The Echo Man jbakb-5

by Richard Montanari

  One room, at the back of the main hallway, had rusted steel buckets lined against the wall, each filled with hardened feces, white and chalky with time. One bucket had the word happy painted on it.

  They took the winding staircase to the second floor.

  In one meeting room was a slanted stage. Above the stage, on the fascia, was a large medallion made of crisscrossed black string, perhaps an occupational-therapy project of some sort.

  They continued through the wing. Byrne noted that many of the individual rooms had observation windows, some as small and simple as a pair of holes drilled into the door. Nothing, it seemed, went unobserved at Convent Hill.

  'This was Maristella's room,' Christa-Marie said. The room was no larger than six by six feet. Against the wall, a long-faded pink enamel, were three threadbare stretchers. 'She was my friend. A little crazy, I think.'

  The massive gymnasium had a large mural, measuring more than fifty feet long. The background was the rolling hills surrounding the facility. Scattered throughout were small scenes, all drawn by different hands — hellish depictions of rape, murder, and torture.

  When they turned the corner into the east wing, Byrne stopped in his tracks. Someone was standing at the end of the wide hallway. Byrne could not see much. The person was small, compact, unmoving.

  It took Byrne a few moments to realize, in the dim light, that it was only a cutout of a person. As they drew closer, he could see that it was a plywood pattern of a child, a boy perhaps ten or twelve years old. The figure wore a yellow shirt and dark brown pants. Behind the figure, on the wall, was painted a blue stripe, perhaps meant to mimic the ocean. As they passed the figure, Byrne saw pockmarks in the plywood, along with a few holes. Behind the figure were corresponding holes. At some point the figure had been riddled with bullets. Someone had drawn blood on the shirt.

  They stopped at the end of the hall. Above them the roof had rotted away. A few drops of water found them.

  'You know at the first note,' Christa-Marie said.

  'What do you mean?'

  'Whether a child has the potential to be a virtuoso.' She looked at her hands, her long, elegant fingers. 'They draw you in. The children.

  At Prentiss they asked me a hundred times to teach. I kept refusing. I finally gave in. Two boys stood out.'

  Byrne took her hand. 'Who are these boys?'

  Christa-Marie did not answer right away. 'They were there, you know,' she eventually said.

  'Where?'

  'At the concert,' she said. 'After.'

  There was a sound, an echoing sound from somewhere in the darkness. Christa-Marie seemed not to notice.

  'That night, Christa-Marie. Take me back to that night.'

  Christa-Marie looked at him. In her eyes he saw the same look he had seen twenty years earlier, a look of fear and loneliness.

  'I wore black,' she said.

  'Yes,' Byrne said. 'You looked beautiful.'

  Christa-Marie smiled. 'Thank you.'

  'Tell me about the concert.'

  Christa-Marie glided across the corridor, into the semi-darkness. 'The hall was decorated for the holidays. It smelled of fresh pine. We debated fiercely over the program. The audience was, after all, children. The director wanted yet another performance of Peter and the Wolf:

  Byrne expected her to continue. She did not. Her eyes suddenly misted with tears. She walked slowly back, reached into her bag, retrieved a piece of paper, handed it to Byrne. It was a letter, addressed to Christa-Marie and copied to her attorney, Benjamin Curtin. It was from the Department of Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. Byrne read the letter.

  A few moments later he took her hands in his. 'Will you play for me tonight?'

  Christa-Marie moved closer. She put her arms around him, her head on his chest. They stood that way for a long time, not moving, not speaking. She broke the silence first.

  'I'm dying, Kevin.'

  Byrne stroked her hair. It was silken to his touch. 'I know.'

  She nestled closer. 'I can hear your heart. It is steady and strong.'

  Byrne looked out the window, at the fogbound forest surrounding Convent Hill. He remained silent. There was nothing to say.

  Chapter 74

  Jessica could not find her partner. she had stopped by Byrne's apartment, visited all his familiar breakfast and coffee haunts, checked his favorite watering holes, hoping not to find him. She had not.

