His gray snout. The dog blinked a few times, adjusting its eyes to the light.
'And who is this?' Jessica asked.
'This is the irascible Biscuit. He is my oldest friend.' Coltrane patted the dog's head. Jessica saw the blanket bounce up and down with the movement of the pooch's tail. 'Is there anything in the world better than a warm biscuit?'
Jessica tried to think of something. She could not. There was as good, but not better. She returned to the business at hand. 'Do you know where I might find Hoochie?'
Coltrane shrugged. '"I wander'd lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills.'"
Jessica raised an eyebrow, expecting more. There was no more. 'Bon Jovi?'
Coltrane smiled. 'Wordsworth.'
In other words, the answer was no. Homeless were just that. Jessica took out the photograph of Marcellus Palmer, the original victim found at Second and Poplar in 2004. 'Did you know this gentleman?'
'Oh yes,' Coltrane said. 'Marcellus. We shared many a tankard of kill-devil. But that was a long time ago.'
'Do you know what happened to him?'
Coltrane nodded sadly. 'I heard he came to an unfortunate end. City buried him.'
'Do you know where?'
Coltrane looked up at the concrete embankment. For a moment there was only the sound of the cars passing overhead. 'Now, I did know at one time. The recollection seems to be pirouetting just at the edge of my memory.'
Jessica produced another five, held it back. 'Think we could coax it back onto the dance floor?'
'I believe we can.'
The money was gone in an instant.
'Up around Parkwood, I believe.'
Jessica's phone rang. She looked at the screen. It was Byrne.
'Thank you for your time, Mr. Coltrane.'
'Always willing to do my part,' he said.
Jessica took a few steps away, answered her phone.
'Where are you?' she asked.
'Still in West Philly.'
Jessica told him what she had learned from Abraham Coltrane. Byrne filled her in on what she had missed. Two of the other homeless men who had been questioned in the murder of Marcellus Palmer were dead. The third man was long gone. Someone told someone that someone's friend had told someone that he was in Florida. Two someones was about the extent of any network worth exploring.
When they met back at the Roundhouse, Jessica checked a roster of the city's graveyards.
There was no cemetery in Parkwood.
Chapter 37
Finnigan's Wake, the popular Irish pub at Third and Spring Garden Streets, in the Northern Liberties section of the city, was packed with a who's who from the department and the DA's office, as well as defense attorneys, paralegals, FBI agents, commissioners, medical examiner's investigators. As always, everyone clustered with their tribe. David Albrecht was there, shooting from the sidelines. Russ Diaz was with his new team. Tom Weyrich was there, looking a little better than Jessica had seen him look in a long time. Maybe it was the Guinness. Dennis Stansfield stood in the corner with two of his old squad mates.
The jampacked party was held on the second floor, also known as the Lincoln Level. After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his body was transported to Philadelphia to lie in state at Independence Hall. That night his body had been kept in a Northern Liberties funeral parlor, and the doors from that establishment became part of the second floor at Finnigan's Wake. More than one pint had been lifted to Honest Abe in this room.
As the evening wore on a number of people got up and told their Michael Drummond stories. Like all leaving parties, the first hour's worth of stories were mild, only somewhat ribald recounts of incidents that happened around the office. The second hour, seeing as Michael Drummond was about to become part of the opposition to most of the people in the room, became a little more adventurous, if not downright drunkenly libelous.
At eleven p.m. Michael Drummond himself took the microphone. Although Drummond was not yet forty, there was a lot of fresh blood in the DA's office and he was referred to as the old man.
'Yes, it's true that I joined the office after an unfortunate incident with a Model A Ford,' he said, drawing polite laughter.
He went on to thank just about everyone he'd ever worked with, on both sides of the aisle, taking particular care to heap praise upon all the judges — men and women in front of whom he would shortly be arguing for the defense — regardless of whether they were at the party or not.
Soon it became time for him to spill the beans. With a clank of a spoon on a crystal glass, he got everyone's undivided attention.
