The Dead Room (25 page)

“Wait a minute,” Teddy said before the detective stepped inside. “I want to see something first.”

“What do you want to see, kid?”

“Stand out here a minute.”

Teddy walked inside and started to close the door.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Jackson shouted. “You heard the lady. We’re supposed to stay close.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I just want a look through the curtain.”

“Okay, but no tricks. I don’t like tricks, kid. I never have.”

Teddy closed the door. Taking a step back, he looked through the curtain. He could see Jackson’s form, but any details were masked by the cloth. Darlene Lewis could’ve opened the door for the killer, thinking it was someone else. She could’ve let the man in.

“You’re wearing me out, kid,” the detective barked through the door. “You seen it yet, or what?”

Teddy opened the door. Jackson gave him a look and stepped inside.

For the next hour, it worked the same way it had at Holmes’s apartment. Teddy would go through a room with Jackson standing behind his back chaining cigarettes and hacking on the smoke. When he walked outside for a look at the pool in the backyard, Teddy noticed the spent beer keg. He walked over and gave it a shake in the snow. To his surprise, the keg wasn’t empty, but full. Darlene Lewis had been planning a party before her death.

Teddy stepped back into the dining room. The place hadn’t been cleaned up yet. He glanced at the blood spatter on the walls as he passed through the room and headed for the stairs. It still bothered him, but not like it had. He could hear Jackson behind him in the hall, staying close but trying to keep out of his way as well. Teddy walked into the girl’s bedroom, and paused. His eyes went right to the computer. He noticed a photograph on the table of Darlene with someone he guessed was her boyfriend. He turned on the computer. As the machine booted up, he heard the words,
“You’ve got mail.”

*          *          *

Teddy saw him walk out of the library with his head down. Long brown hair, medium height with a pack thrown over his shoulder, and skinny as a rail. Teddy glanced at the snapshot he’d lifted from Darlene Lewis’s bedroom when Jackson opened a window and flicked his smoke outside. They were a match. The kid exiting the library was Russell Moss—Darlene Lewis’s classmate at the Friends School and the boyfriend who’d sent her the e-mail.

He slipped the photo into his glove box, watching Moss stroll almost aimlessly away from the building. The campus had the feel of a small college, and Teddy guessed that tuition for the private school was just as steep. When Moss reached the sidewalk heading for Germantown Avenue, Teddy got out of the car and approached him.

Moss looked up from the ground. Teddy’s suit threw him a little, but Moss was eighteen and there wasn’t much difference in their age.

“I need to talk to you, Russell.”

“What about?”

“Darlene Lewis.”

The kid’s eyes fell to the ground. “Who are you?”

“A lawyer. Someone trying to help.”

The kid was nervous, shifting his weight and adjusting his book bag over his left shoulder, then switching it to his right.

“I’ll miss my bus,” the kid said.

“You’re girlfriend’s dead and you’re worried about catching a bus?”

The kid looked him in the eye. His nervousness wasn’t born of fear, but of sadness. Maybe even a measure of self-inflicted guilt.

“Drive me home,” he said. “What you want is there.”

They got in the car and made the short drive to the teenager’s house. Russell Moss was a latchkey kid. When he came home from school, there was no one there. The modest house was set on a heavily wooded half-acre lot three blocks south of Germantown Avenue a mile or so west of the school. Once they were inside Teddy noted the fresh paint on the walls, the polished hardwood floors, the comfortable furnishings. He glanced at the bookcases in a small room by the stairs as they headed up to the kid’s bedroom. Moss came from a family of readers.

“What do your parents do?” Teddy asked.

“My father’s a lawyer and would probably have a shit fit if he knew you were here. My mother teaches at Temple University.”

They entered the room, the kid clearing a joystick off his desk and flipping on his computer. Once the machine booted up, he logged onto the Web, clicked a bookmark, and sat down.

“I couldn’t show you at school,” Moss said. “But I can show you here.”

Teddy leaned over the kid’s shoulder for a closer look. He saw an image of Darlene Lewis appear. He caught the sleepy smile and looked at her body. It was a porno site. She didn’t have any clothes on.

“We built the site together,” Moss said. “I didn’t think anything would happen. But then it did.”

Moss gave up his seat, moving to the bed and sitting down before the window. Teddy grabbed the mouse, clicking through the images. Darlene Lewis posing in a bra and panties, on her knees cupping her breasts in her hands, on her back with her legs spread open. The shots were crude and didn’t leave much to the imagination.

“She got a boob job,” the kid said. “She liked to show them off.”

Teddy wasn’t really listening. He was too busy clicking through the images. Toward the end, the photos switched to hard core. Darlene giving a guy without a face a hand job, then blowing him and fucking him. Moss glanced at the monitor and seemed to shrink. There were fifty thumbnail shots, and Teddy looked at every one of them. He could feel his heart beating in his chest.

“Are they real,” he said to the kid.

“I just told you she got a boob job.”

“Not her tits,” he said. “The tattoos. They’re in every shot. Are they real?”

The kid nodded, thrown by Teddy’s intensity.

Teddy paged back to the early photos of Darlene, enlarging a shot of the girl masturbating on a couch with her legs spread open. The lazy look in her eyes and the slow smile on her face were haunting. The pose all the more disturbing because it brought back memories of her lying dead on the dining room table—his response to seeing her corpse laid out on the gurney at the morgue.

Teddy winced as he studied her naked body. The tattoos were on her calf, just above her vagina, and on the underside of her inflated breasts.

