'I need to talk to you.'
'Where are you? I'll come get you.'
A long pause.
'Lucy?'
'I'm in jail.'
The Mini-Station was located on South Street between Ninth and Tenth. Originally activated in 1985 to provide weekend coverage from spring to autumn, addressing the issues generated by crowds gravitating to South Street for its clubs, shopping and restaurants, it had since become a seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, year-round commitment, expanded to cover the entire corridor, which included more than 400 retail premises and nearly eighty establishments with liquor licenses.
When Byrne walked in, he immediately spotted an old comrade, P/O Denny Dorgan. Short and brick-solid, Dorgan, who was now in his early forties, still worked the bike patrol.
'Alert the hounds,' Dorgan said. 'We got royalty in the building.'
They shook hands. 'You getting shorter and uglier?' Byrne asked.
'Yeah. It's the supplements my wife is making me take. She thinks it will keep me from straying. Shows you what she knows.'
Byrne glanced over at Dorgan's bike, leaning near the front door. 'Good thing you can get heavy-duty shocks on the thing.'
Dorgan laughed, turned and looked at the waif-like girl sitting on the bench behind him. He turned back. 'Friend of yours?'
Byrne looked over at Lucy Doucette. She looked like a lost little kid.
'Yeah,' Byrne said. 'Thanks.'
Byrne wondered what Dorgan wondered, whether he thought that Byrne was dallying with a nineteen-year-old. Byrne had long ago stopped being concerned with what people thought. What had happened here was clear. Dorgan had stepped in between a misdemeanor and the law, on Byrne's behalf, and had done it as a favor to a fellow cop. The gesture would go into the books as a small act of kindness, and would one day be repaid. No more, no less. Everything else was squad-car scandal.
Byrne and Lucy had coffee at a small restaurant on South Street. Lucy told him the story. Or, it seemed to Byrne, the part she could bring herself to tell. She had been detained by security personnel at a kids'-clothing boutique on South. They said she'd attempted to walk out of the store with a pair of children's sweaters. The electronic security tags had been removed and were found underneath one of the sale racks, but Lucy had been observed walking around with the items, items which had not been returned to the racks. She had no sales receipts on her. Lucy had not resisted in the least.
'Did you mean to walk out with these items?'
Lucy buried her face in her hands for a moment. 'Yes. I was stealing them.'
From most people Byrne would have expected vehement denials, tales of mistaken identity and dastardly set-ups. Not Lucy Doucette. He remembered her as a blunt and honest person. Well, she was not that honest, apparently.
'I don't understand,' Byrne said. 'Do you have a child? A niece or a nephew that these sweaters were for?'
'No.'
'A friend's child?'
Lucy shrugged. 'Not exactly.'
Byrne watched her, waiting for more.
'It's complicated,' she finally said.
'Do you want to tell me about it?'
Lucy took another second. 'Do I have to tell you now?'
Byrne smiled. 'No.'
The waitress refilled their cups. Byrne considered the young woman in front of him. He remembered how she had appeared in their therapy group. Shy, reluctant, scared. Not much had changed.
'Have you been back to any kind of treatment?' Byrne asked.
'Sort of.'
'What do you mean?'
Lucy told him a story, a story about a man called the Dreamweaver.
'How did you find this… Dreamweaver guy?'
Lucy rolled her eyes, tapped her fingers on her coffee cup for a few seconds, embarrassed. 'I found his card in the trash bin on my cart. It was right there, staring at me. It was like the card wanted me to find it. Like I was supposed to find it.'
Byrne gave Lucy a look, a look he hoped wasn't too scolding or paternal.
'I know, I know,' Lucy said. 'But I've tried everything else. I mean everything. And I think it might actually be doing me some good. I think it might be helping.'
'Well, that's what counts,' Byrne said. 'Are you going to see this guy again?'
Lucy nodded. 'One last time. Tomorrow.'
'You'll let me know what happens?'
'Okay.'
They stood on the corner of South and Third. The evening had grown cold.
'Do you have a car?' Byrne asked.
