The Echo Man jbakb-5

by Richard Montanari

  They were sitting at the bar in a corner tavern in Kensington, a hole in the wall called The Well. The place was half-full. Kool and the Gang were on the juke; an ESPN wrap-up of the day's sports was on the television over the bar.

  Byrne slipped in the earbuds, blotting out the Parking Wars victim, looked at the screen on his iPod, dialed down to his classic blues playlist. The jukebox in the bar was now playing something by the Commodores, but here, inside Byrne's head, it was 1957, and Muddy Waters was going down to Louisiana, saying something about a mojo hand.

  Byrne nodded to the bartender, the bartender nodded back. Byrne had never been to this tavern before, but the barkeep was a pro at what he did, as was Byrne.

  Byrne had grown up in Philadelphia, was a Two-Streeter for life, had seen the city's best days and its worst. Well, maybe not its best. It was, after all, the place where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, the place where the Founding Fathers had gathered and hammered out the rules by which Americans, at least to some small degree, still lived.

  On the other hand, the Phillies had won the World Series in 2008, and for a Phillies fan that trumped some faded old document any day.

  In his time on the job Byrne had investigated thousands of crimes, worked hundreds of homicides, had spent nearly half his life among the dead, the broken, the forgotten.

  What was the Thomas de Quincy quote?

  If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath- breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

  Byrne had his own word for it.

  Slippage.

  To Kevin Byrne, slippage was about accepting levels of behavior that previous generations would have considered unthinkable, standards that had slowly become the norm, new lows from which the cycle could begin again, inching ever downward.

  Lately he found himself thinking obsessively about all the innocent, the unavenged. He thought about the short, inconsequential life of Kitty Jo Morris, aged three, scalded to death by her mother's boyfriend, a man angered over the little girl's habit of taking the remote from the living room; of Bonita Alvarez, not quite eleven, who was pushed from the roof of a three-story building in North Philly for hiding one of her older sister's Rice Krispie treats in the broom closet; of Max Pearlman, aged eighteen months, left in a car overnight in January while his father smoked crack underneath the Piatt Bridge.

  No headlines here. No NBC White Paper specials on the state of the American family. Just a little less space in the graveyards. Just a little slip.

  Now, in Byrne's head, it was 1970. Blues legend Willie Dixon was proclaiming that he ain't superstitious. Neither was Kevin Byrne. He had seen too much to believe in anything but good and evil.

  And evil is in the house, Byrne thought as he considered the man sitting across the bar from him at that moment, a man who had the blood of at least two people on his hands, a murderer named Eduardo Robles.

  On a hot summer afternoon in 2007, Eduardo Robles and his girlfriend were walking down a street in Fishtown. According to Robles, at around 1:30 p.m. a car cruised slowly by, the deep bass of a rap song rattling the windows of nearby buildings. Someone in that car pointed a gun out the window and fired. Robles's girlfriend, a seventeen-year- old named Lina Laskaris, was struck three times.

  Robles called 911, and when he arrived at the police station, after having his statement taken by a patrol officer on the street, a divisional detective assumed that the young man was a suspect, not a witness. The detective cuffed Robles and stuck him in a holding cell.

  Byrne got the call at eleven p.m. When Robles arrived at the Roundhouse — nearly ten hours after the incident — Byrne removed the cuffs, sat Robles down in one of the interrogation rooms. Robles said he was hungry and thirsty. Byrne sent out for hoagies and Mountain Dew, then began to question Robles.

  They danced.

  At three o'clock the next morning Robles rolled, and admitted it had been he who'd shot Lina Laskaris. Byrne arrested Robles for murder at 3:06 a.m., read him his Miranda warnings.

  The problem with the case was that, according to the law, the police had six hours to determine someone's status as a witness or a suspect.

  Three days later the grand jury came back with a no-bill because they believed, rightly so, that the arrest had begun the moment Robles was mistakenly put in cuffs at the station house. In that moment Robles went from witness to suspect, and the clock began to tick.

