The skin Gods jbakb-2

by Richard Montanari

  But life, and death, went on.

  Since the discovery of the car, there had been two new, unrelated homicides. At six ociock 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 oclock, 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 ag°.;;

  "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."

  Weyrich was silent for a few moments. "Well, I'm no expert at this. I'll track someone down who is, though."

  "How much air does he have, Tom?"

  "Hard to say," Weyrich replied. "It's just over five cubic feet inside the box. Even with that small of a lung capacity, I'd say no more than ten to twelve hours."

  Jessica looked at her watch again, even though she knew exactly what time it was. "Thanks, Tom. Call me if you talk to someone who can
give this kid more time."

  Tom Weyrich knew what she meant. "I'm on it."

  Jessica hung up. She looked back at the screen. The video was at the beginning again. The baby smiled and moved his arms. At the outside, they had less than two hours to save his life. And he could be anywhere in the city. Mateo made a second digital copy of the tape. The tape ran for a total of twenty-five seconds. When it was over, it cut to black. They watched it again and again, looking for something, anything, to give them a clue to where the baby might be. There were no other images on the recording. Mateo started it up again. The camera whipped downward. Mateo stopped it.

  "The camera is on a tripod, and a fairly good one at that. At least for the home enthusiast. It's a smooth tilt, which tells me that the neck on the tripod is a ball head.

  "But look here," Mateo continued. He started the recording again. As soon as he hit PLAY, he stopped it. On screen was an unrecognizable image. A thick vertical smudge of white against a reddish brown background.

  "What is that?" Byrne asked.

  "Not sure yet," Mateo said. "Let me run it through the dTective unit. I'll get a much clearer image. It will take a little time, though."

  "How long?

  "Give me ten minutes."

  In an ordinary investigation, ten minutes would pass in a snap. To the baby in the coffin, it might be a lifetime.

  Byrne and Jessica stood outside the AV Unit. Ike Buchanan walked into the room. "What's up, Sarge?" Byrne asked.

  "Ian Whitestone is here."

  Finally, Jessica thought. "Is he here to make a formal statement?"

  "No," Buchanan said. "Someone kidnapped his son this morning."

  Whitestone looked at the movie of the baby. They had transferred the clip to a VHS cassette. They watched it in the small snack room in the unit.

  Whitestone was smaller than Jessica had expected. He had delicate hands. He wore two watches. He had come with a personal physician and someone who was probably a bodyguard. Whitestone identified the baby in the video as his son, Declan. He looked gut-shot.

  "Why… why would someone do such a thing?" Whitestone asked.

  "We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on that," Byrne said.

  According to Whitestone's nanny, Aileen Scott, she had been taking Declan for a walk in his stroller at about nine thirty that morning. She had been struck from behind. When she awoke, hours later, she was in the back of an EMS rescue, on her way to Jefferson Hospital, and the baby was gone. The time frame told the detectives that, if the time code on the tape had not been manipulated, Declan Whitestone was buried within a thirty-minute drive of Center City. Probably closer.

  "The FBI has been contacted," Jessica said. A patched and back-on- the-job Terry Cahill was at that moment assembling a team. "We're doing everything possible to find your son."

  They walked back into the common room, over to a desk. They put the crime scene photographs of Erin Halliwell, Seth Goldman, and Stephanie Chandler on the table. When Whitestone looked down, his knees buckled. He held on to the edge of the desk.

  "What… what is this?" he asked.

  "Both of these women were murdered. As was Mr. Goldman. We believe the man who kidnapped your son is responsible." There was no need to tell Whitestone about Nigel Butler's apparent suicide at this time.

  "What are you saying? Are you saying that all of them are dead?"

  "I'm afraid so, sir. Yes."

  Whitestone weaved. His face turned the color of dried bones. Jessica had seen it many times. He sat down hard.

  "What was your relationship to Stephanie Chandler?" Byrne asked.

  Whitestone hesitated. His hands were shaking. He opened his mouth, but no sound emerged, just a parched, clicking noise. He looked like a man at risk of a coronary.

  "Mr. Whitestone?" Byrne asked.

  Ian Whitestone took a deep breath. Through trembling lips he said, "I think I should talk to my lawyer."

  76

  They had gotten the whole story from Ian Whitestone. Or at least the part his attorney would allow him to tell. Suddenly the past ten days or so made sense.

  Three years earlier-before all his meteoric success-Ian Whitestone made a film called Philadelphia Skin, directing under the name Ed- mundo Nobile, a character in one of Spanish director Luis Bunuel's films. Whitestone had used two young women from Temple University for the pornographic film, paying them each five thousand dollars for two nights' work. The two young women were Stephanie Chandler and Angelika Butler. The two men were Darryl Porter and Julian Matisse.

  On the second night of filming, what happened to Stephanie Chandler was more than a little fuzzy, according to Whitestone's convenient memory. Whitestone said that Stephanie was shooting drugs. He said he didn't allow it on the set. He said that Stephanie left in the middle of the shoot and never returned.

