The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

  – do murder.

  Byrne thought of Jessica, of her daughter and newly adopted son. He thought of his ex-wife Donna and their daughter Colleen. He thought of Colleen, who would one day soon find love and have a child of her own. He thought about Tanya Wilkins and her sons Gabriel and Terrell. He thought of all the women who hoped for the best for their sons and daughters. He thought of that day long ago when he walked into a church and saw the small figure in the back pew, that blood red coat, the smell of death, a scent he would forever carry in his soul.

  Mother and child, Kevin Byrne thought.

  Mother and child.

  EIGHT

  By the time they returned to the Roundhouse the victim had been transported to the morgue. There he would be fingerprinted, which was protocol for a John Doe. Prints were rarely, if ever, lifted at the scene. Once the prints were taken they would be sent to the latent print section, where they would be run through IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a program run and maintained by the FBI. If the victim had ever been arrested, or worked for a government agency, his prints would be on file.

  While Jessica waited she did the initial paperwork, including filling out the body chart, the standard Police Department form that had four outlines of the human body drawn on it, front and back, left and right side. It also had space for the fundamental details of the crime scene. Whenever someone came onto an existing case, this was the first document they consulted.

  But this body chart was a bit more difficult than usual. It was not easy to diagram the wounds on the body. The fatal wound – the laceration that had probably been responsible for the victim bleeding out – was the one barb that looked to have been specifically sharpened for that purpose. They would know a lot more about that when the victim was autopsied the next morning.

  While all this was pending Jessica called a friend of hers at L & I. The Licenses and Inspections Department was the agency dedicated to, among other things, enforcement and regulation of the city’s code requirements regarding public safety, including building, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, fire, property maintenance, business, and zoning regulations.

  After being on hold for more than five minutes she hung up, deciding to just go there and get what she needed. She crossed the duty room to where Byrne sat at a terminal, running the names of some of the witnesses they had spoken to.

  ‘I’m going to run over to L & I and get a history on that building,’ Jessica said.

  In a city like Philadelphia, with a 300-year history, there was always a battle being fought between progress and preservation. The crime-scene building from that morning had easily been more than a hundred years old. There was nothing particularly interesting or attractive about it, and it clearly had been used for a number of purposes over the years. A visit to the zoning archives would give them a handle on who, if anyone, owned the building now, and what it had been used for in the past.

  Jessica slipped on her coat, looked at her watch. ‘Who’s on at the morgue today?’

  Byrne picked up the phone, made a call to the ID unit. During day work – the shift that was on duty between 8 a.m.

  and 4 p.m. – the print unit kept a technician at the morgue to take prints from unidentified victims. It was the least glamorous duty in the unit – if indeed there was a glamorous section to the latent print unit – and sometimes there was a backlog. Every homicide detective wanted their John or Jane Doe prints yesterday, but sometimes the bodies had to go into the refrigeration rooms pending the process, which made a lousy job even worse.

  Byrne hung up the phone. ‘Judy’s on.’

  Jessica smiled. ‘Lucky us.’

  Judy Brannon was in her late thirties, single, and looking. She was also fearless. Jessica had once visited the morgue on a high-profile case, with the intention of walking the prints through the system. She watched Judy Brannon trying to get prints from a cold corpse when all of a sudden, in the middle of the process, the dead man’s hand contracted, closing around Judy’s wrist. Jessica had jumped a foot when it happened – not to mention enduring two sleepless nights as a result – but Judy had remained completely calm throughout.

  In addition to her valiant work, and rather Rubenesque figure, Judy Brannon had a mad crush on Kevin Byrne.

  ‘Bring me back something sweet,’ Jessica said to Byrne as he walked out the door, heading to the morgue.

  ‘Besides myself?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that sweet.’

  The zoning records for the city of Philadelphia were located at the concourse level of the Licenses and Inspections offices at 15th and JFK. The area dedicated to studying the archives was a warren of drab gray cubicles.

  While she waited, Jessica considered that, because this was part of a homicide investigation, she could have had her commissioner call the commissioner of L & I, thereby greasing the wheels. She decided that sometimes it was easier to save the chit, and wait in line. She flashed her badge and a smile, and before too long an L & I employee led her over to a terminal, and showed her how to access the information she wanted.

  The process was a little confusing at first, but Jessica soon found the data on the crime-scene building. She began to read the history of the address, which went back more than 150 years.

  Working front to back, she waded through documents such as zoning and use permits, prerequisite approvals, limited cooking permits (the building had once been used to house a restaurant it seemed), plot plans, electrical permits, and other documents. Although she found out that the property was abandoned, due to non-payment of taxes, she decided to check records all the way back to the building’s original owners.

  After twenty minutes or so of dry, municipal data, one name popped out, and changed everything.

  ‘You’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me,’ she said, loud enough to draw attention from the handful of people at the other terminals. She looked up, offered a silent sorry to all of them.

  Jessica printed off her findings, grabbed her coat, and all but ran back to her car.

  When Jessica returned to the Roundhouse, Byrne was waiting for her. She didn’t even have to ask. He proffered a white bakery bag – always a good sign.