  Five days after killing his girlfriend in cold blood, Eduardo Robles was a free man, courtesy of the astonishingly incompetent work of a divisional detective who, incredibly, due to some unfathomable political connection, had recently been rewarded for his incompetence with a job in the Homicide Unit, at an increase in pay.

  That man's name was Detective Dennis Stansfield.

  Robles went back to the life and within months was involved in the murder of a man named Samuel Reese, a night clerk at a bodega in Chinatown. Police believed that Robles shot Reese twice, took the surveillance disk from the recorder in the back room, and walked out with sixty-six dollars and a can of brake fluid.

  It was all circumstantial — no ballistics, no physical evidence, shaky witness accounts — nothing that would stand up in court. In terms of the reality of the law, bullshit.

  Byrne had spent the past two days building a case against Robles, but it was not going well. Although they had not found the murder weapon, Byrne interviewed four people who could put Robles in that bodega at that time. None of them were willing to talk to police, at least not on the record. Byrne had seen the fear in their eyes. But he also knew that talking to a cop on the street corner, or in your living room, or even at your place of business was one thing. Talking to a district attorney in front of a grand jury, under oath, was something else. Everyone called to testify would understand that committing perjury in front of a grand jury carried a prison term of five months, twenty-nine days. And that was for each lie.

  In the morning Byrne would meet with Michael Drummond, the assistant district attorney assigned to the Robles case. If they could get four people to implicate Robles, they might be able to get a search warrant for Robles's car and apartment, perhaps finding something that would create a daisy chain, and the evidence would roll in.

  Or maybe it wouldn't get that far. Maybe something would happen to Robles.

  You never knew about such things in a city like Philadelphia.

  Were the police partially responsible for the death of Samuel Reese? In this case they were. Robles should never have gotten back on the street.

  Slippage.

  On the day Robles was arrested, Byrne visited Lina Laskaris's grandmother. Anna Laskaris was a Greek immigrant in her early seventies. She had raised Lina alone. Byrne told the woman that the man responsible for Lina's death was being brought to justice. He remembered the woman's tears, how she held him, how her hair smelled of cinnamon. She was making pantespani.

  What Byrne remembered most was that Anna Laskaris had trusted him, and he had let her down.

  Byrne now caught a glimpse of himself in the filmy mirror behind the bar. He wore a ball cap, and the glasses he had been forced to start wearing lately. If Robles had not been drinking he might have recognized Byrne. But Byrne was probably just a blur in the near distance to Robles, as well as to everyone else in the bar. This was no upscale Center City watering hole. This place was for hard drinkers, for hard men.

  At 12:30 Robles stumbled out of the bar. He got into his car and drove down Frankford Avenue. When Robles reached York Street he turned east, drove a few blocks, parked.

  Byrne sat in his car across the street, and watched. Robles got out of his car, stopped twice to talk to people. He was looking to score. Within minutes a man approached.

  Robles and the other man walked, a little unsteadily, down the alley. A moment later Byrne saw light flare against the dirty brick wall of the alley. Robles was hitting the rock.<
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  Byrne got out of his car, looked both ways up the street. Deserted. They were alone. Philadelphia was once again sliding into slumber, except for those who moved silently through the harbor of night.

  Byrne stepped into shadow. From somewhere, perhaps deep inside him, a long-forgotten melody began to play.

  It sounded like a requiem.

  Chapter 6

  Monday, October 25

  The early morning run through Pennypack Park had become a sacrament, one that Jessica was not quite ready to relinquish. The people she saw every morning were not just part of the landscape but part of her life.

  There was the older woman, always meticulously turned out in 1960s pillbox chic, who walked her four Jack Russell terriers every morning, the dogs in possession of a wardrobe more extensive and seasonal than Jessica's. There was the tai chi group who, rain or shine, performed their morning rituals on the baseball diamond near Holme Avenue. Then there were her buddies, the two Russians, half-brothers, both named Ivan. They were well into their sixties, but incredibly fit, as well as shockingly hirsute, given to jogging in their matching lime- green Speedos in summer. For half-brothers they looked almost identically alike. At times Jessica could not tell them apart, but it didn't really matter. When she saw one of them she simply said, 'Good morning, Ivan.' She always got a smile.

