The Stolen Ones

by Richard Montanari

  The thief takes a deep breath, releases it in four or five small gusts. He slowly turns the knife toward himself.

  ‘I can’t do it!’

  ‘Twenty-five seconds.’

  The thief begins to sob. The knife shakes in his hand as he brings it closer to his face. He raises his other hand to steady himself, and stares at the blade as one might consider a burning rosary, an abacus of sins.

  ‘Twenty seconds.’

  The thief begins to pray.

  ‘Dios te salve, Maria.’

  ‘Fifteen seconds.’

  ‘Llena eres de gracia.’

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  ‘El Señor es contigo.’

  ‘Five seconds.’

  At the moment the tip of the blade pierces his left eye, the 11:05 SEPTA carrying twenty-one passengers roars to a stop outside. The thief’s screams are swallowed by the whet of steel on steel, plumed inside the release of exhaust.

  When the knife falls from the thief’s hand, there is only silence.

  The thief – whose name was Ezequiel Rivera ‘Cheque’ Marquez – had always thought that when death came it would be accompanied by a bright white light, or the sound of angels singing. When his mother died at the age of thirty-one in an osteopathic hospital in Camden, New Jersey, it was what he wanted to believe. It was possible that all eight-year-olds want to believe this.

  For Cheque Marquez the moment wasn’t anything like that. Death wasn’t an angel in a long flowing gown.

  Death was a man in a tattered brown suit.

  One hour later Luther stands across the street from the old woman’s house. He watches as she sweeps the dead leaves from her porch, marveling at how small she is, how big she had at one time seemed to him.

  He knows that the next time he sees her it will be in her bedroom, her ruched and cloying boudoir with its peeling wallpaper and brown mice and generic powders, a visit during which he will return the credit card to her wallet.

  Nothing can be out of place over the course of the coming days. Everything must be as it has always been. Luther had not planned on dealing with the thief, but if the old woman’s card was missing, it might change everything. It might mean they would begin to scrutinize this, her penultimate day.

  He’s already visited her home, three times sitting at the foot of her bed as she fitfully slept, chased by what demons he could only imagine. Perhaps he was one of those demons. Perhaps the woman knows that, when her time comes, it will be him.

  In the end, someone always comes.

  2

  Detective Jessica Balzano found herself in a brightly lit room, sitting upright, her left hand high in the air, the clatter of street noise drifting in from a window behind her. At first she thought she was alone, but soon realized there were people all around her. She didn’t see them, but she knew they were there in the way you know anything when you’re dreaming, the way you know that, while danger may lurk in every shadow, it is only dream-danger, and you will not be harmed. All you have to do is wake up, and it will be gone.

  But this wasn’t a dream. Somehow, she was in a classroom. With her hand raised. And there were at least a dozen people staring at her.

  Real people.

  ‘Ms Balzano?’ someone said.

  The man at the front of the classroom, the man who seemed to know her name, was thin and pale, about sixty. He wore a pilled blue cardigan with epaulets, beige corduroy slacks, cupped at the knees. There was a half-smile on his face, as if he had done this before, as if this were an inside joke he was sharing with everyone.

  Everyone except Jessica Balzano.

  Before Jessica could respond it all came rushing toward her in a hot, mortifying wave. She was not in bed in her small, comfortable South Philly row house, her husband Vincent next to her, her two children safely asleep in their rooms on the third floor. She was, instead, in school – specifically, her second year of law school.

  Jessica had known it was going to be like this, but she had no idea it would be like this. She’d had the feeling this might happen one day, and it finally had. She’d fallen asleep in class.

  She put down her hand, her mind a kaleidoscope of questions. What class was this, again? Contracts? Torts? Civil procedure?

  Not a clue.

  She glanced at the chalkboard, saw a quote from Louis Nizer: In cross-examination, as in fishing, nothing is more ungainly than a fisherman pulled into the water by his catch.

  No help there.

  ‘Ms Balzano?’ the professor said. ‘False imprisonment?’

  God bless him, she thought. He’d repeated the question for her benefit.

  Jessica said, ‘The three elements of false imprisonment are: wilful detention, detention without consent, and unlawful detention.’

  ‘Very good,’ her teacher said with a wink. He’d been a law professor for more than twenty-five years. Jessica was not the first student ever to nod off in class. She would not be the last.

  Jessica reached under the table and pinched the web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger on her right hand, almost to the point of drawing blood. It was an old trick she’d been taught by her Field Training Officer her first year out of the academy, a trick to keep her awake when she worked last-out, the eleven p.m. to seven a.m. shift.

  For the next forty minutes Jessica tried every trick she’d ever learned to regain wakefulness. Thankfully, the professor didn’t call on her again, and somehow she made it to the end of class.

  On the way to her car, Jessica noticed a small group of students from her class walking across the parking lot at Cecil B. Moore and Broad Street. They all looked about twenty – wide awake, happy, fully caffeinated by life. Jessica wanted to shoot them.

  ‘Hey, Jessica,’ one of them said. His name was Jason Cole, and he held the unofficial title of cutest boy in class, a class in which there was a lot of competition for that honor. ‘Nice save back there.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘For a minute there I thought you were going to wash.’

