The Stolen Ones

by Richard Montanari

An officer in the Firearms and Ballistics Unit identified the murder weapon as a railroad spike.

  CSU had lifted and analyzed a number of footwear impressions in the snow around the victim’s body. Their closest guess was a European size 46, which fell between a US 12 and 13. The presumptive determination was a European work boot, brand unknown. The pattern did not show up in any of the reference databases. Because there were no other footprints in the thin layer of snow, it was presumed that the killer carried Robert Freitag to the center of the field. Adding Freitag’s weight, the killer was thought to be between 170 and 200 pounds, based on the depth of the imprint.

  The killer’s height, race, gender and age were unknown, which narrowed the suspect pool to approximately 40 per cent of the adult population of Philadelphia.

  Jessica looked in the large envelope Dana Westbrook had left on the desk. In it was a videotape of the crime scene.

  The lead investigator on the case was a veteran detective named John Garcia. While investigating the Freitag case, Garcia collapsed in the lobby of the Roundhouse one morning and was rushed to the hospital. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and emergency surgery was performed.

  The surgery was unsuccessful. John Garcia died on the operating table.

  Although they were not what either of them would have called close friends, Jessica had liked John Garcia, had worked a few cases with him over the years.

  In the months leading up to his collapse and subsequent surgery, Jessica – along with a number of other detectives in the squad – had noticed Garcia’s increasingly odd behavior, the unfinished sentences, the strange non sequiturs. No one spoke of it. Everyone chalked it up to fatigue.

  And while Garcia’s behavior was the sad result of the tumor growing in his brain, nowhere was his disconnected logic more evident than in the case notes for the Robert Freitag homicide. More accurately, what case notes there were. There were only three torn pages in the binder. On each were a series of drawings, casual doodles of flowers, trains and animals, childlike renderings of houses with smoke curling from their chimneys in long corkscrews.

  The murder book for Robert Freitag should have contained dozens of synopses and witness statements. Instead, it held just a few pages of gibberish. It was not much to go on.

  Jessica closed the binder, put it on the chair next to her. She looked out the window at the parking lot behind the Roundhouse, at the ceaseless cold rain, a question circling her mind. And that question was: Why?

  For the most part, in any homicide investigation, why runs a close third after who and when. Quite often, just by reading the first few lines of a summary, Jessica could tell why someone was murdered. Unknown to the casual observer, a majority of the homicides committed in Philadelphia occurred within a small group of people who were in the game – drugs, vice, prostitution, gangs. There was, of course, a great deal of overlap. And while Jessica and just about every homicide cop she knew – with a few notable exceptions – took every murder on their patch seriously, it was when the average citizen was murdered that the motive moved front and center.

  In the case of Robert Freitag, the how, when and where were scientific fact. He had been killed on 20 February 2013, somewhere between eleven p.m. and midnight, in an open field in a park in Northeast Philadelphia. What little forensics there were from the ME and CSU concluded that Priory Park was the primary offense location.

  Many times, with Philadelphia’s numerous parks, the area was used as a dumping ground, making it the secondary site. Apparently there was evidence that pinpointed the park as the place where Freitag was killed. It just wasn’t in the book.

  Jessica looked at the last piece of paper in the binder. It was a printout of the dead man’s financials. In life, the man had been somewhat of an enigma. In death, his affairs were far more straightforward. His estate, what little there was, had been left to his sole relative, a distant cousin living in Forest Hills, New York, a woman named Edna Walsh.

  In addition to whatever valuables were in his apartment, Freitag had left behind two CD accounts, totaling six thousand dollars, plus a money market account worth, at the time of his murder, just over two thousand. He did not own a car, and had paid off the mortgage on his home three years earlier.

  Jessica looked at the video tape on the desk. She didn’t want to watch it. She knew she had to.

  She picked up the tape, crossed the duty room to the small room next to Interview A, the cluttered space that held the four monitors and VCRs. She slipped the tape out of its sleeve, put it in the machine, pressed PLAY.

