Play dead jbakb-4 Read online

  Play dead

  ( Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne - 4 )

  Richard Montanari

  Richard Montanari

  Play dead

  PROLOGUE

  In the darkness, in the deep violet folds of night, he hears whispers: low, plaintive sounds that dart and shudder and scratch behind the wainscoting, the cornice, the parched and wormy wood lath. At first the words seem foreign, as if uttered in another language, but as dusk inches toward dawn he comes to recognize every voice-every pitch, tone, and timbre-as a mother would her child on a crowded playground.

  Some nights he hears a solitary scream rage beneath the floorboards, stalking him from room to room, down the grand staircase, across the foyer, through the kitchen and pantry, into the consecrated silence of the cellar. There, below ground, entombed by a thousand centuries of bone and fur, he accepts the gravity of his sins. Perhaps it is the dampness itself that accuses, icy droplets on stone shimmering like tears on a brocade bodice.

  As memories flower, he recalls Elise Beausoleil, the girl from Chicago. He recalls her proud manner and capable hands, the way she bargained in those final seconds, as if she were still the prettiest girl at the prom. A Dickensian waif in her high boots and belted coat, Elise Beausoleil liked to read. Jane Austen was her favorite, she said, although she considered Charlotte Bronte a close second. He found a yellowed copy of Villette in her purse. He kept Elise in the library.

  In time he recalls Monica Renzi, her thick limbs and body hair, the frisson of exhilaration as he enthusiastically raised his hand like one of her contemptuous classmates when she asked why. The daughter ofa Scranton shopkeeper, Monica liked to dress in red; shy and wordstruck and virginal. Monica once told him that he reminded her of a young banker in one of those old movies she watched with her grandmother on Saturday nights. Monica's room was the solarium.

  He recalls the thrill of the chase, the bitter coffees consumed in rail stations and bus terminals, the heat and noise and dust of amusement parks and Home Days and county fairs, the frigid mornings in the car. He recalls the excitement of driving through the city, his quarry so delicately in hand, the puzzle enticingly engaged.

  In time, in that gauzy cleave between shade and light, in that gray confessional of dawn, he remembers it all. Each morning the house falls silent. Dust settles, shadows depart, voices still.

  On this morning he showers and dresses and breakfasts, steps through the front door onto the porch. Daffodils near the sidewalk fence greet him, brazen blonds spiriting through the cold sod. A breeze carries the first breath of spring.

  Behind him looms a sprawling Victorian house, a lady of long-faded finery. Her back gardens and side yards are overgrown, her stone paths tufted, her gutters dense with verdigris. She is the very museum of his existence, a house crafted at a time when dwellings ofsuch distinction and character were given names, names that would enter the consciousness of the landscape, the soul of the city, the lore of the region.

  In this mad place where walls move and stairways lead nowhere, where closets give onto clandestine workshops and portraits solemnly observe each other in the midday silence, he knows every corridor, every hinge, every sill, sash, and dentil.

  This place is called Faerwood. In each of its rooms there dwells a restive soul. In each soul, a secret. He stands in the center of the crowded shopping mall, taking in the aromas: the food court and its myriad riches; the department store with its lotions and powders and cloying scents; the salt of young women. He surveys the overweight couples in their twenties, urging the laden pram. He laments the invisible elderly.

  At ten minutes to nine he slips into a narrow store. It is garishly lit, stocked floor to ceiling with ceramic figurines and rayon roses. Small, shiny balloons dance in the overheated air. An entire wall is devoted to greeting cards.

  There is only one other patron in the store. He has been following her all evening, has seen the sadness in her eyes, the weight on her shoulders, the fatigue in her stride.

  She is the Drowning Girl.

  He eases next to her, selects a few cards from the glittering array, chuckles softly at each, returns them to the rack. He glances around. No one is watching.

  It is time.

  "You look a little confused," he says.

  She glances up. She is tall and thin, magnificently pale. Her ash blond hair is pinned in a messy fashion, held in place by white plastic barrettes. Her neck is carven ivory. She is wears a lilac backpack.

