One by One
Page 13
“The hospital is just being cautious. Is that all you called about?”
“You asked me if I remembered anything, and at the time I didn’t think it was anything important.”
Alex grabbed her notebook. “Go on.”
“It was a little before Miss Barb got sick. Not long before. A guy came up to the bar. He ordered a Diet Coke and squeezed lime into it. Then he dropped the lime in the glass.”
“That’s not so unusual, Carlos.”
“I know, but it was the way he was dressed. We all wear black jackets and white shirts with black pants. It’s a uniform. He was dressed that way, but he didn’t work for us.”
“That’s also not so unusual.”
“We also wear red roses in our lapels. He was wearing a red rose.”
“Okay, maybe that was something.” Alex noted it down. “He was trying to blend in.”
Carlos said nothing for a few seconds. “I saw him give the glass to Miss Barb.”
“Wait. Are you sure about that, Carlos?”
“I’m positive.”
She took a moment to speak because she didn’t want to jump all over him. When she finally asked the question, she tried to keep her voice gentle, not accusing. “Why didn’t you say something on Sunday?”
“I was scared.”
“Did you mention this to the cops?”
“I don’t trust cops.”
“Jesus, Carlos. Do you know how that makes you sound? Did you tell anyone about this guy?”
“I’m telling you. I didn’t think anyone else would believe me. I didn’t get a good look at his face, and he just disappeared. He had dark hair and wore glasses, but he kept his head down. He was young. I’m pretty sure. Medium-tall and thin.”
“Well, I don’t know if the police were able to pull any prints off the glass. Barb dropped it when she fell and it shattered. I don’t even know if he’s the person who gave her the glass, but we can see if he showed up on the security tapes. Do you think you could identify him?”
“I don’t know.” Carlos’s voice wavered, whether from fear of the killer or the police or INS. Maybe all three. “I didn’t see his face good. I have to go.”
“Carlos, wait.”
But he had already hung up. She made a quick call to her friend Eric, the paper’s tech reporter. “I wonder if we could backtrace a number,” she said. “I had a possible source call me, but he’s squirrelly.”
“Sure,” he said. “We probably can.”
“Fine.”
Carlos’s number turned out to be untraceable. Eric told her that he must have used a pay-as-you-go phone. “You can’t trace ’em because they don’t have a plan. You pay your minutes up front. Popular with our local druggies, or they used to be.”
But that was okay, for now. At least she had an idea who to look for on the security tape. Now all she had to do was find out what detectives were handling the case. Then she could go back and see if he looked like anyone from Danny’s yearbook.
She handled politics not police, so her list of Philly PD contacts was not extensive. She picked up the phone and dialed Kevin Ryan’s number.
27
Danny leaned against his car and rubbed his cheekbone as Frank paced up and down. Stan shifted from one foot to another. Danny could see he wanted to speak but had the sense to remain silent. The other asshole, Piscone, stared at the dirt.
“I oughta smash in your head, shove you in the trunk of that goddamn car, and send you to the shredder,” Frank said at last. “Add a couple of propane tanks, and you’d be a memory.”
“And we were having such a nice reunion,” Danny said. He didn’t think Frank would carry through with the threat. Frank wasn’t the type to warn you. He’d just sneak up on you and slit your throat—or better, get Stan to do it. Frank didn’t operate in the open. He liked to corner his prey—in the locker room, under the stairs, in an alleyway. In high school, plenty of kids bore scars dealt by Frank, like badges of dishonor. “What’s the big deal about getting texts? You aren’t the only one.”
“You’re an asshole, Ryan,” Frank said, but his eyes no longer burned with that insane fury. He glanced at Piscone and Stan and gave an irritated jerk of his shoulder. Piscone headed back to the office, and when Stan hesitated, Frank said, “Get back to work, Stan. I’ll talk to you later.”
Stan didn’t object, though his mouth turned down. His shoulders slumped, and he nodded to Danny before he shuffled off, kicking up dust and pebbles as he walked.
