The Stolen Ones Page 7

  ‘Of course,’ Jessica said. ‘And the second reason?’

  Karen Jacobs shrugged. ‘Detective Garcia never asked.’

  They stood in the parking lot of the industrial park. The rain had let up for the moment, but the occasional drop signaled a return. The white, legal-document-size cardboard box was on the hood of the car.

  ‘Makes you wonder what else John didn’t ask,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  Jessica opened the box, looked inside. The woman was right. There wasn’t much in there – a stapler, a tape dispenser, a pair of local Philadelphia yellow page directories, along with a white pages directory. There was also a flip-over desk calendar. Jessica took the calendar out of the box and put it on the hood of the car. She began to page through the days.

  ‘Are there any entries around February twentieth?’ Byrne asked.

  Jessica checked. The page for 20 February, the day Robert Freitag was murdered, was gone. As were the pages for the previous six days. The nearest calendar page was for 13 February. Jessica took out her Maglite, angled the beam on that page. There were indentations on the page, as if something had been written on the page above it.

  ‘Can you read what’s there?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Hard to tell.’

  ‘Wish we had a pencil.’

  ‘I think we do,’ Jessica said. She rummaged in the white box, soon produced an unsharpened pencil, as well as a desktop pencil sharpener. The manual kind, not the electric kind.

  ‘Thank God our friend Robert was old-school,’ Byrne said.

  While Byrne held the sharpener, Jessica put a tip on the pencil, blew on it. She then gently rubbed the graphite over the serrations on the calendar page. Just like in the old movies, an image began to appear. When she was done she aimed her Maglite on the page.

  ‘Looks like JCD 10K 8P.’ Jessica handed the calendar to Byrne. ‘What do you think?’

  Byrne scanned the entry. ‘Well, Robert didn’t really look like a runner to me, so I’m thinking this 10K doesn’t refer to a race.’

  ‘Not too many races start at eight p.m., either.’

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘JCD,’ Jessica said. ‘Any bells?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Byrne said. ‘Check the list of CycleLife employees. See if any of the initials sync.’

  Jessica took out the list, scanned it. ‘Nothing. There’s a Judith, but her last name is Blaylock.’ She looked back at the calendar page.

  ‘Let’s assume, for the moment, he wrote this on February fourteenth,’ Byrne said.

  ‘Six days before his murder,’ Jessica said.

  ‘So, Freitag goes to meet with this JCD, gets the money, words are exchanged, confidences are betrayed, and six days later he’s killed.’

  ‘Okay, but why wasn’t his place tossed?’ Jessica asked.

  Byrne thought for a few moments. ‘Spitballing here. Let’s assume further, for the moment, that the killer wanted to make a point.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jessica said. ‘But to whom?’

  Byrne raised an eyebrow. ‘To whom? You sound like a lawyer.’

  ‘Get used to it.’

  ‘Of course, this would mean Freitag was connected to some criminal enterprise, or at least some very dangerous skullduggery.’

  ‘He doesn’t strike me as a guy who was mobbed up.’

  Byrne picked up the pencil, rubbed a little more graphite on the page, gently blew it off. They saw nothing they hadn’t seen the first time.

  ‘How come this always works perfectly in the movies?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘Everything works perfectly in the movies. If it doesn’t, they just reshoot it.’

  ‘Cary Grant had no problems doing this in North by Northwest.’

  ‘I guess I’m no Cary Grant.’

  ‘Sure you are.’ Jessica took the pad from Byrne. Even with her Maglite, it was impossible to tell whether it was 10K or 10E. Now she was starting to doubt the JCD initials. She put the calendar back in the box. ‘I’m sure Hell will have an idea or two about this.’

  Byrne glanced at his watch. ‘He’s gone for the day.’

  Jessica knew what Byrne meant. Seeing as how this was a cold case, there could only be so many demands made on forensic personnel, especially as it related to overtime.

  Jessica tapped the printout they’d gotten from Karen Jacobs. ‘Let’s run these names.’

