Play dead jbakb-4

by Richard Montanari

  She looked at the first box, the one painted yellow. She knew this one had been opened. There was a slight gap between the door on top and the sides, a gap of an inch or so. Jessica was concerned that the person who opened it had been Officer Caruso, a clear breach of procedure. In a situation such as this, all kinds of precautions could have, and should have, been taken.

  Jessica eased open the lid. The hinges creaked, echoing off the hard walls. She angled the beam of her flashlight.

  Inside was a thing of nightmares.

  The partial, long-decayed corpse wore a spangled red sweater, big silver hoop earrings. Around the neck was a distinctive black opal necklace. Jessica had seen it before. She knew who this was. She might have known all along.

  It was the girl in the photograph they had found in the Bible. The girl irretrievably connected to Caitlin O'Riordan.

  The girl they were supposed to find.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He had given the girl a much-needed bath, washed and conditioned her hair, averting his eyes as much as he could and still do a proper job, lest the girl find him immodest or, even worse, lecherous.

  He used a mint shampoo from Origins.

  Restoration, he had thought with a smile. In which an object is restored to its original condition.

  When they were finished, he wheeled her down the hall. She was still a little groggy. He had given her yet another Brisette, one of his crushable ampoules containing chloroform. In the 1970s his father had purchased hundreds of them from an English woman who worked as a midwife. Joseph knew all too well their effect.

  "Are you comfortable, my love?"

  She turned her head slowly, remained silent.

  They entered an upstairs sewing room. It was one of Joseph's favorite rooms. The wallpaper was a blowsy floral in water silk, papered from the skirting board up to the dado rail. But the room was much more than beautiful. It was magic. With the touch of a button, located behind the reproduction of William Beattie-Brown's Golden Highlands, the eastern wall would rise and give onto a small parlor overlooking the rear of the property. The touch of another button, this one beneath the spy window overlooking the great room, would release a four-by-four trapdoor behind the divan. Swann had never found the need to use either.

  He positioned her in front of the television and pressed the PLAY button on the remote, starting the video.

  "Attend, the Great Cygne," Swann said.

  He had transferred all the old film footage-there was precious little of it, reaching back to his father's early performances in 1948-to videocassette years ago. The original 8 mm footage had been brittle, and he had found a company in South Philly that transferred old home movies to CD, DVD, and videocassette.

  The first images were of his father as a very young man, perhaps twenty. An entertainer of German extraction, performing in New York City in the late 1940s. What courage it must have taken, Joseph often thought.

  A quick cut found his father at about twenty-eight. He now sat at a nightclub table with five others. It was a static, high-angle shot. Vegas, late 1950s. The very best place at the one of the very best times in history. The Great Cygne performed some coin magic to a delighted crowd. He executed Four Coins to a Glass, the Flying Eagles, the Traveling Centavos. In a flourish he grabbed an ice bucket from a passing cart and presented a variation on Miser's Dream.

  The next images passed in a blur: a club in Amsterdam, a backyard party in Midland Texas, an appearance at a county fair in Berea, Ohio, a performance for which his father was paid in rolls of quarters.

  Image after image, as the tape rolled on, showed a man whose skills and temperament were slowly eroding, a man whose mind was becoming an echoing hollow of horrors, a journeyman illusionist reduced to catalogue tricks: cigarette through a quarter, cut and restored rope, sympathetic cards.

  That is why, years earlier, Joseph added a postscript to the tape, a breathtaking coda filmed when his father was in his prime.

  The Seven Wonders was a tightly edited, graphic-rich version of a full-length routine his father had performed on a local-access cable channel in Shreveport. Joseph had cut the performance to the sounds of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic?" Hokey, he knew. He had once had thoughts of marketing the event on DVD someday, provided he could get back the rights.

  Swann watched for what was perhaps the five hundredth time, his heart racing.

  First was the Garden of Flowers, then the Girl Without a Middle, then the Drowning Girl, then the Girl in the Sword Box.

