Play Dead (28 page)

FIFTY-SEVEN
T
wo sector cars and two detective cars roared to a halt at the same moment. Jessica and Byrne hit the ground running. Behind them were Josh Bontrager and Dre Curtis.

They arrived to find a disturbing tableau. A sector car was at the mouth of the alley between two blocks of row houses. In front of it was a black Acura TSX. A young officer was handcuffed to one of the spokes of the right front aluminum alloy wheel. In the backseat of the Acura was a young girl, perhaps sixteen. Her face was streaked with mascara tears.

All four detectives drew their weapons, held them at their sides. “Where is he?” Byrne asked the officer.
“He’s gone.” The young man’s shame was palpable. He slammed

his free hand into the front fender.
“Which way?”
The officer pointed east, toward Castor Avenue.
“How long ago?”
“Two minutes, max.”
“Describe him.”
The officer described the man as a white male, thirties, blue and

brown, thick mustache, medium build, no distinguishing marks or scars. He wore a tan windbreaker, black Docker-style pants, black hikers.

“Is he armed?” Byrne asked. “He took my weapon. He said he was going to dump it on Castor. He ejected the mag first.”

Byrne glanced at two of the four uniformed officers. He pointed them in the opposite direction. If their guy said he’d go east, he’d go west. They were off in an instant.

While Jessica got out her keys and unlocked the handcuffs, Dre Curtis got on his handset. “Suspect is not in custody,” he said. “Repeat, suspect is
not
10- 15.”

“Put in a call to K- 9,” Byrne said.
“We need some warm bodies down here,” Dre Curtis continued. “We need a search team now. We need K- 9.”

The officer, a two- year rookie named Randy Sweetin, described what happened. He said he was patrolling, and a woman came across Wyoming Avenue, waving her hands. She told him that she saw a man talking to a teenage girl. She thought it looked funny, so she flagged him down.

“You’re saying the cuffs on him were secure?” Byrne asked. “They were secure. I’m sure of it.”
Josh Bontrager approached. “I called in the plates. Stolen off a

black Acura in long- term parking at the airport.”
“When?” Byrne asked.
“Three days ago.”
“Shit.”
They would have to identify the vehicle by its VIN.

The girl had stopped crying for the moment. She sat on the back of a detective car, a ball of damp tissues in her hands. Someone had brought her a can of Mountain Dew. It sat unopened next to her.

She said her name was Abigail Noonan. She was sixteen. They had not yet pressed her on ID, address, or Social Security number. As a rule, street kids were only truthful about one out of three.

“Are you okay?” Jessica asked.
The girl nodded.
“Is there anything else we can get you right now?”
The girl shook her head.

251 BADLANDS
“Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. He was just, like, parked there, listening to the radio, okay?”
“Do you remember what station?”
“I don’t know too much about which radio stations play what. I’m not, you know, from around here.”
“I understand,” Jessica said. “Do you remember what song he was listening to?”
“Yeah. He was listening to ‘When You Look Me in the Eyes.’ That song by the Jonas Brothers. You know them?”
Jessica didn’t know the Jonas Brothers from the Wright Brothers. “Sure.”
“Anyway, I was on the bench over there, and I heard the music. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. I looked around and I saw this guy in his car. He looked over and saw me.”
“What did he do?”
“Do? He didn’t do anything.”
“I mean, did he smile, did he wave, did he call you over?”
“He might have smiled. I don’t really remember. It looked like he was reading a little book of some kind. More like a booklet.”
“What kind of booklet?”
“Well, when I walked by, I saw that he was holding the booklet in one hand, and this cool video iPod in the other, so I guess it was the manual. He looked a little confused.”
“Did he start talking to you?”
The girl looked at the ground. She began to color. “No,” she said. “I started talking to him.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He said he just bought his daughter a new iPod, and he was having trouble with it. He said he wanted to download a lot of stuff she liked before he gave it to her. He asked me if I knew anything about iPods.”
“Do you?”
“Of course.”
“What happened then?”
“I was so stupid. I walked around and got in the car.” “Did he touch you?”
“No,” she said. “Not right then. I thought everything was cool until I looked in the backseat, and I saw it.”
“You saw it? What did you see?”
“The newspaper. It was opened to the story about that guy who was kidnapping girls off the street. I looked at him. He knew that I saw the newspaper. When our eyes met, we both knew. I
freaked.
”
“Did he strike you? Or try to detain you?”
“No. But when I saw that I couldn’t get out I started yelling my ass off.”
They had checked the interior of the Acura. The inside handle on the passenger’s door had been removed. Jessica made a few notes. She put a hand on the young girl’s shoulder. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to contact your parents. You know that, right?”
The girl nodded. Fresh tears followed.
A few minutes later a K- 9 officer arrived with his dog. The officer ran the dog—a German shepherd tracking dog named Oliver— through the driver’s side of the Acura, and then around the perimeter of the car. He then walked the dog over to the tree line across the street. Almost instantly the dog alerted to a path. The two disappeared into the trees, followed by Josh Bontrager, Dre Curtis, and a pair of uniformed officers.
Jessica glanced at her watch. If this was their killer, he had a pretty good lead. But she had worked with the K- 9 Unit many times. If their man was still in the area, they would find him.

