Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (37 page)

What the hell is my husband doing in a restaurant with a girl who looks about eighteen years old?

Without having to think, the answer came roaring into her head.

You son of a bitch.

Vincent saw Jessica, and his face told the story. Guilt, topped by embarrassment, with a side order of shit-eating grin.

Jessica took a deep breath, looked at the ground, then continued up the street. She was not going to be that stupid, crazed woman who confronts her husband and his mistress in a public place. No way.

Within seconds, Vincent burst through the door.

“Jess,” he said. “Wait.”

Jessica stopped, trying to rein in her anger. Her anger would not hear it. It was a rabid, stampeding herd of emotion.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“Fuck you.”

“It’s not what you think, Jess.”

She put her package on a bench, spun to face him. “Gee. How did I know you were going to say that?” She looked at her husband, up and down. It always amazed her how different he could look, based on her feelings at any given moment. When they were happy, his bad-boy swagger and tough-guy posturing were so very sexy. When she was pissed, he looked like a thug, like some street-corner Goodfella wannabe she wanted to slap the cuffs on.

And, God save them both, this was about as pissed off as she’d ever been with him.

“I can explain,” he added.

“Explain? Like you explained Michelle Brown? I’m sorry, what was that, again? A little amateur gynecology in my
bed
?”

“Listen to me.”

Vincent grabbed Jessica by the arm and, for the first time since they had met, for the first time in their volatile, passionate love affair, it felt as if they were strangers, arguing on a street corner; the kind of couple who, when you are in love, you vow never to become.

“Don’t,” she warned.

Vincent held on tighter. “Jess.”

“Take . . . your fucking . . . hand . . . 
off
me.” Jessica was not at all surprised to find that she had formed both of her hands into fists. The notion scared her a little, but not enough to unclench them. Would she lash out at him? She honestly didn’t know.

Vincent stepped back, putting up his hands in surrender. The look on his face, at that moment, told Jessica that they just crossed a threshold and entered a shadowy territory from which they might never return.

But at the moment, that didn’t matter.

All Jessica could see was a blond ponytail and the goofy smile Vincent had on his face when she caught him.

Jessica picked up her package, turned on her heels, and headed back to the Jeep. Fuck UPS, fuck the bank, fuck dinner. All she could think about was getting away from there.

She hopped in the Jeep, started it and jammed the pedal. She was almost hoping that some rookie patrolman was nearby to pull her over and try to give her some shit.

No luck. Never a cop around when you needed one.

Except the one she was married to.

Before she turned onto South Street she looked in the rearview mirror and saw Vincent still standing on the corner, hands in pockets, a receding, solitary silhouette against the red brick backdrop of Society Hill.

Receding, along with him, was her marriage.

54

WEDNESDAY, 7:15 PM

T
HE NIGHT BEHIND THE DUCT TAPE was a Dalí landscape, black velvet dunes rolling toward a far horizon. Occasionally, fingers of light crept through the bottom part of his visual plane, teasing him with the notion of safety.

His head ached. His limbs felt dead and useless. But that wasn’t the worst of it. If the tape over his eyes was irritating, the tape over his mouth was maddening beyond discourse. For someone like Simon Close, the humiliation of being tied to a chair, bound with duct tape, and gagged with something that felt and tasted like an ancient tack rag finished a distant second to the frustration of not being able to talk. If he lost his words, he lost the battle. It had always been thus. As a small boy, in the Catholic home in Berwick, he had managed to talk his way out of nearly every scrape, every frightful jam.

Not this one.

He could barely make a sound.

The tape was wrapped tightly around his head, just above his ears, so he was able to hear.

How do I get out of this? Deep breath, Simon. Deep.

Crazily, he thought about the books and CDs he had acquired over the years, the ones dealing with meditation and yoga and the concepts of diaphragmatic breathing, the yogic techniques for fighting stress and anxiety. He had never read a single one, nor listened to more than a few minutes of the CDs. He had wanted a quick fix for his occasional panic attacks—the Xanax made him far too sluggish to think straight—but there was no quick fix to be found in yoga.

Now he wished he had stuck with it.

Save me, Deepak Chopra,
he thought.

Help me, Dr. Weil.

Then he heard the door to his flat open behind him. He was back. The sound filled him with a sickening brew of hope and fear. He heard the footsteps approach from behind, felt the weight on the floorboards. He smelled something sweet, floral. Faint, but present. A young girl’s perfume.

Suddenly, the tape was ripped from his eyes. The grease-fire pain made it feel as if his eyelids came off with it.

When his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw, on the coffee table in front of him, his Apple PowerBook, opened and displaying a graphic of
The Report
’s current web page.

MONSTER STALKS PHILLY GIRLS!

Sentences and phrases were highlighted in red.

. . . depraved psychopath . . .

. . . deviant butcher of innocence . . .

Behind the laptop, on a tripod, sat Simon’s digital camera. The camera was on and pointed right at him.

Simon then heard a click behind him. His tormentor had the Apple mouse in his hand and was clicking through the documents. Soon, another article appeared. The article was from three years earlier, a piece he had written about blood being splashed on the door of a church in the Northeast. Another phrase was highlighted:

. . . hark the herald assholes fling . . .