  She doesn't respond. He has scared her.

  Walk away.

  "There are too many choices!" she says animatedly, but not without caution. He expects this. He is, after all, an unknown piece on her game board of strangers. She giggles, chews on a fingernail. Adorable. She is about seventeen. The best age.

  "Tell me the occasion," he says. "Maybe I can help."

  A flash of distrust now-cat paws on an oven door. She peers around the room, at the publicness of it all. "Well," she begins, "my boyfriend is…"

  Silence.

  He begs the conversation forward. "He's what?"

  She doesn't want to say, then she does. "Okay… he's not exactly my boyfriend, right? But he's cheating on me." She tucks a filament of hair behind an ear. "Well, not exactly cheating. Not yet." She turns to leave, turns back. "Okay, he asked out my best friend, Courtney. The slut." She reddens, a sheer crimson pall on her flawless skin. "I can't believe I'm telling you this."

  He is dressed casually this evening: faded jeans, black linen blazer, loafers, a little extra gel in his hair, a silver ankh around his neck, eyeglasses of a modern style. He looks young enough. Besides, he has the sort of bearing that invites faith. It always has. "The cad," he says.

  Wrong word? No. She smiles. Seventeen going on thirty.

  "More like a jerk," she says. "A total jerk." Another nervous giggle.

  He leans away from her, increasing the distance by mere inches. Important inches. She relaxes. She has decided he is no threat. Like one of her cool teachers.

  "Do you think dark humor is appropriate for the occasion?"

  She considers this. "Probably," she says. "Maybe. I don't know. I guess."

  "Does he make you laugh?"

  Boyfriends-boys who become boyfriends-usually do. Even the ones who cheat on achingly beautiful seventeen-year-old girls.

  "Yeah," she says. "He's kinda funny. Sometimes." She looks up, making deep eye contact. This moment all but splinters his heart. "But not lately."

  "I was looking at this one," he says. "I think it might be just the right sentiment." He lifts a card from the rack, considers it for a moment, hands it over. It is a bit risque. His hesitation speaks of his respect for the age difference, the fact that they've just met.

  She takes the card, opens it, reads the greeting. A moment later she laughs, covering her mouth. A tiny snort escapes. She blushes, embarrassed.

  In this instant her image blurs, as it always has, like a face obscured by rain on a shattered windshield.

  "This is, like, totally perfect," she says. "Totally. Thanks."

  He watches as she glances at the vacant cashier, then at the video camera. She turns her back to the camera, stuffs the card into her bag, looks at him, a smile on her face. If there was a purer love, he could not imagine it.

  "I need another card, too," she says. "But I'm not sure you can help me with that one."

  "You 'd be surprised what I can do."

  "It's for my parents." She cocks a hip. Another blush veils her pretty face, then quickly disappears. "It's because I've-"

  He holds up a hand, stopping her. It is better this way. "I understand."

  "You do?"

  "Yes."

  "What do you mean?"

  He smiles. "I
was once your age."

  She parts her lips to answer, but instead remains silent.

  "It all works out in the end," he adds. "You'll see. It always does."

  She looks away for a second. It is as if she has made some sort of decision in this moment, as though a great weight has been lifted from her shoulders. She glances back at him, smiles sadly, and says, "Thanks."

  Instead ofresponding, he just gazes at her with great fondness. The overhead lights cast golden highlights in her hair. In an instant, it comes to him.

  He will keep her in the pantry.

  Ten minutes later he follows her, unseen, into the parking lot, conscious of the shadow, the light, the carbon blue chiaroscuro of the evening. It has begun to rain, a light drizzle that does not threaten a downpour.

  He watches as she crosses the avenue, steps into a shelter. Soon after, she boards the bus, a shuttle to the train station.

  He slips a CD into the player. In seconds the sounds of "Vedrai, Carino" fill the car. It regales his soul-once again, exalting this moment, as only Mozart can.

  He follows the bus into the city, his heart ablaze, the hunt renewed.