  11

  Detective Joshua Bontrager was a veteran of nearly seven years in the PPD Homicide Unit. Before that, he had worked in the Traffic Unit. He had been called up to Homicide to work on a case that took investigators into his home county of Berks, a case that called upon Josh’s unique qualifications, credentials no other homicide detective in Philadelphia – or for that matter most of the world – could provide. Josh Bontrager had grown up in an Amish family.

  And while he had left the church before entering the academy, in the time Jessica had known him he had transformed from a country boy into a street-wise detective, capable of holding his own with the hard realities of investigating homicides in a city like Philadelphia.

  There was, however, one vestige of his former life that was hard for anyone in the squad to believe. In his entire time in the homicide unit, no one had ever heard Josh Bontrager swear. Not once. He’d come close a few times, switching over to darn or heck or shoot at the last second.

  And if there was a record made to be broken, this was the one. A universal trait for law enforcement worldwide was the ability to curse creatively and at prodigious length. There had been a pool ongoing for years about when Josh Bontrager would utter his first fuck.

  If you heard Josh Bontrager come close to swearing, but not pull the trigger, you had to add a dollar to the pot. The pool was over six hundred dollars, with no limit in sight. If you were in the room, and closest to the pot when it happened, you got the money, which would certainly be donated to your favorite charity, which, by default, was the Police Athletic League.

  As Jessica and Byrne walked into the duty room they saw Josh Bontrager poring over a binder, lost in thought.

  ‘Joshua Bontrager!’ Jessica said.

  Bontrager jumped a foot. ‘What?’

  ‘Are you growing a beard?’

  Josh Bontrager was very fair, and his beard was sandy, almost blond. He turned a scarlet red. ‘It’s not a beard, it’s, you know, a goatee.’

  ‘Same thing, isn’t it?’

  Bontrager reflexively stroked his chin. ‘Well, not really. Amish men grow beards.’

  ‘I thought you were Amish.’

  ‘Not technically. Not any more.’

  Jessica gave him a few angles. ‘It looks really good. Really sexy.’

  Another blush. With Josh Bontrager it was like flipping a light switch. On. Off. There was no setting for medium. ‘Thanks.’

  Jessica let him off the hook. She pointed to the binder on the desk.

  ‘What do you have?’ she asked.

  ‘Got a victim down on North Marston, first floor of an abandoned building,’ Bontrager said. He pulled a few crime scene photographs out of the envelope. ‘The victim was stabbed in the eyes.’

  ‘The ME said that’s the cause of death?’

  Bontrager nodded. ‘He believes it was some kind of very long knife that was pushed into the guys eyes so deeply it went right into the victim’s brain.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Jessica said.

  ‘He’s thinking an eight-inch blade, but thin.’

  Jessica looked at the photographs. They were horrifying. The victim was a white or Hispanic male, perhaps in his late teens. He was slumped against a graffiti-covered wall, near the door. There were thick washes of blood down his face onto what had been, at one time, a light-colored shirt.

  What had once been his eyes were now purplish-black holes.

  ‘Any ID on the victim?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Not yet. There are a lot of cars parked on the street. We’re running them now.’

  ‘Are you thinking he was a gang
banger?’

  Bontrager shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look like it. No gang tats.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’ Byrne asked.

  Bontrager slipped the crime scene photos back into the binder. ‘Mass amnesia. Like always.’

  ‘Did you canvass already?’

  ‘Yeah. Neighborhood interviews are done. The first round, anyway.’

  ‘If you need any warm bodies,’ Byrne added.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Conducting neighborhood interviews were always, at the very least, a two-stage process. In a city like Philadelphia, or any large city populated by people working all three shifts, it was in a detective’s best interest to revisit the scene, staggering the time window by four, eight and twelve hours. At least half the doors you knocked on at any given time went unanswered, but might be answered later in the day. More than one case had broken wide open with a re-canvass.

  ‘Flying solo on this?’ Byrne asked.

