Richard Montanari: The Echo Man

It was Michael Drummond who had supplied the forged visitor's pass and clothing to Lucas Anthony Thompson.

Real-estate tax records traced back to Drummond led to a small commercial building in South Philly. Police found his killing room full of recording equipment, as well as a cache of nearly two hundred CDs and audiocassettes — all meticulously dated — of street and human sounds, some of them of people in their death throes. It would be months, maybe years, before police forensic audiologists would be able to make sense of the recordings, if ever. Michael Drummond had been building to this dark denouement for a long time.

At Josh Bontrager's direction K-9 officers from PPD found an unconsious David Albrecht at the bottom of the ravine on Sawmill Road. Albrecht had lost a lot of blood, but paramedics reached him in time. Investigators were certain that he had been attacked and left for dead by Michael Drummond, but Drummond would escape this charge posthumously.

None of this explained the murder of George Archer.

Lucy Doucette, in her statement, told police about the man she had met. The man who called himself Adrian Costa. The Dreamweaver. Police checked with the management of the apartment building off Cherry Street. The landlord said that a man had rented Apartment 106 for six months, paying cash in advance. He gave police a vague description.

They had showed Lucy the video recordings made on Halloween Night at the hotel, recordings of the hallway on the twelfth floor. Jessica had freeze-framed the image of the man in the wizard's costume and mask passing by the camera.

Lucy said she couldn't remember.

Jessica had also visited Garrett Corners again, researched the name Adrian Costa. No one with that name had ever been registered as a voter or resident of the area. The people knew the reclusive van Tassels to be travelers, carny people. The only photograph of the family was nearly fifteen years old. When Jessica revisited Peggy van Tassel's grave, she looked at the two plots next to it. One was the grave of a man named Ellis Adrian. The other was the last resting place of an Evangeline Costa.

Was the Dreamweaver Peggy van Tassel's father?

From what the investigators could gather, it appeared that Florian van Tassel had tracked Archer for years but had not known for sure that it was Archer who had kidnapped both Peggy van Tassel and Lucy Doucette back in September 2001. As the Dreamweaver, van Tassel enticed Lucy to submit to hypnosis sessions during which van Tassel determined that he had been right. George Archer had killed Peggy. It seemed that van Tassel also gave Lucy a post-hypnotic suggestion to leave a note for Archer in his room, drawing him up there at 9:30p.m., then instructed her to open the door to Room 1208 at the right moment.

The enhanced video taken from the twelfth-floor hallway that night showed the man dressed as a wizard — believed to be Florian van Tassel — with an old-style school bell in his hand.

While all of this was circumstantial, it wasn't until forensic results started to come in that police issued an arrest warrant for Florian van Tassel, aka The Dreamweaver. Blood belonging to George Archer was found on the old photograph left behind in the room where the Dreamweaver had met with Lucy Doucette.

The George Archer file sat in a file cabinet at the Roundhouse.

The case remains open.

Monday, November 8

Byrne sat in the small lunch-room at the back of the Roundhouse. The four-to-twelve shift had already come and gone and were out on the street. Byrne, who had been on administrative leave since the shooting, sat by himself, a cold cup of untouched coffee in front of him.

When Jessica entered the room and approached him she saw something else on the table. It was Byrne's fifty-cent piece.

'Hey, partner.'

'Hey,' Byrne replied. 'You finish that FAS?'

A Firearms Analysis System form was a trace request sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

'All done.' Jessica slid into the booth across from Byrne. 'You heading home?'

'In a while.'

They sat in silence. Byrne looked tired, but not nearly as tired as he had looked recently. He'd gotten the results from all his follow-up tests. There was no tumor, nothing serious. They said it was a combination of fatigue, poor diet, insomnia, with a Bushmills chaser. Jessica glanced at the menu displayed over the counter in the corner, and thought about how eating in this place might be part of the problem.

Byrne looked up, at the scarred booths, the plastic flowers, the line of vending machines against the wall, at the place to which he had come to work for more than twenty years. 'I didn't do my job, Jess.'

She'd known this was coming, and here it was. Everything she planned to say vaporized from her mind. She decided to just speak from her heart. 'It wasn't your fault.'

'I was so young,' Byrne said. 'So arrogant.'

'Christa-Marie confessed to the crime, Kevin. I wouldn't have handled it any differently. I don't know any cop who would.'

'She confessed because she was ill,' Byrne said. 'I didn't dig any deeper. I should have, but I didn't. I turned in my report, it went to the DA. Just like always. Boss says move on, you move on.'

'Exactly.'

Byrne spun the coffee cup a few times.

'I wonder what her life would have been like,' he said. 'I wonder where she would have gone, what she would have done.'

Jessica knew there was no answer to this, none that would help. She waited awhile, then slipped out of the booth.

'How about I buy you a drink?' she said. 'It's fifty-cent Miller Lite night at Finnigan's Wake. We can get hammered, drive around, pull people over, do some traffic stops. Be like old times.'

Byrne smiled, but there was sadness in it. 'Maybe tomorrow.'

'Sure.'

Jessica put a hand on Byrne's shoulder. When she got to the door she turned, looked at the big man sitting in the last booth, surrounded by all the whispering ghosts of his past. She wondered if they would ever be silent.

He found her behind the hotel. She was sitting alone on a stone bench, on her dinner break, an untouched salad next to her. When she saw Byrne she stood up, hugged him. He held on as long as she wanted.

She pulled away and turned, brushing off the bench for him. Ever considerate, Byrne thought. He sat down.

They were silent for a few moments. Finally Byrne asked, 'You doing okay?'

Lucy Doucette shrugged. 'Just another day in the big city.'

'Did you have any problems giving your statement?' He had put out the word that she was to be treated with kid gloves. The report back was that she had been. Byrne wanted to hear it from her.

'Yeah,' she said. 'But if I never go back to a police station for the rest of my life, that will be okay with me.'

'About that other matter,' Byrne said, referring back to Lucy's detainment for shoplifting. 'I talked to the DAs office, and to the owner of the store on South. It's all smoothed over. Just a big misunderstanding.' Because Byrne had intervened before Lucy was charged there would not be a record.

'Thanks,' she said. She looked at Byrne, at the bench, at the surrounding area. 'Where's your man bag?'

'I'm not carrying it anymore.'

Lucy smiled. 'Were you getting grief from your fellow officers?'

Byrne laughed. 'Something like that.'

A wink of silver caught Byrne's eye. It was a small heart-shaped pendant around Lucy's neck.

'Nice necklace,' he said.

Lucy lifted the heart, ran it along the chain. 'Thanks. I got it from David.'

'David?'

'David Albrecht. I went and saw him in the hospital.'

Byrne said nothing.

'We're kind of in this thing together, you know?' Lucy said, perhaps feeling the need to explain. 'I guess he's going to be okay?'