Richard Montanari

by The Echo Man

  'All right,' she said. 'Let me a grab a shower. I'll be out in ten minutes.'

  Two things immediately registered on Stansfield's face. One, the idea of her taking a shower. Two, the fact that he hadn't been invited in.

  The crime scene was at the northern end of the Pennsport section of South Philadelphia. Pennsport was a working-class neighborhood, bounded by Passyunk Square to the west, the Delaware River to the east, Queen Village to the north, Whitman to the south.

  One of the oldest sections of the city, Pennsport had been slow in the development of new projects, with some of the homes dating back to 1815. It was quite possible to have a new block of row houses bookended by structures that had been built when James Madison was president of the United States.

  When Jessica and Stansfield pulled up to the crime scene - a boarded-up storefront near the corner of Fifth and Federal Streets - a sector car was parked diagonally across the street. Both Federal and Fifth were one-way streets and at either end of the block stood a pair of uniformed officers, diverting traffic. The Crime Scene Unit had not yet arrived, so there was no tape ringing the perimeter yet. Budget cuts had forced the city to curtail new hires, to postpone updating equipment, and these days there could be a two-hour or longer lag in the arrival of key crime scene personnel.

  But while CSU was not yet there, David Albrecht was, camera in hand.

  'Morning!' he shouted from across the street.

  Great, Jessica thought. Another morning person. Her husband and Sophie were morning people. Everyone around her was a morning person. Except Byrne. It was one of the reasons they worked so well together. On most days they grunted at each other until noon.

  Jessica waved at David Albrecht, who promptly put up his camera and filmed the gesture. Then Jessica glanced at Dennis Stansfield. Stansfield, seeing he was on camera, buttoned his coat, sucked in his gut, and tried to look official.

  They signed onto the log. The uniformed officer pointed down the alley.

  'Inside or outside?' Jessica asked.

  'Inside,' he said. 'But just.'

  The scene was the rear entrance to a closed-up independent shoe store called All Soles. In the back were steps leading down to the basement, a door through which the various retail establishments that had been located there over the years received their shipments. The small area behind the store was littered with fast-food trash, discarded tires, the sort of urban detritus that people found too time-consuming to put in the Dumpster that was located just a few feet away.

  Jessica and Stansfield stopped at the top of the steps. There was an iron handrail leading down. Just as Jessica made a mental note to ask CSU to dust the railing, Stansfield put his hand on it, striking a macho pose, lording his gold badge over the gathering personnel.

  'Um, detective?' Jessica said.

  Stansfield looked over. Jessica pointed at his hand. Stansfield realized that he was possibly contaminating the site, and withdrew his hand as if he were grabbing a red-hot poker.

  Jessica turned her attention to the entrance to the crime scene.

  There were four steps. She scanned the immediate area, saw no blood trail. The door was open just a few inches. She walked down the stairs, edged open the door, Stansfield a little too close behind her. His cologne was nauseating. It would soon become welcome.

  'Holy shit,' said Stansfield.

  The victim was a white male of undeterminable age - undeterminable partly because they could not see all of his face. He was lying in the middle of the small dusty storage room, amid cardboard boxes, plastic buckets, wooden forklift pallets. Jessica immediately saw the deep purple bruises on his wrists and ankles. The victim, it appeared, had been shackled. There was no blood, no sign of struggle in this room.

  But two things gave her pause. First, the victim's forehead and eyes were wrapped in a band of white paper. The paper was about five inches wide and completely encircled the man's head. Across the top of the band was a streak of brown, a straight line drawn in what could have been dried blood. Beneath it was another spot, this one a nearly perfect oval about an inch wide. The paper overlapped at the left side of the man's head. It appeared to be sealed with red sealing wax. The right side had another smear of blood, which looked to be in the shape of a figure eight.

  But that wasn't the worst of it.

  The victim's body was completely nude. It appeared to have been shaved clean, head to toe. Pubic hair, chest hair, arm hair, leg hair - gone. The body's scraped and abraded skin indicated that it had been shaved roughly, violently, perhaps in the past day or so. There appeared to be no new growth.

