Authors: The Echo Man
'Well,
I'm pretty sure there
used
to be a potter's field in Parkwood,' he said.
'It closed a while back.'
'Closed?'
'Yeah.
I think the bodies were disinterred and either moved to other cemeteries or
cremated. I think there was supposed to be some kind of development that went
in that spot, but nothing ever happened.' Drummond drained his glass, put it on
the bar. 'Can you imagine living on top of a former cemetery?'
Jessica
felt a chill at the idea. 'Do you know where the cemetery was located?'
Drummond
shrugged. 'No idea. Sorry. I might even be wrong about this.'
'Counselor!'
someone shouted drunkenly from across the room. 'You're needed for a
voir
dire.'
It
was two old-timers from the DA's office. The
voir dire
was a process of
jury selection, generally involving the judge and attorneys asking potential
jurors about their experiences and beliefs. On the table in front of the two
ADAs was one of every different kind of drink in the bar. There had to be fifty
full glasses. Drummond looked back at Jessica and Byrne. 'Looks like the night
isn't over for me yet. Thanks again for coming.'
Drummond
slipped off his coat and staggered across the room.
Downstairs,
a few minutes later, Byrne held the door for Jessica. They stepped out onto
Spring Garden Street.
'So,
what time do you want to meet me at L & I?' Byrne asked. The License &
Inspections division had city-zoning archives going back more than two hundred
years. If there had once been a cemetery in or around Parkwood it would be
recorded there.
'As
soon as they open, detective,' Jessica said.
Thursday,
October 28
The
city's last official potter's field had opened in 1956 in Philadelphia's
Northeast. Prior to its opening, the most active potter's field had been in a
section now used as a police parking lot at Luzerne Street and Whitaker Avenue,
adjoining Philadelphia Municipal Hospital, where it became the final resting
place for thousands who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. At various times in the
city's history, indigent or unclaimed deceased were buried in a number of
places, including Logan Square, Franklin Field, Reyburn Park, even at the
corner of 15th and Catharine, just a few blocks from where Jessica had grown
up.
These
days, in the interest of logistics and expense, many of the unidentified and
indigent were being cremated, with remains stored in a room off the morgue at
the medical examiner's office.
Jessica
and Byrne visited the zoning-archives department of Licenses and Inspections at
just after eight a.m. The L & I office was located in the Municipal
Services Building at 15th and JFK. What they learned was that there had once
been a potter's field located in the Parkwood section of Northeast
Philadelphia, a field that had since closed.
They
stopped for coffee and got onto 1-95 at just after nine a.m.
The
field was located near the intersection of Mechanicsville Road and Dunks Ferry
Road at the southern end of Poquessing Valley Park.
On
the south side of Dunks Ferry Road were blocks of two-story twin row homes,
their fasciae festooned with Halloween decorations ranging from the elaborate
(one had a skeleton about to climb down the chimney) to the ordinary (an already
dented plastic pumpkin stuck on a gas light).
Jessica
and Byrne got out of the car, crossed the road. They walked through the trees
into a large open field. Here the ground was rippled - the uneven remnants of
graves that had been there a long time.
There
were no headstones, no crypts, no vaults, no mausoleum. The field had indeed
been closed, the bodies moved or cremated, the area planted over.
Jessica
looked at the rutted sod. She considered the generations of kids to come,
flying kites, playing kickball, unaware that at one time the ground beneath
their feet had held the remnants of the city's homeless, its indigent, its
lost.
They
walked slowly across the undulating earth, looking for any sign of what had
once been there - a buried headstone, a grave marker of any kind, a stake in
the ground indicating the boundaries of the cemetery. There was nothing. The
earth had long ago begun to reclaim the area with life.
'Was
this the only city field in this area?' Jessica asked.
'Yeah,'
Byrne said. 'This was it.'
Jessica
looked around. Nothing looked promising, at least as it might concern the
cases. 'We're wasting our time up here, aren't we?'
Byrne
didn't reply. Instead he crouched down, ran his hand over a bare patch of
ground. A few moments later he stood, dusted off his hands.
Jessica
heard a rustling in the nearby trees. She looked up to see a half-dozen crows
perched tenuously on a low branch of a nearby maple. A
murder
of crows,
she had once learned, and had ever since thought how odd a term that was. A
flock of geese, a herd of cattle, a murder of crows. Soon another black bird
landed, rustling the others, who responded with a series of loud caws and
flapping wings. One of them took off and swooped toward the low shrubs at the other
side of the field. Jessica followed the pattern of flight.
'Kevin,'
she said, pointing to the bird before it landed out of sight. They looked at
each other, started across the open field.
Before
they got halfway they saw it - the unnatural gleam through the greenery, the
bright white surface glinting in the sunlight.
They
sprinted the last hundred feet or so and found the body lying in a shallow
depression.
The
victim was black, male, in his forties or fifties. He was nude, his body shaven
head to toe. The ground beneath the corpse was not yet overgrown with grass. It
was a former grave.
'Motherfucker,'
Byrne yelled.
He
stepped through the scene, taking care not to disturb the surrounding area. He
put two fingers to the man's neck. 'Jesus Christ,' he said. 'His body's still
warm.