  The first shot in the video was the time and date stamp, along with victim’s name and location of the scene. A few seconds later the video began to roll. It was handheld, moving toward an object sitting in the middle of the field, about thirty yards away – an object Jessica knew to be a dead human being. The body was sitting up on an old wooden chair, covered with a translucent plastic sheet.

  As the camera moved closer to the body Jessica saw that the sheet was held down in the front by a pair of large stones. In the back someone, probably an officer for the crime scene unit, had fashioned a pair of stakes out of thick tree branches. As the camera focused on the victim, Jessica could see the flesh beneath the plastic – a filmy wash of pink and red and brown.

  Every so often snowflakes would land on the lens, and the videographer would reach around to clean it. During one of these shots, the camera caught two CSU officers, young guys huddling inside their PPD issue rain jackets, stamping their feet, blowing into their gloved hands. At the moment they looked to be rethinking their career choices.

  Jessica had been there, considered that.

  ‘Okay,’ someone on the tape said. It sounded like John Garcia.

  One of the officers reached down and removed the two rocks holding down the plastic sheet. He then grabbed the sheet by those two corners. The other officer pulled up the stakes behind the victim and held those corners. They both looked off camera, presumably at the lead detective. Slowly, the two CSU officers lifted the plastic sheet. They held it over the victim’s head, doing their best to shield him from the snow, which looked to be turning to sleet.

  When the sheet cleared the victim’s head, Jessica saw him for the first time. It was an image that would stalk her dreams for a long time.

  She knew that Robert Freitag was fifty-six years old at the time of his death, but it was almost impossible to tell by looking at his face. Or what was left of his face. There was very little about it that was still recognizable as human. His head had swollen to almost twice its normal size. Where his nose had been was now an amorphous mass of dark blue and purple tissue. Both of his eyes were distended and open so widely that the eyelids had split. A green viscous substance had formed over the top of his eyes, a substance that had begun to freeze in the rapidly dropping temperature. He wore what appeared to be a long-sleeve white shirt, now a mass of dried blood and flecks of mottled flesh.

  As the camera circled the body Jessica saw the murder weapon for the first time. As horrible as it sounded on paper, it was worse to see. The railroad spike sticking out of the victim’s head had split the man’s skull nearly in two. Broken pieces of skull were frozen to the bisected flaps of torn scalp. Flesh clung to the back of the man’s collar.

  Jessica was suddenly glad, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she had skipped lunch.

  As the camera’s field of vision returned to the front of the body, Jessica saw something she had not noticed the first time, something so incongruous to the drab, wintry setting she wondered how she had missed it. There, peeking out of the victim’s clasped hands, was what appeared to be a dried flower. A white flower with a yellow center. She stopped the tape, scanned the evidence log. All of Freitag’s clothing, as well as the murder weapon and the chair in which he sat, were cataloged by CSU. There was no mention of a flower.

  Jessica looked more closely at the screen. She was by no means knowledgeable about flowers – indeed, she had a notorious black t
humb when it came to plants both indoor and outdoor, had been known to kill plants with a dirty look – so she made a note to get a printout of this angle from the video recording.

  She hit PLAY once again. Before the video ended, the camera panned across the area where John Garcia stood. For a brief moment Garcia looked straight at the lens, and Jessica felt her heart flutter. It had only been a month or so since she had seen him, but in that time he had moved to that area of her heart reserved for people who had passed on.

  She rewound the tape, let it play. When the camera once more found John’s face, Jessica hit PAUSE.

  In the background, slightly out of focus, was the body of Robert August Freitag. In the foreground was the detective tasked with finding the man’s killer. Jessica knew that, forty-eight hours after this video was made, John, too, would be dead.

  Jessica saw the puzzlement in the man’s eyes – the confusion caused by the insidious malignancy in his brain – but also saw the kindness. John Garcia had been the gentlest of souls.