  When she and Vincent and Sophie moved to South Philly there would still be a few places for her to jog, but it would be a long time before Jessica could run again without caution, like she could here.

  Here, where her route and path were well worn, she could sort things out. It was this she would miss most of all.

  She rounded the bend, ran up the incline, thought about Marcia Kimmelman, and what had been done to her. She thought about Lucas Anthony Thompson, and the startled look in his eyes when he'd realized it was over, the moment the cuffs clicked shut on his wrists and he was yanked to his feet, dirt and gravel on his face, his clothing. Jessica had to admit she liked the dirt-and-gravel part, always had. Mud, weather permitting, was even better.

  With this comforting image in mind she turned the corner, onto her street, and saw someone standing at the end of her driveway. A man in a dark suit. It was Dennis Stansfield.

  Jessica let her feelings morph from apprehension to annoyance. What the hell was this jackass doing at her house?

  She slowed to a walk for the last one hundred feet, catching her breath. She approached the man, who seemed to realize he was out of place.

  'Detective,' Jessica said, suddenly conscious of her appearance. She wore loose sweatpants and a tight tank top, a sports bra beneath. She had worked up a sweat and taken off her fleece hoodie, tied it around her waist. She saw Stansfield's stare do a quick inventory of her body, then find her eyes. Jessica took a moment, caught the rest of her breath, drilling the look right back. Stansfield flinched first, looking away.

  'Good morning,' he said.

  Jessica had the option of putting her hoodie back on, zipping it up, but that would be telling Stansfield that she had a problem. She had no problems. Not one. She put her hands on her hips. 'What's up?'

  Stansfield turned back to her, clearly doing his best to look at her face. 'The boss said Detective Burns might not be back today, and that if it was okay with you-'

  'Byrne,' Jessica said. 'His name is Kevin Byrne.' Jessica wondered if Stansfield was intentionally busting her chops or was really that clueless. Right now it was a toss-up. It wasn't that Kevin was Superman, but he did have a reputation within the unit, if not the entire department. Jessica and Byrne had worked some high-profile cases over the past few years, and unless you were a rookie you had to know who he was. Plus, Byrne was off cleaning up Stansfield's mess, and this could not possibly have been lost on the man.

  'Byrne,' Stansfield said, correcting himself. 'Sorry. The boss said that he might not be done with the grand jury today, and that we should partner up for the duration. At least until Detective Byrne gets back.' He shuffled his feet. 'If that's all right with you.'

  Jessica didn't remember anyone asking what her thoughts were on the subject. 'You have the notification sheet?'

  Stansfield reached into his suit-coat pocket, retrieved the form, held it up.

  As he did this, Jessica glanced at the house. She saw a shadow near the window in the front bedroom, saw the curtains part a few inches. It was Vincent. Jessica might have been a police officer, and even when she jogged these days she was armed — at that moment she had the sweetest little Browning. 2 5 at the small of her back — but when Vincent saw her talking to someone in front of the house, someone he didn't know, his antennae went up. The number of police officers killed had risen sharply over the past few years, and neither Jessica nor Vincent ever let down their guards.

  Jessica nodded, almost imperceptibly, and, a few seconds later, the curtain closed. She turned back to Stansfield.

  'All in a day, detective,' Jessica said. 'Let's partner up.'

  The twisted, phony smile on Stansfield's face all but shouted his disappointment at her tepid response. 'That's good news,' he said. 'Because we have a job.'

  We, Jessica thought. What a true delight this was going to be. She knew she was up on the wheel. The wheel was the roster of detectives on the Line Squad. When you caught a new case you went to the end of the line, worked the case, slowly making your way back to the top. When you reached the number one position, regardless how many cases you had on your plate, you were up again. Rare was the day in the unit where you cleared your cases when a new body fell.

  '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-consu
ming 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.