FIFTY-EIGHT
T
here were sirens everywhere. Swann had doubled back, circling through the trees near Greenwood Cemetery. He found a row of three unoccupied porta- potties near a construction site.

Once inside, even though the quarters were tight, he worked quickly. He unzipped his bag, put the foam rubber around his waist. He put on a gray wig already tied into a ponytail. He slipped buck teeth over his own. He stepped into a dark blue jumpsuit with the city’s water- department logo on the back.

In less than thirty seconds he had gained forty pounds, aged fifteen years, and changed into an outfit as different from the man they sought as could be. He stuffed his old clothes down into the toilet, along with the young officer’s weapon. There was probably a wealth of forensic evidence to be found on his discards, but he couldn’t think about that now.

He emerged from the portable toilet and made his way south. When he reached the circle at Castor and Wyoming, two sector cars came flashing by.

Moments later Swann flagged a cab. He hated to lose the car, but it was all right. He had four other vehicles.
FIFTY-NINE
T

hey met in the duty room. A suspect sketch was being run off at that moment, and would be distributed to every sector car in the division on the next shift. They would not be releasing it to the media for a while, but that did not mean it wouldn’t leak.

The K- 9 officer and his dog had tracked to a bank of portable toilets. There, in one of the stalls, they found a pile of men’s clothing stuck into the holding tank, along with what appeared to be the young officer’s service weapon. A CSU team was en route to the site to begin the unenviable task of collecting evidence.

At just after noon, a detective walked into the unit. It was Tony Park. Park was in his late forties, one of only a handful of KoreanAmerican detectives in the department. There were few people better with a database or spreadsheet. No one was better on the Internet.

“I’ve been running missing persons of an age along with unidentified DOAs. The DOA data was slim, but, as you might imagine, the missing- person files were huge. Why do so many kids want to come to Philly? Why not New York?”

“Got to be the cheesesteaks,” someone said. Then, as expected, from around the room:
“Which means John’s Roast Pork.”

255 BADLANDS

“Which means Sonny’s Famous.”
“Which means Tony Luke’s.”
Park shook his head. “Every friggin’ time, the same argument,”

he said. “Anyway, one of the files jumped high. Last December, a sixteen- year- old girl from Chicago went missing. Her name was Elise Beausoleil. Elise told one of her friends that she was coming to Philadelphia. Her father, who owns a multinational company called Sunshine Technologies—and also happens to be golfing buddies with the governor of Illinois—makes a call to the governor, who in turn calls his friend, the governor of our fair commonwealth, who in turn puts pressure on the mayor and the commissioner to turn over every rock and bucket to find this kid. You guys remember this case, don’t you?”

The homicide detectives look at each other, shrugged. The truth was, homicide was a fairly insulated unit. If it wasn’t a dead body, you pretty much didn’t see it.

