“I really appreciate this, Tori.”
Victoria waved him off. Byrne read a lot in the wave. Victoria had a stake in getting Julian Matisse off the street again. Or, perhaps, off the world.
Byrne gulped half the bourbon. Almost instantly it met the Vicodin in his system and produced a warm glow inside. He had held off drinking alcohol all night for that very reason. He glanced at his watch. It was time to go. He had taken more than enough of Victoria’s time.
Victoria walked him to the door.
At the door, she put her arms around his waist, her head on his chest. She had kicked off her shoes and, without them, she seemed small. Byrne had never really realized how petite she was. Her spirit always made her seem larger than life.
After a few moments, she looked up at him, her silver eyes nearly black in the dim light. What began as an affectionate hug and a kiss on the cheek, the parting of two old friends, suddenly became something else. Victoria pulled him close and kissed him deeply. Afterward, they pulled back and looked at each other, not so much out of lust as, perhaps, surprise. Had this always been in them? Had this feeling been simmering just below the surface for fifteen years? The look on Victoria’s face told Byrne he wasn’t going anywhere.
She smiled as she began to unbutton his shirt.
“What exactly are your intentions here, Miss Lindstrom?” Byrne asked.
“I’ll never tell.”
“Yes you will.”
More buttons. “What makes you think so?”
“I happen to be a very skilled lawman,” Byrne said.
“Is that right?”
“Oh yes.”
“Will you take me into a small room?” She unbuttoned a few more buttons.
“Yes.”
“Will you make me sweat?”
“I’ll certainly do my best.”
“Will you make me talk?”
“Oh, there’s no question about that. I am a seasoned interrogator. KGB.”
“I see,” Victoria said. “And what is KGB?”
Byrne held up his cane. “Kevin Gimp Byrne.”
Victoria laughed as she slid his shirt off, and led him to the bedroom.
* * *
AFTERWARD, AS THEY lay in the afterglow, Victoria took one of Byrne’s hands in hers. The sun was just beginning to breach the horizon.
Victoria gently kissed his fingertips, one by one. She then took his right forefinger and slowly traced the scars on her face.
Byrne knew that, after all these years, after they had finally made love, what Victoria was doing right then was far more intimate than sex. He had never felt closer to a human being in his life.
He thought about all the stations of her life to which he had been present— the teenaged firebrand, the victim of a horrible attack, the strong, independent woman she had become. He realized that he had long harbored a great and mysterious well of feelings for her, a cache of emotion he had never been able to identify.
When he felt the tears on her face, he knew.
All this time, the feelings had been love.
21
THE MARINE UNIT OF THE PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT had been in operation for more than 150 years, its charter having evolved over time from one of assisting the commerce of marine traffic up and down the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers to one of patrol, recovery, and rescue. In the 1950s the unit added diving to its duty roster, and since that time had become one of the elite aquatic divisions in the nation.
Essentially, the Marine Unit was an extension and supplement to the PPD patrol force whose job it was to respond to any and all water-related emergencies, as well as recoveries of persons, property, and evidence from the water.
They had begun dragging the river at first light, starting at an area just south of the Strawberry Mansion Bridge. The Schuylkill River was murky, with no visibility from the surface. The process would be slow and methodical, with divers working a grid along the banks in fifty-foot segments.
By the time Jessica arrived on the scene at just after eight, they had cleared a two-hundred-foot section. She found Byrne standing on the bank, silhouetted against the dark water. He had his cane with him. Jessica’s heart nearly broke. She knew he was a proud man, and a concession to weakness— any weakness— was hard. She made her way down to the river, a pair of coffees in hand.
“Good morning,” Jessica said, handing Byrne a cup.
“Hey,” he said. He hoisted the cup. “Thanks.”
“Anything?”
Byrne shook his head. He put his coffee on a bench, lit a cigarette, glanced at the bright red matchbook. It was from the Rivercrest Motel. He held it up. “If we don’t find anything, I think we should take another run at this dump’s manager.”
Jessica thought about Karl Stott. She didn’t like him for the murder, but she didn’t think he was telling the full truth, either. “Think he’s holding out?”
“I think he has a hard time remembering things,” Byrne said. “On purpose.”
Jessica looked out over the water. Here, on this gentle bend of the Schuylkill River, it was hard to reconcile what happened just a few blocks away at the Rivercrest Motel. If she was right about her hunch— and there was an overwhelming chance she was not— she wondered how such a beautiful place as this could host such horror. The trees were in full bloom; the water gently rocked the boats at the dock. She was just about to respond when her two-way radio crackled to life.
“Yeah.”
“Detective Balzano?”
“I’m here.”
“We found something.”
* * *
THE CAR WAS a 1996 Saturn, submerged in the river a quarter mile from the Marine Unit’s own mini station on Kelly Drive. The station was only manned during daywork so, under cover of darkness, no one would have seen someone driving or pushing the car into the Schuylkill. The car had no plates on it. They would run it off the VIN, the vehicle identification number, providing it was still in the car and intact.