  You have no idea, Jessica thought. ‘Not a chance,’ she said. She unlocked her car. ‘I’ve had tougher cases.’

  Jason smiled. He had braces, which somehow made him cuter. ‘We’re going to Starbucks for a study jam,’ he added. ‘Want to come with?’

  They all knew she was a police officer, of course, a homicide detective at that. They also knew she was juggling three lives – cop, mother, student – living days haphazardly constructed around a curriculum of early-morning, late-evening and weekend classes. Jessica desperately wanted to feel sorry for herself about this, but she knew it was nothing special for many people her age who were attending college. The truth was, she just wanted to go home and finish the nap she’d begun in the classroom. She couldn’t do that. In addition to the thousand other things she needed to accomplish, she was staring down the barrel of a full twelve-hour shift.

  It was her first day back after a two-week sabbatical.

  ‘Gotta go to work,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe next time.’

  Jason gave her a thumbs-up. ‘We’ll save you a seat.’

  Jessica slipped into her car, the fatigue a living thing within her. She glanced at her law books on the seat, and not for the first time in the past eighteen months wondered how she got here.

  She was currently working in the SIU division of the homicide unit four days a week – a generous offer allowed by her captain, cleared with the inspector and, most importantly, with her husband, Vincent – and getting about five hours of sleep per night. It was one thing when you were a twenty-two-year-old grad student; quite another when you were on the osteoporosis side of thirty-five.

  Of the three divisions in the PPD Homicide Unit – the Line Squad, the Special Investigations Unit, and the Fugitive Squad – SIU was the least demanding, at least in terms of immediacy and the need for overtime. Although the physical and emotional rigors of working cold cases could be just as demanding as working fresh homicides, the days tended to be a little more struct
ured, and the need to get the ball rolling – and hopefully make an arrest – in the first forty-eight hours were not there.

  Still, this was the path she had chosen. She recalled the moment she’d chosen it, as well. She had been thirteen, and had visited City Hall with her brother, Michael. They went to watch their father – then Sergeant Peter Giovanni – testify in Judge Liam McManus’s courtroom.

  On that day Jessica sat in the back row, watching the proceedings, observing as the two lawyers went head to head. Having grown up in a police family, she knew that there were many jobs upon which the carriage of justice depended – cops, judges, forensic specialists, medical examiners. But for some reason she was instantly drawn to this stage, this rarefied arena where, if everyone else did their job, it would all come down to the clear, clinical thinking of two people to build a case for either guilt or innocence.

  Young Jessica Giovanni was hooked, her future fully mapped by the time she and her brother and their father sat down to lunch at Frank Clements Tavern, which was then located across the street from the original Bookbinder’s. As Jessica ate her cheesesteak she watched in something close to awe as defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges – even a future Pennsylvania supreme court justice – all mingled in the smoky, storied bar, many of them stopping by the table to chat with her father.

  On that day the scheme was set in motion: Michael would be the police officer; Jessica would be the ADA. That was the plan. Theirs would be the South Philly version of Law & Order. Peter Giovanni – one of the most decorated officers in the history of the PPD, who eventually retired with the rank of lieutenant – would play the crusty former cop who tended his San Marzano tomatoes in the garden, supplying moral support and pithy wisecracks.

  Everything went according to blueprint, until that horrible day in 1991 when Michael was killed in Kuwait, a Marine fighting in Desert Storm.

  In that instant Michael Giovanni, Jessica’s beautiful brother – her protector, confidante and greatest hero – was gone.

  Jessica recalled sitting with her father the night they learned of Michael’s death, how mightily her father tried not to cry in front of her. A week later, as she knelt next to Michael’s casket, she knew that her dreams of being a lawyer would be put on hold, perhaps for ever, that she would be the one to follow in her father’s footsteps. Over the ensuing years she had never regretted her decision to enter the academy, not once, but she knew that if she was ever going to get her law degree, now was the time.

  She wasn’t certain she would even take the bar exam upon completion of her studies, but she knew that, at the very least, she owed it to her brother to try.

  Jessica started her car, glanced at her watch. It was five minutes to noon. She had five minutes to get to the Roundhouse. In Philly traffic. She opened the glove compartment, found a Twix. High calorie, nutrient-free sugar.

  Yes.

  Candy bar in hand, Detective Jessica Balzano pulled out into the traffic on Broad Street thinking: if God was smiling down on her this day – and she was blessed in so many ways that she couldn’t expect anything else from God, not anytime soon – she would be home and in bed around midnight.

  God wasn’t listening.

  3

  When Jessica reached the Roundhouse, the police administration building at Eighth and Race streets, the duty room was all but deserted. Homicide detectives working day work, the shift from seven a.m. to four p.m., were out on the street. The few who remained were working the phones, the fax machine, the computers, or just trying to look busy to the day watch commander, having hit dead ends in their investigations.

  By the time Jessica removed her coat and sat down she saw Sergeant Dana Westbrook walking purposefully across the duty room in her direction. A former Marine, still in her early fifties, Westbrook cut an imposing figure, despite her five-foot-four frame. Since taking over the job as day watch supervisor from the retired Ike Buchanan she had proven herself more than capable in what was, and would most likely always be, a boys’ club. The fact that Dana Westbrook could bench press her own weight plus twenty didn’t hurt.

