Richard Montanari - The Echo Man

The victim was a white male of undeterminable age — undeterminable partly because they could not see all of his face. He was lying in the middle of the small dusty storage room, amid cardboard boxes, plastic buckets, wooden forklift pallets. Jessica immediately saw the deep purple bruises on his wrists and ankles. The victim, it appeared, had been shackled. There was no blood, no sign of struggle in this room.

But two things gave her pause. First, the victim's forehead and eyes were wrapped in a band of white paper. The paper was about five inches wide and completely encircled the man's head. Across the top of the band was a streak of brown, a straight line drawn in what could have been dried blood. Beneath it was another spot, this one a nearly perfect oval about an inch wide. The paper overlapped at the left side of the man's head. It appeared to be sealed with red sealing wax. The right side had another smear of blood, which looked to be in the shape of a figure eight.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

The victim's body was completely nude. It appeared to have been shaved clean, head to toe. Pubic hair, chest hair, arm hair, leg hair — gone. The body's scraped and abraded skin indicated that it had been shaved roughly, violently, perhaps in the past day or so. There appeared to be no new growth.

The sight was so grotesque that it took Jessica a moment to take it all in. She had seen quite a bit. Never anything like this. The indignities of homicide were legion, but there was something about the final degradation of being left naked that made it all worse, a communique from the killer to the rest of the world that the humiliation of violent death was not the last word. For the most part, you didn't just die in this life. You were found dead.

Jessica took the lead, more out of instinct than from any sense of duty. Hers was a boys' world and the sooner you peed in the corners, the better. She had long since turned the word bitch from an epithet to a badge, an emblem as golden as her shield.

Stansfield cleared his throat. 'I'll, uh, get started on a canvass,' he said, and quickly took his leave.

There were some homicide detectives who liked the idea of being a homicide detective — the prestige, the pay, the cachet of being one of the chosen — but couldn't stand being at a crime scene. Apparently, Stansfield was just such a detective. Just as well, Jessica thought.

She crouched next to the victim, placed two fingers on his neck, checking for a pulse. She found none. She examined the front of the body, looking for some sort of entrance or exit wound. No holes, no blood.

She heard voices outside. She looked up to see Tom Weyrich coming down the steps, his gear in his hand, his photographer in tow. Weyrich was an investigator for the medical examiner's office with almost twenty years on the job.

'Top of the morning, Tom.'

Weyrich was in his early fifties, with a dry wit and a reputation as a thorough and exacting investigator. When Jessica had met him five years earlier he had been a meticulous and classically attired man. Now his mustache was irregularly trimmed, his eyes red and tired. Jessica knew that Weyrich's wife had recently died after a long fight with cancer. Tom Weyrich had taken it hard. Today he appeared to be running on fumes. His slacks were pressed, but Jessica noted that his shirt had probably been slept in.

'Had that double up in Torresdale,' Weyrich said, running his hands over his face, trying to wring out the exhaustion. 'Got out of there about two hours ago.'

'No rest for the righteous.'

'I wouldn't know.'

Weyrich stepped fully inside, saw the body. 'Good God.' Somewhere beneath the trash and shredded cardboard an animal scurried. 'Give me a good old execution-style two taps to the back of the head any day,' he added. 'I never thought I'd miss the crack wars.'

'Yeah,' Jessica said. 'Good times.'

Weyrich tucked his tie into his shirt, buttoned his suit coat, snapped on a pair of gloves. He went about his business. Jessica watched him, wondering how many times he had done this, how many times he had placed his hands on the cold flesh of the dead. She wondered what it was like for him, sleeping alone these days, and how he, more than anyone, needed to sense the warm flesh of the living. When Jessica and Vincent had been temporarily separated a few years earlier, it had been the thing she'd missed the most, the daily intimate contact with the warmth of another human being.

Jessica stepped outside, waited. She saw David Albrecht across the street, getting exterior shots of the building. Behind him, Jessica saw his sparkling new van, which had his website address painted on the side. It also had what Jessica figured was the title of his movie.

Coming soon: AREA 5292

Clever, Jessica thought. It was obviously a play on Area 51, the area in southern Nevada central to UFO conspiracy theories. The number 5292 was PPD parlance for a dead body.

Fifteen minutes later Tom Weyrich emerged.

'Bringing all my training to bear,' he began, 'I would conclude that this is a deceased person.'

'I knew I should have gone to a better school,' Jessica said. 'COD?'

'Can't even give you a presumptive cause of death until we unwrap his head.'

'Ready?' Jessica asked.

'As ever.'

They stepped back inside the storage room. Jessica snapped on latex gloves. Of late they were bright purple. They knelt down on either side of the body.

The band of paper was fastened with a small wad of sealing wax. The wax was a glossy crimson. Jessica knew this would be a delicate operation, if she wanted to preserve the sample.

She took out her knife — a four-inch serrated Gerber that she always carried in a sheath around her ankle, at least when she was wearing jeans — and slipped it under the circle of hard wax. She pried it gently. At first it looked as if it might split in two, but then she got lucky. The specimen fell off in one piece. She placed it into an evidence bag. With Weyrich holding the opposite side of the paper band, they unveiled the victim's face.

It was a horror mask.

Jessica estimated the victim to be about thirty-five to forty, although most of the lividity was gone and the skin had begun to sag.

Across the upper portion of the victim's forehead was a single laceration, running laterally, perhaps four or five inches in length. The cut did not appear to be very deep, splitting just the skin in a deep violet streak, not deep enough to reach bone. It appeared to have been made with either a razor blade or a very sharp knife.

Just above the right eye was a small puncture wound, the diameter of an ice pick or a knitting needle. This too seemed shallow. Neither wound appeared to be fatal. The victim's right ear looked to be mutilated, with cuts along the top and side, all the way down to the lobe, which was missing.

Around the neck was a deep welt. Death appeared to be a result of strangulation.

'You think that's the COD?' Jessica asked, even though she knew that the cause of death could not be conclusively determined until an autopsy had been performed.

'Hard to tell,' Weyrich said. 'But there is petechiae in the sclera of his eyes. It's a pretty good bet.'

'Let's see, he was stabbed, slashed and strangled,' Jessica said. 'Real hat trick.'

'And that's just the stuff we know about. He might have been poisoned.'

Jessica poked around the small room, carefully overturning boxes and shipping pallets. She found no clothing, no ID, nothing to indicate who this victim might be.

When she stepped outside a few minutes later she saw Detective Joshua Bontrager walking across Federal Street, clipping his badge to his jacket pocket.

Josh Bontrager had only been in the unit a few years but he had developed into a good investigator. Josh was unique in a number of ways, not the least of which was the fact that he had grown up Amish in rural Pennsylvania before making his way to Philadelphia and the police force, where he spent a few years in various units before being called into the homicide unit for a special investigation. Josh was in his mid-thirties, country-boy blond, deceptively fit and agile. He did not bring a lot of street smarts to the job — most of the streets on which he'd grown up had been barely paved — or any sort of scientific logic, but rather an innate kindness, an affability that completely disarmed all but the most hardened criminal.