“Anyway, detectives in East division discovered that Elise got a part- time job doing door- to- door surveys for some human- rights group. They interviewed the director and some of the people who worked there. They remembered Elise. They turned up a route she worked. They said that after New Year’s Day she never showed up again. They all just figured she went home. Her father put on some private detectives, but they turned up zilch.”

“Philly guys?” Byrne asked.
“Two from Philly, two from Chicago.”
“When did he call them in?”
“Around March.”
“Was she on the FBI site?”
“Oh, yeah.” Park reached into the folder, pulled out a photograph.

“This is her.”

He put the picture on the desk. The girl was a beauty—almondshaped eyes, cropped dark hair, a long swanlike neck.
The detectives looked at the route Elise had taken on her surveys.
“How deep was the canvass?” Jessica asked.
“Like the Mariana Trench. I think they hit six hundred doors.”
“I take it there were no leads.”
“Not a one.”
The Collector,
Jessica thought, a little dismayed that the nickname had seeped into her consciousness. She looked at Elise Beausoleil’s beautiful dark eyes, wondering if the last person this girl had seen was the man they so desperately sought.

SIXTY
S

wann sat at his kitchen table. He was still dressed in his disguise.
On the way back to the house he saw the FedEx truck three blocks

over. He was waiting for a delivery, a set of antique bronze drawer pulls he had all but stolen on eBay.

A few minutes earlier he had seen on TV the sketch of the man wanted for the attempted abduction of a girl near Tacony Park. It looked no more like him than did the man in the moon. The media was referring to him as “the Collector.” He was pleased with both developments.

He hoped the young officer did not have nightmares. Now that he was so close to the end, to his grand finale, he found his mind drifting back to the place where it all began. It was the same time of day, as he recalled, this lilac- hued hour between the time when he arrived home and his first aperitif. He recalled that he had just watched
The Magic Bricks
in the attic, when the doorbell rang. He thought about Elise sitting at this very table, one leg curled beneath her, the background seeming to dissolve away. She was so bright, so alive, a pixie with a gamine body and close- cropped hair.
She had come from money, of that he was sure. The quality of her boots and jewelry spoke of it; her manner and vocabulary all but confirmed it. She had about her an air of aristocracy, but it was not something by birthright. She was new money. She wore it like a mantle of pride.
Elise had strolled the great room that day, picking up a few of his
objets d’art
on the way. She had seemed particularly interested in the Tiffany crystal and brass carriage clock. It was one of his favorites. This moved him. She also liked—
The doorbell rang. It was FedEx.
Swann crossed the foyer, peered through curtains. It was not the FedEx delivery man after all. Instead it was a very attractive woman. She had silken shoulder-length hair, wore a smart navy suit, white blouse.
“Recall the man in Metairie, Joseph. The one who owned the haberdashery. They know your voice here. Beware.”
Swann smoothed his long gray wig. He opened the door.
“Hello,” he said. His voice now carried the slightest accent. It was a French intonation, but native to Louisiana.
“Hi,” the woman replied. She held up a gold badge. “My name is Detective Jessica Balzano. I’m with the Philadelphia Police Department. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
Swann steadied himself against the doorjamb. “Of course.”
“May I ask your name?”
“Jake,” Swann said. “Jake Myers. Would you like to come inside?”
The woman made a note. “Thanks.”
He opened the door wide. She stepped in.
“Wow,” she said. “This is some place.”
“Thank you,” he said. “It’s been in my family for years.” He gestured. “Would you like to sit in the parlor?”
“No,” she said. “I’m fine. This shouldn’t take too long.”
Swann glanced at the stairs. The stairs leading up to Claire’s room. He had given her another ampoule, but that was an hour ago. Just a few minutes earlier he thought she had stirred. Patricia was fast asleep in the basement.
“Get her into the kitchen, Joseph.”
“Would you like something to drink? I’ve just made fresh coffee. Kenya.”
“No thank you,” she said. “We’re talking to everyone in the neighborhood.”
“I see.”
“Do you live here alone?” she asked.