Текст книги "The Echo Man"

Автор книги: Richard Montanari

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Chapter 74

    Jessica could not find her partner. she had stopped by Byrne's apartment, visited all his familiar breakfast and coffee haunts, checked his favorite watering holes, hoping not to find him. She had not.

    Byrne had not called into the unit nor, more importantly, shown up for his deposition, his on-the-record statement about his whereabouts on the night Eduardo Robles had been killed. Jessica knew that the inspector had smoothed it over with the DAs office, but it was unlike Byrne in any number of ways, not the least of which was his commitment to keeping his word.

    Jessica spent the remainder of the morning reading through the material on Carnival of The Animals. There were indeed fourteen movements, not all of them devoted to animals. One was called Fossils; another, Pianists; yet another, Finale. For some reason the killer had chosen eight of the movements. But they were all there, and it was all making slow sense.

    Beyond this, all these victims were related to cold cases. They were all suspects in homicides. Or suspected of complicity in homicides.

    The connection to a group like Societe Poursuite and a man named George Archer could not be overlooked.

    All these people were in some way culpable. In the eyes of their killer, they were all guilty of something. But why these people? What linked them? Why the cases of Antoinette Chan, Marcellus Palmer, Marcia Kimmelman and Melina Laskaris? Why not any of the other hundreds of unsolved cases sitting in the dusty books on the shelf?

    At one o'clock Jessica put a call into the Department of Motor Vehicles. If George Archer had a driver's license in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they would be able to get a photograph.

    She skipped lunch and spent the early afternoon on the phone with the lab and the DAs office. Michael Drummond was in court, but his secretary promised Jessica that he would get back to her.

    By four o'clock she learned that there was no one named George Archer registered at any hotel in the greater Philadelphia area.

    She also put in a call to Chief Rogers Logan in Garrett Corners. At her request Logan paid a visit to Archer Farms. George Archer had not returned to his house.

    As the first half of Jessica long day wound down, there were no new leads. The three other lead detectives – Josh Bontrager, Nicci Malone, and Dennis Stansfield – were all on the street, chasing down their leads. Josh had interviewed members of the Chan family. All had concrete alibis. Nicci Malone had taken the morning to drive to Weirton, West Virginia to speak to Marcellus Palmer's son and daughter-in-law. She learned nothing of value. God only knew what Stansfield – obsessed now more than ever with Kevin Byrne – was doing.

    It seemed the Byrne/Stansfield conflict had settled for the time being. There would probably be some kind of fallout from the incident, but it wouldn't be tonight. The homicide unit had a few other things with which to be concerned.

    Jessica arrived home around five-thirty, made a quick dinner for her and Sophie. After dinner Sophie modeled her Snow Fairy costume. She looked adorable.

    Outside, the wind picked up, swirling leaves in the street. Perfect Philly Halloween weather. And there was never a shortage of atmosphere or things to do in Philly on Halloween.

    There was the Ghost Tour, which took participants on a candlelight excursion to Society Hill and Independence Park. There was the tour of Eastern State Penitentiary, once voted the number one haunted house in America. Then there was the Mutter Museum, and the home of Edgar Allan Poe.

    But if Philadelphia was attached to its horrific past, it was nothing if not creative. Jessica had already seen news footage of people trick– or-treating in pink body suits, with a band of paper wrapped around their heads. The new favorite costume in Philly, it seemed, was the victim of a serial murderer.

    Jessica took Sophie out for trick-or-treating early. This year was different from previous years. Trick-or-treating among row houses was a frontal assault. Within an hour, they hit a hundred or so houses. Sophie returned with a pair of bulging pillowcases.

    While Sophie divvied up her swag on the living-room floor, Jessica showered and prepared for her undercover assignment at the hotel.

    Before she left the house, she caught her reflection in the hallway mirror. Not bad, she thought. The simple black dress was okay, if a little tight. Time to ease up on the cannoli from Termini's.

    The hard part, of course, was the gun. Though in many ways the perfect accessory, most designers did not allow for the bulk of a weapon when creating a line. It was never the Smith & Wesson collection for Dior, or Vivienne Westwood presents Frocks with Clocks.

    Just to be on the safe side, she packed a small duffel with jeans and a hoodie, stowed it in the car. She had no idea where this night would take her.