  The sight was so grotesque that it took Jessica a moment to take it all in. She had seen quite a bit. Never anything like this. The indignities of homicide were legion, but there was something about the final degradation of being left naked that made it all worse, a communique from the killer to the rest of the world that the humiliation of violent death was not the last word. For the most part, you didn't just die in this life. You were found dead.

  Jessica took the lead, more out of instinct than from any sense of duty. Hers was a boys' world and the sooner you peed in the corners, the better. She had long since turned the word bitch from an epithet to a badge, an emblem as golden as her shield.

  Stansfield cleared his throat. 'I'll, uh, get started on a canvass,' he said, and quickly took his leave.

  There were some homicide detectives who liked the idea of being a homicide detective - the prestige, the pay, the cachet of being one of the chosen - but couldn't stand being at a crime scene. Apparently, Stansfield was just such a detective. Just as well, Jessica thought.

  She crouched next to the victim, placed two fingers on his neck, checking for a pulse. She found none. She examined the front of the body, looking for some sort of entrance or exit wound. No holes, no blood.

  She heard voices outside. She looked up to see Tom Weyrich coming down the steps, his gear in his hand, his photographer in tow. Weyrich was an investigator for the medical examiner's office with almost twenty years on the job.

  'Top of the morning, Tom.'

  Weyrich was in his early fifties, with a dry wit and a reputation as a thorough and exacting investigator. When Jessica had met him five years earlier he had been a meticulous and classically attired man. Now his mustache was irregularly trimmed, his eyes red and tired. Jessica knew that Weyrich's wife had recently died after a long fight with cancer. Tom Weyrich had taken it hard. Today he appeared to be running on fumes. His slacks were pressed, but Jessica noted that his shirt had probably been slept in.

  'Had that double up in Torresdale,' Weyrich said, running his hands over his face, trying to wring out the exhaustion. 'Got out of there about two hours ago.'

  'No rest for the righteous.'

  'I wouldn't know.'

  Weyrich stepped fully inside, saw the body. 'Good God.' Somewhere beneath the trash and shredded cardboard an animal scurried. 'Give me a good old execution-style two taps to the back of the head any day,' he added. 'I never thought I'd miss the crack wars.'

  'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'Good times.'

  Weyrich tucked his tie into his shirt, buttoned his suit coat, snapped on a pair of gloves. He went about his business. Jessica watched him, wondering how many times he had done this, how many times he had placed his hands on the cold flesh of the dead. She wondered what it was like for him, sleeping alone these days, and how he, more than anyone, needed to sense the warm flesh of the living. When Jessica and Vincent had been temporarily separated a few years earlier, it had been the thing she'd missed the most, the daily intimate contact with the warmth of another human being.

  Jessica stepped outside, waited. She saw David Albrecht across the street, getting exterior shots of the building. Behind him, Jessica saw his sparkling new van, which had his website address painted on the side. It also had what Jessica figured was the title of his movie.

  Coming soon: AREA 5292

  Clever, Jessica thought. It was obviously a play on Area
51, the area in southern Nevada central to UFO conspiracy theories. The number 5292 was PPD parlance for a dead body.

  Fifteen minutes later Tom Weyrich emerged.

  'Bringing all my training to bear,' he began, 'I would conclude that this is a deceased person.'

  'I knew I should have gone to a better school,' Jessica said. 'COD?'

  'Can't even give you a presumptive cause of death until we unwrap his head.'

  'Ready?' Jessica asked.

  'As ever.'

  They stepped back inside the storage room. Jessica snapped on latex gloves. Of late they were bright purple. They knelt down on either side of the body.

  The band of paper was fastened with a small wad of sealing wax. The wax was a glossy crimson. Jessica knew this would be a delicate operation, if she wanted to preserve the sample.

