The Stolen Ones

by Richard Montanari

  She understood.

  She was looking for something herself.

  When Rachel returned to the office there was a note on her desk from her boss. Diana wanted to see her.

  Rachel got a cup of coffee, walked down the hallway to her boss’s corner office, knocked on her door.

  Diana Perry was the co-owner of the company, in addition to being a broker and an agent.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said.

  Diana was always well-dressed. Although she saved her pricier outfits for the monthly staff meetings, awards banquets, and the like, she was always stylish in the office. Diana had to be in her early forties, but she presented herself much younger.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Bader stopped in this morning.’

  The Baders were the amazon couple, the cowboy and the Saks model. Rachel tried to read her boss’s face. Diana Perry, like all the best brokers, revealed nothing.

  ‘They made an offer on the property you showed. Full price. Cash.’

  Yes.

  Rachel tried to contain her joy. ‘You know, I had a feeling about them,’ she said. It wasn’t true. She had long ago given up on those sorts of hunches. ‘Did we call the seller?’

  ‘We did. Paperwork is underway. Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.’

  It was true. Outside of drug dealing, there were few ways to make more money in less time than selling real estate.

  Diana got up, walked around her desk, closed the door to her office. She sat on the chair next to Rachel’s.

  ‘First off, congratulations. Good work.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Diana took a few moments. ‘I got an interesting call yesterday.’

  ‘A new listing?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Yes and no.’

  Diana Perry, although in possession of a good sense of humor, was not one to play games. Especially when it came to the agency.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Rachel said.

  Diana tapped her pen a few times on the desk. ‘It was about your house. We have an offer.’

  At first Rachel thought she misunderstood. ‘My house?’

  Diana nodded.

  ‘But my house isn’t for sale.’

  ‘That’s what I told them.’

  Rachel was one of the few people she knew in her age group to own a house. She had paid off the house with her first big commission, a multi-unit sale in the Piazza, a condo complex built on the site of the old Schmidt’s Brewery.

  Diana continued. ‘I just thought that maybe it was…’

  Time, Rachel thought. That’s what Diana wanted to say. But she’s too nice to say it. ‘Time?’

  ‘That. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Rachel said.

  ‘They mentioned a number, though. I think you should know that.’

  ‘A nice number?’

  ‘A very nice number. You think about it, and let me know if you want to hear it.’

  ‘Okay,’ Rachel said. ‘I will.’

  She got up from the chair in a sort of a fugue state, afloat on her great sale – and the nice check it would bring – but also on the concept of actually selling her house. It had never occurred to her that she might do it, or at least not until she was older. Then again, she didn’t want to turn into a Gloria Vincenzi.

  She thought about it all through dinner, a quickly forgotten meal at the Chinese restaurant around the corner from her house.

  When she got home she put on the TV just for the sound. At about ten o’clock she flipped it off, went upstairs to the bathroom. She brushed her teeth, washed her face, moisturized. She stood for a moment considering her reflection. She had not known many of her relatives, indeed she did not even know what mix of nationalities and heritage she was. She had fair skin and hair, with eyes a deeper blue than most. Was she Irish? Scots? Or perhaps she was something further north than that. Nordic or Baltic, perhaps.

  She flipped off the light, walked out of the bathroom, down the hall. She anticipated the slight creak of floorboards near the top of the steps, as she always did.

  She glanced at the white bar of light beneath the door at the end of the hall. She did not touch the knob, nor turn it and enter. She never did. She wondered if she ever would.

  It was about your house. We have an offer.

  Rachel had many times wondered how she might react to such news. She thought about the number of properties she had sold over the last few years, how the news of a good offer to the sellers changed their lives. Properties, especially homes, changed hands many times in the lives of the brick and mortar and wood.

  She walked down the stairs and entered the kitchen, made herself a cup of chamomile tea.

  As she put away the tea she noticed that there was only one other cup in the cabinet. When had she packed all the others away? On what day had she resigned herself to this all but solitary existence, even to the point of packing away dishes and cups and saucers and bowls and platters?