  Bontrager shook his head. ‘Working with Maria.’

  Maria Caruso was a very attractive younger detective. Everyone knew that Josh had a crush on her – more accurately, he was boots over buckles in love – but no one knew if the two were seeing each other. While it wasn’t prohibited by the brass, it was better to keep such things a secret. You never knew what might compromise a trial if and when it came to that.

  Bontrager glanced at his watch. ‘Gotta hit the street,’ he said. ‘We need to get this guy identified before the whole darn case starts getting cold.’

  Jessica glanced at Byrne. Darn. When Josh left the duty room they each took out a dollar, opened the file cabinet drawer, and put them in the kitty.

  The fact that Josh Bontrager had picked up a fresh homicide meant that Byrne was next up on the wheel, the ever-turning mandala that brought detectives back up to the top of the order, regardless of whether or not they had closed their other cases. As a veteran, Byrne did not have to physically man the desk in the duty room, but he would be on call until the next case came in. And the next case always came in. History proved that forty-eight hours without a suspicious death in Philadelphia County had not passed in more than three decades.

  At seven o’clock Jessica ran the names of the employees of CycleLife. Of the six employees who worked at the company during Robert Freitag’s tenure as logistics manager – whatever that was, Jessica made a mental note to look it up – not one of them had a record on NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, or the Philadelphia equivalent, PCIC. One man, Alonzo Mayweather, the man who found Freitag’s birthday card shredded in the recycling bin, seemed to have a problem keeping his car under fifty-five. He’d gotten eleven moving violations in the past six years, and had his license suspended for six months, since reinstated.

  That was it. No killers, no boogeymen. At least none in the employ of CycleLife LLC. Or, if there was a killer in their midst, they’d managed to never commit even a misdemeanor offense. Considering the vitriol with which Robert Freitag met his demise, that was unlikely.

  Jessica then did a search, looking for different uses for railroad spikes. She learned that some people used spikes to literally and figuratively ‘tie down’ their property – guarding against foreclosure, eviction or even harassment – by pounding a spike in all four corners of their property. She also discovered that there was some ancestral significance to the use of iron, traced to a Congolese religion in which the spirit of a violent warrior was embodied in iron.

  Jessica wrote: iron + ritual? in her notes.

  The other search she did was for the flower that was found in Robert Freitag’s hands. Because they did not have the flower itself to work with, finding a match from a database of flowers indigenous to this part of the world proved to be more than daunting. Jessica made a note to take the printout of the freeze-frame to local florists. If that didn’t pan out, she would search for someone at one of Philadelphia’s myriad colleges and universities.

  She was just about to run Google searches on the employees of CycleLife, hoping to pick up something not contained in their less than larcenous non-criminal histories, when she saw Byrne crossing the duty room, documents in hand.

  She gave him a brief rundown on what she had found in her NCIC search, as well as the data on the railroad spike.

  ‘Do you think this might be a ritual killing?’

  Jessica shrugged. ‘Right now it’s as good a theory as any.’ She pointed to the documents. ‘What do you have?’

  ‘Talked to a guy at Amtrak,’ he said. ‘He says a lot of the time, although it’s not company policy, the people who work on the tracks just toss the old spikes on the side of the track when they replace them with new ones.’

  ‘They don’t bring them in for scrap?’

  ‘They’ve started doing that in the last few years, but he said a spike as old and rusty as our murder weapon could have come from anywhere. No identifying characteristics.’

  ‘Shit,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Plus one. What about the flower?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’ She held up the color printout of the flower, a four-X enlargement of the image taken from the videotape. ‘Recognize it?’

  Byrne scanned the photo. ‘Not a clue,’ he said. ‘Did you run it by Dana?’

  Dana Westbrook was the in-house expert on things horticultural. Her office was a virtual conservatory of healthy plants. ‘Yeah,’ Jessica said. ‘She said it didn’t look familiar. She’s bringing in a half-dozen books tomorrow.’

