Shutter Man (24 page)

The murder was not in Philadelphia County, but rather Montgomery County.

When Byrne pulled to the curb at just after 7 a.m., he had two cups of Starbucks in the cup holders. Bless him.

Jessica slipped in, sipped the coffee, still clearing the sleep and her dreams from her head.

As Byrne headed toward the expressway, he filled her in on what he had learned from Sister Kathleen. He handed her a copy of the Sator Square.

‘Is someone running it through ViCAP?’ Jessica asked.

Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP – the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program – was a national registry of violent crimes: homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains.

‘Josh is on it. He’ll be calling.’

‘How did we get this lead?’

‘The detective for the Montgomery County DA’s office said the case is a week old,’ Byrne said. ‘He picked up our cases on the wire. He says he thinks the MO is identical.’

Jessica shuddered. If the Farren brothers had taken their madness to another county, where else would the trail of blood lead?

The seat of Montgomery County was Norristown, a city of 35,000 residents located six miles from the Philadelphia city limits.

On the way up, Jessica read the case file the lead detective had faxed Byrne.

‘This is the Farrens,’ she said.

‘It sure looks like it.’

They met the lead investigator at the crime-scene house, a duplex on Haws Avenue, near Route 202.

Detective Ted Weaver was in his mid-forties. He had thinning blond hair, blond eyelashes, careful blue eyes. His suit coat was one size too small, and the patch pockets bulged with notebooks, receipts, bits of paper and minutiae that apparently did not fit in the bursting leatherette portfolio on which the zipper had long ago quit. He had that hunched-over posture that Jessica recognized immediately as belonging to an overworked investigator.

He smiled when they approached, and his expression lit up the otherwise depressing scene.

Jessica and Byrne introduced themselves.

‘You guys up to speed?’ he asked.

According to the summary Weaver had sent, the victim was a fifty-two-year-old man named Robert Kilgore. An attorney specializing in estate planning, Kilgore, according to co-workers, had left his office on the day he was murdered at 5.30. Credit-card receipts showed that he had stopped for pizza at an Italian restaurant on West Main Street at 5.50. He was not seen alive again.

When his tenant in the duplex, a thirty-two-year-old woman named Denise Joseph, knocked on his door at seven the next morning requesting that he move his car, she looked in the window and saw the horror in the living room.

Like Edwin Channing and Laura Rousseau, Robert Kilgore had no face.

‘And Miss Joseph didn’t see or hear anything the previous night?’ Byrne asked.

‘Not according to her statement. She said she got home at nine o’clock, took a shower, sat in front of her iMac with headphones on until midnight, then went to bed.’

‘What about the neighborhood interview?’

‘Nothing. This is a pretty quiet place. Whoever did this was careful not to be seen or heard.’

‘Did you read the summaries of our cases?’ Byrne asked.

Weaver nodded. ‘It looks like the same MO,’ he said. ‘Home invasion, single tap to the center of the chest.’

‘Duct tape?’

‘Yeah.’

Weaver opened the folder on the car’s hood, flipped through it. Jessica saw that the crime-scene photographs were as horrific as in the other two cases.

The victim sat in a chair in the middle of the dining room, his ankles tied to the legs, his hands bound behind him. His head slumped forward. A close-up from the front showed that his chest had a single entry wound.

It looked like he was wearing an expensive cashmere sweater and paint-stained sweat pants.

‘What about the forensics?’ Byrne asked.

Weaver shook his head. ‘Gloves on every surface. No latents on the duct tape.’

‘Did you recover the projectile?’ Jessica asked.

‘We did.’ He found two photographs of the slug. It wasn’t in good shape, but there was no reason to believe it came from anything other than the Makarov used in the other murders.

Byrne took out two photographs. They were the most recent mug shots of Sean and Michael Farren. He handed them to Weaver. Weaver studied them.

‘These are our guys?’ Weaver asked.

‘These are our guys,’ Byrne said.