Let's get everyone and his mother down here. Let's get a K-9 unit.'
Then
Byrne gently opened the dead man's hand. There, on the ring finger of his left hand,
was the tattoo of a fish.
They
both called it in - Byrne contacted the crime-scene unit, Jessica contacted the
homicide unit who would then alert the MEO. They spread out to either side of the
open field, weapons out. They checked the immediate area, combing the bushes,
the scrub, the culverts and ditches, finding nothing.
Later
they regrouped at the corner, each lost in their own thoughts. Although they
had not immediately located any ID, there was no doubt in either Jessica's or
Byrne's mind that the body they'd found - the dead man lying atop a former
grave - was that of Tyvander 'Hoochie' Alice.
The
tactical team hit the block in six cars, a combination of special-
investigation detectives and members of the fugitive squad.
Russ
Diaz and his squad fanned out north and east, toward the woods. A K-9 unit
showed up a few minutes later. The next car brought Dana Westbrook. For the
moment, this relatively quiet corner of Northeast Philadelphia - a place that
had one time been a place of repose and solitude - was crawling with
law-enforcement personnel.
Ten minutes later the dog and his officer came full circle, back
to
the parking area near the ball diamonds. It probably meant that the
killer had parked there, returned after dumping the body, and then left. If
that was so, the trail was cold.
While
CSU processed the crime scene, Jessica and Byrne stood at the top of the hill,
watching the choreography unfold below.
Detectives
would soon canvass the immediate area. There was a condo development at
Mechanicsville and Eddington Roads, a pair of apartments next to it. Maybe
someone had seen something. But Jessica doubted it. Their killer was a ghost.
Kenneth
Beckman, Sharon Beckman, Preston Braswell, Tyvander Alice.
Four
bodies, eight tattoos.
Four
to go.
And
they didn't have a single solid lead.
The
team spent the entire afternoon canvassing. The residences in this part of the
city were not as tightly packed as they were in the inner city, so the act of
interviewing and asking the same questions over and over was a much slower,
even more enervating process.
They
returned to the Roundhouse, followed up on a few weak leads. Nothing. By the
end of the tour, the entire unit was exhausted and frustrated. Someone was
solving the unsolved crimes in Philadelphia, but they were killing the killers
and their accomplices. Someone was shaving these bodies clean, mutilating their
faces, and wrapping them in paper. Someone who floated through the city like a
phantom.
Jessica
sat on the edge of a desk, a cup of cold coffee in her hand. She glanced over
at the walk-in closet. Inside were the books of homicide cases dating back more
than a hundred years. Inside the books were summaries of hundreds of unsolved
cases, cases wherein there were suspects who were never charged with the crime,
suspects who never became defendants, defendants who were acquitted for any
number of reasons. The books were essentially a list of potential victims for
their ghoul.
The
duty room was mostly empty. The second tour had already begun, and those
detectives were on the street, pursuing leads, tracking down witnesses. Jessica
was envious.
'Don't
you have a family to go home to?' Byrne asked.
'Nah,'
Jessica said. 'Although, funny you should mention it, I
have
seen a man
and a little girl hanging around my house. I should call the police.'
Byrne
laughed. 'Speaking of which, how are you adjusting to the new house?'
'Well,
besides tripping over the furniture and spinning in place for five minutes
because there's nowhere to put a cup of coffee down, it's great.'
'Is
it that much smaller?'
Jessica
nodded. 'It's a lot like the house I grew up in. Same layout. The only problem
is, I was a lot smaller then.'
'What,
like a size four?'
'Smartass.'
Byrne's
phone beeped in his hand. He looked at the screen, read for a moment, smiled.
'It's
a text from Colleen,' he said. 'She wanted me to know she got back from D.C.
okay.'
Jessica
nodded. 'Wow,' she said. 'Colleen in college.'
'Don't
remind me.'
Byrne
picked up a tall stack of mail that was rubber-banded together on the desk. It
looked like two weeks' worth of correspondence, mostly junk. Jessica wanted to
mention to her partner that it was probably a good idea to check the inbox once
in a while, but she figured he knew this.
As
Byrne went through the pile, throwing most of the mail in the trash can,
Jessica smelled the perfumed letter before she saw it. The scent was jasmine.
Byrne held up the envelope, eyed it, sniffed it. It was the size of a personal
note card, maybe four by six inches. Expensive-looking paper.
'A
note from an admirer?' Jessica asked. 'As if,' Byrne replied.
'It's
the charcoal gray suit, Kevin. I'm telling you.' Byrne pulled a letter opener
off the desk, slit the envelope, extracted the card.
As
much as Jessica wanted to pry, she stepped a few feet away, giving her partner
a little privacy, shoving everything she needed to take with her into her tote
bag. When she looked again at Byrne, he was bone pale. Something was wrong.
'What
is it?' Jessica asked.
Byrne
remained silent.
'Kevin.'
Byrne
waited a few moments, then took Jessica by the arm, led her to the small coffee
room, closed the door. He handed her the card. It was printed on a luxurious
paper, ivory in color. The scent of jasmine was now much stronger. Jessica put
on her glasses, read the note, a brief message written in an elegant hand. The
ink was lavender.