  As Westbrook got closer, Jessica saw the look on her boss’s face. It was a look that said: job.

  No rest for the righteous, Jessica thought.

  Other than a few loose ends that needed to be clipped and sorted on a murder case she and her partner had just closed, there was nothing on her plate.

  That, it appeared, was about to change.

  ‘Hey, Sarge,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Morning, Jess.’

  Jessica stole a glance at the wall clock. It was technically afternoon. She wondered if Dana Westbrook was taking a shot, or just offering that greeting out of habit. ‘What’s up?’

  Westbrook held up a thin folder, a folder that looked curiously like a binder. The binder – often referred to as the murder book – was the Bible of a homicide investigation. A fresh binder was opened the day the investigation began, and by the time the investigation was closed, if it was closed, every piece of paper – summaries, witness statements, autopsies and toxicology reports, ballistics, crime scene and collateral photographs, even the handwritten notes from the investigating detective’s work – was contained between its covers. Sure, there were backup systems in place, forensic data recorded onto hard drives in various laboratories, but the most referred to set of documents in a murder investigation were in the binder.

  ‘We’ve got an open unsolved,’ Westbrook said. ‘About a month old.’

  ‘You want me to be lead on this?’ Jessica asked.

  Westbrook nodded.

  ‘What’s the new information?’

  When a fresh homicide is investigated there is a great push, not only from detectives and brass in the homicide unit, but also from the crime scene unit, and all collateral laboratory divisions. The concept of the first forty-eight hours being critical in a homicide investigation was no cliché. Witnesses got amnesia, nature began to take back its evidence, suspects found the wind. The sad truth was, if solid leads were not generated in the first week or so, a case began to cool. Within a month it was cold.

  ‘There isn’t really a new lead,’ Westbrook said. ‘Nothing solid anyway. After the lead investigator visited the crime scene, and made an initial report, the victim’s house was sealed.’

  Jessica didn’t understand. Crime scenes were always sealed. At least until it was cleared by the investigators.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Jessica said.

  ‘When I say sealed, I mean the property was sealed by court order, by the victim’s lawyer. It seems the victim had only one living relative, a distant cousin living in New York, a cousin he apparently didn’t exactly get along with. The victim died intestate, which means the cousin would get whatever money and possessions he had. She had her lawyer meet the investigator at the crime scene on the day of the murder. When they left the apartment was sealed.’

  ‘So the victim was not killed in his residence.’

  ‘No,’ Westbrook said. ‘The body was found in a park in the Northeast.’

  ‘So why now?’

  ‘The DA’s office was able to get the victim’s apartment unsealed.’ Westbrook put down a small envelope. ‘Here’s the address and a key to the front door.’ She held up the binder. ‘Everything else is in here.’ Dana Westbrook put the binder down on the desk. What should have been about an inch thick appeared to contain no more than three or four documents.

  ‘It looks a little thin, Sarge,’ Jessica said.

  Westbrook looked at the floor for a moment, then back up. ‘There are a few missing files,’ she said. ‘Most of them, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why are they missing?’

  Westbrook smoothed the front of her sweater. ‘This was one of John Garcia’s last cases,’ she said.

  And Jessica understood.

  4

  The dead man’s name was Robert August Freitag. On the day of his murder he was unmarried, had no children, and was five days shy of hi
s fifty-seventh birthday. He was five foot seven, weighed 166 pounds. He had brown hair, brown eyes.

  When Jessica opened the binder, the first thing she saw was a picture of the victim, an executive-type headshot most likely taken for an annual report or a company website. Robert Freitag was a pleasant-looking middle-aged man, just sprouting gray around the temples. In the photograph he wore a blue sport coat, white shirt and a green and white striped tie, as well as aviator-style bifocals.

  According to the summary, on the evening of 20 February 2013 Robert Freitag – who worked as a logistics manager for a company called CycleLife – walked from his home on Almond Street, in the Port Richmond section of the city, to a small convenience store on Allegheny Avenue. While there he purchased a loaf of wholewheat bread, two cans of candied yams, a package of votive candles and a Snickers. Surveillance cameras showed him leaving the store at 6:22 p.m.

  No one saw him alive again.

  While Jessica was certain that a neighborhood interview had been conducted – a canvass of residents and shop employees spanning a one- or two-block radius of the victim’s home – there were no statements in the binder. Nor was there an autopsy protocol. Freitag’s body had been cremated within a week of his murder.

  There were no crime scene photographs in the binder, but there was a brief description of the scene. Robert Freitag’s body was discovered by an early morning jogger, sitting on an old wooden chair in the middle of a field in Priory Park, a densely forested parcel in Northeast Philadelphia, just a few blocks from the Delaware River.

  Jessica had to read the brief twice. According to the summary, and the ME’s ruling, the cause of death was loss of blood due to a massive fissure fracture of the skull.

  The truth was that someone took a ten-inch-long, rusted piece of steel, and drove it into the back of Freitag’s skull.