  She got dressed, walked out the front door, stood on the sidewalk. The street was dark and quiet.

  She looked at the solitary light burning in the upstairs window. She always thought she saw shadows move on the blinds, but she never had.

  She never would. She knew that, but it never stopped her.

  We have an offer.

  Maybe Diana’s right, Rachel thought.

  Maybe it is time.

  39

  In the hours since Dr Edward Richmond’s body had been found, a task force was formed, fully funded for all the overtime that would most likely be needed to investigate the four murders – Robert Freitag, Joan Delacroix, Edward Richmond and Dustin Green.

  There were now eight detectives assigned to the task force. Calls had been made from high on high to all the science divisions involved in the cases – fingerprint, DNA, criminalistics, document – which were also authorized overtime.

  The FBI had sent over their initial findings on the flowers found at all three murder sites. The white flower left in the hands of both Robert Freitag and Joan Delacroix, as well as placed in a circle at the feet of Edward Richmond, was called anaphalis margaritacea, more commonly known as Pearly Everlasting. It was a perennial flower indigenous to many areas of North America and, according to the FBI report, had been dried and finished using an over-the-counter hair spray. Any forensic possibilities beyond this were negated by the rain, which helped to as good as completely deteriorate the integrity of the evidence.

  As to the little girl, two detectives from the Special Victims Unit had canvassed the area where Violet was found, and had spoken to all but a handful of the people who lived in the immediate area, showing a picture of the girl, with no results.

  As a result, or despite a result, a picture of Violet had been broadcast on all the local television stations, and published in both the Inquirer and the Daily News. So far, no one had called DHS claiming to be a member of the little girl’s family.

  Jessica knew that if no one came forward, Violet would be placed in emergency foster care by day’s end.

  At just before noon John Shepherd walked into the duty room. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. Many times that was the case with a new homicide, certainly one discovered late in the afternoon or evening of the previous day.

  ‘Sorry about that kid,’ Byrne said.

  Shepherd sat down on the edge of a desk. ‘Not as sorry as I am,’ he said. ‘Didn’t get anything out of him before he coded. No description of our boy. Except for white and thirty or forty.’

  ‘I take it that wasn’t just ecstasy he was on,’ Jessica said.

  Shepherd shook his head. ‘Turns out the pills he had – the pills he said he got from the guy whose car he drove up to the park – were laced with potassium cyanide.’

  ‘Cyanide?’ Jessica said. ‘I haven’t heard of that in a while.’

  ‘Tox isn’t complete yet. It might have been a cocktail.’

  ‘So our guy got the kid to drive his car to the park, knowing the kid would take
the tainted pills, and not be able roll on him if he was caught.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Shepherd said. ‘He had to bank on the kid actually doing the job, not coding in the black car before he made it up to the park.’

  ‘How could he depend on that?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘Good question. Two ways, the way I see it. One, the kid hoped to do another job for the guy in the future. Or two, the guy scared the shit out of him.’

  And with good reason, Jessica thought.

  ‘How’s the boy doing?’ Byrne asked. ‘The victim’s son.’

  ‘He’s stable,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’m hoping to talk to him today.’

  ‘What about the place setting on Richmond’s table?’

  Shepherd took out his phone, scrolled through the pictures. He stopped at one, tapped it to enlarge it, showed it to the other two detectives.

  There, on the dining-room table of the victim’s house, was a large soup bowl with a mug turned upside down on it. Next to it, on a folded linen napkin, was a silver spoon.

  Anthony Giordano looked significantly better than he had when they’d first met him sitting watch in his second-story window overlooking the alleyway behind Joan Delacroix’s house. He had trimmed his beard and even gotten his unruly eyebrows in check. Jessica wondered if he had used the Best Cuts coupon on his cork board.

  ‘Thanks for coming in,’ Byrne said. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Took the bus.’