    The team met in Le Jardin's Loss Prevention office. There were ten detectives in all, including Josh Bontrager, Dennis Stansfield, Nicci Malone, and Nick Palladino. Most were in plain clothes, the remaining few had on PPD windbreakers.

    They were briefed by John Shepherd on the layout of the floors, the location of surveillance cameras, the hotel protocol for emergencies. They went briefly over the program for the evening, which included a lavish dinner, a number of speakers, along with a keynote address by the attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition, in the smaller meeting rooms there were various panels and demonstrations. According to Shepherd, excluding front– and back-of-the-house staff and personnel, there were close to one thousand people in the building.

    Every so often Jessica glanced at the door. Byrne had not shown.

    After John Shepherd had completed his briefing, Dana Westbrook addressed the task force. They had received more than seventy DMV photographs of men named George Archer. None were registered to the man at the Archer Farms. The sheriffs office, in addition to detectives from the Pennsylvania State Police, were showing the photographs to neighbors and vendors in the area, trying to match the photo with the man who ran Archer Farms.

    For the first hour Jessica worked the reception table, just outside the Crystal Room. The double-length conference table was draped with white bunting, and carried a few hundred name tags, programs, and pins bearing the slogan He escapes who is not pursued.

    As people filed by, Jessica watched their movements, their behaviors. Overall, it was a rather staid-looking group. Conservatively dressed, quiet in demeanor, polite in manner. In the course of an hour she handed out more than fifty name tags.

    At eight o'clock three men approached from across the lobby, one of them quite inebriated. They were in their forties, white, casually dressed. As they got closer, the shortest one – the drunk one – did his best to focus on the table, on the name tags, and finally on Jessica.

    'Whoa!' he said, reeling a little.

    'Welcome,' Jessica said.

    'My name is Jukka Tolonen,' the tall blond man said, introducing himself.

    'Jay Bowman,' said the other. Jessica scanned the table, found the name tags she was looking for, handed them both a tag and a program.

    'Thanks,' the two men said in tandem, both sounding a little embarrassed for their friend.

    'You know,' the drunk one said, 'I've been coming to this convention for, I don't know, five years? Most of the women look like Mrs. Marble.'

    Jessica was pretty sure the man meant Miss Marple. 'What's your name?' she asked.

    The man looked at his friends. 'You hear that? She asked my name, dude. She's hitting on me!'

    'I think she wants to give you your name tag,' Tolonen said. He had an accent. Maybe Finnish. 'Oh.'

    The drunk man made a production of reaching into his pocket for his wallet. He pulled it out, made a bigger deal of extracting one of his business cards, a big smile on his face as if this were the cleverest bit ever. 'It looks like I'm somebody named Barry Swanson,' he said. 'Like the frozen dinner.'

    Like the frozen adolescence, Jessica thought. She handed Barry Swanson his ID and a program. Swanson immediately dropped it all on the floor. Tolonen picked up the material, clipped the name tag on his wobbly friend.

    'Sorry,' Bowman said to Jessica. 'He's a forensic chemist. He doesn't get out much.'

    Jessica watched them walk away, wondering how crimes ever got solved.

    When Jessica was relieved by a member of the task force, a detective out of West Division named Deena Yeager, she walked over to the front desk, surveyed the crowded lobby. David Albrecht had not gotten permission to film inside the ballroom, but he was allowed to shoot footage in the lobby and out on the street. Jessica saw that he had snagged some talking-head interview time with some pretty heavy hitters.

    Just about everyone in the room had some connection to law enforcement. There were retired detectives, prosecutors, forensic professionals of every discipline, men and women who worked in the processing of fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood, documents. There were pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, people who worked in behavioral science and mathematics. She'd heard there was a small contingent from Keishicho, the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department.

    She saw Hell Rohmer and Irina Kohl, pretending to be merely colleagues. It didn't take a seasoned detective to detect the occasional brush of hands, or the more than occasional longing glance. She saw judges, lawyers, bailiffs, along with a handful of ADAs.

    She did not see Kevin Byrne.

Chapter 75

    Lucy Doucette stood at the end of the hallway on the twelfth floor.

    Her shift ended at six-thirty, but she asked Audrey Balcombe if there were any credits to be had and it turned out that three of the guests had requested housekeeping twice a day. She imagined these people were in some kind of lab or forensic work and had a serious germ phobia. Regardless, she was able to stay on for an extra two hours. Now she was just killing time.

