Richard Montanari (37 page)

    Lucy
nodded. 'One last time. Tomorrow.'

    'You'll
let me know what happens?'

    'Okay.'

    'Do
you have a car?' Byrne asked.

    Lucy
shook her head. 'I don't drive.'

    Byrne
glanced at his van, then back. 'I'm afraid I'm going the other way.' He took
out his cellphone, called for a cab. Then he reached into his pocket pulled out
a pair of twenties.

    'I
can't take that,' Lucy said.

    'Pay
me back someday, then.'

    Lucy
hesitated, then took the money.

    Byrne
put a hand on each of her slight shoulders. 'Look. You made a mistake today.
That's all. You did the right thing calling me. We'll work it out. I want you
to call me tomorrow. Will you promise to do that?'

    Lucy
nodded. Byrne saw her eyes glisten, but no tears followed. Tough kid. He knew
that she had been on her own for a while, although she hadn't brought up her
mother this time. Byrne didn't ask. She would tell him what she wanted to tell
him. He was the same way.

    'Am I
going to prison?' she asked.

    Byrne
smiled. 'No, Lucy. You're not going to prison.' The cab arrived, idled. 'As
long as you don't carjack this guy on the way home you should be fine.'

    Lucy
hugged him, got into the cab.

    Byrne
watched the cab drive away. Lucy's face was small and pale and frightened in
the back window. He couldn't imagine the burden she carried. He'd had the same
experience of not knowing what had happened to him or where he had gone for
that short period of time when they had declared him dead. But he had been an
adult, not a child.

    The
truth was, Lucy Doucette had a bogeyman. A bogeyman who had kidnapped her and
held her for three long days. Three days of dead zone in her life. A bogeyman
who lived in every shadow, stood waiting around every corner.

    Byrne
had gotten a vision when he hugged her, a sparkling clear image that told him
about a man who—

    —
dates
women with young daughters and comes back years later for the girls. . .
something about red magnetic numbers on a refrigerator door. . . four numbers .
. .

    
1
...2...0...8
.

    Byrne
made a mental note to call Lucy the next day.

    Jessica
looked around the bedroom. At least they hadn't broken any lamps. They had,
however, knocked everything off one of the night stands. She hoped her mother's
Hummels were okay.

    Jessica
rolled over, gathered the sheets around her. Vincent looked as if he had been
hit by a car.

    'Hey,
sailor.'

    'No,'
Vincent said. 'No, no, no.'

    Jessica
ran a finger over his lips. 'What?'

    'You
are a devil temptress.'

    'I
told you not to marry me.' She snuggled closer. 'What, are you worn out?'

    Vincent
caught his breath. Or tried to. He was coated with sweat. He pushed the covers
off, remained silent.

    'Boy,
you macho Italian cops sure talk a good game,' Jessica said. 'Try to get you
into round two?
Fuggetaboutit.''

    'Do
we have any cigarettes?'

    'You
don't smoke.'

    'I
want to start.'

    Jessica
laughed, got out of bed, went down to the kitchen. She returned with two
glasses of wine. If her calculations were correct - and they usually were at
times like these, she had managed to get new appliances over the past two years
by playing these moments just right - she would start her maneuvers in ten
minutes.

    On
the other hand, this was not about a new washer or dryer. This was about a
life. Their life. Sophie's life. And the life of a little boy.

    When
she slipped back into bed, Vincent was checking his messages on his cellphone.
He put the phone down, grabbed his glass of wine. They clinked, sipped, kissed.
The moment was right. Jessica said: 'I want to talk to you about something.'

    
The
man was stabbed twenty times by his lover. The killer, whose
name was
Antony - a bit of Shakespearean irony - then proceeded to cut open his own
stomach, finally bleeding out on the parkway, not two hundred feet from the
steps leading to the art museum. The papers ran stories for nearly a week, the
high drama too much for them to resist.

    
I
know what really happened.

    
The
murder victim had simply made a meat dish on Good Friday and Antony, being the
devout Vatican I Catholic he was, and this being 1939, could not take the shame
and guilt. I know this because I can hear their final argument. It is still in
the air.

    
The
voices of the dead are a shrill chorus indeed.

    
Consider
the man stabbed over his Social Security check, his final pleas lingering at
Fifth and Jefferson Streets.

    
Or
the teenager shot for his bicycle, forever crying at Kensington and Allegheny,
right in front of the check-cashing emporium where the regular customers pass
by with smug indifference.

    
Or
the grandmother bludgeoned for her purse at Reese and West Dauphin, her voice
to this day howling her husband's name, a man dead for more than thirty-five
years.

    
It
is becoming harder to keep them out. When I bring one to the other side, it
quiets for a while. But not for long
.