  Byrne had not called into the unit nor, more importantly, shown up for his deposition, his on-the-record statement about his whereabouts on the night Eduardo Robles had been killed. Jessica knew that the inspector had smoothed it over with the DAs office, but it was unlike Byrne in any number of ways, not the least of which was his commitment to keeping his word.

  Jessica spent the remainder of the morning reading through the material on Carnival of The Animals. There were indeed fourteen movements, not all of them devoted to animals. One was called Fossils; another, Pianists; yet another, Finale. For some reason the killer had chosen eight of the movements. But they were all there, and it was all making slow sense.

  Beyond this, all these victims were related to cold cases. They were all suspects in homicides. Or suspected of complicity in homicides.

  The connection to a group like Societe Poursuite and a man named George Archer could not be overlooked.

  All these people were in some way culpable. In the eyes of their killer, they were all guilty of something. But why these people? What linked them? Why the cases of Antoinette Chan, Marcellus Palmer, Marcia Kimmelman and Melina Laskaris? Why not any of the other hundreds of unsolved cases sitting in the dusty books on the shelf?

  At one o'clock Jessica put a call into the Department of Motor Vehicles. If George Archer had a driver's license in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they would be able to get a photograph.

  She skipped lunch and spent the early afternoon on the phone with the lab and the DAs office. Michael Drummond was in court, but his secretary promised Jessica that he would get back to her.

  By four o'clock she learned that there was no one named George Archer registered at any hotel in the greater Philadelphia area.

  She also put in a call to Chief Rogers Logan in Garrett Corners. At her request Logan paid a visit to Archer Farms. George Archer had not returned to his house.

  As the first half of Jessica long day wound down, there were no new leads. The three other lead detectives — Josh Bontrager, Nicci Malone, and Dennis Stansfield — were all on the street, chasing down their leads. Josh had interviewed members of the Chan family. All had concrete alibis. Nicci Malone had taken the morning to drive to Weirton, West Virginia to speak to Marcellus Palmer's son and daughter-in-law. She learned nothing of value. God only knew what Stansfield — obsessed now more than ever with Kevin Byrne — was doing.

  It seemed the Byrne/Stansfield conflict had settled for the time being. There would probably be some kind of fallout from the incident, but it wouldn't be tonight. The homicide unit had a few other things with which to be concerned.

  Jessica arrived home around five-thirty, made a quick dinner for her and Sophie. After dinner Sophie modeled her Snow Fairy costume. She looked adorable.

  Outside, the wind picked up, swirling leaves in the street. Perfect Philly Halloween weather. And there was never a shortage of atmosphere or things to do in Philly on Halloween.

  There was the Ghost Tour, which took participants on a candlelight excursion to Society Hill and Independence Park. There was the tour of Eastern State Penitentiary, once voted the number one haunted house in America. Then there was the Mutter Museum, and the home of Edgar Allan Poe.

  But if Philadelphia was attached to its horrific past, it was nothing if not creative. Jessica had already seen news footage of people trick- or-treating in pink body suits, with a band of paper wrapped around their heads. The new favorite costume in Philly, it seemed, was the victim of a serial murderer.

  Jessica took Sophie out for trick-or-treating ea
rly. This year was different from previous years. Trick-or-treating among row houses was a frontal assault. Within an hour, they hit a hundred or so houses. Sophie returned with a pair of bulging pillowcases.

  While Sophie divvied up her swag on the living-room floor, Jessica showered and prepared for her undercover assignment at the hotel.

  Before she left the house, she caught her reflection in the hallway mirror. Not bad, she thought. The simple black dress was okay, if a little tight. Time to ease up on the cannoli from Termini's.

  The hard part, of course, was the gun. Though in many ways the perfect accessory, most designers did not allow for the bulk of a weapon when creating a line. It was never the Smith amp; Wesson collection for Dior, or Vivienne Westwood presents Frocks with Clocks.

