76
They had gotten the whole story from Ian Whitestone. Or at least the part his attorney would allow him to tell. Suddenly the past ten days or so made sense.
Three years earlier-before all his meteoric success-Ian Whitestone made a film called Philadelphia Skin, directing under the name Ed- mundo Nobile, a character in one of Spanish director Luis Bunuel's films. Whitestone had used two young women from Temple University for the pornographic film, paying them each five thousand dollars for two nights' work. The two young women were Stephanie Chandler and Angelika Butler. The two men were Darryl Porter and Julian Matisse.
On the second night of filming, what happened to Stephanie Chandler was more than a little fuzzy, according to Whitestone's convenient memory. Whitestone said that Stephanie was shooting drugs. He said he didn't allow it on the set. He said that Stephanie left in the middle of the shoot and never returned.
Nobody in the room believed a word of it. But what was crystal clear was that everybody involved in the making of the film had paid dearly for it. Whether Ian Whitestone's son would pay for the crimes of his father was yet to be seen. Mateo caLLed tHem down to the AV Unit. He had digitized the first ten seconds of the video field by field. He had also separated the audio track and cleaned it up. He played the audio first. There was only five seconds of sound.
First there was a loud hiss, then a rapid decrease in intensity, followed by silence. It was clear that whoever was operating the camera had turned down the microphone as he began to roll the tape.
"Run that back," Byrne said.
Mateo did. The sound was one of a quick burst of air, which began to fade immediately. Then the white noise of electronic silence.
"One more time."
Byrne seemed transfixed by the sound. Mateo looked to him before continuing with the video portion. "Okay," Byrne finally said.
"I think we have something here," Mateo said. He clicked through a number of still images. He stopped on one, enlarged it. "This is just over two seconds in. It's an image right before the camera tilts downward." Mateo tightened the focus slightly. The image was all but indecipherable. A splash of white against a reddish brown background. Rounded geometric shapes. Low contrast.
"I don't see anything," Jessica said.
"Hang on." Mateo ran the image through the digital enhancer. On screen, the image moved closer. After a few seconds, it became slightly clearer, but not clear enough to read. He zoomed and clarified one more time. Now the image was unmistakable.
Six block letters. All white. Three on top, three on the bottom. The image appeared to be:
ADI ION
"What does it mean?" Jessica asked.
"I don't know," Mateo replied.
"Kevin?"
Byrne shook his head, stared at the screen.
"Guys?" Jessica asked the other detectives in the room. Shrugs all around.
Nick Palladino and Eric Chavez each got on a terminal and began to search for possibilities. Soon they both had hits. They found something called the ADI 2018 Process Ion Analyzer. It rang no bells. "Keep looking," Jessica said. BYRNE STARED AT the letters. They meant something to him, but he had no idea what. Not yet. Then, suddenly, the images touched the edge of his memory. ADI. ION. The vision came back on a long ribbon of remembrance, a vague recollection of his youth. He closed his eyes and-heard the sound of steel on steel… eight years old now… running with Joey Principe from Reed Street… Joey was fast… hard to keep up…felt the rush of wind, spiked with diesel fumes… ADI… breathed the dust of a July afternoon… ION… heard the compressors fill the main reservoirs with high-pressure airHe opened his eyes.
"Play the audio again," Byrne said.
Mateo brought the file up, clicked PLAY. The sound of the hissing air filled the small room. All eyes turned to Kevin Byrne. "I know where he is," Byrne said.
The South Philadelphia train yards were a huge, foreboding parcel of land at the southeastern end of the city, bounded by the Delaware River and I-95, along with the navy shipyards to the west and League Island to the south. The yards handled the bulk of the city's freight and cargo, while Amtrak and SEPTA handled the commuter lines out of the Thirtieth Street station across town.
Byrne knew the South Philly yards well. When he was growing up, he and his buddies would meet at the Greenwich Playground and ride their bikes down to the yards, usually sneaking onto League Island along Kitty Hawk Avenue, then onto the yards. They'd spend the day there, watching the trains come and go, counting boxcars, throwing things into the river. In his youth, the South Philly rail yards were Kevin Byrne's Omaha Beach, his Martian landscape, his Dodge City, a place he believed to be magic, a place he believed to be inhabited by Wyatt Earp, Sergeant Rock, Tom Sawyer, Eliot Ness.
Today he believed it to be a burial ground. THe K-9 Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department worked out of the training academy on State Road, and had more than three dozen dogs under its command. The dogs-all male, all German shepherds-were trained in three disciplines, that being the detection of cadavers, narcotics, and explosives. At one time there were well over one hundred animals in the unit, but a shifting of jurisdictions had reduced the force to a tightly knit, highly trained squad of fewer than forty men and dogs.
Officer Bryant Paulson was a twenty-year veteran of the unit. His dog, a seven-year-old shepherd named Clarence, was trained as a cadaver dog, but also worked patrol. Cadaver dogs were attuned to any and all human smells, not just that of the deceased. Like all police dogs, Clarence was a specialist. If you put a pound of marijuana in the middle of a field, Clarence would walk right by it. If the quarry was human- dead or alive-he would work all day and all night to find it.
At nine o'clock, a dozen detectives and more than twenty uniformed officers gathered at the western end of the rail yard, near the corner of Broad Street and League Island Boulevard.
Jessica gave Officer Paulson the nod. Clarence began to work the area. Paulson kept him on a fifteen-foot lead. The detectives hung back, in order to not disturb the animal. Air scenting is different from tracking, a method by which a dog follows a trail, head close to the ground, searching for human smells. It was also more difficult. Any shift in the wind could redirect a dog's effort, and any ground covered might have to be re-covered. The K-9 Unit of the PPD trained its dogs in what was called the "disturbed earth theory." In addition to any human smells, the dogs were trained to respond to any recently turned soil.
If the baby was buried here, the earth would be disturbed. There was no dog better at this than Clarence.
For now, all that the detectives could do was watch.
And wait. Byrne surveyed tHe huge parcel of land. He was wrong. The baby wasn't here. A second dog and officer had joined the search, and together they had nearly covered the entire plot with no results. Byrne glanced at his watch. If Tom Weyrich's assessment had been accurate, the baby was already dead. Byrne walked alone toward the eastern end of the yard, toward the river. His heart was heavy with the image of that baby in the pine box, his memory now alive with the thousand adventures he had played out on these grounds. He stepped down into a shallow culvert, and up the other side, an incline that was-Pork Chop Hill… the last few meters to the summit of Everest… the mound at Veterans Stadium… the Canadian border, protected by Mounties.
He knew. ADI. ION.
"Over here!" Byrne yelled into his two-way.
He ran toward the tracks near Pattison Avenue. Within moments his lungs were on fire, his back and legs a network of raw nerve endings and searing pain. He scanned the ground as he ran, running the beam of the Maglite a few feet ahead. Nothing looked fresh. Nothing overturned.
He stopped, his lungs now spent, hands on his knees. He couldn't run anymore. He was going to let the baby down like he had let Angelika Butler down.