The house was a large 1930s duplex on Haws Avenue, just a few blocks from the Schuylkill River. The house was set back from the road, on a rise, with a stone retaining wall. There were old-growth maples and pin oaks around the perimeter, and heavy shrubbery near the windows. Perfect cover for breaking and entering.

But the killers did not break and enter. Like the other two scenes, there was no sign of forced entry.

They stepped onto the porch. Jessica noticed that there had at one time been a porch swing. The two eyelets screwed into the ceiling had begun to rust.

Weaver cut the seal, and unlocked the door on the left.

Byrne pointed to the door on the right. ‘Is Miss Joseph available for an interview?’

‘Not anytime soon. She decided to go stay with her sister in Meadville. I can give you contact information, but we’ve got her statement, and it’s pretty thorough.’

Jessica did not notice any annoyance in Weaver’s tone, although no detective really wanted another investigator going over work that was done right the first time. She also knew that Byrne had to ask.

Robert Kilgore’s front room was large and had too much furniture. There were two full-size couches, a loveseat, two large recliners. A bookcase ran along one wall, and Jessica noticed that many of the books were legal thrillers, with a few shelves dedicated to textbooks on estate planning law.

In the center of the almond-colored carpeting was a large dark brown stain. Jessica noticed that the dining room table had only five chairs. She assumed that the chair in which the victim had been killed had been removed and processed at the crime lab.

‘Where was the bullet evidence collected?’ Byrne asked.

Weaver crossed the room, pointed to a torn-out section in the drywall. ‘Went in here, hit the back of the brick facade. It’s not in great shape.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘I’ve got it in the trunk of my car.’

Byrne stepped back, considered the trajectory, the angle of flight. While he did this, Jessica studied the rest of the first floor. Robert Kilgore, who, according to the summary, was unmarried, was neat but not to the point of obsession. There were only two dishes in the sink, and the appliances – all about fifteen years old – were clean and grease-free. She noted the pizza box on the table. She lifted a corner, saw that there was not one piece missing. Mold had begun to grow on the cheese.

She stepped into a small room off the kitchen. In it was a large oak desk, an older-model tower desktop computer, a 20-inch LCD screen. Around the screen were a cascade of yellow Post-it notes. She read some of them.

Next to the desk was a three-drawer metal file cabinet. The drawers had been rifled. The floor beneath the desk and next to the cabinet was covered in documents.

Jessica poked her head into the small room that led to the back porch. There was an old bookcase that held running shoes and hiking boots. The middle shelves were stuffed with gardening books and gardening supplies: fertilizers, natural bug sprays, seeds, ornamental bulbs. She could see a small fenced-in garden at the rear of the property.

When she rejoined Byrne and Detective Weaver, they were poring over documents spread out on the dining room table.

‘I’ve got to ask,’ Weaver said. ‘And I’ll understand if you have to play it close.’

‘What’s that?’ Byrne asked.

Weaver took a moment, looked at the photos of the victim. ‘The facial mutilation,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know Philly gets a lot more cases of homicide than we do, but I’ve got some time in. I’ve never seen anything like this.’

Byrne nodded. ‘This is a new one for of all us.’ He went on to explain that the ViCAP search for similar crimes had come up empty.

‘When you searched the grounds and the premises, did you find anything that struck you as strange, or out of place?’ he asked.

‘Not sure what you mean.’

Jessica saw Byrne hesitate for a moment. She understood. While Ted Weaver was a fellow cop, and by all appearances a thorough investigator, letting him in on something known only to the PPD and the killers was not necessarily a good idea.

Byrne decided to do so.

‘Did you find a large linen handkerchief?’

Weaver stared at him for a few seconds. He then picked up the thick folder, searched through it. When he reached the end he said simply: ‘No.’

Byrne waited a few more seconds, then opened one of his own folders. He took out the two photographs of the linen handkerchiefs found at the Rousseau and Channing scenes. He placed them on the table. Jessica watched Detective Weaver as he looked at them. He seemed to blanch a little, then immediately recover. He had indeed seen a few things.

‘I can tell you without a doubt that we did not recover anything like this.’

‘Have you ever heard of something called the Sator Square?’

