Voices Carry (9 page)

Everyone froze where they stood, from the boy whose hand had just accepted her money, to the dark-haired juggler.

No one spoke for a long minute.

“Where’d you hear
FBI
, Becky?” her brother asked.

“Granny Frick said that she,” the girl pointed to Genna, “Miss Wheeler’s girl, was an
FBI.”

“FBI means Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rebecca,” Genna answered with forced nonchalance. “People who work for the FBI investigate crimes.”

“Like the police?” Becky stated.

“Sometimes we work with the police,” Genna nodded.

The pale blue eyes of the boy holding Genna’s money darted anxiously from one of the bikers to the other. Genna pretended not to notice. She lifted her cantaloupe and held out her hand and asked, “Do I get change?”

The boy mumbled something and handed her a few bills, which she pretended to count as she
walked back to the car, knowing that all eyes were on her.

Inside she was shaking with the effort it took to keep from yelling in frustration.

Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn.

“Is something wrong, Genna?” Patsy asked as Genna slid behind the wheel.

“What could be wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Patsy replied. “You look distracted.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Did you get everything you wanted?”

“Yes.” Genna smiled tersely and put the car in gear, driving away slowly as if nothing was amiss.

Damn.

She’d have to call Decker and give him the good news as well as the bad.

Two miles up the road, a half mile before the turn for the lake, Genna saw the two bikes in her rearview mirror. They approached quickly, then slowed down, staying with her, one on her right rear bumper, the other on her left.

Patsy turned nervously to look over her left shoulder.

“What are they doing?” she asked.

“Just trying to act cool,” Genna told her. “Ignore them.”

“Are they following us?”

“Of course not. Why would they follow us?”

“Genna, are you hiding something from me?”

“No.”

Why bring Patsy into this? Genna thought. Especially since her own part in the investigation
had just been brought to a screeching halt. Genna flicked on her left turn signal and slowed down. Both bikes cut around the Taurus and passed it with a deafening roar.

Genna couldn’t help but feel that she’d just been given a message. With Patsy so often alone at the lake, she hoped that she was wrong.

John Mancini leaned back against the fake rattan headboard of the king-sized bed in his room at the Cozy Nook Motel off Route 13 in Delaware, just a breath from the Maryland border, and crossed his arms behind his head. He was tired and irritable and wished to God that he hadn’t answered the phone on Tuesday morning. If he’d let Connie, the receptionist, pick up he wouldn’t have had to speak with Calvin Sharpe. If he hadn’t spoken with Sharpe, he wouldn’t be here, right outside of Nowhere, Delaware, a stack of photographs of a headless woman resting on his lap, a warm beer on the nightstand, and an attitude brought on by indigestion and lack of sleep.

But he had picked up the phone, and when your boss asks you to drop everything and hold the hand of his son-in-law who happens at that moment to be on the verge of screwing up a major investigation, chances are he isn’t really asking at all. To ask implies that there is a choice of responses. When you’re dealing with Calvin Sharpe, there really was only one choice.

One headless woman found in a county park is a sign that there’s a nasty killer on the loose.

Three headless women in as many weeks is a sign that he’s enjoying it. And since Sharpe’s son-in-law, Kurt Fraser, was the chief of police in the sleepy town where the bodies were piling up, and since Sharpe feared that Fraser might have already bungled the investigation of the first victim completely, the second one marginally, Sharpe couldn’t move quickly enough to send in one of his own to help out.

Helping out meant, among other things, to help Fraser—and therefore Sharpe—to save face.

John had met with the young police chief earlier that morning, and quickly recognized that while Fraser was not totally inept, he was inexperienced and intimidated by his father-in-law’s high standing within the Bureau. The first of the three crime scenes had been totally corrupted when the troop of Cub Scouts, who had stumbled upon the body, had gone running off in all directions, covering any and all footprints and disturbing any trace evidence that might otherwise have been recovered. And it hadn’t been Fraser’s fault that a torrential rain had flooded the creek near where the second body had been left, not only washing away almost everything that could have been left behind but moving the body as well. To his credit, Fraser had been smart enough to figure out where the body might have been dumped a quarter mile upstream, by calculating where the creek had crested the night before. Working as a oneman forensic unit, because the small town lacked the funds for full-time specialists, Fraser had personally compiled the detailed notes, over which John Mancini now pored.