  "Watch this," he said to Patricia. "Watch what happens next. This is the Girl in the Sub Tank. This is your part."

  When the video was finished, Swann descended the stairs, crossed the great room, allowed himself a glass of sherry. He climbed back upstairs.

  "I have a few errands to run, but I will be back, and you and I will have dinner. Maybe we'll even dress. Won't that be fun?"

  The girl looked at him. Her velvet gaze was no longer soft. It amazed him again and again how quickly youth faded. He rolled the chair into the guest room and locked the door.

  Minutes later, as he prepared to leave, he heard the girl scream. By the time he reached the foyer and slipped into his coat, the sound had receded to a distant echo. By the time he stepped onto the porch, it was only a memory.

  The day was bright and sunny, rich with birdsong. Swann singled out a voice. It was a yellow-throated warbler, another lost soul, asking its peculiar questions of the world.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Byrne walked to his car, his heart and mind abuzz with the events of the past hour. He still really didn't know what this lunch date with his wife was all about, but he wasn't going to overanalyze it.

  Who was he kidding? Besides being one of his most annoying personality quirks, overanalyzing was pretty much what he did for a living.

  He took out his phone, fired it up, wincing immediately at the possibility of a dozen angry messages waiting for him. You were never supposed to be completely out of touch with the unit, even if you were off duty, especially if you had active investigations. But in this age of cellular communications, and all its attendant glitches, there was always an excuse.

  I couldn't get a signal.

  My battery was low.

  I had it on Silent.

  As soon as the phone went through its boot-up process and found a tower, he got an e-mail. It was from Colleen. She'd sent him the photograph she'd taken in the lobby. It completed his day.

  Seconds later his phone rang. Byrne looked at the display. It was Jessica. Even her name looked pissed off. He flipped open the phone, went for bright and cheerful.

  "Hey!"

  "So now you turn your phone off?"

  Busted. "I'll explain," Byrne said. "Where are you?"

  "Shiloh Street."

  "Shiloh Street?" Byrne was a little surprised, a lot intrigued. "Why?"

  "We've got a body. Female, mid-teens."

  Shit. "Warm or cold?"

  "Cold," Jessica said. "Been here for months."

  "Inside the house?"

  "Yep."

  "Where was she?"

  "Remember that rug in the basement?" Jessica asked.

  "Yeah."

  "CSU rolled it up and found a hole cut into the floor. An access hole to the crawlspace."

  "She was in the crawlspace?"

  "In the crawlspace."

  "Any ID on the victim?"

  "I haven't been able to confirm it, but my gut tells me we do."

  "Why is that?"

  "She's wearing the same jewelry as the girl whose picture we found in that Bible."

  Byrne's stomach, and mind, began to revolve. This was starting to reach deeper, and further, than he had imagined. And he had imagined something pretty bad. "Go on."

  "About an hour ago we got the Missing Person info, so we have a name, but the body is decomposed to the point where a visual ID isn't possible. We're going to have to get dental. Still, I think the clothes and jewelry are a slam."


  "We have a COD?"

  "We won't know that for a while, but I can make a fairly informed guess," Jessica said.

  "What do you mean?"

  A moment's hesitation. "You don't want to know."

  "It's kinda my job."

  Byrne heard his partner clear her throat. It was her usual stall. "She's in pieces, Kevin. In boxes."

  "Christ."

  "There are three wooden boxes in the crawlspace, but there are only remains in two of them. One box is empty. The one in the middle. And they're painted. Red, blue, and yellow."

  "The same colors as those marks in the Bible."

  "Yep."

  Byrne closed his eyes, recalled the girl in the photograph. She looked so young, so vulnerable. He'd had hopes. Not great hopes, but hopes. "And this is ours?"

  "It is."

  Byrne took out his notebook, noted the time. "Hit me."

  "Presumptively, the victim's name is Monica Louise Renzi," Jessica said, spelling the first and last name. "She was sixteen. From Scranton. Missing for just over six months. Dino and Eric are on the way up just in case."