  God, she was going to become a cow. She decided she would put these empty calories into the bank of time she owed the treadmill, as opposed to the other bank she owed the elliptical trainer. She figured she was up to somewhere around four and a half months straight on the treadmill, at a four-mile-per-hour pace. If she ran all the way to Baltimore, and halfway back, she’d be paid up.

  She finished the Danish, took the computer printout from her portfolio.

  ‘You ready for this?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘I love conversations that begin that way.’

  Jessica handed Byrne the printout she made at L & I.

  ‘This is the ownership history of that building?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Yeah. Skip down to the bottom of the second page. The rest of it is pretty boring.’

  Byrne flipped a page, scanned the next one. It listed the previous owners of the property.

  ‘Check out the owner in 1853,’ Jessica said.

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Well put.’

  Byrne read it again. ‘John Nepomucene Neumann?’

  ‘Himself.’

  ‘As in Bishop Neumann?’

  ‘Well, Saint John Nepomucene Neumann now, but yeah.’

  Jessica had asked the clerk in zoning about ownership. It turned out that, for many years, property owned by the Catholic church listed the bishop of the diocese as the owner. As a Catholic Jessica probably should have known this, but it was far from the only thing about her faith on which she was clueless.

  ‘So, this means that the property was at one time a Catholic church,’ Byrne said.

  ‘It does. It was originally called St Adelaide’s. After St Adelaide’s merged with a larger parish the building was sold to the Methodists, and I guess they couldn’t make a go of it either. As y
ou can see, it’s been a lot of things since.’

  ‘It still had that Catholic vibe though, didn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  Jessica knew that ‘vibe’ meant one thing to Byrne, and another to her. When she saw her partner go back into St Adelaide’s, on his own, she knew that he needed time inside by himself. She had long ago learned to accept and respect Kevin Byrne’s gifts. They didn’t talk about them too much, but the knowledge was always there, always between them. Jessica figured one day Byrne might spill his guts to her about it. Doubtful, but maybe.

  ‘And no one is on the books for the property now?’

  Jessica shook her head. ‘No one has paid taxes on it in ten years. I checked the last owners. Long out of business. In the wind.’

  Philadelphia had the unfortunate distinction of having more real estate tax deadbeats than any other big city in the United States, with more than 100,000 properties in default. There were tens of thousands of empty buildings and vacant lots in North Philadelphia, Fairhill, and Nicetown/Tioga alone.

  Byrne filed the zoning documents in the binder, considered some of the exterior photographs of the building that was once St Adelaide’s. ‘The X on the pole,’ he said. ‘It means something.’

  ‘It has to,’ Jessica said. ‘Let’s get on ViCAP today. Plug all this in.’

  Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program – was a national registry of violent crimes: homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains. Case information submitted to ViCAP was available to authorized law-enforcement agencies around the world, and allowed investigators to compare their evidence to all other cases in the database and identify similarities.

  Jessica crooked a thumb over her shoulder, in the general direction of the morgue on University Avenue. ‘So, how’d we do, Romeo?’

  ‘Have I failed yet?’

  ‘It’s the lemon Pledge. I’m telling you.’

  ‘Judy said she would red line the fingerprints,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s in the works.’

  ‘Guys?’ came a voice from behind them.

  Jessica and Byrne turned. Josh Bontrager was in the doorway to the duty room.

  ‘What’s up, Josh?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘There’s something you should see.’

  The Video Monitoring Unit was on the first floor of the Roundhouse. The huge space was arranged in three tiers with long curved tables on each level. Each table had a number of wired terminals into which a technician could plug a laptop, and from there monitor any of the hundreds of police cameras that were deployed around the city.

  At the front of the room was an enormous monitor, measuring ten feet diagonally. At any given time, any image from any camera in the city could be displayed on this.

  When Jessica and Byrne walked in with Josh Bontrager there were four technicians at work. Bontrager led Jessica and Byrne over to a monitor at the far end of the top tier. On the laptop was a high-angle night shot of a street corner. A now-familiar street corner.

  ‘This footage is from that pole cam?’ Byrne asked.

  Bontrager sat down at the terminal. ‘Yeah. As you can see, it covers the entrance to the alley next to the building, over to just left of the front door.’

  ‘How far back can we go on this cam?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘This cam dumps every two weeks, so we have footage of our victim and someone else entering the building. Or at least their shadows.’

  Bontrager hit a few keys on the keyboard. The image on the small screen was dark, but Jessica was able to pick out some details. There was a light-colored van parked directly in front of the church. The space in front of the van was empty. Every so often someone would pass by, walking either up or down Amber Street. Jessica constantly checked the time code. At the 10:05:44 p.m. mark Bontrager stopped the recording.

  ‘Okay, here we’re going to see two individuals enter from frame right. At least it looks like two individuals. No way of knowing what’s out of frame.’ Bontrager tapped the screen, lower right. ‘As you’ll see, they hesitate, then go down that alley. Which, as you know, is a dead end.’