The discovery of the last body had been made late the previous morning by an elderly woman who was
walking her dog. John had read her statement of the morning’s events at least three times.

“Jelly and I walk here twice each week,” the woman had related. “Always in the same part of the park. I’ve been bringing Jelly here since she was a pup—she’s eight now, so she knows the area. She goes off on her own, just so far ahead of me, then she comes back. Then she goes off again, then she comes back. We were halfway back to the parking lot when she took off, but didn’t come back. I called and called, but she wouldn’t come. Finally, I heard her barking and followed the sound. I thought perhaps she’d cornered something, a deer maybe—that’s happened before—or maybe that cougar that people around here keep saying they’ve seen. Well, there was Jelly, standing over that woman. Of course, at first I wasn’t sure it was a woman. It was there on the ground. . .”

“What do you think?” Fraser had asked when John arrived on the scene. “You seen anything like this before?”

“Close enough,” John had replied as he knelt down carefully beside the body.

“Where do you suppose the head is?” asked the young police chief.

“That’s anybody’s guess at this point,” John muttered.

“It never fails to amaze me that anyone could do something like this.” Fraser shook his head. “This is really the
worst
.”

John could have told him that this, this headless woman left in a park to be found by an elderly woman in the middle of a summer morning, while gruesome, obscene, was by no stretch of the imagination the
worst.
And compared to some of the cases John had handled in his career, the headless woman had met a relatively benign end. The body showed no sign of abuse, no wounds, no mutilation below the line of decapitation. There were several cases on John’s desk at that very moment where the victim had met a much more horrific end.

John looked over the photos of the site where the body had been found, on its back, arms crossed over the chest, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. Fully dressed. The body had not yet begun to decompose. Poor Mrs. Turner could well have passed the killer as he had made his way out of the park.

The phone on the table next to the bed began to ring.

“Mancini here.”

“‘Mancini here.’ What the hell kind of way is that to answer the phone?”

John grinned at the sound of his sister’s voice.

“Hey, Ang. How’s it going?”

“I’ll tell you how it’s going. Ma’s on the warpath. She wants to know why she has to depend on the noontime news to find out that her son is close enough to home to come to dinner.”

“I was going to call as soon as I got back to the motel but it was late by the time I got here and. . .”

“And that’s another thing she was not happy about. ‘A little more than an hour and a half from his mother’s house and he’s sleeping in a motel? What will people think?’ “

John laughed out loud.

“I guess I’d better give her a call first thing in the morning.”

“If you were smart, you’d make a beeline in the
direction of Passyunk Avenue first thing in the morning and forget the phone.”

“Can’t do it, Ang. I’m going to be tied up for at least another day here. But I promise I’ll give her a call.”

“Don’t wait too long, pal. The rest of us still have to live with her, you know.”

“How is everyone?”

“Show up at the baby’s christening on Sunday and find out for yourself.”

“I have all intentions of doing that. How is my little nephew, by the way?”

“Cutest thing on God’s green earth, I swear to God.” Angela gave a motherly sigh.

“I can’t wait to see him again.”

“You remembered that Genna is coming? She is still coming, right?”

“When I spoke with her a few days ago, she said she was planning on it.”

“Good. I liked her. We all did.”

“I know, Angie.”

“So what should I tell Mom?”

“About what?”

“Dinner tomorrow night.”

“Doesn’t look good.”

“I’ll tell her you’re still with the body. That’s about the only excuse she’s going to buy.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“You’re welcome. We’ll talk on Sunday. Call your mother. I gotta go. Carmen’s home.”

“Tell him I said hi and that. . .” John smiled even as his sister hung up the phone, “. . . I’ll see him on Sunday.”

Angela was their mother all over again. Tiny, small boned, dark-haired, smart mouthed. One
hundred percent South Philadelphia Italian and proud to be. Such a contrast to Tess, the youngest of the three Mancini children, who was soft-spoken, mild tempered, and gentle of spirit. And John, the only son, fell somewhere between the two.