    Lucy knew that the moment she swiped her card in the electronic lock on the door to 1208 it would go on the record. She was scared out of her wits to go back in there, but she had been scared so long it just didn't matter anymore.

    She looked over her shoulder. The hallway was deserted, but Lucy knew she was not alone, not technically. She had once been in the main security station and had seen the big monitors. All staff knew where the closed-circuit cameras were. At least, the cameras they knew about, the obvious ones on the ceiling. At the end of each hallway was a sideboard and a mirror, and Lucy always wondered if the mirrors were two-way mirrors and maybe had a camera behind them.

    Before she could stop herself, Lucy knocked on the door to Room 1208.

    'Housekeeping.'

    Nothing. She knocked again, repeated the word. Silence from within. She leaned closer to the door. There was no sound of a TV, a radio, a conversation. The general rule was two announcements, then enter.

    Lucy tried one last time, got no response, then swiped her card, eased open the door.

    'Housekeeping,' she said once more, her voice barely above a whisper. She slipped inside, let the door close behind her. It shut with a loud and final click, meaning that the lock had irrevocably registered that she was in Room 1208.

    The room looked exactly the same as it had the last time. The minibar was untouched, the bed had not been slept in, the wastebasket beneath the desk was empty. She peeked into the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed in there, either. The toilet paper was still in a point, the soaps wrapped. Sometimes the nicer guests tried to hang the towels back the way they were, but Lucy could always tell. They never got them exactly right. She could also tell if someone had taken a shower or bath, just by the smell, the damp sweetness of body gel and shampoo that hung in the air.

    She stepped back to the door, put her ear to it, listened for sounds in the hallway. It was silent. She walked to the closet, opened the door. The garment bag hung there like a body at a gallows. She reached out slowly, turned over the ID tag, her hand shaking.

    This bag belongs to George Archer.

    Lucy felt a chill ripple through her body. His name was George Archer. All these years she had tried to imagine her kidnapper's name. Everyone had a name. Whenever she read a newspaper or a magazine, whenever she watched a movie or a TV show, whenever she was in a place like a doctor's office or the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and someone said a name out loud she wondered: Is that his name? Could that person be the man in her nightmares? Now she knew. George Archer. It was, at the same moment, the most benign and the most frightening name she'd ever heard.

    She closed the closet door, walked quickly over to the dresser, her heart pounding. She eased open the bottom drawer. The same shirts were inside – one blue, one white, one white with thin gray stripes. She mind-printed the way they were arrayed in the drawer so she could put them back in precisely the same manner. She bunched the three shirts together, lifted them. They seemed almost hot to her touch. But when she looked beneath the shirts, she saw that the picture was gone.

    Had she imagined it?

    No. It had been there. She had never seen that particular photograph before, but she knew where it had been taken. It had been taken at the ice-cream parlor on Wilmot Street. It was a photo of her mother, and her mother was wearing the red pullover sweater that Lucy had taken from Sears at the mall.

    Lucy turned, looked at the rest of the room. It suddenly seemed foreign, as if she had never been here before. She put the shirts back in the drawer, arranging them carefully. She noticed something in the pocket of the shirt on top, the blue one. It was a piece of paper, a piece of Le Jardin notepad paper.

    Lucy slipped her fingers gently into the pocket, took out the paper. It read:

    Meet me here on Sunday night at 9:30. Love, Lucy.

    It was her handwriting.

    It was a note she had written and had left in the room for Mr. Archer to find.

    She looked at her watch. It was 9:28.

    The room began to spin. It felt for a moment as though the floor beneath her was about to give way. She slammed the drawer shut. It no longer mattered if she didn't get everything back the way it was supposed to be. The only thing that mattered was getting out of this room.

    She recoiled from the dresser as if it were on fire, and suddenly heard—

    —the bell.

    Her bell. Her special bell.

    Lucy felt calm, completely at peace. She knew what she had to do, what she must do. She walked to the hotel room door, propped it open. Then she entered the closet, closed the door, sat on the floor.

    Once inside she smelled apples, pipe smoke, the essence of George Archer, the essence of evil. But this time she was not afraid.

    As footsteps passed by the closet – two sets, a few minutes apart – the night closed in around her, and Lucy Doucette remembered it all.

