched the homeless stir in doorways; she watched the cabs and the cops, two groups who knew no time.

She walked, her treasure in hand.

When she was twelve or so she had gone to a house party. As she was about to leave, her friend Roz slipped her a huge bud of weed, but she’d had nowhere to put it, no foil or plastic or anything. So she walked all the way home with it pinched between her thumb and forefinger, hanging on to it for dear life. She was not going to lose it. She walked more than two miles, cutting through Culver Park, across the reservoir, across the tracks. Somehow she made it home, her riches intact and whole, and dropped it into an empty pill vial with no small hum of accomplishment.

She had something even more important than that in her hand now. She couldn’t even bring herself to put it in her pocket. She needed the feel of it against her skin.

She had his phone number. He was going to help her.

And so she walked, from Front Street to Broad Street, until she could walk no more. She sat on one of those big concrete planters.

She waited for the sun.

| FIFTY-FIVE |

T
HE MURDERS WERE THE LEAD STORY OF THE DAY
. I
T WAS ABOVE THE
fold in the
Inquirer,
on the front page of the
Daily News.
It led all three network affiliate television broadcasts. It was featured on every local news website.

The lab was fast-tracking every piece of forensic evidence. A partial shoe print had been lifted off the roof where Katja had been posed on the wooden chair. The chair itself had yielded a number of friction ridge prints, which were being fed through AFIS. The swords were identified as a homemade version of a double-wide épée, the type commonly used in fencing. They yielded no prints.

Katja’s mother, Birta Dovic, was driving in from Connecticut. Two investigators from the Connecticut state police were interviewing Katja’s friends and classmates. Photographs of the three victims were now on the dashboards of every sector car in the city. Patrol officers were instructed to ask everyone they encountered if they had ever seen them.

The investigation had reached a whirlwind pace, but the one thing it had not produced, the one thing they all sought, was still eluding them.

They needed a name.

A
T JUST AFTER
8:00
AM
Josh Bontrager came running into the duty room, out of breath.

“What’s up?” Jessica asked. Her head felt like it was made of cast iron. She’d gotten three hours’ sleep and driven into the city in a fog. It reminded her of her college days.

Bontrager held up a hand. He couldn’t catch his wind.

“Take it easy, Josh.”

Bontrager nodded.

“Water?”

Another nod.

Jessica handed him a bottle. He chugged a full bottle of Aquafina. Deep breath. Then: “A woman called 911. She was in the park.”

“What park? Fairmount Park?” Byrne asked.

“Tacony Creek,” Josh said, nearly recovered. “You know the one I mean?”

Everyone did. Tacony Creek Park, which was technically part of the Fairmount Park system, was a 300-acre park that ran along the Tacony Creek, connecting Frankford Creek in the south to Cheltenham Township in the north. It skirted a very densely populated area in North Philadelphia.

“Anyway, the woman calls in, says she saw a man—a well-dressed white man—let a teenage girl get into his car. It was a black Acura. She said the whole thing looked a little funny, so she kept watching them. After a few seconds, she said she saw the man and the girl fighting in the car.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, I guess while the woman was on the line with 911 a sector car drove by. She hung up, flagged it down, told the officer what was going on.”

“Did she get a plate?”

“Better than that. She said the car went up an alley and the sector car blocked it in. It’s a dead end.”

“What are you saying, we have the car?” Jessica asked.

“Not only do we have the car,” Bontrager said. He raised his empty bottle of spring water, like a toast. “We’ve got the
guy.
”

| FIFTY-SIX |

S
WANN SAT ON THE CURB
. H
E CALMED HIMSELF
. A
S A BOY HE HAD BEEN
in chains many times.

He reached over with his left hand, slid over the back of his watch, removed the thin steel needle. Nearby, the girl sat crying in the back of the patrol car. A very nervous young officer leaned against the trunk.

Swann rocked gently to one side, then the other. “Officer, I’m afraid you’ve gotten these cuffs on far too tightly. I’m losing the feeling in both my arms.”

At first the officer pretended not to hear him.

“Officer?”

The young man looked up the alleyway, then reluctantly walked over, unsnapping his holster. “If you try anything, I swear to God I will mace you in the face. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Roll onto your knees and stand up.”

In one graceful move Swann rose. He dropped the handcuffs to the ground, then pulled the officer’s weapon out of its holster. He leveled it at the young man’s head.

“Don’t!” the officer screamed.
“Oh God Jesus don’t.”
He closed his eyes, waiting for the click, the pain, the dark.

“Cuff yourself to the front wheel. Do it now.”

The young man grabbed the cuffs, did as he was told. The girl in the back seat began to cry. Swann took the handcuff keys from the officer’s belt, then took a few steps away. He ejected the magazine from the weapon, racked the slide. Empty now. He threw the magazine and keys as far as he could. He leaned close to the young man’s ear. “I’m sorry for all this. I would never have hurt you.”

He held up the weapon. “You will find this in a sewer on Castor Avenue.”

Swann smoothed his clothing. He grabbed his bag from the backseat of the black car, walked up the alley, and was gone.

| FIFTY-SEVEN |

T
WO SECTOR CARS AND TWO DETECTIVE CARS ROARED TO A HALT AT THE
same moment. Jessica and Byrne hit the ground running. Behind them were Josh Bontrager and Dre Curtis.