Lucy shook her head. 'I don't drive.'
Byrne glanced at his van, then back. 'I'm afraid I'm going the other way.' He took out his cellphone, called for a cab. Then he reached into his pocket pulled out a pair of twenties.
'I can't take that,' Lucy said.
'Pay me back someday, then.'
Lucy hesitated, then took the money.
Byrne put a hand on each of her slight shoulders. 'Look. You made a mistake today. That's all. You did the right thing calling me. We'll work it out. I want you to call me tomorrow. Will you promise to do that?'
Lucy nodded. Byrne saw her eyes glisten, but no tears followed. Tough kid. He knew that she had been on her own for a while, although she hadn't brought up her mother this time. Byrne didn't ask. She would tell him what she wanted to tell him. He was the same way.
'Am I going to prison?' she asked.
Byrne smiled. 'No, Lucy. You're not going to prison.' The cab arrived, idled. 'As long as you don't carjack this guy on the way home you should be fine.'
Lucy hugged him, got into the cab.
Byrne watched the cab drive away. Lucy's face was small and pale and frightened in the back window. He couldn't imagine the burden she carried. He'd had the same experience of not knowing what had happened to him or where he had gone for that short period of time when they had declared him dead. But he had been an adult, not a child.
The truth was, Lucy Doucette had a bogeyman. A bogeyman who had kidnapped her and held her for three long days. Three days of dead zone in her life. A bogeyman who lived in every shadow, stood waiting around every corner.
Byrne had gotten a vision when he hugged her, a sparkling clear image that told him about a man who — dates women with young daughters and comes back years later for the girls… something about red magnetic numbers on a refrigerator door… four numbers…
1…2…0…8.
Byrne made a mental note to call Lucy the next day.
Chapter 42
Jessica looked around the bedroom. At least they hadn't broken any lamps. They had, however, knocked everything off one of the night stands. She hoped her mother's Hummels were okay.
Jessica rolled over, gathered the sheets around her. Vincent looked as if he had been hit by a car.
'Hey, sailor.'
'No,' Vincent said. 'No, no, no.'
Jessica ran a finger over his lips. 'What?'
'You are a devil temptress.'
'I told you not to marry me.' She snuggled closer. 'What, are you worn out?'
Vincent caught his breath. Or tried to. He was coated with sweat. He pushed the covers off, remained silent.
'Boy, you macho Italian cops sure talk a good game,' Jessica said. 'Try to get you into round two? Fuggetaboutit.''
'Do we have any cigarettes?'
'You don't smoke.'
'I want to start.'
Jessica laughed, got out of bed, went down to the kitchen. She returned with two glasses of wine. If her calculations were correct — and they usually were at times like these, she had managed to get new appliances over the past two years by playing these moments just right — she would start her maneuvers in ten minutes.
On the other hand, this was not about a new washer or dryer. This was about a life. Their life. Sophie's life. And the life of a little boy.
When she slipped back into bed, Vincent was checking his messages on his cellphone. He put the phone down, grabbed his glass of wine. They clinked, sipped, kis
sed. The moment was right. Jessica said: 'I want to talk to you about something.'
Chapter 43
The man was stabbed twenty times by his lover. The killer, whose name was Antony — a bit of Shakespearean irony — then proceeded to cut open his own stomach, finally bleeding out on the parkway, not two hundred feet from the steps leading to the art museum. The papers ran stories for nearly a week, the high drama too much for them to resist.
I know what really happened.
The murder victim had simply made a meat dish on Good Friday and Antony, being the devout Vatican I Catholic he was, and this being 1939, could not take the shame and guilt. I know this because I can hear their final argument. It is still in the air.
The voices of the dead are a shrill chorus indeed.
Consider the man stabbed over his Social Security check, his final pleas lingering at Fifth and Jefferson Streets.
Or the teenager shot for his bicycle, forever crying at Kensington and Allegheny, right in front of the check-cashing emporium where the regular customers pass by with smug indifference.
