The Stolen Ones (3 page)

Detective Kevin Francis Byrne stood in the cold rain, at the edge of the field, thinking:
All killing grounds are the same
.

If there was one truth he had learned in his many years working homicides, it was that a place where murder is done – whether it be an inner-city tenement, a Chestnut Hill mansion, a lush, green field – never again holds a sense of peace. What had once been pristine land was forever lost to madness.

For Byrne it was more than that. In his time as a homicide detective he had witnessed the grim residue of violence, the broken lives, the yoke of suspicion and hatred and distrust. Neighborhoods never forgot.

Byrne had long ago given up the notion of closure as it applied to the family of the victim. For the police and the courts and the politicians closure meant one thing: a number on a ComStat report, a headline in the paper, a campaign slogan. For survivors, it was a nightmare that never found the morning.

At times Byrne forgot simple things – he’d once left a pair of dress shirts at a dry cleaner’s for over a year – but he recalled in rich detail every case he had ever worked, every notification he’d ever made. He often drove through the city and got a feeling when he passed the scene of a murder, felt the hair on his arms bristle. For more than twenty years – since he himself had been pronounced dead for more than a minute, only to come back to life – he’d had these intuitions, these vague feelings that led him down dark paths.

On this day, standing in a place where murder was done, Byrne saw that there were no flowers, no wreaths, no crosses, no remembrance of the evil that had been loosed here. The field probably looked as it had a hundred years earlier.

It was not.

Byrne walked the grid as he imagined it, the path by which Robert Freitag had come to this place.

When he had read the files in the binder, such as it was, the first thing he noticed was that there was no hand-drawn sketch of the crime scene. Even in this age of iPads and Nexus tablets, the most frequently used method of detailing a murder scene was still a pencil and a yellow legal pad. If you were a real up-and-comer you bought your own grid paper.

Whether John Garcia was capable of such a thing, so close to the very end of his life, was unknown.

Byrne wondered what it looked like from the inside for Garcia. Byrne had twice been shot in the head. The first time, he was just grazed by the bullet. The second time it was much more serious. He was extremely fortunate that there was no lasting damage, but his lot in life, for the rest of his life, was to undergo a yearly MRI. The prevailing theory, at least as far as his neurologists went, was that the MRI was just precautionary. The truth was that Kevin Byrne was at risk for a litany of neurological maladies, not the least of which were aneurysms and tumors.

Many a night – too many, if truth were told – he had stayed up, cruising the internet for horror stories that involved aneurysms and tumors, especially the warning signs. Usually, for the first few days after those Bushmills-fueled research sessions, he was certain that he exhibited nine out of ten symptoms.

Lately, there had been one sign that lingered. It was probably something that he should contact his doctors about, but he hadn’t had the courage to do so.

At this moment, at the edge of this frozen field, there was a scent in the air, something Byrne was certain no one else could smell. Part of him hoped there was a reasonable explanation for it. Part of him feared there was not.

Byrne closed his eyes and breathed deeply. There could be no doubt. The smell brought him to a time and a place he could not see; a flood of sensory input he knew was part of a memory not his own.

There, beneath the odor of sack cloth and human waste, was the smell of wet straw.

Priory Park, in the northeast section of the city, was tucked between Frankford Avenue and the banks of the Delaware River. The heavily wooded 62-acre tract acquired its name from the monastery that had once stood on the grounds in the early 1800s. All but one of the buildings had long since been razed, leaving only a small stone chapel near the northwestern corner. Threaded through the dense trees was a tributary of the Poquessing Creek, which emptied into the Delaware River, just a few hundred yards from the eastern edge of the park.

When Jessica turned onto Chancel Lane she saw the solitary figure standing at the edge of the southern section of the park. Although it had only been two weeks since she had seen him, it seemed like a longer period of time. When you work as closely as she and Byrne did, time apart was, in many ways, the same as time apart in a marriage. At first it was a welcome respite, but after a while, when the people around you didn’t quite get what you were saying, didn’t see things quite the same way you did, you began to miss that person, to miss the shorthand. More than once, over the past two weeks, Jessica had seen or heard or read something, and one of her first reactions was to tell her partner about it.

She had her husband Vincent, of course, but Vincent Balzano was as different from Kevin Byrne as he could be. Except for the brooding part. What complemented Jessica’s own personality in her marriage also worked with her partnership as a homicide detective. It carried the same basic statute, as well.

You could both be crazy, you could both be temperamental, just not at the same time.