They arrived to find a disturbing tableau. A sector car was at the mouth of the alley between two blocks of row houses. In front of it was a black Acura TSX. A young officer was handcuffed to one of the spokes of the right front aluminum alloy wheel. In the backseat of the Acura was a young girl, perhaps sixteen. Her face was streaked with mascara tears.

All four detectives drew their weapons, held them at their sides.

“Where is he?” Byrne asked the officer.

“He’s gone.” The young man’s shame was palpable. He slammed his free hand into the front fender.

“Which way?”

The officer pointed east, toward Castor Avenue.

“How long ago?”

“Two minutes, max.”

“Describe him.”

The officer described the man as a white male, thirties, blue and brown, thick mustache, medium build, no distinguishing marks or scars. He wore a tan windbreaker, black Docker-style pants, black hikers.

“Is he armed?” Byrne asked.

“He took my weapon. He said he was going to dump it on Castor. He ejected the mag first.”

Byrne glanced at two of the four uniformed officers. He pointed them in the opposite direction. If their guy said he’d go east, he’d go west. They were off in an instant.

While Jessica got out her keys and unlocked the handcuffs, Dre Curtis got on his handset. “Suspect is not in custody,” he said. “Repeat, suspect is
not
10-15.”

“Put in a call to K-9,” Byrne said.

“We need some warm bodies down here,” Dre Curtis continued. “We need a search team now. We need K-9.”

The officer, a two-year rookie named Randy Sweetin, described what happened. He said he was patrolling, and a woman came across Wyoming Avenue, waving her hands. She told him that she saw a man talking to a teenage girl. She thought it looked funny, so she flagged him down.

“You’re saying the cuffs on him were secure?” Byrne asked.

“They were secure. I’m sure of it.”

Josh Bontrager approached. “I called in the plates. Stolen off a black Acura in long-term parking at the airport.”

“When?” Byrne asked.

“Three days ago.”

“Shit.”

They would have to identify the vehicle by its VIN.

T
HE GIRL HAD STOPPED CRYING
for the moment. She sat on the back of a detective car, a ball of damp tissues in her hands. Someone had brought her a can of Mountain Dew. It sat unopened next to her.

She said her name was Abigail Noonan. She was sixteen. They had not yet pressed her on ID, address, or Social Security number. As a rule, street kids were only truthful about one out of three.

“Are you okay?” Jessica asked.

The girl nodded.

“Is there anything else we can get you right now?”

The girl shook her head.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. He was just, like, parked there, listening to the radio, okay?”

“Do you remember what station?”

“I don’t know too much about which radio stations play what. I’m not, you know, from around here.”

“I understand,” Jessica said. “Do you remember what song he was listening to?”

“Yeah. He was listening to ‘When You Look Me in the Eyes.’ That song by the Jonas Brothers. You know them?”

Jessica didn’t know the Jonas Brothers from the Wright Brothers. “Sure.”

“Anyway, I was on the bench over there, and I heard the music. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. I looked around and I saw this guy in his car. He looked over and saw me.”

“What did he do?”

“Do? He didn’t do anything.”

“I mean, did he smile, did he wave, did he call you over?”

“He might have smiled. I don’t really remember. It looked like he was reading a little book of some kind. More like a booklet.”

“What kind of booklet?”

“Well, when I walked by, I saw that he was holding the booklet in one hand, and this cool video iPod in the other, so I guess it was the manual. He looked a little confused.”

“Did he start talking to you?”

The girl looked at the ground. She began to color. “No,” she said. “I started talking to him.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said he just bought his daughter a new iPod, and he was having trouble with it. He said he wanted to download a lot of stuff she liked before he gave it to her. He asked me if I knew anything about iPods.”

“Do you?”

“Of course.”

“What happened then?”

“I was so stupid. I walked around and got in the car.”

“Did he touch you?”

“No,” she said. “Not right then. I thought everything was cool until I looked in the backseat, and I saw it.”

“You saw it? What did you see?”

“The newspaper. It was opened to the story about that guy who was kidnapping girls off the street. I looked at him. He knew that I saw the newspaper. When our eyes met, we both knew. I
freaked.
”

“Did he strike you? Or try to detain you?”

“No. But when I saw that I couldn’t get out I started yelling my ass off.”

They had checked the interior of the Acura. The inside handle on the passenger’s door had been removed. Jessica made a few notes. She put a hand on the young girl’s shoulder. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to contact your parents. You know that, right?”

The girl nodded. Fresh tears followed.

A few minutes later a K-9 officer arrived with his dog. The officer ran the dog—a German shepherd tracking dog named Oliver—through the driver’s side of the Acura, and then around the perimeter of the car. He then walked the dog over to the tree line across the street. Almost instantly the dog alerted to a path. The two disappeared into the trees, followed by Josh Bontrager, Dre Curtis, and a pair of uniformed officers.

Jessica glanced at her watch. If this was their killer, he had a pretty good lead. But she had worked with the K-9 Unit many times. If their man was still in the area, they would find him.