  She took out her knife - a four-inch serrated Gerber that she always carried in a sheath around her ankle, at least when she was wearing jeans - and slipped it under the circle of hard wax. She pried it gently. At first it looked as if it might split in two, but then she got lucky. The specimen fell off in one piece. She placed it into an evidence bag. With Weyrich holding the opposite side of the paper band, they unveiled the victim's face.

  It was a horror mask.

  Jessica estimated the victim to be about thirty-five to forty, although most of the lividity was gone and the skin had begun to sag.

  Across the upper portion of the victim's forehead was a single laceration, running laterally, perhaps four or five inches in length. The cut did not appear to be very deep, splitting just the skin in a deep violet streak, not deep enough to reach bone. It appeared to have been made with either a razor blade or a very sharp knife.

  Just above the right eye was a small puncture wound, the diameter of an ice pick or a knitting needle. This too seemed shallow. Neither wound appeared to be fatal. The victim's right ear looked to be mutilated, with cuts along the top and side, all the way down to the lobe, which was missing.

  Around the neck was a deep welt. Death appeared to be a result of strangulation.

  'You think that's the COD?' Jessica asked, even though she knew that the cause of death could not be conclusively determined until an autopsy had been performed.

  'Hard to tell,' Weyrich said. 'But there is petechiae in the sclera of his eyes. It's a pretty good bet.'

  'Let's see, he was stabbed, slashed and strangled,' Jessica said. 'Real hat trick.'

  'And that's just the stuff we know about. He might have been poisoned.'

  Jessica poked around the small room, carefully overturning boxes and shipping pallets. She found no clothing, no ID, nothing to indicate who this victim might be.

  When she stepped outside a few minutes later she saw Detective Joshua Bontrager walking across Federal Street, clipping his badge to his jacket pocket.

  Josh Bontrager had only been in the unit a few years but he had developed into a good investigator. Josh was unique in a number of ways, not the least of which was the fact that he had grown up Amish in rural Pennsylvania before making his way to Philadelphia and the police force, where he spent a few years in various units before being called into the homicide unit for a special investigation. Josh was in his mid-thirties, country-boy blond, deceptively fit and agile. He did not bring a lot of street smarts to the job - most of the streets on which he'd grown up had been barely paved - or any sort of scientific logic, but rather an innate kindness, an affability that completely disarmed all but the most hardened criminal.

  There were some in the unit who felt that Josh Bontrager was a country bumpkin who had no business in one of the most respected elite urban homicide divisions in the country. But Jessica knew that you underestimated him at your own peril, especially if you had something to hide.

  Bontrager crossed the alley to Jessica's side, lowered his voice. 'So, how do you like working with Stansfield?'

  'Well, aside from the racism, sexism, homophobia and completely exaggerated sense of self-worth, it's a blast.'

  Bontrager laughed. 'That bad?'

  'Nah. Those are the highlights.'

  'How come no one seems to like him?'

  Jessica explained the Eduardo Robles case, including Stansfield's monumental fuck-up - a fuck-up that to all intents and purposes had led to the death of Samuel Reese.

  'You'd think he would have known better,' Bontrager said.

  'You'd think.'

  'And we definitely like this Robles guy for that second body?'

  'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'Kevin's at the grand jury today.'

  Bontrager nodded. 'So, for messing up royally Stansfield gets a promotion and a kick in pay?'

  'The brass works in mysterious ways.'

  Bontrager put his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. 'Well, until Kevin is back, if you want another partner next time you're up on the wheel, let me know.'

  'Thanks, Josh. I will.' She held up a folder. 'Write me up?'

  'Sure.'

  He took the folder from her, extracted a body chart, clipped it to a clipboard. The body chart was a standard police-department form that had four outlines of the human body drawn on it, front and back, left and right side, as well as space for the rudimentary details of the crime scene. It was the first and most referred-to form in the binder that would be dedicated to the case.

  The two detectives stepped inside. Jessica spoke while Josh Bontrager wrote.