  She is Emma Bovary. She is Elizabeth Bennet. She is Cassiopeia and Cosette.

  She is his.

  I

  Shadow House

  An echoing, garnish'd house — but dead, dead, dead.

  WALT WHITMAN

  ONE

  The dead girl sat inside the glass display case, a pale and delicate curio placed on a shelf by a madman. In life she had been beautiful, with fine blond hair and cobalt blue eyes. In death her eyes pleaded for benediction, for the cold symmetry of justice. The last thing they had seen was a monster.

  Her tomb was a stifling basement in an abandoned building in the Badlands, a five-square-mile area of desolate terrain and destroyed lives in North Philadelphia, running approximately from Erie Avenue south to Girard, from Broad Street east to the river.

  Her name was Caitlin Alice O'Riordan. On the day of her murder, the day her brief story came to a close, she was seventeen.

  For Detectives Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano of the Philadelphia Police Department's Homicide Unit, Caitlin's story was just beginning.

  There are three Divisions in Philly Homicide-the Line Squad, which handles new cases; the Fugitive Squad; and the Special Investigations Unit, which handles, among other things, cold cases. To the detectives of SIU, all of whom were members of the Five Squad, an elite group of investigators handpicked by the captain based on their abilities, their closure rates, and their investigative skills, a cold case investigation represented a second chance to right a wrong, an ultimatum to the killers who arrogantly walked the streets of Philadelphia, a statement that said the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the City of Brotherly Love, were not done with them.

  The Caitlin O'Riordan investigation was the first SIU case for Kevin Byrne and Jessica Balzano.

  When the detectives arrived at the Eighth Street address there was no yellow tape ringing the property, no sector cars blocking traffic, none of the blue and white Crime Scene Unit vans, no officer guarding the entrance, crime-scene log in hand. All this was long gone.

  They had read the reports, seen the autopsy protocol, viewed the photographs and video. But they had not yet followed the path of the killer.

  Both detectives believed that their investigation would truly begin the moment they stepped into the room where Caitlin O'Riordan had been found.

  The building had been sealed four months earlier at the time of the initial investigation, the doors replaced and padlocked, the plywood over the windows secured with lag bolts. Originally a single-family row house, this corner building had been bought and sold many times. Its most recent incarnation was as a small grocery, a narrow, slipshod emporium hawking baby formula, chips, diapers, canned meats, magazines, lottery dreams. Its stock-in-trade, its lifeblood, had been the Holy Trinity of crack addiction: Chore Boy scouring pads, disposable plastic lighters, and individually packaged tea roses. The roses came in long, narrow glass tubes which, within a minute or two of leaving the store, became straight shooters, a fast and easy way to fire up a rock, the ashes from which were caught by the steel wool of the scouring pad. Every convenience store in the Badlands carried tea roses, which probably made this part of North Philly the most romantic place on earth. Hundreds of times a day someone bought a flower.

  The bodega had closed more than three years earlier, and no tenant had moved in. The building's facade was still a Day-Glo green, with a strange sign painted over the front window:

  OPEN 24 HOURS. DAYS 12 TO 8 PM.

  Jessica unlocked the padlock on the corrugated metal door, rolled it up. They stepped inside and were immediately greeted with the unpleasant odor of mold and mildew, the chalky scent of damp plaster. It was late August and the temperature outside was eighty-eight degrees. Inside it had to be nearing a hundred.

  The first floor was remarkably clean and tidy, except for a thick layer of dust on everything. Most of the trash had long ago been collected as evidence and removed.

  To their left was what was once the counter; behind it, a long row of empty shelves. Above the shelves lingered a few remaining signs- KOOLS, BUDWEISER, SKOAL-along with a menu board offering a half dozen Chinese takeout items.

  The stairwell down was at the back of the building on the left. As Jessica and Kevin began to descend the steps they clicked on their Maglites. There was no electricity here, no gas or water, no utilities of any kind. Whatever thin sunlight seeped through the cracks between the sheets of plywood over the windows was instantly swallowed by the darkness.

