Richard Montanari (15 page)

    In
the first ten minutes after the police left her house, Sharon Beckman found she
couldn't move. She stood by the front door, paralyzed.

    Jason
went back out. God only knew what he did these days. What Jason had not told
the cops was that the last time he had seen Kenny the two had gotten into a
fist fight. The last thing Jason had said to his stepfather was 'If you ever
touch me again I'm going to fucking kill you.'

    That
was not something you told the police.
She
knew Jason would never do
anything like that, but
they
didn't.

    The
house was quiet.

    Kenny
was dead.

    Sharon
knew she was supposed to be feeling something, something akin to grief,
something like heartache, but she didn't. All she felt was a faint cold fear.
And the knowledge that she had to move. Fast.

    From
right when she'd first met Kenny, Sharon had known it was all going to fall
apart one day. It wasn't like she didn't know who he was when they'd met, what
kind of life she was getting into. She was no angel herself. But eight years
ago, when Kenny had robbed all those houses and put himself on the police
radar, she'd known a day like this would come.

    When
she had set fire to the house on Lenox Avenue, back in 2002, destroying all
that evidence, she'd known she'd pay for it some day. Today. She had been a
little sorry that the whole block had gone up in flames, but no one had got
hurt. She didn't lose much sleep over it. There was no love lost between her
and her neighbors on Lenox Avenue anyway.
Fucking lowlife crackheads.

    She
turned around three times in the living room, trying to organize her thoughts,
trying to think straight.

    She
should have left a long time ago. When cops followed up on things it was a clear
sign that they had you in their sights. Cops always knew a lot more than they
let on. It was like those jobs she used to go on with her father when she was
small. Her dad would work on somebody's plumbing, and when he was all done he'd
turn the water back on and slide a sheet of newspaper under the pipes. If one
drop of water fell, blotting out on the paper, the job was shit. Her father
would always tear it out and start over. If there was one solitary drop there
was certain to be more.

    Same
thing with cops.

    
Drip,
drip, drip
.

    Then
they had you.

    Kenny
had put all the new stolen merchandise into a storage locker on Linden Avenue.
He'd learned the first time not to keep anything in the house. They both had.
She wasn't sure what he had in there these days and that was fine with her. The
less she knew, the better.

    Sharon
also knew what Kenny had done to that girl in 2002, even as she tried hard to
block it out of her mind. Of course, there wasn't a jury in the world that
would give a shit. They had gotten away with it once, but now that Kenny was
dead everything was going to fall on her like a load of bricks. There was no
way she could deal with this on her own. She knew at least a dozen people who
might have wanted to do Kenny in, a dozen people who'd had a beef with him, and
once the police realized this they were going to see her as a link. It was only
a matter of time until they revisited the Antoinette Chan case. She knew how
hard cops worked on burglaries. They didn't give up until they had you in a
jail cell.

    
Murder
?

    
Forget
it
.

    Sharon
ran upstairs. She would load the car with what she could, go find Jason. She
would get the keys to the Master lock that was on the door at the storage locker,
throw them in the Delaware River, and she and her son would be long gone.

    But
where would they go? They couldn't go to her sister's in Toledo. That would be
the first place they'd look. She had exactly eight hundred twenty-six dollars
to her name. Plus whatever was in the coin jar, plus whatever was in the gas
tank.

    Sharon
was only forty-four. Still young. Still had her looks, or whatever looks she'd
had to begin with. She'd start a new life. Meet a man with a real job.

    
Kenny
was dead
.

    Before
she could get her things out of the drawers in the upstairs bedroom she heard a
noise.

    'Jason?'
No answer.

    She
listened for a few more moments, heard nothing. Must have been the brats next
door, she thought. One day they'd thrown a basketball against an adjoining wall
for three straight hours. She wouldn't miss them.

    She
grabbed her two battered suitcases from the top shelf of the bedroom closet,
began to stuff them with clothing. She soon realized she would need some big
plastic garbage bags to take it all.

    Sharon
ran down the stairs, her mind racing in a hundred different directions. When
she turned the corner toward the kitchen she saw the shadow on the wall. She
stopped, spun around, her heart pounding.

    'Jason,
we—'

    It wasn't
Jason.

    The
building at 31st and Market streets where old police records were kept had once
been the offices and publishing plant of the
Evening Bulletin.
The
Bulletin,
published from 1847 to 1982, was at one time the largest evening
newspaper in the United States.

    Now
the massive and deceptively benign-looking building was fenced and sealed like
Fort Knox, with concertina wire ringing the exposed public areas. The enormous
brick wall that faced the parking lot rose more than four stories and boasted
only five small windows near the roofline. A dozen or so parking-lot lights
jutted from the wall like rusted bowsprits.

    Jessica
signed in at the gate, drove in, parked. She was about twenty minutes late, but
had not spotted Byrne's van. She decided to wait in the car.

    Before
leaving the Roundhouse she had run Sharon Beckman and Jason Crandall through
the databases. The kid had a misdemeanor possession charge from last year, a
charge that was dropped when Jason did community service.