Or the grandmother bludgeoned for her purse at Reese and West Dauphin, her voice to this day howling her husband's name, a man dead for more than thirty-five years.
It is becoming harder to keep them out. When I bring one to the other side, it quiets for a while. But not for long.
I push through the huge rusted gate, drive along the overgrown lane. I park in the pooled darkness, remove my shovels. The voices calm for a moment. All I can hear, as I begin to dig, is the slow, inexorable descent of leaves falling from the trees.
Chapter 44
Byrne couldn't sleep. The images of the four corpses rode a slow carousel in his mind. He got up, poured himself an inch of bourbon, flipped on the computer, logged onto the Net, launched a web browser. He cruised the headlines on philly. com, visited a few other sites, not really reading or comprehending.
Have you found them yet? The lion and the rooster and the swan? Are there others? You might think they do not play together, but they do.
He got onto YouTube. Once there, he typed in Christa-Marie Schцnburg's name. Even before he was done typing, a drop-down window opened, listing a number of possibilities.
CHRISTA-MARIE SCHVNBURG BACH
CHRISTA-MARIE SCHVNBURG HAYDN
CHRISTA-MARIE SCHVNBURG ELGAR
CHRISTA-MARIE SCHVNBURG BRAHMS
Byrne had no idea where to begin. In fact, he really had no idea what he was doing, or exactly what he was looking for. On the surface he imagined he was looking for a portal, admittedly obscure, to the case. Something that might trigger something else. Something that might begin to explain Christa-Marie's impenetrable note to him. Or maybe he was looking for a young detective who had walked into a house in Chestnut Hill in 1990 and there began a long, dark odyssey of bloodshed and tears and misery. Maybe he was really looking for the man he used to be.
The final entry on the list was:
Christa-Marie Schцnburg Interview
Byrne selected it. It was three minutes long, recorded on a PBS show in 1988. Christa-Marie was at the height of her fame and talent. She looked beautiful in a simple white dress, drop earrings. As she answered questions about her playing, her celebrity at such a young age, and what it was like to play for Riccardo Muti, she vacillated between confident career woman, shy schoolgirl, enigmatic artiste. More than once she blushed, and put her hair behind one ear. Byrne had always thought her an attractive woman, but here she was stunning.
When the interview was complete Byrne clicked on the Bach entry. The browser took him to a page that linked to a number of other Christa-Marie Schцnburg videos. Her entire public life was shown in freeze-frames down the right-hand side of the page — bright gowns and brighter lights.
He clicked on Bach Cello Suite No. 1. It was a montage video, all still photographs. The photographs in the montage, one slowly dissolving into the next, showed Christa-Marie at a number of ages, a variety of poses and settings: in a studio, smiling at the camera, a side view on stage, a low-angle photograph of her at nineteen, a look of intense concentration on her face. The last photograph was ChristaMarie at nine years old, a cello leaning against the wall next to her, almost twice her size.
Byrne spent most of the next hour watching the YouTube offerings. Many were collage-type videos, assembled by fans, but there were also live performances. The last video was Christa-Marie and a pianist in a studio, playing Beethoven's Sonata No. 3 in A. At the halfway point, in close-up, Christa-Marie looked up, straight at the lens, straight at Byrne.
When the piece finished, Byrne went to the kitchen, took two Vicodin, chased it with a swig of Wild Turkey. Probably not the prescribed way, but you had to go with what worked, right?
He looked out the window at the empty street below. In the distance was the glow of Center City. There was another body out there, another body waiting to be discovered, a raw, abraded corpse with a strip of blood-streaked paper around its head.
He glanced at the kitchen clock, although he didn't need to.
It was 2:52.
Byrne grabbed his coat, his keys, and went back out into the night.
Chapter 45
Lucy sat on the fire escape, wrapped in her dark blue afghan, one of the few things that had survived her childhood, one of the few things that she could stuff into a nylon duffel bag and take with her when she moved on, which she had done so many times in the past two years that she had nearly lost count.
She looked in the window. She had rented this room, a third-floor room in a trinity on Fourth Street, about two months earlier. The family was very nice. An elderly couple with no children, they had welcomed her like a granddaughter, and for the first two weeks had invited her to dinner every night.