He tried to keep cool. Tried not to think about why a girl who came from a family of means would do something like this. It was all about the murder, he told himself. The man who murdered Darlene Lewis had cut her skin away. But his approach hadn’t been haphazard. There was purpose in the act. Some horrific reason.

THIRTY-FOUR

Teddy slid a disk into Nash’s computer, copied the file onto his hard drive and clicked on the image of Darlene Lewis masturbating on the couch. Nash found the black and white print of the girl’s corpse on the dining room table and held it up to the monitor. Teddy didn’t need to compare the images to know what the killer had done.

The patches of missing skin found on her body matched the placement of her tattoos perfectly. The killer had removed her tattoos with his knife and taken them.

Nash gazed at the nude photo for a long time. “The tattoo artist wasn’t very talented, was he?” he said. “I can’t say much for the photographer either.”

“Her boyfriend, Russell Moss.”

“Has he spoken with the police?” Nash asked.

“No. Not about this anyway. They came to the house and asked about his relationship with Lewis. He answered their questions, but that’s it.”

“How’s he doing?”

“When I left, he was tearing the Web site down.”

“I’m always fascinated by how people spend their free time,” Nash said as he finally looked away from the monitor. “What do you think this means?”

“That we’re on the right track,” Teddy said. “Darlene Lewis heard someone at the door. She thought it was Holmes, delivering the mail. But it was someone else. Someone who saw the tattoos on her body and rejected her.”

Nash swiveled his chair around to the window behind his desk. It was dusk, and the windows in the houses and buildings that made up West Philadelphia were glowing a deep yellow-red in the blue of early night. But Teddy knew the man wasn’t really looking at the view outside his window. The man’s eyes were turned inward again, and he appeared deep in thought.

“He came to her house,” Nash said quietly. “He saw the tattoos and took them away with him. It sounds like he got something in return to me. Why do you say he rejected her?”

“Because he didn’t take her. Valerie Kram was in good shape. When she went into the water and then washed up on shore, she wasn’t. The man kept her and did things to her. She may have been cut down the middle, but her skin was intact. I saw her body. She didn’t have any tattoos. I’ll bet it’s the same with those pictures on your wall. I’ll bet not one of them has a tattoo on their entire body. If they did, the bulletins would’ve said so.”

“Tell me about the wound you saw on Valerie Kram,” Nash said.

“You saw a picture of it just a few minutes ago.”

“Describe it for me anyway.”

Teddy wondered what Nash was up to. The photos Carolyn Powell had sent over in the manila envelope were lying on Nash’s desk beside the murder book.

“It was a single cut,” Teddy said. “The kind you’d make if you were gutting an animal in the field.”

“Have you gutted an animal in the field?”

“I’m not much of a hunter. I used to shoot though. I’ve seen it done before. It was the same cut they made at the autopsy.”

“From the ME’s initial report, it says Kram’s internal organs were accounted for. But they looked as if they had been handled, perhaps moved. Too much time had passed and the ME couldn’t be sure.”

“The time she spent in the water,” Teddy said. “He couldn’t make the call.”

“Her neck was broken as well.”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “Just the same as Darlene Lewis.”

“So if we know why the killer cut Lewis, that he wanted the tattoos, then what do you suppose he was thinking when he split Valerie Kram open?”

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it.”

Nash swiveled his chair around. He looked tired. Spent. Like whatever was preying on his mind had cost him something.

“What two things does Philadelphia grow best?” he said.

Teddy shrugged. He wasn’t sure where Nash was going with the riddle.

“I want you to read a book tonight,” Nash said. “
The Agony and the Ecstasy,
by Irving Stone.”

Teddy found the idea of wasting the night reading a book more than disturbing. He was thinking about their search for Rosemary Gibb. If Nash had something, why wasn’t he just saying it so that they could move on? And what about the riddle? The two things the city grows best. What was that about?

“Time would seem to be of the essence,” Teddy said.

“It is,” Nash said, rising to his feet. “I hope you’re a fast reader. I’ve got an idea, Teddy, but I want you to confirm it. Call me as soon as you’re done.”

THIRTY-FIVE

There was a bookstore two blocks from the office on Walnut Street. Teddy flipped open his cell phone, entering his office number and filling Jill in as he wove through traffic on his way downtown. She offered to help and agreed to pick up two copies of
The Agony and the Ecstasy
, along with a pizza. With two people reading the book, they could get through the copy in half the time.

Teddy cleared the call, pulled Detective Ferarro’s card out of his pocket, and punched in his number at the missing persons unit. The detective picked up the call at his desk and recognized Teddy’s voice from earlier that afternoon.

“I need to know if there are any marks on the bodies,” Teddy said.

“What kind of marks on which bodies?” Ferarro asked.

“We can start with Rosemary Gibb, but I’m asking about the files on the ten girls you sent down to the homicide unit. The families gave you pictures and physical descriptions. I know you asked. Did Rosemary Gibb’s mother describe any marks on her body that would distinguish her from anyone else? Birthmarks, moles, or tattoos.”

There was a long pause. Teddy thought that he might have lost the connection. When the detective finally spoke up, Teddy recognized the concern in the detective’s voice and knew he had his ear.

“Where you going with this, Teddy? It sounds like you’ve got a body.”

“I’m on my way back to the office. I was just wondering about the marks. I noticed on the missing persons bulletins that nothing was mentioned.”

“If they had any distinguishing marks,” Ferarro said, “they would have been registered with the FBI and listed on the bulletin. Rosemary Gibb does not have a birthmark or a tattoo.”

“You get that from her mother?” Teddy asked.