  Nobody in the room believed a word of it. But what was crystal clear was that everybody involved in the making of the film had paid dearly for it. Whether Ian Whitestone's son would pay for the crimes of his father was yet to be seen. Mateo caLLed tHem down to the AV Unit. He had digitized the first ten seconds of the video field by field. He had also separated the audio track and cleaned it up. He played the audio first. There was only five seconds of sound.

  First there was a loud hiss, then a rapid decrease in intensity, followed by silence. It was clear that whoever was operating the camera had turned down the microphone as he began to roll the tape.

  "Run that back," Byrne said.

  Mateo did. The sound was one of a quick burst of air, which began to fade immediately. Then the white noise of electronic silence.

  "One more time."

  Byrne seemed transfixed by the sound. Mateo looked to him before continuing with the video portion. "Okay," Byrne finally said.

  "I think we have something here," Mateo said. He clicked through a number of still images. He stopped on one, enlarged it. "This is just over two seconds in. It's an image right before the camera tilts downward." Mateo tightened the focus slightly. The image was all but indecipherable. A splash of white against a reddish brown background. Rounded geometric shapes. Low contrast.

  "I don't see anything," Jessica said.

  "Hang on." Mateo ran the image through the digital enhancer. On screen, the image moved closer. After a few seconds, it became slightly clearer, but not clear enough to read. He zoomed and clarified one more time. Now the image was unmistakable.

  Six block letters. All white. Three on top, three on the bottom. The image appeared to be:

  ADI ION

  "What does it mean?" Jessica asked.

  "I don't know," Mateo replied.

  "Kevin?"

  Byrne shook his head, stared at the screen.

  "Guys?" Jessica asked the other detectives in the room. Shrugs all around.

  Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez each got on a terminal and began to search for possibilities. Soon they both had hits. They found something called the ADI 2018 Process Ion Analyzer. It rang no bells. "Keep looking," Jessica said. BYRNE STARED AT the letters. They meant something to him, but he had no idea what. Not yet. Then, suddenly, the images touched the edge of his memory. ADI. ION. The vision came back on a long ribbon of remembrance, a vague recollection of his youth. He closed his eyes and-heard the sound of steel on steel… eight years old now… running with Joey Principe from Reed Street… Joey was fast… hard to keep up…felt the rush of wind, spiked with diesel fumes… ADI… breathed the dust of a July afternoon… ION… heard the compressors fill the main reservoirs with high-pressure airHe opened his eyes.

  "Play the audio again," Byrne said.

  Mateo brought the file up, clicked PLAY. The sound of the hissing air filled the small room. All eyes turned to Kevin Byrne. "I know where he is," Byrne said.

  The South Philadelphia train yards were a huge, foreboding parcel of land at the southeastern end of the city, bounded by the Delaware River and I-95, along with the navy shipyards to the west and League Island to
the south. The yards handled the bulk of the city's freight and cargo, while Amtrak and SEPTA handled the commuter lines out of the Thirtieth Street station across town.

  Byrne knew the South Philly yards well. When he was growing up, he and his buddies would meet at the Greenwich Playground and ride their bikes down to the yards, usually sneaking onto League Island along Kitty Hawk Avenue, then onto the yards. They'd spend the day there, watching the trains come and go, counting boxcars, throwing things into the river. In his youth, the South Philly rail yards were Kevin Byrne's Omaha Beach, his Martian landscape, his Dodge City, a place he believed to be magic, a place he believed to be inhabited by Wyatt Earp, Sergeant Rock, Tom Sawyer, Eliot Ness.

  Today he believed it to be a burial ground. THe K-9 Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department worked out of the training academy on State Road, and had more than three dozen dogs under its command. The dogs-all male, all German shepherds-were trained in three disciplines, that being the detection of cadavers, narcotics, and explosives. At one time there were well over one hundred animals in the unit, but a shifting of jurisdictions had reduced the force to a tightly knit, highly trained squad of fewer than forty men and dogs.

  Officer Bryant Paulson was a twenty-year veteran of the unit. His dog, a seven-year-old shepherd named Clarence, was trained as a cadaver dog, but also worked patrol. Cadaver dogs were attuned to any and all human smells, not just that of the deceased. Like all police dogs, Clarence was a specialist. If you put a pound of marijuana in the middle of a field, Clarence would walk right by it. If the quarry was human- dead or alive-he would work all day and all night to find it.

  At nine o'clock, a dozen detectives and more than twenty uniformed officers gathered at the western end of the rail yard, near the corner of Broad Street and League Island Boulevard.

  Jessica gave Officer Paulson the nod. Clarence began to work the area. Paulson kept him on a fifteen-foot lead. The detectives hung back, in order to not disturb the animal. Air scenting is different from tracking, a method by which a dog follows a trail, head close to the ground, searching for human smells. It was also more difficult. Any shift in the wind could redirect a dog's effort, and any ground covered might have to be re-covered. The K-9 Unit of the PPD trained its dogs in what was called the "disturbed earth theory." In addition to any human smells, the dogs were trained to respond to any recently turned soil.