    Sharon
Beckman had no record.

    Jessica
thought about how the case was developing. The bizarre condition of Kenneth
Beckman's corpse was still a mystery and indicated something that festered deep
in the heart of the killer, something personal and twisted. She thought about
the paper band wrapped around the victim's head, the way the cut traversed the
forehead, the way the—

    There
was a loud sound, inches from her left ear, a cracking noise that made her
jump. She spun in her seat, her hand automatically unsnapping her holster.

    Byrne
had tapped her window with his ring. Jessica slowly rolled down the window,
making him wait in the drizzling rain.

    'This
is how people get shot, you know,' Jessica said.

    'I
could use the rest.'

    She
took her time getting out of the car, driving home her point. A minute later
they entered the building, walked over to the elevators, shaking off the rain.

    'Did
you talk to Sharon Beckman again?' Jessica asked.

    Byrne
shook his head. 'She wasn't home,' Byrne said. 'Neither was Spicoli.'

    Referencing
the Sean Penn role in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
Byrne was, of
course, referring to Jason Crandall. Jessica had no idea where Kevin Byrne's
frame of cultural references began and ended.

    Instead,
here were block after block of huge steel shelving racks, some reaching twenty feet
high, each packed firm with thousands of cardboard boxes, each box tagged with
a white label detailing name of the deceased, case number, and year.

    They
split up the Beckman files. Byrne read the witness statements and forensic
reports, while Jessica went through the original police reports and the notes
written by the lead detective.

    Just
inside the binder was a picture of Antoinette Chan. She'd been a pretty girl,
with flawless skin and a beguiling smile. Jessica moved on to the police report
on Beckman.

    Kenneth
Arnold Beckman, born in 1970, was originally from the Brewerytown area of
Philadelphia. At the time of Antoinette Chan's murder he had worked as a
handyman for a pair of apartment complexes in Camden, and had lived in the Nicetown/Tioga
area on Lenox Avenue.

    By
the age of twenty-nine he had been arrested five times for breaking and
entering, twice convicted of possession of stolen merchandise.

    In
2001 Beckman took his ten-year-old stepson Jason trick-or- treating on North 18th
Street between Westmoreland and Venango. They went door to door, with Beckman
accompanying the boy to each stoop. Some of the people in the neighborhood
later remarked about how Beckman hovered a little too close to the door, how he
seemed to be looking into the houses with a little too much interest as the
little boy received his candy.

    Over
the next five months there were six burglaries in the neighborhood, all
occurring during daylight hours when the residents were at work. Each time the
same sort of items were stolen: cameras, jewelry, cash, MP3 players. Nothing
too big to fit in a pillowcase.

    A
pair of astute divisional detectives noticed the pattern and created a photo
lineup of people living in a one-mile radius of the break-ins who had a criminal
history of burglaries. One of the people in that lineup was Kenneth Beckman.

    After
getting positive IDs of Beckman as someone who had come to neighborhood houses
on Halloween, the detectives placed him under surveillance. Within a few days
they followed him to a pawnshop in Chinatown, a known address for fencing
stolen items. In forty-eight hours they set up a sting operation, with a
detective posing as an employee of the shop. But Beckman, perhaps sensing a
problem, never returned.

    In
mid-March 2002 they received a call from a young woman they had spoken to
earlier, a woman named Antoinette Chan, the daughter of one of the burglary
victims. She said she had gone down to her basement for the first time in a few
weeks to do laundry and had seen a shoe print in the small lavatory off the
furnace room. Whoever had broken into her house had come through the basement
window. It appeared that the burglar had made a comfort stop. The original
investigators had never looked in the lavatory.

    The
shoe print matched a size twelve Frye boot. Surveillance photos of Kenneth
Beckman revealed him wearing the exact model.

    Detectives
visited Beckman's place of employment, only to discover that he had left.

    When
detectives arrived at the Beckman house on Lenox Avenue, search warrant in
hand, they found a pair of PFD ladder trucks on the scene, and the block of row
houses - four in all - ablaze. The old wooden structures burned to the ground
in a matter of hours.

    Across
the street, sitting on a curb, smoking a cigarette, was Sharon Beckman. There
was little doubt in anyone's mind about who had started the blaze, and no doubt
at all why. Unfortunately for the investigators, there was no direct evidence.
Sharon was not formally questioned or charged.

    According
to police, later that night Kenneth Beckman kidnapped Antoinette Chan, brought
her to a location in South Philly and bludgeoned her to death. When Beckman was
found in a motel in Allentown three days later and brought in for questioning,
he dummied up and requested a lawyer.

    Without
any witnesses, and without any opportunity to search his house, all charges
against Kenneth Arnold Beckman were dropped.

    And
now he was dead.

    Jessica
opened the folder with the crime-scene photos and felt her heart leap. 'Holy
shit.
'

    'What?'
Byrne asked.

    Jessica
put two of the Antoinette Chan crime-scene photos on the table, took out her
iPhone, opened the photos folder, swiped over to her most recent photographs.
She put the phone on the table, next to the printed pictures.