  Jessica was talking about Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez, two experienced detectives from the homicide unit. "Okay."

  "This is developing hard and fast, partner," Jessica said. "Ike is down here, and word is that the captain is on his way. Nobody's smoking and everyone's buttoned up. Sarge said he called you three times." Shit.

  "Which one are you going to use?" Jessica asked.

  Byrne had to think about it. He didn't want to repeat himself. "I had my phone on silent."

  "I like that one," Jessica said. "Get here as fast as you can."

  "I'm on the way," Byrne said. He headed toward his car. "One more question for you. Why is this ours again?"

  Jessica took a second-a telling second that, between people who know each other well, spoke volumes. Then came the four words Byrne dreaded hearing.

  "She was a runaway."

  TWENTY-SIX

  The first thing she noticed was that there were a lot of foreign people. Foreign people as in Asian, Middle Eastern, African. Not foreign as in folks from three counties over.

  The second thing she noticed was that this was, by far, the biggest room she had ever been in. It might have even been too big to classify as a room. It was more like a cathedral. The coffered ceilings had to be fifty feet high, maybe more, offering a dozen or so enormous hanging chandeliers, ringed by the tallest windows she had ever seen. The floors were marble, the hand railings looked like they were made of brass. At one end was a huge bronze statue called the Angel of the Resurrection.

  As train stations went, she thought, this was probably the Taj Mahal.

  She sat on one of the long wooden benches for a while, watching the crowds come and go, listening to the announcements, to the variety of accents and languages, reading-but not really reading-one of the free newspapers. Politics, opinion, reviews, sex ads. Blah, blah, blah. Even the columns on music and movies bored the shit out of her. Which was rare.

  Around two o'clock she walked the edges of the huge room a few times, passing by the shops, the ticket machines, the escalators down to the trains. She was still stunned by the scale of the place, still glancing upward every so often. She didn't want to look like a tourist-or even worse, some hick runaway-but she couldn't seem to help herself. The place was that amazing.

  At one point she glanced over her shoulder. Three small Mennon- ite children, perhaps just off the train from Berks County, were looking at the ceiling, too. At least she wasn't alone, she thought. Although, with her tight jeans, Ugg boots, and heavy eye makeup, she was just about the furthest thing from Mennonite she could imagine.

  In her experience, the only other place she had ever been that compared to this train station was the King of Prussia mall, the place that had every single store you could imagine, along with a few extra. Burberry, Coach, Eddie Bauer, Louis Vuitton, Hermes. She had visited the mall once when she was about ten. Her aunt had taken her there as a birthday present, but she only came away with a pair of Gap jeans (she preferred Lucky Brand these days) and a bad stomach from something crappy they had eaten at the Ho-Lee Chow or Super Wok or Shang- High or whatever they called the fast-food Chinese restaurant. It was okay, though. Her family was far from rich. Gap was cool back then. Before they left the mall she had found a small discarded shopping bag from Versace and walked around with it at school for three weeks, carrying it like a funky purse. The haters hated, but she didn't care.

  According to the brochure she found on the train, the Thirtieth Street station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and was 562,000 square feet. Located on Market Street, between Twenty-ninth and Thirtieth, it was one of the busiest intercity passenger facilities in the United States, the brochure went on to say, and it ranked behind only New York's Penn Station and Washington's Union Station in its yearly volume of passengers. In the three previous years there had been 4.4 million people boarding trains in the Thirtieth Street terminal.

  Millions, she thought. You'd think there'd be one cute guy. She laughed. She didn't feel like it-there was the rough equivalent of a ball of hot barbed wire in her stomach-but she laughed anyway. The last thing she was doing here was trying to meet cute guys. She was here for something else.

  She sat at one of the tables in the food court, beneath a bright yellow Au Bon Pain umbrella. She tapped her pocket. She was almost broke. When she left the house she'd had sixty-one dollars and change. It seemed like enough money to get through at least a few days on the road.

