Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense by Richard Montanari Read Free Book Online Page B

knows?”
    “He called it in?”
    “No,” Davis said. “He probably didn’t have change.” Another knowing smile. “He flagged us down, we called radio.”
    “Hang on to him.”
    Byrne glanced at the front door. It was sealed. “Which house is it?”
    Officer Davis pointed to the row house on the right.
    “And how do we get inside?”
    Officer Davis pointed to the row house to the left. The front door was torn from its hinges. “You have to walk through.”
    Byrne and Jessica walked through the row house to the north of the crime scene, a long-since abandoned and stripped property. The walls were scarred with years of graffiti, pocked with dozens of fist-sized holes in the drywall. Jessica noticed that there wasn’t a single item left that might be worth anything. Switch plates, outlet plates, outlets, fixtures, copper wire, even the baseboards were long gone.
    “Serious feng shui problem here,” Byrne said.
    Jessica smiled, but a bit nervously. Her main concern at the moment was not falling through the rotted joists into the basement.
    They emerged in the back and negotiated through the chain-link fence to the rear of the crime scene house. The tiny backyard, which abutted an alley that ran behind the block of houses, was besieged with derelict appliances and tires, all overgrown with a few seasons of weeds and scrub. A small doghouse at the rear of the fenced-in property stood guard over nothing, its chain rusted into the earth, its plastic dish filled to the brim with filthy rainwater.
    A uniformed officer met them at the back door.
    “You clear the house?” Byrne asked. House was a very loose term. At least a third of the rear wall of the structure was gone.
    “Yes, sir,” he said. His tag read R. VAN DYCK . He was in his early thirties, Viking blond, pumped, and heavily muscled. His arms strained the material of his coat.
    They gave their information to this officer, who was taking the crime scene log. They entered through the back door and as they descended the narrow stairs to the basement, the stench greeted them first. Years of mildew and wood rot dallied beneath the smells of human by-products—urine, feces, sweat. Beneath that there was an ugliness suggesting an open grave.
    The basement was long and narrow, mirroring the layout of the row house above, perhaps fifteen by twenty-four feet, with three support columns. As Jessica ran her Maglite over the space she saw it was littered with rotting drywall, spent condoms, crack bottles, a disintegrating mattress. A forensic nightmare. In the damp grime were probably a thousand smeary footprints if there were two; none, at first glance, pristine enough for a usable impression.
    In the midst of this was a beautiful dead girl.
    The young woman sat on the floor in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around one of the support pillars, her legs splayed on either side. It appeared that, at some point, a previous tenant had tried to make the supporting columns into Doric-style Roman columns with a material that might have been Styrofoam. Although the pillars had a cap and a base, the only entablature was a rusted I-beam above, the only frieze, a tableau of gang tags and obscenities spray-painted along the length. On one of the walls of the basement was a long-faded mural of what was probably supposed to be the Seven Hills of Rome.
    The girl was white, young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. She had flyaway strawberry-blond hair cut just above her shoulders. She wore a plaid skirt, maroon knee socks, and white blouse beneath a maroon V-neck with a school logo. In the center of her forehead was a cross made of a dark, chalky material.
    At first glimpse Jessica could not see an immediate cause of death, no visible gunshot or stab wounds. Although the girl’s head lolled to her right, Jessica could see most of the front of her neck, and it did not appear as if she had been strangled.
    And then there were her hands.
    From a few feet away, it appeared as if her