  ‘We’ll get you a ride back.’

  Tony gestured at Jessica, who was standing across the room, talking to John Shepherd. ‘She Italian?’

  Byrne smiled. ‘She is.’

  Tony glanced back at Jessica. ‘Man, if I was fifty years younger.’

  ‘Did I mention she’s married to a cop?’

  Tony looked surprised. ‘She’s married?’

  Byrne nodded.

  ‘She’s not wearing a ring.’

  ‘It’s a whole new world, my friend.’

  Byrne pulled out a chair for the man. Tony sat down.

  ‘What I’d like to do is go through some possibilities to try to identify the car you saw the other day.’

  ‘You mean pictures?’

  ‘Yes,’ Byrne said. ‘We don’t have the pictures here, though. They’re on the internet.’

  ‘I hope you can find them. I don’t know the first damn thing about it.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  Byrne sat down in front of the terminal, navigated to a site they sometimes used to ID cars. The site was divided by decades, starting with the 1930s.

  ‘Where do you want to start?’ Byrne asked.

  Tony thought for a few moments. ‘I’m thinking the sixties,’ he said. ‘That’s when everything went to hell, and I stopped paying attention. I don’t think it was any older than that.’

  ‘Okay,’ Byrne said. ‘So you think it was a big car, right? A full-size sedan?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They began to scroll through the database of full-size sedans from the 1960s: DeSotos, Imperials, Newports, New Yorkers, Galaxies, Lincoln Continentals. Among them, Tony did not recognize any that looked like the car he had seen.

  They moved on to the 1970s, this time scrolling past Eldorados, Impalas, Mercury Marquis, Monte Carlos. They were just about to move onto the 1980s when Tony sat up a little straighter in his chair.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s the one.’

  Anthony Giordano was pointing at a 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado.

  ‘How sure are you that this is the car?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Not one hundred per cent. Like I say, I usually only saw it from behind when it was parked on the street. Do you think we can find a shot of just the rear end, taken from above?’

  ‘It’s the internet. We can find anything.’ A few moments later, on Flickr, they found an overhead shot.

  ‘That sure as hell looks like it,’ Tony said.

  ‘Good deal,’ Byrne said. He hit a few keys, and began to print off some copies. While they were printing, Tony said: ‘Funny thing about cars. There’s that eight- or ten- or twelve-year period in your life – from, maybe, twelve to twenty years old, for boys, anyway – when you know every make and model, every change in the grill, every fender skirt, every fin, every taillight.’

  ‘What decade was yours?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘The forties.’

  Byrne nodded. ‘What was your dream machine?’

  ‘Easy,’ Tony said. ‘It was a nineteen forty-one Buick Club Coupe. Three-speed manual on the column, Fireball straight eight.’

  ‘What color?’

  ‘Powder blue.’

  ‘Sweet.’

  The two men stood up. ‘We really appreciate you coming in,’ Byrne said, helping the old man with his coat.

  ‘Happy to help,’ Tony said. ‘Got me out of the house.’

  ‘If you see that car show up again, you call me.’

  ‘Will do.’ He glanced across the room at Jessica, who was working at a computer terminal.

  ‘She’s married, huh?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘The good ones always are.’

  ‘Truer words,’ Byrne said. ‘Come on. I’ll walk you down.’

  By the time Byrne got back to the duty room, Hell Rohmer was sitting on one of the desks. He wore a knee-length leather duster and a black porkpie hat. In his hands was a large brown envelope.

  ‘I come bearing gifts,’ he said.

  ‘Gifts are good,’ Byrne said. He got Jessica’s attention.

  ‘About those Polaroids,’ Hell began. ‘I managed to get only one of the pictures off the cardboard backing. The reason for that is as follows: the longer any kind of adhesive sits, the more it integrates with the fibers on both surfaces, making it essentially one surface.’

  ‘I always tell Kevin that,’ Jessica said. ‘Now maybe he’ll believe me.’