'Folks, I have an announcement to make,' Drummond said.
Everyone quieted down. This was, more or less, the reason they had gathered.
'In two weeks I will start work as a junior partner at Paulson Derry Chambers. Until then, I'm on the job. So watch yourselves.'
A rumble went through the room. Paulson Derry Chambers was one of the most prominent firms in the city. Everyone expected Mike Drummond to go for the dollar, but a junior partnership at Paulson Derry was like stepping into Valhalla. Applause followed.
'Although I didn't know him personally, I'd like to leave you with the wise words of Pericles,' Drummond added. 'He said: "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others."'
'Hear, hear,' someone said.
Everyone raised a glass.
'Here's to old dogs,' a slightly inebriated Nick Palladino added.
Drummond laughed. 'And soft bones.'
Everyone returned to their small groups. The detectives gathered near the tall windows overlooking Spring Garden Street and the view of the Ben Franklin Bridge.
'Ah, shit,' Dino said after everyone sat down.
'What?' Jessica asked.
Dino stood up, looked in his pockets, patted himself down like a suspect. 'I can't believe this.'
'What's wrong?'
Deadpan: 'I think I left my lip gloss at home.'
Someone snorted.
Dino pointed at Byrne's man bag, hanging off the back of his chair. 'Hey, Kev. You wouldn't happen to have any in there, would you?'
Muffled laughs around the table. Byrne shook his head. 'I'm a lot bigger than you are, you know that, right?'
'I know,' Dino said. 'But you're also older.'
'By what, five or six months?'
'Still.'
'That just means it will take me a few seconds longer to get across the room.'
Dino held up both hands. 'Just don't hit me with your man bag.'
Byrne shot to his feet.
Nick Palladino ran to the bar.
By midnight most of the younger players had moved on or gone home. It was a work night. There were young families waiting. After the midnight hour the floor was left to the serious drinkers.
Jessica, who was just about out the door, stood with Byrne near the elevator. Michael Drummond found them, crossed the room. He'd had his share of cheer, and more.
'Thanks for coming, guys.'
Drummond gave Jessica a brotherly hug, shook Byrne's hand, clapped him on the shoulder.
'You do realize we'll probably go up against each other one of these days,' Byrne said.
Drummond nodded. 'Yeah. I feel like I've gone over to the dark side.'
'The money should help ease your pain.'
Drummond smiled. He glanced at his watch. 'I've got to be up in about three hours,' he said. 'We're moving my mother into an assisted- living facility.'
'Do you need another pair of hands?' Byrne asked.
'No, we're good. Thanks.' Drummond slipped on his overcoat. 'I just have to be in Parkwood around six-thirty.'
Jessica looked at Byrne, then back. 'Parkwood?'
'What about it?'
'Well, it's just come up twice in one day.'
'What do you mean?' Drummond asked.
Jessica explained what they had done that afternoon, about Abraham Coltrane's claim that Ma
rcellus Palmer, the 2004 victim found in the Dumpster just a few blocks from where they now stood, was buried in or around Parkwood. Drummond thought for a few moments.
'Well, I'm pretty sure there used to be a potter's field in Parkwood,' he said. 'It closed a while back.'
'Closed?'
'Yeah. I think the bodies were disinterred and either moved to other cemeteries or cremated. I think there was supposed to be some kind of development that went in that spot, but nothing ever happened.' Drummond drained his glass, put it on the bar. 'Can you imagine living on top of a former cemetery?'
Jessica felt a chill at the idea. 'Do you know where the cemetery was located?'
Drummond shrugged. 'No idea. Sorry. I might even be wrong about this.'
'Counselor!' someone shouted drunkenly from across the room. 'You're needed for a voir dire.'
It was two old-timers from the DA's office. The voir dire was a process of jury selection, generally involving the judge and attorneys asking potential jurors about their experiences and beliefs. On the table in front of the two ADAs was one of every different kind of drink in the bar. There had to be fifty full glasses. Drummond looked back at Jessica and Byrne. 'Looks like the night isn't over for me yet. Thanks again for coming.'
