The Stolen Ones by Richard Montanari Read Free Book Online

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?
    Just as important, if not more so, was the money, which looked to be more than thirty thousand dollars. Had Freitag embezzled it? If so, why hadn’t his murderer come here and torn the place apart looking for it? Had John Garcia cleaned the place up during his one and only visit?
    These were questions neither detective had to ask aloud. They would collect the photographs, and cash, put it all into the chain of evidence, and have it processed.
    Robert Freitag’s secrets were now part of the record.
    Sorry, Mrs Edna Walsh of Forest Hills, New York
, Jessica thought.
This part of your loving relative’s estate will be tied up for a while longer. Maybe forever.
     
    As she buttoned her coat, and tried to brace herself for the icy rain, Jessica glanced around the small, forlorn house. Somehow, since the discovery of these ugly pictures, the atmosphere had morphed from one of loneliness into one of despair. She wanted a hot shower. She turned back to her partner.
    ‘So, I can understand hiding the stash of cash, and I can understand not wanting to leave those pictures on the coffee table, but why that page from the
Inquirer
?’
    ‘Good question, Counselor.’
    Jessica smiled.
Counselor
. She wondered if she would ever earn that title.
    ‘And why those pictures?’ Jessica asked. ‘There isn’t anything remotely like them in the whole house. No
Playboy
, no
Penthouse
, no
Hustler
. Do they still publish
Hustler
?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know.’
    ‘Uh huh.’
    The photographs and the money now added a sense of direction to the case. Perhaps Robert Freitag was not