Byrne had been injured on a case the previous year, and had spent a long time on medical leave, the longest time he had been off the job in his entire time on the force. Many in the unit were certain he would retire, but one day he showed up at the Roundhouse, as if nothing ever happened, and he and Jessica were soon on a new case.

But Jessica, who arguably knew him better than anyone in the squad, maybe in the world, had noticed a change. While he was not one of those detectives always ready to deliver some wisecrack, he did have his moments. Still, he seemed more serious in the past six months. Maybe serious was the wrong word. He seemed a bit more introspective.

Seeing him standing at the edge of the field, silhouetted in the gray mist, he looked more solitary than ever.

The rain was unremitting. As always, Jessica had her umbrella – the big London Fog Auto Stick she’d gotten as a Christmas present from Vincent, Sophie and Carlos last year – in the trunk of the car. Why she did this, she would never know. How hard was it to keep an umbrella in the back seat?

As she parked she noticed that Byrne was holding one of those small umbrellas you pick up on Market Street for five dollars when you’re caught on the street without one. It barely reached halfway to his shoulders. It was mostly serving to keep his head relatively dry. One good gust, though, and it would invert. And the wind was starting to blow. Jessica grabbed her notepad, tucked it inside her coat, clicked her pen three times, which had somehow become a habit years ago, as if she were Dorothy and wore ruby slippers. She put her pen away, took a deep breath knowing she was going to get soaked, opened the door and sprinted to the back of the car. Within seconds she had the trunk open, and her umbrella out and unfurled.

She crossed the road, walked over to where Byrne stood.

‘Hey, partner,’ she said.

Byrne turned to look at her. Any fear she’d had about him and his dark moods evaporated in an instant. His eyes were a bright emerald, like always.

‘Hey.’

‘Not much of an umbrella.’

Byrne smiled. ‘No substitute for quality,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Thanks.’ Jessica pointed to the field. ‘Did you walk it off?’

It was a perfunctory question. She knew he had.

‘Yeah.’ He pointed to an area about thirty feet in from the road. ‘The body was found right there.’

‘What about the binder?’ Jessica asked. ‘Are you up to speed?’

‘As much as I can be.’

‘Did you make much out of John’s notes?’

‘Not really,’ Byrne said.

John Garcia did not work with a partner, so there was no one to ask about these things. His strange doodles, it seemed, would forever remain a mystery.

‘And there’s no lead on where the missing files are?’ Byrne asked.

‘No. Before I left the office I looked at every binder in that drawer, plus the drawers above and below it. They’re not in there.’ Jessica put her umbrella over the two of them just as a gust of wind cut across the open field, soaking them both with frigid rain. They huddled a few inches closer to each other.

‘Did you watch the video?’ Jessica asked.

Byrne shook his head. He knew that Jessica would watch it, and tell him if there was anything he needed to know. There wasn’t.

‘I made a few calls before I left,’ Jessica said. ‘I asked for backup copies to some of the files that are missing. They’re on the way.’

These files included the autopsy and the toxicology reports, as well as a detailed report from the Firearms Unit on the murder weapon. There were digital copies of all this material, of course, but it would take a while. Although the murder of Robert Freitag was an open/unsolved, it was technically a cold case. There had been more than thirty homicides in the City of Brotherly Love since then, and every victim deserved the attention of all divisions in those crucial first few days.

Jessica looked out over Priory Park. ‘Is it too late to turn in my badge today?’

Byrne smiled. ‘You can do it, but I don’t think you’ll get a full refund. And then there’s that restocking fee.’

‘It’s always something.’ She glanced at her watch. She was wet and cold and ready to move inside. She knew that her partner needed time at the crime scene, even one as cold and wet as this. She asked anyway. ‘Ready to head back?’

‘Sure.’

‘You want to follow me?’

‘No, I’ll ride with you. I want to come back here later, make a lap around the park. Look for vantage points.’

The nearest houses were just to the west. Although the view from those houses was almost certainly obscured by a deep tree line, it was probably worth checking out. If John Garcia had driven up there, and talked to some of the residents, the notes were not in the binder. They would have to re-canvass, although conducting a neighborhood interview a month after a crime rarely yielded anything useful.

The missing files, combined with John Garcia’s notes, meant that they were not even starting at square one, but before square one. They didn’t even have the benefit of a dead body or crime scene to work.

The killing ground had long ago disclosed its secrets.

Twenty minutes later, Jessica and Byrne turned onto Almond Street. Jessica pulled over in front of Robert Freitag’s row house, put the car in park.

Neither detective wanted to leave the warmth of the car.