  Just to be on the safe side, she packed a small duffel with jeans and a hoodie, stowed it in the car. She had no idea where this night would take her.

  The team met in Le Jardin's Loss Prevention office. There were ten detectives in all, including Josh Bontrager, Dennis Stansfield, Nicci Malone, and Nick Palladino. Most were in plain clothes, the remaining few had on PPD windbreakers.

  They were briefed by John Shepherd on the layout of the floors, the location of surveillance cameras, the hotel protocol for emergencies. They went briefly over the program for the evening, which included a lavish dinner, a number of speakers, along with a keynote address by the attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition, in the smaller meeting rooms there were various panels and demonstrations. According to Shepherd, excluding front- and back-of-the-house staff and personnel, there were close to one thousand people in the building.

  Every so often Jessica glanced at the door. Byrne had not shown.

  After John Shepherd had completed his briefing, Dana Westbrook addressed the task force. They had received more than seventy DMV photographs of men named George Archer. None were registered to the man at the Archer Farms. The sheriffs office, in addition to detectives from the Pennsylvania State Police, were showing the photographs to neighbors and vendors in the area, trying to match the photo with the man who ran Archer Farms.

  For the first hour Jessica worked the reception table, just outside the Crystal Room. The double-length conference table was draped with white bunting, and carried a few hundred name tags, programs, and pins bearing the slogan He escapes who is not pursued.

  As people filed by, Jessica watched their movements, their behaviors. Overall, it was a rather staid-looking group. Conservatively dressed, quiet in demeanor, polite in manner. In the course of an hour she handed out more than fifty name tags.

  At eight o'clock three men approached from across the lobby, one of them quite inebriated. They were in their forties, white, casually dressed. As they got closer, the shortest one — the drunk one — did his best to focus on the table, on the name tags, and finally on Jessica.

  'Whoa!' he said, reeling a little.

  'Welcome,' Jessica said.

  'My name is Jukka Tolonen,' the tall blond man said, introducing himself.

  'Jay Bowman,' said the other. Jessica scanned the table, found the name tags she was looking for, handed them both a tag and a program.

  'Thanks,' the two men said in tandem, both sounding a little embarrassed for their friend.

  'You know,' the drunk one said, 'I've been coming to this convention for, I don't know, five years? Most of the women look like Mrs. Marble.'

  Jessica was pretty sure the man meant Miss Marple. 'What's your name?' she asked.

  The man looked at his friends. 'You hear that? She asked my name, dude. She's hitting on me!'

  'I think she wants to give you your name tag,' Tolonen said. He had an accent. Maybe Finnish. 'Oh.'

  The drunk man made a production of reaching into his pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out, made a bigger deal of extracting one of his business cards, a big smile on his face as if this were the cleverest bit ever. 'It looks like I'm somebody named Barry Swanson,' he said. 'Like the frozen dinner.'

  Like the frozen adolescence, Jessica thought. She handed Barry Swanson his ID and a program. Swanson immediately dropped it all on the floor. Tolonen picked up the material, clipped the name tag on his wobbly friend.

  'Sorry,' Bowman said to Jessica. 'He's a forensic chemist. He doesn't get out much.'

  Jessica watched them walk away, wondering how crimes ever got solved.

  When Jessica was relieved by a member of the task force, a detective out of West Division named Deena Yeager, she walked over to the front desk, surveyed the crowded lobby. David Albrecht had not gotten permission to film inside the ballroom, but he was allowed to shoot footage in the lobby and out on the street. Jessica saw that he had snagged some talking-head interview time with some pretty heavy hitters.

  Just about everyone in the room had some connection to law enforcement. There were retired detectives, prosecutors, forensic professionals of every discipline, men and women who worked in the processing of fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood, documents. There were pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, people who worked in behavioral science and mathematics. She'd heard there was a small contingent from Keishicho, the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department.