Frank turned to Danny and scowled as if he were a particularly annoying insect. “I thought I’d seen the last of you twenty-some years ago.”
“Yeah, well. Life’s a bitch that way. Tell me, Frank. What happened at Greg Moss’s beach house?”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“I have this theory that all this is connected to senior week at Greg’s house.”
Frank turned angry again for a moment, his whole body tensing. Then he laughed. “Shit, Ryan. You were there when whatever this big something supposedly happened. You see anything?”
“I was on the porch.”
“Bangin’ Michelle Perry. Yeah, yeah. I remember that stuck-up bitch. You were perfect for each other. Point is, you would’ve heard something, don’t you think?”
Would I have remembered? It was so long ago. The whoops and shouts. Music playing. If he could only remember the song, but it played at the edge of his mind, almost there, yet not. Why did that seem important? He and Michelle making out on the porch.
“It was a long time ago,” Danny said.
“Yeah, it was. It was a party. Everyone was drunk or high, and how the fuck do you remember everything that happened? I don’t remember. We smoked some pretty good weed that night. Excellent weed, in fact.” Frank smirked, and Danny recognized the subtext. They smoked some pretty good weed that Danny had supplied. Yeah, he got it. Maybe Frank should have gotten “Danny Ryan was my dealer” tattooed on his hand. “Now I’m getting these goddamn texts.”
“That’s the problem, Frank. Nobody I talk to remembers, but something must have happened just the same. It’s the only time we were all together.”
The muscle under Frank’s left eye was twitching, but otherwise his face was expressionless. “Look, I didn’t say anything about the texts ’cause of this.” He held out his hand, the one with the prison tat. “I’m an ex-con, dumbass. Last thing I need is people looking into my connections.” Frank rubbed his mouth, looking around, and Danny could sense his unease and something else—a bright thread of fear running under the bravado and anger. When Danny didn’t answer, Frank said, “Why did something have to happen?”
“I don’t know,” Danny said. “But I think something did, and it pissed off someone enough to kill. So you’d better put on your thinking cap, Frank, and try to come up with what that something could be.”
“No one’s coming after me.”
“You want to bet on that? You willing to put money on that?”
“You gonna bet your fortune, Ryan?”
“No. I know someone’s out there.”
Frank glanced toward the road, squinting his eyes. He looked apprehensive for a moment and then smiled. “Let him come. I’m not afraid. I’m not like Greg.”
Danny shrugged. Frank the Ferret was back. Maybe he would be able to handle whoever was out there. Danny was sure he’d put up a fight. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”
*
Frank watched Ryan take off in his slick BMW. He lit a cigarette and stared after the trail of dust. Fucking Danny Ryan. After all these years. And here he was, all concerned about Greg Moss. Not that some whack job didn’t kill old Greg off for that beach party bullshit, but Greg was up to his ass in dirt with his land deals and parties and other schemes.
“Hey, Frank, everything okay?” Stan came shuffling up to stand beside him.
“Yeah. Everything’s just great,” Frank said. “What’d I tell you about talkin’ to people you don’t know?”
When the first text came, Frank hadn’t told anyone. Then he’d heard about Nate Pulaski. Okay, small loss there. Old Penis Head got whacked. Big deal. But then he got another text. It spooked him, enough to get in touch with Greg, and Greg told him about Soldano and Farnasi.
He’d been kind of relieved to find out Greg had gotten texted as well. They weren’t alone. Then Stan had come blundering in, flapping his gums about the goddamn texts. Frank had told him it was a stupid prank, and Stan had grinned like it was a great joke. Frank hadn’t told him about what had happened to Pulaski and the others, but he’d never expected Ryan to show up asking questions.
Why Ryan?
He stared into Stan’s smiling face. He’d always figured Stan was nine cents short of a dime, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was something going on inside that idiot head.
Stan patted him on the shoulder. “I got work to do,” he said.
“Yeah.” Frank watched him amble away. “Sorry I lost it earlier, Stan. That wasn’t right.”