Lucy, having had no experience with real family life, had begged off with a variety of excuses until the couple — Tilly and Oscar Walters — had gotten the hint.
The night was calm, the sky was clear, and for the first time in a long while she could see a few stars. Maybe they had been there all the time and she had forgotten to look. Perhaps the darkness was inside her, had made its nest in her soul, and refused to leave, refused to let up.
She wrapped the afghan more tightly around her, but she wasn't really all that cold. Maybe it was all those years in drafty apartments, all those years when the heat was turned off, all those years huddling around an electric stove in winter until the electricity too was turned off.
Since the day the plane came out of the sky, she had tried everything to make the feeling go away. Drugs, alcohol, men, religion, yoga, all manner of self-destruction and abuse. Men. Quite often the men she chose — boys, really — filled in any small gaps in the abuse, making her hell complete.
And now she was in trouble. She always knew she would eventually get caught shoplifting, even though she was good at it. Her mother had sent her into stores from the time she was only three years old. In the first few years she was only the diversion, doing the little-cutie bit to distract store owners while her mother boosted cigarettes or alcohol or, once in a great while, a treat for Lucy.
But today she had gotten caught, and she was going to go to jail. Even though Detective Byrne said that wasn't going to happen, she wasn't so sure. She had wanted to tell him about the man in 1208, but for some reason she couldn't bring herself to do it.
And now, sitting on this rusting fire escape, she began to cry. It was the first time for years. She tasted the salt on her lips. She felt pathetic.
It was worse for the little girl who'd been killed. Little Stacy Pennell. Sergio had told her the story.
In 1999 a ten-year-old girl, whose family had lived in Le Jardin when it had been an apartment building, had been down in the laundry room with her older sister Cyndy. Cyndy, whose job it was to watch her runt of a sister, couldn't be bothered, it seemed. When Cyndy wasn't looking, Stacy had grabbed the keys from on top of the dryer and snuck out of the laundry room.
Sergio said that
when Stacy got off the elevator she probably did not notice the man standing in the stairwell at the end of the hall, just a few feet from the entrance to the Pennell apartment.
When they found Stacy later she had been brutally murdered, her throat cut from ear to ear. Sergio said her body had bite marks on it.
It had happened in Room 1208.
It couldn't have been coincidence, Lucy thought. It just couldn't. The man in 1208 had been there for a reason. Some other little girl was going to be hurt.
Was the man who killed Stacy Pennell the same man who had kidnapped her?
Lucy was suddenly cold. She slipped back inside, shut the window. She walked over to the closet, opened the door, sat down, and waited for the night to embrace her.
Fifteen feet below, in the gloom of the stairwell beneath the fire escape, a man stepped into the shadows and joined Lucinda Doucette in darkness.
Chapter 46
Friday, October 29
In the shower Jessica thought about the previous night. Vincent had listened to her entire well-planned speech. He had been surprisingly receptive to the idea of adopting Carlos, considering that he was not the most open-minded person she had ever met.
They made love a second time, this time sweet, married love, and halfway through she saw something in Vincent's dark eyes that told her they might actually do this. Later Vincent told her, in the twilight before sleep, that he wanted to meet Carlos first before even thinking about making any decision, of course. Maybe he wanted to do a little male bonding, Jessica thought. Take the kid to a Flyers game, do a few Jager Bombs, leaf through a copy of the new Maxim.
As she was getting dressed, she realized that Vincent had made the bed — a first. She also noticed a flower on her pillow. Granted, it was a silk flower, and Vincent had taken it from the arrangement on the dining-room table. But it was the thought that counted.
Marcel's Costume Company was a storefront on Market Street near Third. Established in 1940, Marcel's carried a full line of Halloween outfits, professional make-up, wigs, and accessories. Marcel's also created costumes for local television shows and was quite often hired for supplemental wardrobe for Philadelphia's booming film-production industry.
The Echo Man jbakb-5 Page 22