Their mother, Rita Theresa Esposito Mancini, was a force to be reckoned with, every bit as formidable as Calvin Sharpe. And first thing in the morning, her only son would call her.

John sat on the end of the bed and grinned. He knew exactly how the conversation with his mother would start.

“So you’re only one state away and you can’t come for dinner?”

And how it would end.

“So you won’t forget to not wear your gun to the christening, right? You know how nervous the DelVecchio boys get when you’re around. You being the FBI and everything.”

The DelVecchio brothers all reportedly had some nebulous ties to the Philadelphia Mafia, except, of course, for Carmen, who had married the sister of an FBI agent whose reputation had achieved legendary status in the neighborhood. It never failed to amuse John that certain members of the DelVecchio clan always seemed to be just on their way out when John arrived at family functions.

John closed his briefcase and placed it on the dresser that stood along the opposite wall, then turned the covers down, snapped off the light, and got into bed. He wondered if Genna was still awake. In the dark, he could see the face of the clock on the table. It was almost midnight. Too late to call the cottage. Patsy was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type.

John turned over in the dark, wishing he’d called her earlier. He should have called before he picked up that stack of reports and photographs. He should have known how involved he’d get. If Angie hadn’t called when she did, he’d probably still be lost in the details of this stranger’s death. It was only when he’d stopped for a moment that he realized how tired he was. They’d been at the crime scene from late afternoon the day before until the sun had come up this morning, then at the police station where he’d met with various members of local and state agencies and the press until well after the dinner hour.

He hoped that Genna was enjoying her week with Patsy. Hoped the weather was good so that they’d have lots of opportunity to sail and swim and fish, all those things that they so enjoyed. All those things, he half-smiled in the dark, that city boys like him had to be taught. He thought back to two summers ago, when he’d spent several long weekends at the lake with Genna and Patsy, who seemed to keep up a nonstop pace of activity.

When told they were going to go bass fishing, John had smiled at Patsy and said, “I’ll pass. I think I’ll just grab a lounge and sit in the shade and read a book.”

“John, there is no lounge,” Patsy had told him.

“No lounge?”

Patsy had shaken her head. Behind her, on the deck, Genna had appeared vastly amused.

“Just a folding chair, then. . . ?”

“Sorry.”

“What do you sit on when you come outside to read?” he asked.

“I don’t,” she told him. “I read inside, at night, or if it’s
raining. But when the sun is up and the bass are biting, or the water is right for swimming or the wind right for sailing, or it’s a good day to hike, then that’s what I do. And right now, the sun is up and the bass are frisky. Put the book down and take your shoes off. We’re taking the boat out. You’ll like it.”

John hadn’t exactly liked it, but he hadn’t really minded it much, either, which more or less had satisfied Patsy. But later that day, when she’d suggested a hike around the lake, he’d driven the twenty minutes into Wick’s Grove and headed for the nearest shopping center, where he found a store that sold outdoor furniture. He purchased a lounge and a couple of folding chairs, and when he arrived back at the cottage, he planted himself solidly on the deck in the shade and with no small ceremony opened his book. Patsy had good-naturedly brought him a glass of iced tea before she and Genna set off on their trek.

John lay on his back in the dark and stared at the ceiling of his motel room. He had really loved those days at the cottage with Genna, had loved seeing the interaction between Genna and Patsy. Loved watching Genna’s face when she and Patsy bantered, loved the tenderness she showed the older woman, loved the woman that Genna was when she was there in that place where she felt so secure. There was something about Bricker’s Lake that brought out Genna’s most vulnerable side, and John had found that aspect of her personality sweetly appealing.

Other images played through his sleep-deprived brain. Genna in short shorts, standing at the end of the dock, watching an early morning fog so dense that he could barely see her from the lake’s edge.
Genna in the sun, her head thrown back, laughing at something he’d said. Genna in the moonlight, the night the two of them took out a canoe and paddled down to a quiet stretch of man-made beach at the far end of the lake, where they’d rowed to shore and spent an hour wrestling in the sand. . .