Stan didn’t turn around, but he gave him the thumbs up.
Frank headed back to his Caddy. These texts were making him crazy, and he needed to figure out who was sending them before Danny Ryan or the goddamn police beat him to it. His stomach gave a sour lurch. The worst part was that the texts weren’t the beginning. This shit started long before Nate Pulaski, and it was going to get worse.
But no one was going to catch him sleeping. “Good luck,” Ryan had said. Fuck him. It would take survival skills, and Frank had plenty of those.
Goddamn Greg Moss.
28
The Philadelphia Morgue was located in the same place as the medical examiner’s office, an unassuming brick building behind the University of Pennsylvania and across from the VA Hospital. Alex normally didn’t spend her time there, and she hoped to avoid it in the future. She still smelled the faint aroma of formalin and death, but she’d gone there to satisfy her curiosity.
The police weren’t ready to let her look at the security video, probably because she hadn’t done a very good job of selling herself as a potential witness. Kevin had listened to her stumble through her story about remembering a dark-haired man hanging around Barb Capozzi, and he’d only said, “You’re just remembering this now?”
“Well, I . . . it was a pretty crazy night.” She should have told Kevin she was making out with his brother. He probably would have exploded.
“I wasn’t there that night, and the detectives who were are on another call.”
“Well, maybe I could come in and just take a quick peek at the video.”
She’d understood from his long silence that she’d said the wrong thing.
“You mean like an advance screening? This isn’t a movie, Ms. Burton. A woman almost died on that tape. We’re not giving special viewings to reporters, even reporters who are friends of my brother. You can tell him that.”
“Danny didn’t—I’m not looking for an advance screening.” She’d been surprised that he thought so little of her.
“Is there anything else?”
She’d hung up, pissed off. Of course, he would believe she wanted to see the tape to get some kind of awful scoop. Fuck him. She didn’t need the tape. She’d been there. In fact, she’d kicked the story over to Eddie Overstreet, the stringer the paper had sent to cover the event. Kevin Ryan had assumed the worst. Asshole.
To mollify herself, she’d left a blistering voicemail for Danny, and then she went to the medical examiner’s office because Jenna Jeffords was nagging her. She’d seemed like a misfit. A sad kid who never fit in. She’d been at the shore house, though Alex couldn’t quite force the picture into her head. Had she come alone? Had someone invited her? It didn’t make sense. She had died long before any of this had started. And yet Alex couldn’t get the picture of the sleepy-eyed girl from Danny’s yearbook out of her head.
A girl with dark hair and a round face, she’d been unexceptional in appearance. Alex imagined Jenna had gone through high school under a veil of invisibility if she wasn’t outright tormented—a heavy girl, uncool, unstylish, just there. Had Jenna hoped that one day she’d turn into a swan?
High school must have been a special brand of hell for Jenna.
Adults always told kids high school was the best time of their lives, but it was a lie. High school was filled with traps and pitfalls for the innocent, the socially awkward, the different. Jenna seemed to have been all those things.
Alex figured she would just stop in, discuss the autopsy with the ME, and take it to Danny. Then they’d both have a laugh at her inability to stop picking at stupid details and his need to beat a story to death. She’d invite him over for dinner because Sam would be late as usual, and when he did get home, he’d shake his head at them, puzzling over their mutual obsessions.
Sam always said if she’d been a dog, she’d have been a bloodhound. Relentless and single-minded when she caught the scent of a story. She told him he’d be a poodle, a big old standard poodle. Smart and handsome but a little prissy. Besides, Alex had always been a cat person. Danny called her a lioness, and she liked that. It went with her astrological sign. Sam didn’t believe in astrology.
Maybe it would be easier to avoid going home.
The sun was starting to set by the time Alex headed out of the medical examiner’s office to the parking lot. She slid the copy of Jenna Jeffords’s autopsy report into her overlarge bag along with every article the paper had run about the fire. Cars whizzed past, and the gritty exhaust seemed to hang in the humid air, but Alex stood for a moment in the parking lot, just breathing. She could see the hospital down the road, and she almost wanted to walk down to wait in Sam’s serene office at HUP and stare at his ocean photographs.