The look on Weaver’s face told Jessica that he knew the theories were coming in like fastballs. He took a second before answering.

‘Can’t say I have.’

Byrne pulled out the photocopy of the full Sator Square. Weaver took a moment to study it.

‘Palindromes,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

Weaver tapped the photographs of the handkerchiefs. ‘Where did you find these?’

Byrne explained how the first handkerchief,
TENET
, was found on a hardy orange tree behind Edwin Channing’s house. The second,
OPERA
, on an apple tree at the back of the Rousseau property.

‘We looked around the exterior of the house, searching for footwear impressions, checked the hedges close to the house for any fiber that might have come from snagged clothing,’ Weaver said. ‘There was nothing like this.’

‘The tomato plants,’ Jessica said.

Both men looked at her.

‘What tomato plants?’ Weaver asked.

Jessica pointed in the direction of the small room at the rear of the house. ‘Mr Kilgore was a gardener. On one of the shelves is a bag of Burpee organic fertilizer with aragonite. My father uses it. It’s not cheap, so it looks like Kilgore was serious about his tomatoes. There have to be tomato plants around here somewhere.’

Byrne caught her eye, nodded. He knew that she already knew that there were tomato plants, and where they were located. But she could not say so, could not be where new evidence was collected, if there was any to be found.

‘I’ve got a few calls to make,’ she said.

She walked out of the house, toward the car, as the two detectives slipped on latex gloves and headed for the rear of the property. Although there was no reason to think that Ted Weaver, if called to the stand at any time in the future, would betray the trust of a fellow cop, Jessica was not on the record as saying anything other than that she had seen a bag of fertilizer.

She made a few calls, one of them to Josh Bontrager, who told her that the ViCAP search for the Sator Square had come up empty. Before long, she saw Byrne and Ted Weaver walking down the driveway. She knew from her partner’s gait that they had found something. She’d seen it many times before.

When they got to the car, Byrne reached into the back seat, took out a white paper bag. He slit it open, laid it across the hood. He then placed the handkerchief on the bag, gently untied the twine, unrolled it. When Jessica saw it, she felt her pulse quicken. It read:

SATOR
.

Byrne took out the photocopy of the Sator Square, as well as the two photographs.

‘It fits with the other two,’ Weaver said.

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Don’t know how we could have missed it.’

‘We missed it too,’ Byrne said.

Jessica noted that this handkerchief, having been exposed to the elements for a week, was a little more worse for wear than the others.

‘Robert Kilgore was killed first, then the Rousseaus, then Edwin Channing,’ Weaver said.

Byrne just nodded.

‘Which means there will be two more.’

‘
AREPO
and
ROTAS
.’

The fact that they’d just established that their killers had already begun their spree a week ago, and done so in another county, opened up the investigation to a whole new level of possibilities, none of them good.

‘By the way,’ Byrne said, ‘did you make a list of important documents that were missing from Mr Kilgore’s files?’

‘We did,’ Weaver said. ‘The only major document we couldn’t find was his birth certificate.’

‘Can we get copies of everything you have so far?’ Byrne asked. It was asking a lot, but it had to be done.

Weaver reached into his trunk, took out a shopping bag. He handed the bag to Jessica.

‘All yours. I already made the call. The Montgomery County district attorney’s office is here to assist. Anything you need. Bullet is in there too.’

‘Thanks, detective.’

‘You are more than welcome.’

Everyone shook hands.

‘Next time you’re in Philly, dinner is on the PPD,’ Byrne said.

Weaver smiled, patted his not insubstantial belly. ‘Sure you can afford it?’

They stopped at a diner on Route 202. They tried to talk about something else beside the case. It didn’t last long.

‘Has Robert Kilgore come up anywhere in connection with the Farrens?’ Byrne asked.

Jessica shook her head. ‘Not yet. But now that I have the name, we’ll see.’

It was over coffee that Jessica said what was on both their minds. Neither had said it out loud because it was one more piece of this horrifying puzzle – including the Sator Square and the mutilating of faces – that added a new and opaque dimension.