Richard Montanari (16 page)

    There
was no mistake.

    The
man they had found dead that morning, Kenneth Arnold Beckman, the lead suspect
in an eight-year-old murder case - that case being the bludgeoning to death of
a young woman named Antoinette Chan - was posed inside a building on Federal,
the same place where Antoinette Chan had been found.

    Eight
years before it became the Beckman crime scene it had been the Chan crime
scene.

    'The
suspect in an unsolved homicide gets murdered himself and placed in the same
location as his victim,' Jessica summed up.

    'Yep,'
Byrne said.

    'As
in
exactly
the same place. Posed in
exactly
the same position as
the original victim.' She held up both the photograph and her cellphone.
'Kevin, these are absolutely identical crime-scene photos, only the second
murder, our murder, was eight years later.'

    'Eight
and change, but yeah,' Byrne said. 'These are the facts as we know them.'

    The
two detectives looked at each other, knowing that this case had just crossed
the line. It was now more than a vendetta murder, more than some act committed
in the fiery grip of passion.

    Jessica
glanced again at the photographs. Some inner bell began to peal. In
Philadelphia's history, any large city's history, there were many unsolved
murders, victims of insanity and fury who for years went unavenged, evil
echoing across time.

    There
was just such a legacy in the City of Brotherly Love, shame and guilt and
madness that ran beneath the cobblestone streets like a blood river. Staring at
photographs taken eight years apart, at the ragged flesh of two victims
connected in a way neither she nor her partner yet understood, Detective
Jessica Balzano wondered how much of this history they were about to see.

    
I
float in darkness. i have always been nocturnal, eluding sleep, embraced by
waking dreams.

    
Here
the screams are scuttled and still. It is a place of repose and reflection, a
place of wintry silence. For many years I have felt at home here.

    
I
place the body on the ground. It is the third note. There are eight in this
measure. Harmony and melody. I prop the leg against the low headstone. The
music swells as I leap into the air, bringing down my full weight. The bone
snaps. The sound echoes across the wet granite, the moonlit grass. I take the
recorder in my hand, play back the sound. The cracking of bone is bright
percussion.

    
I
move among the dead, listening. The departed speak softly to me, etudes of
grace and humility. Soon my movements become fluid, an exaltation of this
moment, a dance of death. Le danse macabre. Around and around I twirl. I am
free here
.

    
I spin
among the deceased, thinking about the next days, days leading up to All
Hallow's Eve, when all the world's departed will rejoice.

    
Soon
we will dance, the detective and I. We will dance, and in our embrace we will
find that we are of the same heart, the same mind, two damaged souls sipping
from a tarnished cup of blood.

    Tuesday,
October 26

    Lucinda
Doucette looked at the bathroom floor, thinking:
I live in a world full of
pigs.

    Le
Jardin, a modern 300-room hotel near Seventeenth and Sansom streets, in the
heart of Center City, was a monolithic gray edifice with angular black
wrought-iron railings around its seventy balconies, a model of European
modernity at the corner of what was now being considered Philadelphia's new
French Quarter. Managed by a Belgian multinational firm that also managed
properties in Paris, Monaco and London, Le Jardin, which had been completely
renovated in 2005, catered to the upscale business and leisure traveler, with
its highly polished mahogany trim, its frosted French doors, its expensive
French amenities.

    In
addition to the guest rooms there were six suites on the penultimate floor, all
of them with views of the city, along with a presidential suite on the top floor
that had breathtaking views of the Delaware River and beyond.

    For
Lucinda Doucette, along with everyone else who worked in hotel housekeeping,
the views were less than scenic, although sometimes just as breathtaking in
their own right.

    Like
all hotels, Le Jardin lived and died by its 'star' ratings - Orbitz,
Hotels.com, Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline.

    And
while the management looked to online sites for input and feedback, there were
only two accommodation ratings that really mattered: Mobil and AAA.

    Mobil
'shopped' hotels every few years. The American Automobile Association, on the
other hand, was far more exacting, some might say stingy, with their Diamond
ratings, and thus were the most feared and respected of all the organizations
on whose assessment of accommodations, dining, and travel the success of any
hotel depended. Disappoint AAA, and the drop in business was palpable within
months.

    What
it all boiled down to was comfort, staff, accommodation, and cleanliness.

    Le
Jardin was rightfully considered an upscale establishment, consistently rated
at four stars, and this was something the management guarded fiercely.

    Lucy
Doucette had worked in housekeeping at Le Jardin for just over a year, starting
a few days after her eighteenth birthday. When she first got on staff she found
herself visiting the various travel websites with some regularity, checking the
guest reviews, the user opinions, especially in the area of cleanliness.
Granted, if she wasn't doing her job, she would certainly have heard about it
from the director of housekeeping, a chilly, no-nonsense woman named Audrey
Balcombe who, it was rumored, held a Master's Degree in communications from the
Universite d'Avignon
and had apprenticed as a hotelier with Kurt Wachtveitl,
the legendary former general manager of the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok.