  Jessica hit the eject button, removed the tape from the machine, put it back in the envelope, thinking: We’ve got your back now, John. Rest well, my friend.

  Back at her desk, Jessica picked up the small envelope containing the door key she would need to gain entrance into the victim’s house. As she slipped on her coat she saw Dana Westbrook crossing the duty room.

  ‘Sarge, have you seen Kevin?’

  Westbrook pointed in the general direction of Northeast Philadelphia, and said: ‘He’s already at the scene. He’s waiting for you.’

  ‘At the crime scene?’

  Westbrook nodded. ‘At the crime scene.’

  5

  Detective Kevin Francis Byrne stood in the cold rain, at the edge of the field, thinking: All killing grounds are the same.

  If there was one truth he had learned in his many years working homicides, it was that a place where murder is done – whether it be an inner-city tenement, a Chestnut Hill mansion, a lush, green field – never again holds a sense of peace. What had once been pristine land was forever lost to madness.

  For Byrne it was more than that. In his time as a homicide detective he had witnessed the grim residue of violence, the broken lives, the yoke of suspicion and hatred and distrust. Neighborhoods never forgot.

  Byrne had long ago given up the notion of closure as it applied to the family of the victim. For the police and the courts and the politicians closure meant one thing: a number on a ComStat report, a headline in the paper, a campaign slogan. For survivors, it was a nightmare that never found the morning.

  At times Byrne forgot simple things – he’d once left a pair of dress shirts at a dry cleaner’s for over a year – but he recalled in rich detail every case he had ever worked, every notification he’d ever made. He often drove through the city and got a feeling when he passed the scene of a murder, felt the hair on his arms bristle. For more than twenty years – since he himself had been pronounced dead for more than a minute, only to come back to life – he’d had these intuitions, these vague feelings that led him down dark paths.

  On this day, standing in a place where murder was done, Byrne saw that there were no flowers, no wreaths, no crosses, no remembrance of the evil that had been loosed here. The field probably looked as it had a hundred years earlier.

  It was not.

  Byrne walked the grid as he imagined it, the path by which Robert Freitag had come to this place.

  When he had read the files in the binder, such as it was, the first thing he noticed was that there was no hand-drawn sketch of the crime scene. Even in this age of iPads and Nexus tablets, the most frequently used method of detailing a murder scene was still a pencil and a yellow legal pad. If you were a real up-and-comer you bought your own grid paper.

  Whether John Garcia was capable of such a thing, so close to the very end of his life, was unknown.

  Byrne wondered what it looked like from the inside for Garcia. Byrne had twice been shot in the head. The first time, he was just grazed by the bullet. The second time it was much more serious. He was extremely fortunate that there was no lasting damage, but his lot in life, for the rest of his life, was to undergo a yearly MRI. The prevailing theory, at least as far as his neurologists went, was that the MRI was just precautionary. The truth was that Kevin Byrne was at risk for a litany of neurological maladies, not the least of which were aneurysms and tumors.

  Many a night – too many, if truth were told – he had stayed up, cruising the internet for horror stories that involved aneurysms and tumors, especially the warning signs. Usually, for the first few days after those Bushmills-fueled research sessions, he was certain that he exhibited nine out of ten symptoms.

  Lately, there had been one sign that lingered. It was probably something that he should contact his doctors about, but he hadn’t had the courage to do so.

  At this moment, at the edge of this frozen field, there was a scent in the air, something Byrne was certain no one else could smell. Part of him hoped there was a reasonable explanation for it. Part of him feared there was not.

  Byrne closed his eyes and breathed deeply. There could be no doubt. The smell brought him to a time and a place he could not see; a flood of sensory input he knew was part of a memory not his own.

  There, beneath the odor of sack cloth and human waste, was the smell of wet straw.