When the car breached the surface of the water, all eyes on the riverbank turned to Jessica. Thumbs-up all around. She found Byrne’s eyes. In them, she saw respect, and no small measure of admiration. It meant everything.
THE KEY WAS still in the ignition. After taking a number of photographs, a CSU officer removed it, opened the trunk. Terry Cahill and half a dozen detectives crowded around the car.
What they saw inside would live with them for a very long time.
The woman in the trunk had been destroyed. She had been stabbed repeatedly and, because of her time submerged in the water, most of the smaller wounds had puckered and closed. The larger wounds— a few in particular on the woman’s stomach and thighs— oozed a brackish brown liquid.
Because she had been in the trunk of the car, and not fully exposed to the elements, her body was not covered with debris. This might make the medical examiner’s job a little easier. Philadelphia was bounded by two large rivers; the ME’s office had a good deal of experience with floaters.
The woman was nude, positioned on her back, her arms out to the sides, her head turned to the left. The stab wounds were too numerous to count at the scene. The cuts were clean, indicating that no animals or river life had been at her.
Jessica forced herself to look at the victim’s face. Her eyes were open, shocked with red. Open, but totally void of expression. Not fear, not anger, not sorrow. Those were emotions for the living.
Jessica thought about the original scene in
Psycho,
the way the camera backed up from a close-up of Janet Leigh’s face, how pretty and intact the actress’s face had looked in that shot. She looked at the young woman in the trunk of this car and thought about what a difference reality makes. No makeup artist here. This was what death really looked like.
The two detectives gloved up.
“Look,” Byrne said.
“What?”
Byrne pointed to the waterlogged newspaper on the right side of the trunk. It was a copy of the
Los Angeles Times.
He gently opened the paper with a pencil. Inside were wadded-up rectangles of paper.
“What is that, fake money?” Byrne asked. Bunched up inside the paper were a few stacks of what looked like photocopied hundred-dollar bills.
“Yeah,” Jessica said.
“Oh, this is great,” Byrne said.
Jessica leaned in, looked a little more closely. “How much do you want to bet there’s forty thousand dollars in funny money in there?” she asked.
“I’m not following,” Byrne said.
“In
Psycho,
Janet Leigh’s character steals forty grand from her boss. She buys a Los Angeles newspaper and stashes the money inside. In the movie it’s the
Los Angeles Tribune,
but that paper’s defunct.”
Byrne stared at her for a few seconds. “How the hell do you know this?”
“I looked it up on the Internet.”
“The Internet,” he said. He leaned over, poked at the phony money again, shook his head. “This guy’s a real fucking piece of work.”
At this point, Tom Weyrich, the deputy medical examiner, arrived with his photographer. The detectives stood back and let Dr. Weyrich in.
As Jessica pulled off her gloves and breathed in the fresh air of a new day, she felt pretty good about her hunch paying off. This was no longer about the gauzy specter of a murder committed in two dimensions on a television screen, the ethereal notion of a crime.
They had a body. They had a homicide.
They had a case.
* * *
LITTLE JAKE’S NEWSSTAND was a fixture on Filbert Street. Little Jake sold all the local papers and magazines, as well as the Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Erie, and Allentown papers. In addition, he carried a selection of out-of-state dailies and a selection of adult magazines, discreetly displayed behind him, and covered with squares of cardboard. It was one of the few places in Philadelphia where the
Los Angeles Times
was for sale over the counter.
Nick Palladino went with the recovered Saturn and the CSU team. Jessica and Byrne interviewed Little Jake while Terry Cahill canvassed the immediate area up and down Filbert.
Little Jake Polivka had gotten his nickname due to the fact that he was somewhere in the neighborhood of six three and three hundred pounds. He was always slightly stooped over inside the kiosk. With his bushy beard, long hair, and hunched posture, he reminded Jessica of the Hagrid character in the Harry Potter movies. She had always wondered why Little Jake simply didn’t buy or build a bigger kiosk, but had never asked.
“Do you have any regulars who buy the
Los Angeles Times
?” Jessica asked.
Little Jake thought for a few moments. “Not that I can think of. I only get the Sunday edition, and only four of them at that. Not a big seller.”
“Do you get them on the day they’re published?”
“No. I get them maybe two or three days late.”
“The date we’re interested in was from two weeks ago. Can you remember who you might have sold the paper to?”
Little Jake stroked his beard. Jessica noticed there were crumbs in it, remnants of this morning’s breakfast. At least, she
assumed
it was this morning’s. “Now that you mention it, a guy did come by and ask for it a few weeks ago. I was out of the paper at the time, but I’m pretty sure I told him when they were coming in. If he came back and bought one, I wasn’t here. My brother runs the shop two days a week now.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?” Byrne asked.
Little Jake shrugged. “Hard to remember. I see a lot of people here. And it’s usually just this much.” Little Jake squared his hands into a rectangular shape, like a movie director, framing the opening in his kiosk.
“Anything you can remember would be very helpful.”
“Well, as I recall he was about as ordinary as you can get. Ball cap, sunglasses, maybe a dark blue jacket.”