  She saw Hell Rohmer and Irina Kohl, pretending to be merely colleagues. It didn't take a seasoned detective to detect the occasional brush of hands, or the more than occasional longing glance. She saw judges, lawyers, bailiffs, along with a handful of ADAs.

  She did not see Kevin Byrne.

  Chapter 75

  Lucy Doucette stood at the end of the hallway on the twelfth floor.

  Her shift ended at six-thirty, but she asked Audrey Balcombe if there were any credits to be had and it turned out that three of the guests had requested housekeeping twice a day. She imagined these people were in some kind of lab or forensic work and had a serious germ phobia. Regardless, she was able to stay on for an extra two hours. Now she was just killing time.

  Lucy knew that the moment she swiped her card in the electronic lock on the door to 1208 it would go on the record. She was scared out of her wits to go back in there, but she had been scared so long it just didn't matter anymore.

  She looked over her shoulder. The hallway was deserted, but Lucy knew she was not alone, not technically. She had once been in the main security station and had seen the big monitors. All staff knew where the closed-circuit cameras were. At least, the cameras they knew about, the obvious ones on the ceiling. At the end of each hallway was a sideboard and a mirror, and Lucy always wondered if the mirrors were two-way mirrors and maybe had a camera behind them.

  Before she could stop herself, Lucy knocked on the door to Room 1208.

  'Housekeeping.'

  Nothing. She knocked again, repeated the word. Silence from within. She leaned closer to the door. There was no sound of a TV, a radio, a conversation. The general rule was two announcements, then enter.

  Lucy tried one last time, got no response, then swiped her card, eased open the door.

  'Housekeeping,' she said once more, her voice barely above a whisper. She slipped inside, let the door close behind her. It shut with a loud and final click, meaning that the lock had irrevocably registered that she was in Room 1208.

  The room looked exactly the same as it had the last time. The minibar was untouched, the bed had not been slept in, the wastebasket beneath the desk was empty. She peeked into the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed in there, either. The toilet paper was still in a point, the soaps wrapped. Sometimes the nicer guests tried to hang the towels back the way they were, but Lucy could always tell. They never got them exactly right. She could also tell if someone had taken a shower or bath, just by the smell, the damp sweetness of body gel and shampoo that hung in the air.

  She stepped back to the door, put her ear to it, listened for sounds in the hallway. It was silent. She walked to the closet, opened the door. The garment bag hung there like a body at a gallows. She reached out slowly, turned over the ID tag, her hand shak
ing.

  This bag belongs to George Archer.

  Lucy felt a chill ripple through her body. His name was George Archer. All these years she had tried to imagine her kidnapper's name. Everyone had a name. Whenever she read a newspaper or a magazine, whenever she watched a movie or a TV show, whenever she was in a place like a doctor's office or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and someone said a name out loud she wondered: Is that his name? Could that person be the man in her nightmares? Now she knew. George Archer. It was, at the same moment, the most benign and the most frightening name she'd ever heard.

  She closed the closet door, walked quickly over to the dresser, her heart pounding. She eased open the bottom drawer. The same shirts were inside — one blue, one white, one white with thin gray stripes. She mind-printed the way they were arrayed in the drawer so she could put them back in precisely the same manner. She bunched the three shirts together, lifted them. They seemed almost hot to her touch. But when she looked beneath the shirts, she saw that the picture was gone.

  Had she imagined it?

  No. It had been there. She had never seen that particular photograph before, but she knew where it had been taken. It had been taken at the ice-cream parlor on Wilmot Street. It was a photo of her mother, and her mother was wearing the red pullover sweater that Lucy had taken from Sears at the mall.

  Lucy turned, looked at the rest of the room. It suddenly seemed foreign, as if she had never been here before. She put the shirts back in the drawer, arranging them carefully. She noticed something in the pocket of the shirt on top, the blue one. It was a piece of paper, a piece of Le Jardin notepad paper.

  Lucy slipped her fingers gently into the pocket, took out the paper. It read:

  Meet me here on Sunday night at 9:30. Love, Lucy.

  It was her handwriting.