  'We have a Caucasian male, aged thirty to forty-five years. There is a single laceration across the forehead, what appears to be a puncture wound above the right eye. The victim's right ear is mutilated. A portion of the ear lobe is missing. There is a ligature mark across the base of the neck.'

  Bontrager went over the form, marking these areas on the figure.

  'The victim is nude. The body looks to have been recently shaved from head to toe. He is barefoot. There are bruises on the wrists and ankles, which indicate the victim may have been restrained.'

  Jessica continued to describe the scene, her path now forever crossed with that of this dead man, a dead man with no name.

  Twenty minutes later, with Josh Bontrager back at the Roundhouse, and Dennis Stansfield still on canvass, Jessica paused at the top of the stairs. She turned 360 degrees, scanning the landscape. Directly behind the store was a double vacant lot, a parcel where a pair of buildings had recently been razed. There were still piles of concrete, bricks, lumber. There was no fence. To the right was a block of row houses. To the left was the rear of some sort of commercial building, with no windows overlooking the alley. If someone were to have seen anyone entering the rear of the crime scene, they would have had to have been in a back room of one of the row houses, or in the vacant lot. The view from across the street was partially obscured by the large piles of debris.

  Jessica approached the responding officer, who stood at the mouth of the alley with the crime-scene log. One of his duties was to sign everyone in and out.

  'Who found the body?' Jessica asked him.

  'It was an anonymous tip,' the officer said. 'Came into 911 around six o'clock this morning.'

  Anonymous, Jessica thought. A million and a half people in her city, and they were all anonymous. Until it was one of their own.

  Chapter 7

  He awoke, dreambound, still in the hypnotic thrall of troubled sleep. This morning, in his final reverie, as the light of day filtered through the blinds, Kevin Byrne stood in the defendant's well of a cavernous courtroom that was lit by a sea of votive candles. He could not see the members of the jury but he knew who they were. They were the silent victims. And there were more than twelve. There were thousands, each holding one light.

  Byrne got out of bed, staggered to the kitchen, splashed cold water on his face. He'd gotten four hours of sleep; three the night before. Over the past few months his insomnia had become acute, a routine part of his life so ingrained that he could not imagine living any other way. Nevertheless, he had an appointment - doctor's orders and against his will - w
ith a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania Sleep Clinic.

  He took a long hot shower, rinsing off the previous night. He toweled, dressed, pulling a fresh shirt out of the dry-cleaning bag. He put on a new suit, his favorite tie, then sat at his small dinette table, sipped his coffee. He glanced at the Sleep Clinic questionnaire. All one hundred sixty probing questions.

  Question 87: Do you snore?

  If I could get someone to sleep with me, I might be able to answer that, he thought.

  Then Byrne remembered his little experiment. The night before, at around two a.m., when he'd found that he couldn't drift off, he'd dug out his small Sony digital recorder.

  He got back in bed, took two Ambien, turned on the recorder, flipped off the light, and closed his eyes. Four hours later he awoke.

  And now he had the results of his experiment. He poured more coffee, played the recording from the beginning. At first he heard some rustling, the settling of the unit on the nightstand. Then he heard himself turn off the lamp, a little more rustling, then a bump of the table, which was so loud that it made him jump. He turned down the volume. Then, for the next five minutes or so, he heard nothing but white noise, the occasional car passing by his apartment.

  Byrne listened to this rhythmic breathing awhile, which seemed to get slower and slower. Then he heard the first snort. It sounded like a backfire. Or maybe a pissed-off Rottweiler.

  Great, he thought. So he did snore. Not constantly, but about fifteen minutes into the recording he began to snore again, loudly for a few minutes, then not at all, then loudly again. He stared at the recorder, thinking:

  What the fuck am I doing?

  The answer? Sitting in his small dining room, barely awake, listening to a recording of himself sleeping. Did it get dumber than this?

  Man, he had to get a life.

  He pressed the fast-forward button, and every time he came across a sound he stopped, rewound for a few seconds, played it back.