    Still,
Lucy took pride in what she did, and wanted to hear about it, good or bad, from
the guests themselves. One review on trip- advisor.com had given Le Jardin a
single star (there was no option for zero stars, or this guest reviewer
certainly would have used it) in the area of cleanliness, going so far as to
compare the hotel to a locker room at an inner-city YMCA. The reviewer
complained specifically about entering the bathroom upon checking in, only to
find the toilet unflushed. Lucy thought that the guy who'd written and uploaded
the review, not the toilet, was the one full of shit - there was virtually no
chance of this ever happening - but nonetheless, for the next two weeks, she
worked doubly hard on her floor, the twelfth floor, checking and then
rechecking the toilets before clearing the rooms for the arriving guests.

    Most
of the time her work ethic was its own reward - God knew the pay was not - but
sometimes, not often, there were unexpected perks.

    One
guest, about five months earlier - an elderly, refined man - stayed for six
days and when he checked out he left Lucy a one- hundred-dollar tip beneath the
pillow, along with a note that said
To the girl with the haunted eyes: Good
job.

    
Haunted
eyes,
Lucy thought at the time. She wore sunglasses to and from work for
weeks afterward.

    Right
now Lucy wanted to choke the man staying in 1212. In addition to the spilled
coffee on the chair, the stained pillowcases, the broken beer bottles in the
tub, the overturned breakfast tray, the hair- clogged sink, and the shampoo and
conditioner bottles which had somehow ended up under the bed along with two
pairs of stained and streaked underwear, every towel was soaking wet and had
been piled on the floor. And although she was used to this, this time it was
particularly gross. In one of the towels was a copious amount of what looked
like vomit.

    
Jesus,
what a pig
.

    Time
to move. Lucy had four more rooms to clean before her lunch break and less than
two hours to do it. Management knew exactly when she clocked into a room. If
she took longer than forty minutes, they noticed.

    In a
given day, each room attendant had fourteen rooms to clean. If you were fast -
and Lucy, at nineteen, had energy to burn - you could buy 'credits,' or other
rooms to clean. Lucy often did. She was good at her job. She did not engage the
guests in a lot of small talk in the hallways, she was always courteous and
polite, and with a little make-up she was not that hard to look at. With her
cornflower-blue eyes, her butterscotch hair and slender figure, she never had a
problem fitting into her uniform and more than once had caught the male guests
following her movement down the long hallways at the hotel.

    Although
the work was not particularly demanding, it was mentally taxing. The difference
between a three-and-a-half-star and a four-star hotel was often in the attitude
and the details.

    Some
things were out of the control of the employees - the quality of the linens and
towels, for instance, or whether or not to include mouthwash in the bathroom,
or services like an evening turn-down - while other things were clearly in the
purview of the 'ladies' in housekeeping.

    Today
there was a convention checking into the hotel, booked for three days.
Something called
Société Poursuite,
a group of people, as Lucy
understood it, who looked into unsolved murders as some sort of strange hobby.
They had purchased a third of all the rooms, including the entire twelfth
floor.

    Using
her finely tuned sense of logic, Lucy deduced that the word
Sociét
é
meant Society. She just hoped the other word didn't stand for Pig.

    She
had seen so many so-called professionals in the past nine years, so many people
who thought they knew what was wrong with her. She had even taken part in a
pilot program on regression therapy at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.
Despite Lucy having no money to pay for the treatment, after three separate
interviews they had agreed to take her. It hadn't gone well. For five straight
days she'd sat in a group of eight people who'd pretty much talked about how,
in previous lives, they were raped by Attila the Hun or played footsie with
Marie Antoinette, or swapped spit with John the Baptist's severed head.
Yuck.
They had not really understood her problem. Lucy had yet to meet
anyone who did.

    She did
meet some nice people there. The man who died and was brought back to life. The
woman who was hit in the head and wandered around the city for three whole
months, not knowing who she was.

    Lucy
had also been to a behavioral psychologist - exactly ten times. Her medical
benefits at the hotel allowed her to see someone in the mental health field ten
times in a calendar year, paying only her co- pay, which was twenty-five
dollars. She could barely afford that.

    Today,
if she was lucky, all that was going to change. Today she was going to see the
Dreamweaver.

    She
had found his card just sitting on her cart one day, probably tossed there by a
passing guest. For some reason she had put it in her pocket and kept it. Just a
week earlier she'd called the number out of the blue and had a brief
conversation with the man, who had told her what he did.

    He
said he helped people explore their dreams. He claimed he could make her
nightmares go away. She had made an appointment with him, an appointment for today
at noon.

    Lucy
smoothed the top of the bedspread, scanned the room. Perfect. But while the
room was finished, she was not.

    She
walked to the closet, stepped inside, and closed the door. She sat down, took the
blindfold out of her pocket, wrapped it around her eyes, and tied it at the
back of her head.

    The
darkness drew silently around her, and she welcomed it.

    It
had been this way for nine years, ever since the ground trembled beneath her
feet, the devil had taken her hand, and three days of her life had been stolen.