  Hell smiled. ‘But first to this one.’ He held up one of the Polaroids – the one taken of the man sitting at the long table with dishes on it. Jessica saw where Hell might be going with this, and she found that her heart had begun to race.

  Hell pointed at the dishes and silverware on the table.

  ‘I had this section enlarged,’ he said. ‘It took a little pixel manipulation, but after a few half-steps, I got it up to eight hundred per cent.’ He reached into the envelope, extracted a nine-by-twelve enlargement. He put it on the table. ‘There’s an engraving on the handle. It reads DVSH. It stands for —’

  ‘Delaware Valley State Hospital,’ Byrne said. ‘Cold River.’

  The Delaware Valley State Hospital was euphemistically called Cold River because of its close proximity to the Delaware River. Over the almost one hundred years of its operation, many patients had wandered off the grounds, only to end up in the Delaware. The ones who didn’t drown or die of hypothermia had only one travel tip for fellow inmates upon their return to the institution: stay out of the water.

  When Jessica was small – she imagined it was this way for half the kids who grew up in Philadelphia – her father would threaten her with the place.

  ‘Clean your room or I’m going to send you to Cold River,’ he would say. Cold River was the boogeyman place. It had been closed for a long time.

  ‘This is what Lenny Pintar was referring to,’ Jessica said. ‘The Big Place.’

  She picked up the enlargement. The engraving on the spoon was clear, because when this photograph was taken the etching was new.

  ‘These are our spoons,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Byrne replied.

  Hell looked up. ‘You have these spoons?’

  ‘Long story,’ Jessica said.

  Hell got back to business. ‘Okay. About separating the photographs from the mounting cardboard. The good news is that, if you can get the two surfaces apart, the surface that originally held the adhesive becomes a virtual fingerprint tablet. Like a built-in Super Glue chamber.’

  The Super Glue method of retrieving f
ingerprints, known as cyanoacrylate fuming, was a process where items suspected of containing latent fingerprints were put in a sealed chamber with hot water, a heating element, and a small amount of Super Glue. It was a fairly uncomplicated way of obtaining prints from a nonporous surface, but also carried the danger of over-processing, and losing the specimen for ever. Jessica had seen it happen more than once. Many times, you only had one shot in the Super Glue chamber.

  Hell retrieved a final item from his envelope with a grand gesture. It was an enlargement of what looked to be a thumbprint.

  ‘This was on the back of this photograph?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘It was,’ Hell said. ‘And because I always wanted to grow up and be a detective, I took the initiative.’ At this he took a document from the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Cue the CSI theme music, please.’

  ‘Hell.’

  ‘Right.’ He handed the printout to Jessica. ‘The gentleman whose prints were on the back of that rather unpleasant Polaroid lives in North Philly. His name is Lucius Winter.’

  Jessica sat down in front of a computer terminal. She ran a PCIC check on Lucius Winter. Moments later she had results.

  Lucius Winter was a small-time criminal, twice convicted of misdemeanor assault, once tried and subsequently acquitted of armed robbery. The address was his last-known.

  Jessica held up the Polaroid of the naked man sitting on the table next to the photograph on the computer screen. There was no doubt. The man in the photograph was Lucius Winter.

  Byrne stepped forward, hit a key on the keyboard, scrolling down.

  ‘Jess.’

  Jessica looked at the screen. She saw the stats. Her pulse spiked. Lucius Winter was a white male, six feet, 165, brown and brown. But none of those details leapt off the screen.

  Lucius Winter owned a black 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado.

  40

  The target house was a dilapidated building on Fifth Street, near Diamond Avenue. They sat in an unmarked van three doors east, on the opposite side of the street.

  The process of obtaining a warrant was as maddeningly slow as it was necessary. While the team deployed, Jessica stayed behind, typed out the affidavit of probable cause, then faxed it over to the district attorney’s office, where it had to be vetted by an ADA. Sometimes the process needed to involve the US Attorney’s office.