Behind him, Simon heard a satchel being unzipped. Moments later, he felt the slight pinch at the right side of his neck. A needle. Simon struggled mightily against his bindings, but it was useless. Even if he could get loose, whatever was in the needle took almost immediate effect. Warmth spread through his muscles, a pleasurable weakness that, were he not in this situation, he might have enjoyed.

His mind began to fragment, soar. He closed his eyes. His thoughts took flight over the last decade or so of his life. Time leapt, fluttered, settled.

When he opened his eyes, the cruel buffet displayed on the coffee table in front of him arrested the breath in his chest. For a moment, he tried to conjure some sort of benevolent scenario for them. There was none.

Then, as his bowels released, he recorded the final visual entry in his reporter’s mind—a cordless drill, a large needle, threaded with a thick black thread.

And he knew.

Another injection took him to the edge of the abyss. This time, he willingly went along with it.

A few minutes later, when he heard the sound of the drill, Simon Close screamed, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, a disembodied wail that echoed off the damp stone walls of a Catholic home in the time-swept north of England, a plaintive sigh over the ancient face of the moors.

55

WEDNESDAY, 7:35 PM

J
ESSICA AND SOPHIE sat at the table, pigging out on all the goodies they had brought home from her father’s house—panettone,
sfogliatelle,
tiramisu. It wasn’t exactly a balanced meal, but she had blown off the grocery store and there was nothing in the fridge.

Jessica knew it wasn’t a good idea to let Sophie eat so much sugar at this late hour, but Sophie had a sweet tooth the size of Pittsburgh, just like her mother, and, well, it was so hard to say no. Jessica concluded long ago that she had better start saving for the dental bills.

Besides, after seeing Vincent mooning with Britney or Courtney or Ashley, or whatever the hell her name was, tiramisu was just about the right medicine. She tried to exile the image of her husband and the blond teenager from her mind.

Unfortunately, it was immediately replaced by the picture of Brian Parkhurst’s body, hanging in that hot room, the rank smell of death.

The more she thought about it, the more she doubted Parkhurst’s guilt. Had he been seeing Tessa Wells? Perhaps. Was he responsible for the murders of three young women? She didn’t think so. It was nearly impossible to commit a single abduction and homicide without leaving behind trace evidence.

Three of them?

It just didn’t seem feasible.

But what about the P A R on Nicole Taylor’s hand?

For a fleeting moment, Jessica realized that she had signed on for a lot more than she felt she could handle with this job.

She cleaned the table, plopped Sophie down in front of the TV, popped in the
Finding Nemo
DVD.

She poured herself a glass of Chianti, cleared the dining room table, then spread out all her notes on the case. She walked her mind over the time line of events. There was a connection among these girls, something other than the fact that they attended Catholic schools.

Nicole Taylor, abducted off the street, dumped in a field of flowers.

Tessa Wells, abducted off the street, dumped in an abandoned row house.

Bethany Price, abducted off the street, dumped at the Rodin Museum.

The selection of dump sites seemed in turn random and precise, elaborately staged and mindlessly arbitrary.

No, Jessica thought. Dr. Summers was right. Their doer was anything but illogical. The placement of these victims was every bit as significant as the method of their murder.

She looked at the crime scene photographs of the girls and tried to imagine their final moments of freedom, tried to drag those unfolding moments from the dominion of black and white to the saturated color of nightmare.

Jessica picked up Tessa Wells’s school photograph. It was Tessa Wells who troubled her most deeply; perhaps because Tessa had been the first victim she had seen. Or maybe because she knew that Tessa was the outwardly shy young girl that Jessica had once been, the chrysalis ever yearning to become the imago.

She walked into the living room, planted a kiss on Sophie’s shiny, strawberry-scented hair. Sophie giggled. Jessica watched a few minutes of the movie, the colorful adventures of Dory and Marlin and Gill.

Then her eyes found the envelope on the end table. She had forgotten all about it.

The
Rosarium Virginis Mariae
.

Jessica sat down at the dining room table and skimmed the lengthy letter, which seemed to be a missive from Pope John Paul II, affirming the relevance of the holy rosary. She glossed over the headings, but her attention was drawn to one section, a segment titled “Mysteries of Christ, Mysteries of His Mother.”

As she read, she felt a small flame of understanding ignite within her, the realization that she had crossed a barrier that, until this second, had been unknown to her, a barricade that could never be breached again.

She read that there are five “Sorrowful Mysteries” of the rosary. She had, of course, known this from her Catholic school upbringing, but hadn’t thought of it in years.

The agony in the garden.

The scourge at the pillar.

The crown of thorns.

The carrying of the cross.

The crucifixion.

The revelation was a crystalline bullet to the center of her brain. Nicole Taylor was found in a garden. Tessa Wells was bound to a pillar. Bethany Price wore a crown of thorns.

This was the killer’s master plan.

He is going to kill five girls.

For a few anxious moments she didn’t seem to be able to move. She took a few deep breaths, calmed herself. She knew that, if she was right about this, the information would change the investigation completely, but she didn’t want to present the theory to the task force until she was sure.