    'It's okay, Eve, ' he said. 'There's been an accident. I will take care of you.'

    He held out his hand. On it he wore a ring in the shape of a snake. The air was thick with smoke, the sky darkened from it.

    ' What kind of accident?' she asked.

    Mr. Archer opened the door to his car. Lucy got in. 'A plane crash,' he said. 'A bad plane crash.'

    'Where's my mom?'

    'She wants me to watch after you. She's going to go help the people where the plane crashed.'

    'My mom is?'

    'Yes, Eve.'

    Mr. Archer started the car.

    He led her down the narrow wooden steps, through a small door into a drafty room with stone walls. The room was lit only with candles. It seemed as though there were hundreds of them. The room smelled like bad perfume and fermenting apples. Even the dust and cobwebs were cold.

    When Mr. Archer left, and Lucy heard the door at the top of the stairs lock, she saw that there was another girl sitting there. She was about Lucy's age, eleven or so, but she was wearing a grown-up dress. It was spangly and short, and had straps over the shoulders. The girl's face was smeared with make-up. She had been crying for a long time. Her eyes were red and puffy.

    'Who are you?' Lucy asked.

    The girl shivered.

    'I'm ... I'm Peggy.'

    'Why are you here?'

    The girl did not answer. Lucy looked at the girl's arms and legs. There were deep purple bruises on them. Then she looked over and saw a second dress hanging from one of the pipes in the ceiling.

    A long time passed. Hours and hours of which Lucy had no mind, no memory. Days of darkness.

    On the third day she took a bubble bath. The bathroom was in a small room off the cellar. The walls were a pink enamel. The sink had gold-colored faucets.

    When it was dark Mr. Archer came downstairs to get her. He brought her up to the dining room for the first time. The table was set for grown-ups. Wine glasses and more candles. Lucy found herself in her own grown-up dress, and wearing high heels that were too big for her. Mr. Archer was dressed up like a man in an old movie. He had on a white bow tie. He walked to the kitchen.

    Lucy looked at the window. She walked across the room, edged it open, slipped through.

    'Eve!' Mr. Archer yelled.

    Lucy ran. She ran as far and for as long as she could, through endless apple orchards, tripping and falling, scraping her knees and elbows, mushing the rotting apples beneath her. She looked over her shoulder, watching for Mr. Archer. She didn't see him. She soon came to a large pipe that emptied into a lake, crouched down inside, waited. She didn't know how long she was there. Hours and hours. She must have cried herself to sleep, because the next thing she knew there was a light in her face.

    'It's okay,' the man with the flashlight said.

    But it wasn't. It wasn't okay.

    They talked to her for hours, but Lucy didn't say a word. What happened to her was locked away inside.

    Her mother took her home. Time passed, and the man with the ring in the shape of a snake faded from her mind but took up faceless residence in that nest of fear inside her, flying overhead in the darkness of her dreams.

    At night she would hear him humming, she would hear the sound of the car door slamming, the creak of the old wooden steps, the softness of his voice, she would hear—

    The bell.

    The bell rang again.

    It seemed to come from far away, as if it were at the end of that long drainage pipe in which she had crawled. For the briefest of moments she smelled the sewage, felt the dampness of the air. Then it was gone.

    Lucy looked around. It took a while for her to realize where she was. She was in the hotel. Le Jardin. She knew every inch of this place. She looked around the dark closet, felt overhead.

    How much time had passed? She didn't know. She stood, opened the closet door, stepped into the room. The air had changed, changed in a way you could only know from being in a place day after day, knowing its walls, it ceilings, its corners, its very presence.

    The door to the hallway was closed. Lucy looked at her watch. She hadn't been gone long. She had to get out of this room. Mr. Archer could be back any second.

    She turned to leave, but suddenly felt lightheaded. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Her mind began to clear, but something was wrong. Something felt wet underneath her. She got up, looked at her hands. They were coated in bright, glossy scarlet. She turned around and saw, in the dim light, the form under the blood– soaked sheets.

    Lucy felt the contents of her stomach come up inside her throat. She backed away, certain that her heart was going to explode. She could no longer hold it in. She vomited on the floor.

    Then she looked at the telephone on the desk. It seemed a mile away. The smell of her own vomit reached her at the same time as the metallic smell of blood. She was going to be sick again.

    She ran to the bathroom.