  6

  Priory Park, in the northeast section of the city, was tucked between Frankford Avenue and the banks of the Delaware River. The heavily wooded 62-acre tract acquired its name from the monastery that had once stood on the grounds in the early 1800s. All but one of the buildings had long since been razed, leaving only a small stone chapel near the northwestern corner. Threaded through the dense trees was a tributary of the Poquessing Creek, which emptied into the Delaware River, just a few hundred yards from the eastern edge of the park.

  When Jessica turned onto Chancel Lane she saw the solitary figure standing at the edge of the southern section of the park. Although it had only been two weeks since she had seen him, it seemed like a longer period of time. When you work as closely as she and Byrne did, time apart was, in many ways, the same as time apart in a marriage. At first it was a welcome respite, but after a while, when the people around you didn’t quite get what you were saying, didn’t see things quite the same way you did, you began to miss that person, to miss the shorthand. More than once, over the past two weeks, Jessica had seen or heard or read something, and one of her first reactions was to tell her partner about it.

  She had her husband Vincent, of course, but Vincent Balzano was as different from Kevin Byrne as he could be. Except for the brooding part. What complemented Jessica’s own personality in her marriage also worked with her partnership as a homicide detective. It carried the same basic statute, as well.

  You could both be crazy, you could both be temperamental, just not at the same time.

  Byrne had been injured on a case the previous year, and had spent a long time on medical leave, the longest time he had been off the job in his entire time on the force. Many in the unit were certain he would retire, but one day he showed up at the Roundhouse, as if nothing ever happened, and he and Jessica were soon on a new case.

  But Jessica, who arguably knew him better than anyone in the squad, maybe in the world, had noticed a change. While he was not one of those detectives always ready to deliver some wisecrack, he did have his moments. Still, he seemed more serious in the past six months. Maybe serious was the wrong word. He seemed a bit more introspective.

  Seeing him standing at the edge of the field, silhouetted in the gray mist, he looked more solitary than ever.

  The rain was unremitting. As always, Jessica had her umbrella – the big London Fog Auto Stick she’d gotten as a Christmas present from Vincent, Sophie and Carlos last year – in the trunk of the car. Why she did this, she would never know. How hard was it to keep an umbrella in the back seat?

  As she parked she noticed that Byrne was
holding one of those small umbrellas you pick up on Market Street for five dollars when you’re caught on the street without one. It barely reached halfway to his shoulders. It was mostly serving to keep his head relatively dry. One good gust, though, and it would invert. And the wind was starting to blow. Jessica grabbed her notepad, tucked it inside her coat, clicked her pen three times, which had somehow become a habit years ago, as if she were Dorothy and wore ruby slippers. She put her pen away, took a deep breath knowing she was going to get soaked, opened the door and sprinted to the back of the car. Within seconds she had the trunk open, and her umbrella out and unfurled.

  She crossed the road, walked over to where Byrne stood.

  ‘Hey, partner,’ she said.

  Byrne turned to look at her. Any fear she’d had about him and his dark moods evaporated in an instant. His eyes were a bright emerald, like always.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Not much of an umbrella.’

  Byrne smiled. ‘No substitute for quality,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jessica pointed to the field. ‘Did you walk it off?’

  It was a perfunctory question. She knew he had.

  ‘Yeah.’ He pointed to an area about thirty feet in from the road. ‘The body was found right there.’

  ‘What about the binder?’ Jessica asked. ‘Are you up to speed?’

  ‘As much as I can be.’

  ‘Did you make much out of John’s notes?’

  ‘Not really,’ Byrne said.

  John Garcia did not work with a partner, so there was no one to ask about these things. His strange doodles, it seemed, would forever remain a mystery.

  ‘And there’s no lead on where the missing files are?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘No. Before I left the office I looked at every binder in that drawer, plus the drawers above and below it. They’re not in there.’ Jessica put her umbrella over the two of them just as a gust of wind cut across the open field, soaking them both with frigid rain. They huddled a few inches closer to each other.