  ‘By the way, I ran into Tommy D on the way up,’ Byrne said. ‘I’ve got good news and weird news.’

  ‘Can you tell me them both at once?’

  ‘What’s the fun in that?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jessica said. ‘You pick.’

  ‘Okay.’ Byrne held up a sheet. ‘We’ve got hits on the fingerprints that were on those photographs.’

  ‘But we’re not happy.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Byrne said. ‘There were four good matches. All six-pointers. All four hits were men with criminal records.’

  ‘By criminal I take it you don’t mean serial jaywalking.’

  Byrne glanced at the sheet. ‘No. We’ve got two ag assaults, one attempt to lure, two armed robberies, assorted and sundry burglaries.’

  Now her partner had her undivided attention. ‘So, we’re talking jailhouse porn, right?’

  ‘Probably.’

  They had a number of photographs bearing fingerprints of men with criminal records. There was a good chance that the pictures were passed around a county jail or state prison.

  ‘So, why were they in Robert Freitag’s attic?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘You mean our Robert Freitag, a man who did not even have a speeding ticket in his life, as far as we know. Robert Freitag who never spent so much as a single night in a drunk tank?’

  ‘Himself.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Byrne said. ‘Yet.’

  Jessica tried to make the connection. Nothing jumped. She looked back at her partner. ‘There’s more, isn’t there?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘All right,’ Jessica said. ‘I’m sitting.’

  ‘These men? The ones who handled the photographs?’

  ‘What about them?’

  Byrne put the files on the desk, one by one, and said: ‘They’re all dead.’

  12

  Sixteen years earlier

  How many nights had the man come to visit? It was all a blur. Tuff could not remember. He was younger than she’d originally thought. Maybe just an older teenager. At first she’d thought him to be as old as their father – their late father he was called, although neither Bean nor Tuff knew what that meant, he wasn’t late, he was gone – who had died at the age of thirty-four.

  But Tuff recalled with clarity the first night the man had visited. On that first night, after she opened the closet door, she was so scared she could not move. Or speak. She wanted to run out of the room, but she knew she could not leave her sister in the bedroom with the tall man in ragge
d clothes.

  In the end, she simply backed up from the closet until she felt her bed hit the back of her legs. She didn’t need any help sitting down. Her legs felt as if they had turned to water.

  The man stepped out of the closet, and sat down in the chair that was pulled up to the small desk next to the window. At first he didn’t say anything. It was almost as if he were in some kind of trance.

  There was something about him, the way he looked at Tuff and Bean, that made them feel safe. For some reason, they weren’t afraid. At least, Bean wasn’t. And that was pretty amazing. Bean was usually very frightened of strangers.

  When this man finally talked, he knew things about them. He knew that Bean had gotten her nickname because she liked string beans. No little kids liked string beans. And she was only called Bean around the house. Not at her pre-school, or anywhere else. Just by Mom and Dad and Tuff.

  How could he know these things unless he was a friend?

  After that night, Tuff forgot how many times he came to visit. She was sure there were nights when she didn’t even wake up. She seemed to remember Bean talking to the man, but later wasn’t sure if she had dreamed this.

  Just as she recalled the first time the man came to visit, she remembered with clarity the last time. On the last night Tuff fell asleep to the sound of his voice, the taste of apple juice and something bitter on her tongue.

  That was the first night she had the dreams, dreams of walking through dark caves, hearing the sounds of cars and people as a soft, distant echo. In the dream the man in the ragged clothes took her and Bean to meet another man, a man in a white jacket.

  A man who stood in shadows.

  Tuff knew that she’d had dreams before, but not like this. This was so real; it was as if she wasn’t dreaming at all, as if it was actually happening. She felt the dampness on her skin, felt the chill in the air, saw crooked shadows on glistening stone.

  It wasn’t until many years later, when the dreams returned, that Tuff began to understand who the raggedy man was, how he had stepped into their lives from darkness, and how, if she were to ever be free, she would have to follow him back there.