The Killing Room

by Richard Montanari

‘No, Hell,’ Jessica said. ‘I’m asking if there is –’

  ‘There is,’ Hell said. ‘It’s not really a church, but rather a chapel. Used to be a chapel.’

  ‘It’s closed?’

  ‘It is. A couple of years now. Ever since they tore that old hospital down.’

  Jessica heard her phone beep.

  ‘I just texted you the address.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You got it,’ Hell replied. ‘I hope the good guys get there first.’

  The good guys did not.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Jessica and Byrne stood at the foot of the mattress. Next to them stood Maria Caruso and Josh Bontrager. The sight before them was horrific beyond imagining.

  The dead woman was white, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. She was naked, except for a cloth that covered her eyes.

  The old mattress beneath her body was soaked with blood. The woman’s throat had been slashed. No, slashed was too kind a word, Jessica thought. Her throat had been savaged. The action had left the muscles in the woman’s face in a rictus of terror.

  ‘Detectives?’

  It was a CSU officer in the small room off the main section of the basement. The four detectives walked across the room. The first thing Jessica noticed as she got closer were the dozen or so small yellow cones on the floor, placed there by crime scene officers, noting where blood evidence had been dropped. The drops led to the old stone archway.

  Jessica stepped in first. There was something on the floor. When she knelt down to get a closer look, she realized what it was. Bile rose in her throat.

  It was the woman’s tongue. The killer had cut out the woman’s tongue, and pulled it from her throat.

  Jessica looked overhead, and saw the rusted iron pipe coming through the floor. They were below the sacristy.

  Look to the sacrarium.

  While the CSU began to process the basement, Jessica walked the first floor, made some rough measurements. Josh Bontrager drew the sketch. He would be the lead investigator on this case.

  Four churches. Four brutal murders. No suspects.

  Jessica knew this case would be folded into the task force, just as she knew that status reports on these murders had already reached the inspector level, most likely the commissioner.

  She also had the feeling that whatever overtime money was needed to put the rest of the shuttered churches in Philadelphia County under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance would now be appropriated.

  By early afternoon they learned that, unlike the other cases, they already had an ID on the victim. A car parked directly in front of the chapel was registered to a woman named Michelle A. Calvin. A PCIC check provided a photo ID, and showed that a few years earlier Michelle Calvin had been arrested in a prostitution sting, and as a result served four months in jail. The search also yielded the woman’s current employer, Rudolph Realty. Josh Bontrager put in a call and spoke to the owner of the victim’s firm, Raymond Rudolph, who agreed to come down to the crime scene to talk to investigators.

  As Jessica and Byrne emerged from the church, they saw Rudolph standing next to one of the sector cars, talking to Bontrager. Rudolph was clearly shaken. In his late thirties, standing five-eight or so, Rudolph was dressed conservatively in a black trench coat, white shirt, maroon club tie. He turned a BlackBerry over and over in his gloved hands.

  Introductions were made.

  ‘You were her boss?’ Bontrager asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was.’

  ‘Do you know what brought her here today?’

  ‘She had an appointment with a buyer.’

  ‘This property is for sale?’

  Rudolph nodded. ‘It’s been on the market for a long time.’

  ‘What do you know about the buyer?’

  Rudolph reached into his pocket, brought out a printout of an email. ‘Michelle was here to meet a woman named Mara Reuben.’

  Jessica looked at Byrne. Mara Reuben. The woman Jessica had talked to across from St Adelaide’s. The phantom who was not on the video recording.

  ‘Did you ever meet this woman?’ Bontrager asked.

  ‘No,’ Rudolph said. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Do you know if this woman ever called Ms Calvin, ever left a voicemail?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I can check.’

  ‘We’d appreciate that,’ Bontrager said. ‘Also, do you know if the woman ever visited your office? If, perhaps, someone else there has ever met her?’

  ‘I don’t believe so. Again, I’ll ask. But keep in mind we’re a small office. There are only five of us.’ The expression on Rudolph’s face said that it suddenly occurred to him that there were now only four.

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might have had a problem with Ms Calvin?’ Bontrager asked. ‘Any deal that might have turned sour?’

  Jessica knew that Josh knew that this murder was part of an ongoing ritual, not a personal vendetta, but it was a question that had to be asked.

  Rudolph shook his head. ‘Not really.’

  They gave the man a moment to clarify his answer. He did not.

  ‘Is that a no or a maybe?’ Bontrager asked.

  The man looked up, clearly conflicted about something. ‘Look, it’s not really my business what a person does, or what they used to do. I know Michelle had some … difficulties in life before she came to work for us. But she was bright and smart and, by all accounts, had turned her life around. I was happy to work with her, and happy to have known her. God judges, detective. Not man.’

  Rudolph began to mist up. He turned away. Bontrager gave him time.

  Jessica figured the man was talking about Michelle Calvin’s arrest and conviction for prostitution, but maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe there was much more.

  Because of the ever-widening scope of these related murders, everything was passing through the commanders of the various units. On scene now was the day work commander of the Crime Scene Unit. Sergeant Terry O’Neal was a veteran in his fifties, a jovial father of six, but heart-attack serious about his job. He had worked as a patrol officer when Byrne was coming up, and the two men had a long relationship.