She wouldn’t. Sam didn’t appreciate her just appearing. He had meetings and patients. He preferred that she schedule her visits. It was neater that way. Sam liked his personal life orderly, in contrast to the chaos of the emergency room. They were in so many ways ill-matched.
Alex walked to her car, thinking about Jenna’s autopsy. Poor Jenna had been burned almost beyond recognition, and the photos had been gruesome. She had shrunk up against herself, her arms drawn up against her chest in a fighter’s stance, except there was very little body left to protect, mostly black and twisted bones and some patches of her clothes. There wasn’t much left of Jenna, and nobody had demanded any extensive testing. Dead was dead.
Apparently there had been some question of arson, however. The gas main had erupted, and three homes had been destroyed. The firefighters on the scene had noted that the fire had burned unusually hot, but there had been no hard evidence of accelerant. In any case, the report had not been extensive, whether because the city wanted to get the case resolved or simply because arson was notoriously difficult to prove.
Rachel Jeffords had identified Jenna by a blue necklace that had partially melted into her bones and those scraps of clothes. Indeed, in the autopsy photo, Jenna’s breastbone appeared to have been lacquered with blackened turquoise paint. Rachel had a very good eye for detail if she could identify that as a necklace.
Alex shivered despite the late afternoon heat. It had been an unusually warm spring, even for her, but goose bumps rose on her arms. She should put all this aside for one evening. She’d already gotten too close to Danny for her own good. One of them was bound to get burned.
Besides, his brother had pissed her off. Alex stood for a moment longer. She didn’t like this case, but she couldn’t let it go. Something about it was uglier than the politics she usually covered. On the surface this seemed to be about murder, but it ran much deeper. It was about deep cuts inflicted on vulnerable souls. She understood something about those deep cuts, and she knew Danny did as well. Looking back was dark and dangerous. Soul crushing.
Alex opened her car d
oor and slid in. Who was Jenna Jeffords anyway? Why did it seem to matter? She had to look at everything together.
She started the ignition. She’d show all this to Danny. Maybe it would make more sense to him. After all, he knew Jenna to some degree. Alex cast a look over at the hospital and sighed. Sam might or might not come home tonight, but she needed to hustle.
For a moment, Alex rested her head against the steering wheel. She’d spent all day running around trying to put Sunday night out of her head, but it hit her now. She’d been waiting for Danny to notice her as a woman for a long time, and now that he had, she didn’t know what to do about it.
29
Danny sped down Kelly Drive, a packet of autopsy photographs courtesy of Kevin on the passenger’s seat. Normally he would have driven with the top down, but the heat had grown too oppressive. Summer, in its humid glory, had arrived in Philadelphia, and it wasn’t even June.
He’d stopped in to visit Kevin, who hadn’t been overjoyed to pull everything he had on the South Philly fire that killed Jenna Jeffords. Kevin had done it, but he’d bitched and moaned about Alex wanting to see the security footage from the book signing. Danny was still smarting from Alex’s succinct, but to the point, voicemail: “Fuck you and your sonofabitch brother. Teach him some goddamn manners, or take this case and shove it up your ass.” It had taken him half an hour to soothe her before she informed him she was heading off to fetch Jenna’s autopsy.
“It’s my fault,” Danny had said to his brother. “Don’t blame her. I thought if she saw the footage, she might recognize someone.”
Kevin had harrumphed a little longer before he took Danny to see the tape. Danny had recognized Alex and Sam, other reporters, and Barb. The figure who sauntered up to Barb with the drink had his back to the camera, and yet something about him was familiar. Danny tried to trace him through the crowd, but he must have been aware of the cameras. He faded back into a dead space and disappeared. He reminded Danny of the kid he’d bumped into in Northern Liberties. The kid at the Shamrock. Was it possible? Danny couldn’t swear to it.