    Byrne
couldn't sleep. The images of the four corpses rode a slow carousel in his
mind. He got up, poured himself an inch of bourbon, flipped on the computer,
logged onto the Net, launched a web browser. He cruised the headlines on
philly.com, visited a few other sites, not really reading or comprehending.

    
Have
you found them yet? The lion and the rooster and the swan? Are there others?
You might think they do not play together, but they do.

    He got
onto YouTube. Once there, he typed in Christa-Marie Schönburg's name. Even
before he was done typing, a drop-down window opened, listing a number of
possibilities.

    Byrne
had no idea where to begin. In fact, he really had no idea what he was doing,
or exactly what he was looking for. On the surface he imagined he was looking
for a portal, admittedly obscure, to the case. Something that might trigger
something else. Something that might begin to explain Christa-Marie's
impenetrable note to him. Or maybe he was looking for a young detective who had
walked into a house in Chestnut Hill in 1990 and there began a long, dark
odyssey of bloodshed and tears and misery. Maybe he was really looking for the
man he used to be.

    The
final entry on the list was:

    
Christa-Marie
Schönburg Interview

    Byrne
selected it. It was three minutes long, recorded on a PBS show in 1988.
Christa-Marie was at the height of her fame and talent. She looked beautiful in
a simple white dress, drop earrings. As she answered questions about her
playing, her celebrity at such a young age, and what it was like to play for Riccardo
Muti, she vacillated between confident career woman, shy schoolgirl, enigmatic
artiste. More than once she blushed, and put her hair behind one ear. Byrne had
always thought her an attractive woman, but here she was stunning.

    When
the interview was complete Byrne clicked on the Bach entry. The browser took
him to a page that linked to a number of other Christa-Marie Schönburg videos.
Her entire public life was shown in freeze-frames down the right-hand side of
the page - bright gowns and brighter lights.

    He
clicked on
Bach Cello Suite No. 1.
It was a montage video, all still
photographs. The photographs in the montage, one slowly dissolving into the
next, showed Christa-Marie at a number of ages, a variety of poses and
settings: in a studio, smiling at the camera, a side view on stage, a low-angle
photograph of her at nineteen, a look of intense concentration on her face. The
last photograph was Christa- Marie at nine years old, a cello leaning against
the wall next to her, almost twice her size.

    Byrne
spent most of the next hour watching the YouTube offerings. Many were
collage-type videos, assembled by fans, but there were also live performances.
The last video was Christa-Marie and a pianist in a studio, playing Beethoven's
Sonata No. 3 in A.
At the halfway point, in close-up, Christa-Marie looked
up, straight at the lens, straight at Byrne.

    When
the piece finished, Byrne went to the kitchen, took two Vicodin, chased it with
a swig of Wild Turkey. Probably not the prescribed way, but you had to go with
what worked, right?

    He
looked out the window at the empty street below. In the distance was the glow
of Center City. There was another body out there, another body waiting to be
discovered, a raw, abraded corpse with a strip of blood-streaked paper around
its head.

    He
glanced at the kitchen clock, although he didn't need to.

    It
was 2:52.

    Byrne
grabbed his coat, his keys, and went back out into the night.

    Lucy
sat on the fire escape, wrapped in her dark blue afghan, one of the few things
that had survived her childhood, one of the few things that she could stuff
into a nylon duffel bag and take with her when she moved on, which she had done
so many times in the past two years that she had nearly lost count.

    She
looked in the window. She had rented this room, a third-floor room in a trinity
on Fourth Street, about two months earlier. The family was very nice. An
elderly couple with no children, they had welcomed her like a granddaughter,
and for the first two weeks had invited her to dinner every night.

    Lucy,
having had no experience with real family life, had begged off with a variety
of excuses until the couple - Tilly and Oscar Walters - had gotten the hint.

    The
night was calm, the sky was clear, and for the first time in a long while she
could see a few stars. Maybe they had been there all the time and she had
forgotten to look. Perhaps the darkness was inside her, had made its nest in
her soul, and refused to leave, refused to let up.

    She
wrapped the afghan more tightly around her, but she wasn't really all that
cold. Maybe it was all those years in drafty apartments, all those years when
the heat was turned off, all those years huddling around an electric stove in winter
until the electricity too was turned off.

    Since
the day the plane came out of the sky, she had tried everything to make the
feeling go away. Drugs, alcohol, men, religion, yoga, all manner of
self-destruction and abuse.
Men.
Quite often the men she chose - boys,
really - filled in any small gaps in the abuse, making her hell complete.

    And
now she was in trouble. She always knew she would eventually get caught
shoplifting, even though she was good at it. Her mother had sent her into
stores from the time she was only three years old. In the first few years she
was only the diversion, doing the little-cutie bit to distract store owners
while her mother boosted cigarettes or alcohol or, once in a great while, a
treat for Lucy.