  Jessica overheard bits of their conversation.

  ‘Every inch, Terry. Every fucking inch,’ Byrne said, sotto voce. ‘I’ll pay for the overtime myself.’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘There is something in this building that is going to lead us to the next scene, and I want to find it before he gets to the next church.’

  And the next body, Jessica thought.

  She took out her iPhone, opened a browser. On a hunch she did a search for names of people in the Bible. Before long she was rewarded. Of all the women in the Bible, there was one named Mara, and one man named Reuben. She called Byrne and Bontrager over. ‘Look.’

  The two men looked at the screen.

  ‘In Hebrew, Mara translates as sad, and Reuben means vision of the son,’ Jessica said. She put her phone away. ‘I think I’m going to get together with a sketch artist today.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Bontrager said.

  Twenty minutes later, as the investigators began the process of collating the details of a new homicide, Jessica looked out the window of the chapel, saw Byrne talking to a paramedic, a woman in a blue windbreaker. Jessica soon recognized her as one of the paramedics who treated Danny Palumbo.

  Jessica observed the woman’s body language and noticed that there were private signals happening between her and Byrne. She couldn’t see the woman’s face, which would have helped, but it looked like there was something between the two of them that transcended the job.

  Something intimate.

  FORTY

  Shane watched the police activity from the coffee shop across the street. There were a half-dozen sector cars ringing the old church, a gathering of rubberneckers. Shane hadn’t gotten the details over police radio – you rarely did, you were lucky to get the nature of the complaint and an address – but he knew this h
ad to be the discovery of another body. You didn’t call out the cavalry over some kid breaking and entering for a place to hit the pipe.

  But more important than the sector cars was the Ford Taurus that had arrived, and was now parked fewer than fifty feet away from where Shane stood. A PPD detective car parked outside the crime scene tape. A car that had brought detectives Byrne and Balzano.

  Their presence here told him pretty much all he needed to know.

  Cyn was on assignment up in Cheltenham, some kind of water main break. That was okay. This one Shane wanted all to himself. He had become so prolific at one-man-banding a story that he would defy any field reporter, anywhere in the world, to tell the difference with an on-air piece. He could even edit on the fly on his MacBook Pro if he needed to.

  This was the kind of investigative piece that would land him in Anderson Cooper’s chair.

  As a pair of CSU vans arrived at the scene, and the patrol officers in the street made the gathering crowd part for them, Shane saw his opportunity. He put up the collar on his coat, exited the coffee shop.

  When he got near the car he dropped his shoulder bag – ostensibly by accident, if anyone was watching – and put the small magnetic tracking device inside the right rear fender. He stood up, dusted off his pants, glanced around. No one had seen him.

  Perfect.

  The car was, of course, a departmental car, and didn’t belong to either Jessica Balzano or Kevin Byrne, but Shane knew that detectives tended to sign out the same cars over and over again. This allowed them to keep some of their personal gear in the trunks. The tracking unit was a little pricey, and Shane had already lost one, but the monthly fee for tracking via GPS was only $19.95. As long as his laptop could get a satellite signal, he could track the device anywhere in the world.

  Shane had gotten shut out of the story featuring Byrne doing his Hulk act on that punk dealer, and it wasn’t going to happen again. True, he’d gotten the exclusive with the kid’s cell-phone footage, but he could have had crystal clear video if he’d been a little better at his surveillance technique.

  He now had his DV camera with him, battery charged, with a second fully charged backup battery in the trunk.

  When this story broke big – and he had the feeling that was going to happen very soon – he would be there.

  FORTY-ONE

  From the vestibule at St Ignatius’s Jessica and Byrne watched the crime-scene officers establish a search grid. A half-dozen technicians would spend the rest of the day and night collecting any and all potential evidence – hair, fiber, fingerprints, fluids. It was an exasperatingly slow and exacting process.

  Byrne walked over to where Jessica stood.

  ‘If they don’t come up with something I’m going to rip this place apart with my bare hands,’ he said. ‘It’s here.’

  Before Jessica could respond her phone rang. She answered. It was Dana Westbrook.

  ‘What’s up, Sarge?’

  ‘Well, first things first,’ Westbrook said. ‘We ran the name Mara Reuben and came up empty.’

  This was no surprise.

  ‘Where are you on the canvass?’ Westbrook continued.

  ‘We’re just going to start,’ Jessica said. ‘CSU is here, and I just wrapped up with the sketch artist.’

  A sketch of the woman Jessica had talked to across from St Adelaide’s, the woman who called herself ‘Mara Reuben,’ would soon be circulated. Jessica had given a highly detailed description of the woman, but was now all but certain her beautiful silver hair was a wig.

  ‘I’m going to send some other detectives down there for the neighborhood interviews,’ Westbrook said.

  ‘Why?’ Jessica asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We’ve got DNA results back.’

  ‘Are you saying we have a hit?’

  ‘We do.’

  By the time they arrived at the Roundhouse a half-dozen task-force detectives had assembled in the duty room. There was more than a little electricity in the room.

