"Are you Detective Byrne?" he asked.
"I am," Byrne said. "And you are?"
The man reached into his back pocket, pulled out a gold shield. "Detective Joshua Bontrager," he said. "Homicide." He proffered a big smile, the color rising in his cheeks.
Bontrager was probably thirty or so, but he looked much younger. A slim five ten, his hair was summer blond gone December dull, cropped relatively short; spiky, but not in a GQ way. It looked like it may have been a homemade haircut. His eyes were mint green. He had about him the air of scrubbed country, of rural Pennsylvania that spoke of state college on an academic scholarship. He pumped Byrne's hand, then Jessica's. "You must be Detective Balzano," he said.
"Nice to meet you," Jessica said.
Bontrager looked between them, back and forth. "This is just, just, just… great."
If nothing else, Detective Joshua Bontrager was full of energy and enthusiasm. With all the cutbacks, retirements, and injuries to detectives- not to mention the spiking homicide rate-it was good to have another warm body in the unit. Even if that body looked like it just stepped out of a high school production of Our Town.
"Sergeant Buchanan sent me out," Bontrager said. "Did he call you?"
Ike Buchanan was their boss, the day watch commander of the homicide unit. "Uh, no," Byrne said. "You've been assigned to homicide?"
"Temporarily," Bontrager said. "I'll be working with you and two other teams, rotating tours. At least until things, you know, calm down a bit."
Jessica looked closely at Bontrager's clothing. His suit coat was a dark blue, and his slacks were black, as if he had cobbled together an ensemble from two different weddings, or had gotten dressed while it was still dark. His striped rayon tie was from sometime around the Carter administration. His shoes were scuffed but sturdy, recently resoled, tightly laced.
"Where do you want me?" Bontrager asked.
The look on Byrne's face fairly screamed the answer. Back at the Roundhouse.
"If you don't mind me asking, where were you before you got assigned to Homicide?" Byrne asked.
"I was in the Traffic Unit," Bontrager said.
"How long were you there?"
Chest out, chin high. "Eight years."
Jessica thought about looking at Byrne, but she couldn't. She just couldn't.
"So," Bontrager said, rubbing his hands together for warmth, "what can I do?"
"For now we want to make sure the scene is secure," Byrne said. He pointed to the far side of the building, to the short driveway on the north side of the property. "If you could secure that entry point, it would be a great help. We don't want folks coming onto the property and disturbing the evidence."
For a second, Jessica thought Bontrager was going to salute.
"I am so on it," he said.
With this, Detective Joshua Bontrager all but ran across the grounds.
Byrne turned to Jessica. "What is he, about seventeen?"
"He'll be seventeen." "Did you notice he's not wearing a coat?" "I did."
Byrne glanced at Officer Calabro. Both men shrugged. Byrne pointed at the building. "Is the DOA on the first floor?"
"No, sir," Calabro said. He turned and pointed to the river.
"The victim is in the river?" Byrne asked.
"On the bank."
Jessica glanced toward the river. The angle sloped away from them, so she could not yet see the bank. Through the few barren trees on this side she could see the opposite side of the river, the cars on the Schuylkill Expressway. She turned back to Calabro. "Have you cleared the immediate area?"
"Yes," Calabro said.
"Who found her?" Jessica asked.
"Anonymous 911 call."
"When?"
Calabro looked at the log. "About an hour and fifteen minutes ago."
"Has the ME's office been notified?" Byrne asked.
"On the way."
"Good work, Mike."
Before heading down to the river, Jessica took a number of photographs of the exterior of the building. She also photographed the two abandoned vehicles in the lot. One, a twenty-year-old midsize Chevy; the other, a rusted out Ford van. Neither had plates. She walked over, felt the hoods of both vehicles. Stone cold. On any given day there were hundreds of derelict cars in Philadelphia. Sometimes it seemed like thousands. Every time someone ran for mayor or council, one of the planks in their platform was always the promise to get rid of the abandoned vehicles and tear down the abandoned buildings. It never seemed to happen.
She took a few more photographs. When she was finished, she and Byrne snapped on latex gloves.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Let's do it."
They walked to the end of the lot. From there, the ground gently sloped down toward the soft riverbank. Because the Schuylkill was not a working river-almost all commercial traffic navigated the Delaware River-there were few docks as such, but occasionally there were small stone jetties, the infrequent narrow floating pier. As they reached the end of the asphalt, they saw the victim's head, then her shoulders, then her body.
"Ah, God," Byrne said.
She was a young blond woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties. Perched on a short stone dock, her eyes were wide open. It looked like she was just sitting at the river's edge, watching it flow.
In life there was no doubt she had been very pretty. Now her face was a ghastly and pallid gray, her bloodless skin already beginning to split and crack from the ravages of the wind. Her nearly black tongue lolled to the side of her mouth. She wore no coat, no gloves, no hat, only a long dusty-rose-colored dress. It looked to be very old, suggesting a time long gone. It hung below her feet, nearly touching the water. It appeared that she had been there for a while. There was some decomposition, but not nearly as much as there would have been if the weather had been warm. Still, the smell of decaying flesh hung heavy in the air, even ten feet away.
Around the young woman's neck was a nylon belt, knotted in the back.
Jessica could see that some exposed parts of the victim's body were covered in a thin layer of ice, giving the corpse a surreal, artificial gloss. It had rained the day before, then the temperature had plummeted.
Jessica took a few more photographs, stepped closer. She would not disturb the body until the medical examiner cleared the scene, but the sooner they got a better look, the sooner they could begin their investigation. While Byrne walked the perimeter of the parking lot, Jessica knelt next to the body.
The victim's dress was clearly a few sizes too large for her slender frame. It was long-sleeved, had a removable lace collar, as well as knife pleats at the cuff. Unless Jessica had missed a new fashion trend-and that was a possibility-she didn't see why this woman had been walking around Philadelphia, in winter, in such an outfit.
She looked at the woman's hands. No rings. There were no obvious calluses either, no scars or healing cuts. This woman did not work with her hands, not in the manual labor sense. She had no visible tattoos.
Jessica moved a few steps back and took a picture of the victim in relation to the river. It was then that she noticed what looked like a drop of blood near the hem of the dress. A single drop. She crouched down, took out her pen, and lifted the front edge of the dress. What she saw caught her completely off guard.
"Oh, God."
Jessica fell back on her heels, nearly toppling into the water. She grabbed at the earth, found purchase, sat down hard.
Having heard her cry out, Byrne and Calabro came running over.
"What is it?" Byrne asked.
Jessica wanted to tell them, but the words were logjammed in her throat. She had seen a lot in her time on the force-in fact, she really believed she could look at anything-and she was usually braced for the special horrors that came with working homicides. The sight of this dead young woman, her flesh already giving way to the elements, was bad enough. What Jessica saw when she lifted the victim's dress was a geometric progression of the revulsion she felt.