  Knock knock. Reality calling.

  She dreamed about food. An eight-slice pizza with onions, mushrooms, and red peppers. A double veggie-burger with onion rings. Her taste buds recalled a dish her aunt once made: potato gnocchi with pesto and roasted red potatoes. God, she was hungry. But out here there was a well-known equation: runaway = hungry.

  It was a truth she had better get used to.

  In addition to her rumbling stomach, there was something else she realized that she had better get ready to address. She was on the street, and she needed a street name. She glanced around the room, at the stalls near the doors that led to Thirtieth Street. She watched the people come and go. Every one of them had a name.

  Everyone in the world was known by something, she thought. A name, a nickname, an epithet. An identity. What were you if you didn't have a name?

  Nothing.

  Even worse, a number. A Social Security number. A prison number. You couldn't sink much lower than that.

  No one knew her here. That was both the good news and the bad news. The good news because she was completely anonymous. The bad news because there was no one she could rely upon, no one to call. She was on her own, a fallen pine cone in a lonely forest.

  She watched the ebb and flow of humanity. It did not stop. Tall, fat, short, black, white, scary, normal. She remembered every face. She always had. When she was five years old, the doctors said she had an ei- detic memory-the ability to recall images, sounds, or objects with extreme accuracy-and ever since she had never forgotten a face, or place, or photograph.

  She noticed a guy at the end of the bench, a sailor with a canvas gym bag bursting at the seams sitting next to him like a dutiful beagle. Every so often he would look over at her, then look away, a flash of hot red guilt on his face. He could not have been more than twenty-kind of cute in his buzz cut and uniform-but she was younger, still bona fide jailbait. She smiled at him anyway, just to make it worse. After that, he got up and walked over to the food court. God, what a bitch she could be.

  She glanced at the doors leading to the street. There was a booth selling gifts and flowers. An older couple, perhaps in their thirties, debated over a basket intended for a funeral ceremony. It seemed that the woman wanted to spend a lot of money, seeing as how the dearly departed was her cousin or second cousin, and how they had come all the way from Rochester. The man-a fat guy, a heart attack on a stick, as her aunt used to say
-wanted to forget the whole thing. It seemed he was not a big fan of the deceased.

  She watched them argue for a while, her eyes roaming the florist's wares. Mylar balloons, ceramic knickknacks, crappy vases, a nice selection of flowers. And it came to her. Just like that. All things considered, as she perused the floral displays, she might have called herself Dahlia or Fern or Iris. Maybe even Daisy.

  In the end it became a no-brainer. She may have been a runaway, but now she had a name.

  She decided to call herself Lilly.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Kevin Byrne crouched in the crawlspace, his sciatica besting the Vicodin in his system. It always did. At his height, just over six- three, he felt entombed by the damp, close walls.

  Jessica was directing the scene out front.

  Byrne looked at the three brightly colored boxes in front of him. Red. Yellow. Blue. Used-car lot pennant colors. Happy colors. The boxes-each had a small bronze doorknob and hinges-were closed now, but he had looked inside each. He wished he hadn't, but he'd been thinking that same thought since the first time he walked onto the scene of a violent homicide on the first night he spent in uniform. That night it was a shotgun triple in Juniata. Brains on the wall, guts on the coffee table, St. Elsewhere on the blood-splattered TV It never got better. A little easier sometimes, but never better.

  The wooden boxes were covered in a layer of dust, disturbed only, he hoped, by the gloved hands of the two police officers who had been down here. Jessica and a uniformed officer named Maria Caruso.

  Byrne studied the joints, the miters, the construction of these small coffins. They were expertly crafted. There was definitely a great deal of skill at work here.

  In a few moments the crime scene unit would begin their collection of evidence in situ, then the victim would be transported to the medical examiner's office. The techs were outside the building now, drinking cold coffee and chatting, waiting for Detective Kevin Byrne's signal.

  Byrne wasn't ready yet.