  Dana Westbrook spoke first.

  ‘Folks, we have a serious break. We have DNA results from the first three scenes,’ she said. ‘As you know, there were hair samples found on all three sites, follicles stuck between the pages of missals. According to the lab, there was enough mitochondrial DNA present to make a match.’

  Although Jessica was far from an expert on forensic hair analysis, it had come up often enough for her to have a basic understanding of what the lab could and could not do with a hair sample. If samples were matched with DNA analysis, it was better than a fingerprint.

  ‘All three were between pages?’ Byrne asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Westbrook said. ‘In Revelation. Dead solid on all three. We ran them through CODIS and every bell, whistle, and alarm went off.’

  The Combined DNA Index System was a database maintained by the FBI that matched profiles of unknown perpetrators against a state’s database of convicted offenders.

  ‘So we have a suspect?’ Byrne asked.

  Westbrook nodded. But there did not seem to be any glee in her face, or the expected – and well-earned – smug satisfaction all cops get from the gotcha phase of a homicide investigation.

  ‘I’m not seeing happiness here, Sarge,’ Maria Caruso said. ‘Why are we not happy?’

  Westbrook handed the report to Byrne. Jessica, Josh Bontrager, and Maria Caruso crowded around.

  The DNA sample found on three separate crime scenes – three separate homicide scenes – belonged to a man named Roland Hannah, a self-styled evangelist preacher who had once terrorized the city with his vigilante murders. Both Jessica and Byrne had worked a collateral case, which took investigators up the Schuylkill River.

  But that wasn’t the amazing part.

  The amazing part was that Roland Hannah had been an inmate in the State Correctional Facility at Graterford for the past five years.

  THREE

  THE LAST SAINT

  Who is worthy to open the book,

  and to loose the seals thereof?

  – REVELATION, 5:2

  FORTY-TWO

  Detectives Jessica Balzano and Kevin Byrne sat in a department-issue Taurus on the rise overlooking Graterford State Correctional Facility.

  In her years on the Philadelphia Police force Jessica had only been here a handful of times. The realm of correctional facilities – their inner workings, their politics, the very world they occupied – was beyond the experience of most city detectives. The majority of a homicide detective’s work took place at a different part of the continuum which began the moment one person lifted his or her hand in anger at another, and ended when a convicted suspect was led from a courtroom in shackles.

  The Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Graterford was located in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, about thirty miles west of the city of Philadelphia. Built in 1929, it was Pennsylvania’s largest maximum-security prison, housing more than 3,500 inmates. In addition to its five major cell blocks, and small mental-health unit, the facility was surrounded by 1,700 acres of farmland.

  There were nine manned towers sticking out above its high walls, ringed with concertina wire.

  Overcrowding was a problem in many US prisons, and in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania it was no different. The prison population was currently at over 50,000 inmates, occupying space meant for just over 43,000.

  In 2010 an inmate serving a ten-year sentence was released and went on to murder a Philadelphia police officer. A moratorium on paroles was instituted and, although that had eased, overcrowding was still an issue.

  The crumbling facility was due to be mothballed when two new prisons opened near Philadelphia. Meanwhile Graterford was bursting at the seams.

  The process by which a city detective arranged an interview with an inmate incarcerated at Graterford was a fairly complicated one, a process which had been smoothed over by the captain of the Homicide Unit and the district attorney’s office.

  Roland Hannah had confessed to th
ree homicides, but waived his right to allocution – the process by which an individual stands before the court and explains his actions. To this day the reasons for those crimes remained a mystery, but only in the legal sense. It was clear to everyone, especially police investigators, why Roland Hannah did what he did. As a result of his confession Hannah was spared the death penalty, and was sentenced to three life sentences, without the possibility of parole.

  But all of that now had the potential to change. Jessica and Byrne had been briefed before visiting the prison that Hannah’s lawyer had already petitioned the court for his client’s release, pending a new trial, all on the basis that Hannah had been framed then, as he was now. The reason for his prior confession, it was now being alleged, was diminished capacity, and no small measure of police coercion.

  There were many questions, not the least of which was who was bankrolling Roland Hannah’s new lawyer, James H. Tolliver, one of the priciest defense attorneys in Philadelphia.

  They met James Tolliver just outside the meeting room. He was about fifty, well-tanned and well-dressed. He carried an expensive charcoal gray overcoat over one arm, and held a black leather Ferragamo briefcase.

  Just where was Roland Hannah getting the funds? Jessica wondered. While it was true that many lawyers at white-shoe firms did pro bono work, this case didn’t seem to line up, politically speaking. Unless, of course, the ultimate strategy was that an overzealous police department and district attorney’s office had railroaded Roland Hannah’s conviction to close out a terrible run of unsolved murders.

  They all introduced themselves. Polite, but stone cold.

  ‘Against my advice, Reverend Hannah has requested that I not be present in the room when you speak with him.’

  Good, Jessica thought.

  ‘But rest assured that I will be listening to everything said in that room, detectives,’ Tolliver added. ‘If I feel you are moving into an area I think it unwise for my client to enter, I will be inside in a flash and this interview will be over.’