  The room where Caitlin O'Riordan was found was at the basement's far end. Years ago, the small windows at street level had been bricked in. The gloom was absolute.

  In the corner of the room was a glass display case, a commercial beverage cooler used at one time for beer and soda and milk. It had stainless steel sides, and stood more than six feet tall. It was in this glass coffin that Caitlin's body had been discovered-sitting on a wooden chair, staring out at the room, eyes wide open. She'd been found by a pair of teenage boys scrapping for copper.

  Byrne took out a yellow legal pad and a fine point marker. Holding his flashlight under his arm, he made a detailed sketch of the subterranean room. In homicide work, the investigating detectives were required to make a diagram of every crime scene. Even though photographs and videotape records of the scene were made, it was the investigator's sketch that was most often referred to, even in the trial stage. Byrne usually made the diagram. By her own admission, Jessica couldn't draw a circle with a compass.

  "I'll be upstairs if you need me," Jessica said.

  Byrne glanced up, the darkness of the room a black shroud around his broad shoulders. "Gee thanks, partner."

  Jessica spread out the files on the front counter, grateful for the bright sunlight streaming through the open door, grateful for the slight breeze.

  The first page of the binder was a large photograph of Caitlin, a color eight-by-ten. Every time Jessica looked at the photograph she was reminded of the Gene Hackman movie Hoosiers, although she would be hard-pressed to explain why. Perhaps it was because the girl in the picture was from rural Pennsylvania. Perhaps it was because there was an openness to the girl's face, a trusting countenance that seemed locked into the world of 1950s America-long before Caitlin's birth, life, and death-a time when girls wore saddle shoes and kneesocks and vest sweaters and shirts with Peter Pan collars.

  Girls didn't look like this anymore, Jessica thought. Did they?

  Not in this time of MySpace and Abercrombie amp; Fitch catalogs and rainbow parties. Not in this day and age when a girl could buy a bag of Doritos and a Coke, board a bus in Lancaster County, and ninety minutes later emerge in a city that would swallow her whole; a trusting soul who never had a chance.

  The estimated time of Caitlin's death was between midnight and 7 AM on May 2, although the medical examiner could not be more precise, gi
ven that by the time Caitlin O'Riordan's body had been discovered she had been dead at least forty-eight hours. There were no external wounds on the victim, no lacerations or abrasions, no ligature marks to indicate she may have been restrained, no defensive wounds that would suggest she struggled with an assailant. There had been no skin or any other kind of organic matter beneath her fingernails.

  At the time she was discovered, Caitlin had been fully clothed, dressed in frayed blue jeans, Reeboks, black denim jacket, and a white T-shirt. She also wore a lilac nylon backpack. Around her neck had been a sterling silver Claddagh, and although it was not particularly valuable, the fact that she wore it in death did not support any theory that she had been the victim of a robbery gone bad. Nor did the cause of the death.

  Caitlin O'Riordan had drowned.

  Homicide victims in North Philadelphia were generally not drowned. Shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, sliced and diced with a machete, pummeled with an ax handle, yes. Popped by a rebar, run over with a Hummer, stuck with an ice pick, doused with gasoline and lit ablaze- yeah, all the time. Jessica had once investigated a North Philly homicide committed with a lawn edger. A rusty lawn edger.

  But drowned? Even if the vic was found floating in the Delaware River, the cause of death was usually one of the above.

  Jessica looked at the lab report. The water in Caitlin's lungs had been carefully analyzed. It contained fluoride, chlorine, zinc orthophos- phate, ammonia. It also contained trace levels of haloacetic acid. The report contained two pages of graphs and charts. It all went way over Jessica's head, but she had no problem at all understanding the report's conclusion. According to the forensics lab and the medical examiner's office, Caitlin O'Riordan did not drown in the Delaware or Schuylkill River. She did not drown in Wissahickon Creek, nor in any of the fountains for which the City of Brotherly Love was rightly known. She did not drown in a swimming pool, public or private.