‘I forgot to ask,’ Byrne said. ‘How’s school?’

Jessica shook her head. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘That bad?’

‘I fell asleep in class.’

‘Sleep was pretty much my default position when I was in school.’

‘With your hand raised?’

‘No,’ Byrne said. ‘I think you win that one. Then again, I never raised my hand.’ He pointed to the pile of texts on the front seat of Jessica’s car. ‘Has anyone offered to carry your books?’

‘
Please
. I have pantyhose older than these kids.’

‘Jess, you have a ponytail. You don’t look a day older than any of them.’

Jessica cut the engine. ‘You are a fabulous liar,’ she said. ‘Have you ever considered going to law school?’

Byrne smiled. ‘And give up show business?’

The address was a two-story stone-front structure, third from the corner, 1920s vintage. There were four sandstone steps up to the front door, which shared a white awning with the house next to it. The two sidewalk-level basement windows were glass blocked. The front windows had security bars, as did most of the houses on the street.

Jessica opened the screen door. Across the interior door jamb was a bright orange PPD sticker, signed by John Garcia two days before he died.

The sticker was intact. No one had been inside Robert Freitag’s house since that day.

Jessica took out the envelope she had gotten from Dana Westbrook, tore it open, dumped the key into her hand. She slipped the key in the lock.

As she opened the door she turned to her partner.

‘So, you don’t have a new case yet?’

Byrne shook his head. ‘Philly behaved last night.’

‘Imagine that.’

Jessica had always thought that loneliness had a smell, a grim and silent airlessness that said that the occupant of a space drew a distinct line between inside – where he lived his solitary existence – and the rest of the world.

Robert Freitag’s small row house was just such a place. From the moment she entered Jessica could sense Freitag’s seclusion, his desire to be shut off from others.

Against the wall to the left was an inexpensive sofa; to the right, at a precise ninety-degree angle, a matching chair. The coffee table had a pair of remotes aligned perfectly next to each other, along with a candy dish with three pinwheel candies in it.

The wall unit across from the sofa held a twenty-seven-inch LCD television. On either side were books, mostly paperbacks on top, with two rows of hardcovers on the bottom. At first glance Jessica could see that many were novels popular in the eighties and nineties. Jessica wondered if the books had come with the house.

Above the couch was a generic landscape print, something you might see on the wall at a budget interstate motel. There was nothing else on the walls in the living room or the attached dining room.

Jessica and Byrne fell into a familiar rhythm: Byrne headed downstairs, Jessica went up.

On the second floor were two bedrooms and a bathroom. Jessica walked down the short hallway to the first bedroom. It was empty, save for a pair of laundry baskets. One of the hampers held a pair of blue bath towels. The other, a white undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts.

The bathroom was as tidy as the rest of the house. Jessica opened the medicine cabinet: Tylenol, Listerine, Arid Extra Dry, dental floss. No prescription medications.

She walked down the hall to the other bedroom.

A bed, a dresser and a small vanity. A month of passing street traffic had shaken loose dust. A thin film covered all the smooth surfaces in the room.

Inside the closet were two dark suits, a pair of navy sport coats, a half-dozen or so short-sleeve dress shirts, just as many striped ties. There were a pair of V-neck sweaters on the shelf, along with a 1970s-vintage Samsonite suitcase. Jessica took down the suitcase, put it on the bed, snapped it open. The case was empty, save for a small plastic bag with travel-sized bottles of shampoo, conditioner and body lotion. All appeared unused. Jessica put the suitcase back on the shelf. She checked the pockets on all the items of clothing, found nothing.

No matter how many times she did this, Jessica always felt as if she were violating the rights of the victim. While she had no problem frisking a suspect, and subsequently going through their possessions, when the items belonged to the victim it was different. She often thought about what her own closets and drawers and suitcases would yield.

She opened the drawers in the dresser. Socks in one drawer, underwear in another, T-shirts in yet another. Robert Freitag’s was a life of mathematical order.

Jessica walked back downstairs, stepped into the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was way too clean. The refrigerator door handle had no smudges, the kitchen drawer that held the cutlery and carving knives held no crumbs. The house was not spotless, but it was close.

As Jessica moved from room to room she took dozens of pictures, mostly for her own reference. She never printed them off, for the simple reason that they might become mixed in with official crime scene photos, and in this era of PhotoShop it would leave the door open for a savvy defense attorney to have all photographic evidence come under suspicion.

While Jessica was upstairs, Byrne had taken the contents of the small living-room desk and spread it out on the dining-room table.

‘Anything in the basement?’ Jessica asked.