  ‘They don’t walk in front of the camera?’ Byrne asked.

  Bontrager shook his head. ‘Just our victim, and just for a second.’

  The recording inched forward. For a moment, the street-lamp caught the figure on the left in profile. Although Jessica wouldn’t swear to it in court, it looked a lot like their victim. But it did not look as if he were being coerced or forced down the alley. Despite the moment’s hesitation, he looked like a willing participant. A second later there were only shadows on the alley wall, one of them wearing a pointed hood. Then they were gone.

  ‘And we never get another angle?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Unfortunately no. The cam was set up to catch activity on the corner. We’re lucky to have this much.’

  ‘Can you run that back?’ Jessica asked.

  Bontrager rewound the recording, replayed it. He isolated the frame where the victim was most discernible.

  Jessica checked the date code. It was a week and a half old. ‘Wait. You’re saying he was in that basement for ten days?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ Bontrager said. ‘I ran the recording forward, and no one goes in or out of that alley, except for that person in the hood, and then we only see the shadow.’ He pointed to the time code in the corner. ‘And always at the same time every night.’

  ‘Always around ten?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘Always around ten.’

  Jessica shuddered at the idea of being strapped to a chair for ten days, gagged and bound by barbed wire, in virtual darkness.

  Bontrager fast-forwarded through the recording for the next ten days. Every night, around 10 p.m., a figure would go up that alley, then emerge a few minutes later. It was impossible to see anything other than the shape of the pointed hood.

  ‘And this brings us to last night,’ Bontrager said.

  He hit the key. A few seconds later the figure entered the frame, stood for a moment, raising both hands, as if in benediction, then reached out and touched the lamp post, marking it in a slashing motion. This was the ‘X’ they had found.

  A moment later the figure walked off, frame right. Jessica looked at the time code. It was 10:10:54.

  ‘Is there any way to see this more clearly?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, not more clearly, but bigger,’ Bontrager said.

  He backed up the recording to the point when the hooded figure finished marking the pole. He hit a few more keys, and threw the image onto the huge monitor at the front of the room. He hit a button, and the recording began to progress one frame at a time. Bontrager got up, walked down the tiers, positioned himself next to the huge monitor.

  Onscreen, the hooded figure stood, hands raised. They could now see that the figure’s hands were white, but that may have been gloves.

  ‘I don’t suppose we could get this in any more detail,’ Byrne said.

  ‘No,’ Bontrager said. ‘I asked the techs. This was recorded at night, with low-level light. What we’re seeing here is about it.’

  ‘Can they get us a printout of this frame?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘That they can do,’ Bontrager replied. He looked at his watch. ‘Maria and I are going to recanvass. It’s possible that someone might have had an angle from the other side of Amber Street.’

  While Byrne studied the image on the huge monitor, Bontrager walked back to the table, gathered his belongings. He lingered for a moment.

  ‘What is it, Josh?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘She’s really pretty.’ He turned, looked at Jessica, reddening by the second. ‘I said that out loud, didn’t I?’

  Jessica smiled. ‘I’m afraid so. You’re talking about Maria?’

  Bontrager nodded, swallowed hard.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ Jessica said.

  Bontrager lowered his voice. ‘Do you know if she’s, you know, seeing anyone?’

  Jessica knew that Mari
a Caruso had an on-again, off-again relationship with a lieutenant in the 23rd District. It was mostly off-again these days, if Jessica wasn’t mistaken. ‘I don’t think she is, Josh.’

  ‘I wonder what would happen if I asked her out.’

  ‘Worlds would definitely collide,’ Jessica said. ‘The heavens would fall, the seas would dry up. I don’t think we’d even get cable anymore.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Bontrager said. ‘Seriously. Do you think she would go out with me?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Do you want the long list or the short list?’

  Jessica had to smile. Josh Bontrager was terminally shy.

  ‘I think it’s time to bust a move, detective. No time like the present, right?’

  Bontrager thought for a moment. ‘You’re right. Maybe I will.’ He slipped on his coat. ‘Thanks, Jess.’

  He put his shoulders back and left the room, a spring in his step. A few minutes later a uniformed officer stepped in. ‘Detective Byrne?’

  Byrne turned from the monitor. ‘Yes?’

  The officer held up a pair of documents. ‘You just got this from latents.’

  Byrne crossed the room, thanked the officer, read the sheets. He came back to where Jessica was standing.

  ‘Looks like we have an ID,’ Byrne said. ‘Our victim’s name is Daniel E. Palumbo.’

  ‘He was in the system,’ Jessica said.

  ‘He was.’

  Jessica, recalling the needle marks on the victim’s arms, figured he had been processed at some point in his life. She looked back at the monitor, at the façade of the abandoned church. She now had a name to go with the horror that took place in that basement.

  ‘You ready for this?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Now, see, that’s just payback for before.’

  ‘He was a cop.’

  Jessica was stunned. More than stunned. ‘What?’

  Byrne tapped the paper in his hands. ‘He was a patrol officer for eighteen months.’

  ‘Here in Philly?’

  ‘Here in Philly.’