Drummond slipped off his coat and staggered across the room.
Downstairs, a few minutes later, Byrne held the door for Jessica. They stepped out onto Spring Garden Street.
'So, what time do you want to meet me at L amp; I?' Byrne asked. The License amp; Inspections division had city-zoning archives going back more than two hundred years. If there had once been a cemetery in or around Parkwood it would be recorded there.
'As soon as they open, detective,' Jessica said.
Chapter 38
Thursday, October 28
The city's last official potter's field had opened in 1956 in Philadelphia's Northeast. Prior to its opening, the most active potter's field had been in a section now used as a police parking lot at Luzerne Street and Whitaker Avenue, adjoining Philadelphia Municipal Hospital, where it became the final resting place for thousands who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. At various times in the city's history, indigent or unclaimed deceased were buried in a number of places, including Logan Square, Franklin Field, Reyburn Park, even at the corner of 15th and Catharine, just a few blocks from where Jessica had grown up.
These days, in the interest of logistics and expense, many of the unidentified and indigent were being cremated, with remains stored in a room off the morgue at the medical examiner's office.
Jessica and Byrne visited the zoning-archives department of Licenses and Inspections at just after eight a.m. The L amp; I office was located in the Municipal Services Building at 15th and JFK. What they learned was that there had once been a potter's field located in the Parkwood section of Northeast Philadelphia, a field that had since closed.
They stopped for coffee and got onto 1-95 at just after nine a.m.
The field was located near the intersection of Mechanicsville Road and Dunks Ferry Road at the southern end of Poquessing Valley Park.
On the south side of Dunks Ferry Road were blocks of two-story twin row homes, their fasciae festooned with Halloween decorations ranging from the elaborate (one had a skeleton about to climb down the chimney) to the ordinary (an already dented plastic pumpkin stuck on a gas light).
Jessica and Byrne got out of the car, crossed the road. They walked through the trees into a large open field. Here the ground was rippled — the uneven remnants of graves that had been there a long time.
There were no headstones, no crypts, no vaults, no mausoleum. The field had indeed been closed, the bodies moved or cremated, the area planted over.
Jessica looked at the rutted sod. She considered the generations of kids to come, flying kites, playing kickball, unaware that at one time the ground beneath their feet had held the remnants of the city's homeless, its indigent, its lost.
They walked slowly across the undulating earth, looking for any sign of what had once been there — a buried headstone, a grave marker of any kind, a stake in the ground indicating the boundaries of the cemetery. There was nothing. The earth had long ago begun to reclaim the area with life.
'Was this the only city field in this area?' Jessica asked.
'Yeah,' Byrne said. 'This was it.'
Jessica looked around. Nothing looked promising, at least as it might concern the cases. 'We're wasting our time up here, aren't we?'
Byrne didn't reply. Instead he crouched down, ran his hand over a bare patch of ground. A few moments later he stood, dusted off his hands.
Jessica heard a rustling in the nearby trees. She looked up to see a half-dozen crows perched tenuously on a low branch of a nearby maple. A murder of crows, she had once learned, and had ever since thought how odd a term that was. A flock of geese, a herd of cattle, a murder of crows. Soon another black bird landed, rustling the others, who responded with a series of loud caws and flapping wings. One of them took off and swooped toward the low shrubs at the other side of the field. Jessica followed the pattern of flight.
'Kevin,' she said, pointing to the bird before it landed out of sight. They looked at each other, started across the open field.
Before they got halfway they saw it — the unnatural gleam through the greenery, the bright white surface glinting in the sunlight.
They sprinted the last hundred feet or so and found the body lying in a shallow depression.
The victim was black, male, in his forties or fifties. He was nude, his body shaven head to toe. The ground beneath the corpse was not yet overgrown with grass. It was a former grave.
'Motherfucker,' Byrne yelled.