Byrne shook his head. ‘Washer and dryer, a Christmas tree in a box, a folded treadmill. That’s about it.’

Jessica stepped into the dining area. On the table was a soup bowl with a coffee mug upside down it. Next to these items was a folded linen napkin and a silver spoon. All were clean, perhaps set up for a meal Robert Freitag would not live to enjoy. The spoon looked to be a commemorative, with something etched into the handle. She pointed to the papers on the table.

‘This is all that was in the desk?’ she asked.

Byrne nodded.

Freitag’s personal papers were as tidy and minimal as everything else in his life – a checkbook, a neatly bound stack of electric and gas bills, a few paper-clipped coupons for nearby Chinese takeout and dry cleaners. As far as they knew, Robert Freitag had no computer, no cell phone, no pager. This was the extent of his interaction with the outside world. There were no personal letters, no birthday or Christmas cards.

Jessica flipped through the check register, found the expected: utilities, insurance, income tax, doctor’s and dentist bills. She made note of the doctor and dentist names.

The only thing left to search were the books on the bookshelves.

They crossed the living room in silence. Byrne took the shelves to the left; Jessica, the right. The paperbacks on the shelves – mostly worn, second-hand copies – were popular novels: Stephen King, John Grisham, Tom Clancy. Jessica flipped through them, one by one, found nothing.

‘Jess,’ Byrne said. ‘Look at this.’

Byrne had in his hands a yellow hardcover book. It was an old book club edition. The cover was ripped in a few places. It was titled
Dreams and Memory
.

‘Never read it.’

‘Me neither,’ Byrne said. ‘Waiting for the movie.’

‘Anything inside?’

Byrne riffled the pages. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘But it is inscribed.’ He opened the book, turned to the title page. On the left-hand side was a brief inscription. It was written in blue ink, with a flourish.

‘Just the inscription? No name signed?’

‘No,’ Byrne said.

‘Looks like a textbook,’ Jessica said. ‘Doesn’t really fit with the other reading material in the house, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

Byrne turned back to the title page, then flipped to the copyright page. The book was first published in 1976.

‘I didn’t see any inscriptions in any of the other books,’ Jessica said. ‘Did you?’

‘No. This is the only one.’

Byrne looked at the inscription for a few more moments, opened the book to the back. There, drawn in pencil on the last blank page, were a series of geometric shapes. One long rectangle, with a much smaller rectangle to the left, as well as a small square at the top of the page, drawn in perspective. He showed the page to Jessica. ‘Mean anything to you?’

Jessica looked at the drawings. ‘Not a clue.’

Byrne glanced at the inscription once again, then put the book back on the shelf. They were done. They knew nothing more than they had when they walked into this house, or at least nothing that would point them to the person who had so brutally murdered Robert August Freitag.

‘This guy was a ghost,’ Jessica said.

‘Yeah, but why?’ Byrne replied. ‘How?’

Jessica thought about it. She wondered how many people in her city, any city, live their lives like this. No ripples, no tracks. Before leaving the Roundhouse she’d done an online search on the man, and come up with nothing. In this day and age it was virtually impossible to leave no digital footprint whatsoever. But Robert Freitag had done it.

‘If he was so ordinary, why did someone put a railroad spike through his head?’ Byrne said.

For now, that remained the most important question.

As they prepared to leave, Byrne walked to the end of the living room. He glanced down the short hallway leading to the kitchen.

Like everything else in the house there was a thin layer of dust on the baseboards. In the center of the hallway the dust looked to be lighter in color. Almost white.

‘You see that?’ Byrne asked, pointing to the powder on the floor.

‘Yeah,’ Jessica said. ‘It looks like it might have come from the light fixture.’

Without a word, Jessica returned to the dining room, retrieved one of the chairs. She put it under the light fixture, climbed onto it. Steadying herself with one hand on the ceiling, she slipped a finger behind the plate and gently pulled downward. The frame opened easily. She unclipped both sides, handed the lens and plate to Byrne. She looked up.

‘Um, partner?’ Jessica asked. ‘I’m no expert, but shouldn’t there be something up here with wires and sockets and light bulbs in it?’

‘You would think.’

There was no fixture recessed into the ceiling, just a rough cut hole in the drywall and a metal frame. Jessica positioned herself on the chair, felt around the opening. After a few moments she found something.

‘There’s a box.’

For a moment Jessica thought about getting the crime scene unit out to handle the removal of whatever was in the ceiling, considering that, in this day and age, anything and everything was possible, including booby-trapped boxes in a dead man’s ceiling. On the other hand, this was not technically a crime scene and, besides, Jessica had already reflexively grabbed the box before she could stop herself. She edged it toward the opening, bringing with it more than a little dust.

