“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
BY 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
THE 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.
* * *
AT 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.”
* * *
BY 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.
Jessica clicked the SHOW MESSAGE key. The LCD displayed a new screen. She showed the phone to Byrne. “Look.”
There was a new message. The readout declared that a private number had sent the file.
To a dead woman.
They ran it down to the AV unit.
* * *
“IT’S A MULTIMEDIA message,” Mateo said. “A video file.”
“When was it sent?” Byrne asked.
Mateo checked the readout, then his watch. “A little over four hours ago.”
“And it just came in now?”
“Sometimes that happens with really big files.”
“Any way to tell where it was sent from?”
Mateo shook his head. “Not from the phone.”
“If we play the video, it’s not going to delete itself or anything, will it?” Jessica asked.
“Hang on,” Mateo said.
He went into a drawer, retrieved a thin cable. He tried to plug it into the bottom of the phone. No fit. He tried another cable, failed again. The third one slipped into a small port. He plugged the other into a port on the front of a laptop. In a few moments, a program started on the laptop. Mateo tapped a few keys, and a progress bar appeared, apparently transferring the file from the phone to the computer. Byrne and Jessica looked at each other, once again in awe of Mateo Fuentes’s capabilities.
A minute later, he put a fresh CD-ROM in the drive, dragged and dropped an icon.
“Done,” he said. “We’ve got the file on the phone, on the hard drive, and on disc. No matter what happens, we’re backed up.”
“Okay,” Jessica said. She was a little surprised to find that her pulse was racing. She had no idea why. Maybe the file was nothing at all. She wanted to believe that with all her heart.
“You want to watch it now?” Mateo asked.
“Yes and no,” Jessica said. It was a video file, sent to the phone of a woman who had been dead for more than a week— a phone they had recently gotten courtesy of a sadistic serial killer who had just burned himself to death.
Or maybe that was all an illusion.
“I hear you,” Mateo said. “Here we go.” He clicked the PLAY arrow on the small button bar at the bottom of his video software screen. A few seconds later, the video rolled. The first few seconds of footage were a blur, as if the person holding the camera was whipping it right to left, then down, attempting to point it at the ground. When the image stabilized, and was brought into focus, they saw the subject of the video.
It was a baby.
A baby in a small pine coffin.
“Madre de Dios,”
Mateo said. He made the sign of a cross.
As Byrne and Jessica stared in horror at the image, two things were clear. One was that the baby was very much alive. Two, that the video had a time code in the lower right-hand corner.
“This tape wasn’t made with a camera phone, was it?” Byrne asked.
“No,” Mateo said. “It looks like it was made with a basic camcorder. Probably an eight-millimeter tape camcorder, not a digital video model.”
“How can you tell?” Byrne asked.
“Quality of image, for one thing.”
On screen, a hand entered the frame, placing a lid on the wood coffin.
“Jesus Christ, no,” Byrne said.
And that was when the first shovel full of dirt landed on the box. Within seconds the box was completely covered.
“Oh my God.” Jessica felt nauseous. She turned away at the moment the screen went black.
“That’s the whole file,” Mateo said.
Byrne remained silent. He walked out of the room, immediately back in. “Run it again,” he said.
Mateo clicked PLAY again. The image went from a blurry moving image to clarity as it came to focus on the baby. Jessica forced herself to watch. She noticed that the time code on the tape was from ten o’clock that morning. It was already past eight o’clock. She took out her cell phone. Within in a few seconds she had Dr. Tom Weyrich on the phone. She explained her reason for calling. She didn’t know if her question fell within the area of expertise of a medical examiner, but she didn’t know who else to call.
“How big is the box?” Weyrich asked.
Jessica looked at the screen. The video was running for a third time. “Not sure,” she said. “Maybe twenty-four by thirty inches.”
“How deep?”
“I don’t know. It looks to be about sixteen inches or so.”
“Are there any holes in the top or sides?”
“Not in the top. Can’t see the sides.”
“How old is the baby?”
This part was easy. The baby looked to be about six months old. “Six months.”