He stepped through the scene, taking care not to disturb the surrounding area. He put two fingers to the man's neck. 'Jesus Christ,' he said. 'His body's still warm. Let's get everyone and his mother down here. Let's get a K-9 unit.'
Then Byrne gently opened the dead man's hand. There, on the ring finger of his left hand, was the tattoo of a fish.
They both called it in — Byrne contacted the crime-scene unit, Jessica contacted the homicide unit who would then alert the MEO. They spread out to either side of the open field, weapons out. They checked the immediate area, combing the bushes, the scrub, the culverts and ditches, finding nothing.
Later they regrouped at the corner, each lost in their own thoughts. Although they had not immediately located any ID, there was no doubt in either Jessica's or Byrne's mind that the body they'd found — the dead man lying atop a former grave — was that of Tyvander 'Hoochie' Alice.
The tactical team hit the block in six cars, a combination of special- investigation detectives and members of the fugitive squad.
Russ Diaz and his squad fanned out north and east, toward the woods. A K-9 unit showed up a few minutes later. The next car brought Dana Westbrook. For the moment, this relatively quiet corner of Northeast Philadelphia — a place that had one time been a place of repose and solitude — was crawling with law-enforcement personnel.
Ten minutes later the dog and his officer came full circle, back to the parking area near the ball diamonds. It probably meant that the killer had parked there, returned after dumping the body, and then left. If that was so, the trail was cold.
While CSU processed the crime scene, Jessica and Byrne stood at the top of the hill, watching the choreography unfold below.
Detectives would soon canvass the immediate area. There was a condo development at Mechanicsville and Eddington Roads, a pair of apartments next to it. Maybe someone had seen something. But Jessica doubted it. Their killer was a ghost.
Kenneth Beckman, Sharon Beckman, Preston Braswell, Tyvander Alice.
Four bodies, eight tattoos.
Four to go.
And they didn't have a single solid lead.
The team spent the entire afternoon canvassing. The residences in this part of the city were not as tightly packed as they were in the inner city, so the act of interviewing and
asking the same questions over and over was a much slower, even more enervating process.
They returned to the Roundhouse, followed up on a few weak leads. Nothing. By the end of the tour, the entire unit was exhausted and frustrated. Someone was solving the unsolved crimes in Philadelphia, but they were killing the killers and their accomplices. Someone was shaving these bodies clean, mutilating their faces, and wrapping them in paper. Someone who floated through the city like a phantom.
Jessica sat on the edge of a desk, a cup of cold coffee in her hand. She glanced over at the walk-in closet. Inside were the books of homicide cases dating back more than a hundred years. Inside the books were summaries of hundreds of unsolved cases, cases wherein there were suspects who were never charged with the crime, suspects who never became defendants, defendants who were acquitted for any number of reasons. The books were essentially a list of potential victims for their ghoul.
The duty room was mostly empty. The second tour had already begun, and those detectives were on the street, pursuing leads, tracking down witnesses. Jessica was envious.
'Don't you have a family to go home to?' Byrne asked.
'Nah,' Jessica said. 'Although, funny you should mention it, I have seen a man and a little girl hanging around my house. I should call the police.'
Byrne laughed. 'Speaking of which, how are you adjusting to the new house?'
'Well, besides tripping over the furniture and spinning in place for five minutes because there's nowhere to put a cup of coffee down, it's great.'
'Is it that much smaller?'
Jessica nodded. 'It's a lot like the house I grew up in. Same layout. The only problem is, I was a lot smaller then.'
'What, like a size four?'
'Smartass.'
Byrne's phone beeped in his hand. He looked at the screen, read for a moment, smiled.
'It's a text from Colleen,' he said. 'She wanted me to know she got back from D.C. okay.'
Jessica nodded. 'Wow,' she said. 'Colleen in college.'
'Don't remind me.'
Byrne picked up a tall stack of mail that was rubber-banded together on the desk. It looked like two weeks' worth of correspondence, mostly junk. Jessica wanted to mention to her partner that it was probably a good idea to check the inbox once in a while, but she figured he knew this.
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