‘Steady me,’ Jessica said.

Byrne put a hand on her back as Jessica got on her tiptoes. She removed the box – an old Nike shoebox with a large rubber band around the middle. She handed it to Byrne, then climbed off the chair, brushed herself down. They walked into the small dining area.

Byrne took out his cell phone and took a few pictures of the box. He then gently slid off the rubber band, opened it. As he did this, Jessica found that she was holding her breath.

Inside the box, on top, was a five by eight inch white envelope. The envelope was sealed, with a signature across the flap. The very careful hand of the signature was Robert A. Freitag. Byrne removed the envelope, placed it on the table. Beneath the envelope was a layer of newspaper. Byrne removed the folded page of the newspaper, set it next to the box.

‘Oh,
hello
,’ Jessica said. There, on the bottom of the box, were six rubber-banded stacks of cash, all with one-hundred-dollar bills on top.

Jessica looked at Byrne, back. It was a look they each knew well, one that said that something – although, at the moment, they had no idea what – had changed. Before touching the money, Byrne took photographs of everything
in situ
.

With his gloved hands he gently picked up the stacks of bills, thumbed through them. They were all one-hundred-dollar notes.

‘The bills are old,’ Byrne said. ‘Non-sequential.’

He carefully put the stacks back in the box.

When he was finished, Jessica picked up the envelope, held it up to the light. Inside she saw the silhouette of what appeared to be rectangular pieces of cardboard, perhaps three by five inches in size.

Jessica took out her knife, a four-inch serrated Gerber she was rarely without. She looked at Byrne. ‘Shall we?’

‘We came to the fair,’ Byrne said. ‘Might as well ride the rides.’

It was something they probably should have waited to do back at the Roundhouse but, having found this material, neither wanted to wait. Jessica flicked open the razor-sharp blade, slit the bottom of the envelope, carefully preserving the signature across the flap. She gently shook the contents onto the dining-room table.

As she had surmised, the rectangles inside the envelope were photographs. One by one, Byrne flipped them over.

They were old pictures, edges curled by time, the color all but leached to sepia. But it wasn’t the age of the photographs that drew Jessica’s interest, as well as her partner’s, it was the content.

The photographs were of nude people.

One showed a woman, clearly in her fifties or sixties. She sat on the edge of a steel-frame cot, staring at something on the floor. On her small, sagging breasts was some sort of dark liquid. Another photo was of two men, also in their sixties, fondling each other against the backdrop of a painted cement wall. A third was of a couple on a bed, a man and a woman, with three nude men watching their sex act, each at some stage of tumescence. In that photograph, the men were only visible from the neck down. One photograph was a close-up of someone’s face, very blurred, with an open door in the background.

There was nothing remotely erotic about the pictures. If anything, they were ugly and exploitative; candid snapshots of people who had either no idea they were being photographed or no interest in stopping the practice.

Byrne flipped the photographs over. There was nothing written on the backs – no dates, times, names. One was stained with something light brown, perhaps a partial coffee cup ring.

He stacked the photographs, took a paper evidence bag from his pocket, slid the photographs inside. He took out a second evidence bag, and put in it the envelope in which the pictures were contained. In this bag he also put one of Robert Freitag’s voided checks for later comparison of signatures.

Jessica picked up the sheet of newspaper that had been between the envelope and the bands of cash. She unfolded it. It was from the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
the front page of the Metro section, dated two weeks before Robert Freitag had been found murdered.

She scanned the page. The articles were local to Philly – a city councilman in some kind of tax trouble, the announcement of condominiums in the Northeast, a pair of girls from Conshohocken were accepted into a prestigious piano competition, along with a handful of ads. None of the articles were circled, no words underlined, nothing had been clipped.

‘You see anything there?’ Byrne asked.

Jessica scanned both sides again, just for good measure. ‘Nothing.’

‘Well, these photographs look a lot older than a month. If Freitag was the one who put this page in here back in February, he didn’t do it by accident. It wasn’t used to wrap anything delicate. This meant something to him.’

While it was obvious that Robert Freitag wanted to keep the contents of this box secret – if, indeed, it was Freitag who had placed the box in the ceiling – the question was: did these photographs, and the money, have anything to do with why the man had been murdered? Had he taken these pictures? Was he one of the men in the background? Was his murderer one of the people photographed? Or were these just a prurient, albeit grotesque, hobby?