Authors: The Echo Man
Beyond
this, all these victims were related to cold cases. They were all suspects in
homicides. Or suspected of complicity in homicides.
The
connection to a group like
Societe Poursuite
and a man named George
Archer could not be overlooked.
All these
people were in some way culpable. In the eyes of their killer, they were all
guilty of something. But why
these
people? What linked them? Why the
cases of Antoinette Chan, Marcellus Palmer, Marcia Kimmelman and Melina
Laskaris? Why not any of the other hundreds of unsolved cases sitting in the
dusty books on the shelf?
At
one o'clock Jessica put a call into the Department of Motor Vehicles. If George
Archer had a driver's license in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, they would
be able to get a photograph.
She
skipped lunch and spent the early afternoon on the phone with the lab and the
DAs office. Michael Drummond was in court, but his secretary promised Jessica
that he would get back to her.
By
four o'clock she learned that there was no one named George Archer registered
at any hotel in the greater Philadelphia area.
She
also put in a call to Chief Rogers Logan in Garrett Corners. At her request
Logan paid a visit to Archer Farms. George Archer had not returned to his
house.
As the
first half of Jessica long day wound down, there were no new leads. The three
other lead detectives - Josh Bontrager, Nicci Malone, and Dennis Stansfield -
were all on the street, chasing down their leads. Josh had interviewed members
of the Chan family. All had concrete alibis. Nicci Malone had taken the morning
to drive to Weirton, West Virginia to speak to Marcellus Palmer's son and
daughter-in-law. She learned nothing of value. God only knew what Stansfield -
obsessed now more than ever with Kevin Byrne - was doing.
It
seemed the Byrne/Stansfield conflict had settled for the time being. There
would probably be some kind of fallout from the incident, but it wouldn't be
tonight. The homicide unit had a few other things with which to be concerned.
Jessica
arrived home around five-thirty, made a quick dinner for her and Sophie. After
dinner Sophie modeled her Snow Fairy costume. She looked adorable.
Outside,
the wind picked up, swirling leaves in the street. Perfect Philly Halloween
weather. And there was never a shortage of atmosphere or things to do in Philly
on Halloween.
There
was the Ghost Tour, which took participants on a candlelight excursion to
Society Hill and Independence Park. There was the tour of Eastern State
Penitentiary, once voted the number one haunted house in America. Then there
was the Mutter Museum, and the home of Edgar Allan Poe.
But
if Philadelphia was attached to its horrific past, it was nothing if not
creative. Jessica had already seen news footage of people trick- or-treating in
pink body suits, with a band of paper wrapped around their heads. The new
favorite costume in Philly, it seemed, was the victim of a serial murderer.
Jessica
took Sophie out for trick-or-treating early. This year was different from
previous years. Trick-or-treating among row houses was a frontal assault.
Within an hour, they hit a hundred or so houses. Sophie returned with a pair of
bulging pillowcases.
While
Sophie divvied up her swag on the living-room floor, Jessica showered and
prepared for her undercover assignment at the hotel.
Before
she left the house, she caught her reflection in the hallway mirror.
Not
bad,
she thought. The simple black dress was okay, if a little tight. Time
to ease up on the cannoli from Termini's.
The
hard part, of course, was the gun. Though in many ways the perfect accessory,
most designers did not allow for the bulk of a weapon when creating a line. It
was never the Smith & Wesson collection for Dior, or Vivienne Westwood
presents Frocks with Clocks.
Just
to be on the safe side, she packed a small duffel with jeans and a hoodie,
stowed it in the car. She had no idea where this night would take her.
The
team met in Le Jardin's Loss Prevention office. There were ten detectives in
all, including Josh Bontrager, Dennis Stansfield, Nicci Malone, and Nick
Palladino. Most were in plain clothes, the remaining few had on PPD
windbreakers.
They
were briefed by John Shepherd on the layout of the floors, the location of
surveillance cameras, the hotel protocol for emergencies. They went briefly
over the program for the evening, which included a lavish dinner, a number of
speakers, along with a keynote address by the attorney general for the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In addition, in the smaller meeting rooms there
were various panels and demonstrations. According to Shepherd, excluding front-
and back-of-the-house staff and personnel, there were close to one thousand
people in the building.
Every
so often Jessica glanced at the door. Byrne had not shown.
After
John Shepherd had completed his briefing, Dana Westbrook addressed the task
force. They had received more than seventy DMV photographs of men named George Archer.
None were registered to the man at the Archer Farms. The sheriffs office, in
addition to detectives from the Pennsylvania State Police, were showing the
photographs to neighbors and vendors in the area, trying to match the photo
with the man who ran Archer Farms.
For
the first hour Jessica worked the reception table, just outside the Crystal
Room. The double-length conference table was draped with white bunting, and
carried a few hundred name tags, programs, and pins bearing the slogan
He
escapes who is not pursued.
As
people filed by, Jessica watched their movements, their behaviors. Overall, it
was a rather staid-looking group. Conservatively dressed, quiet in demeanor,
polite in manner. In the course of an hour she handed out more than fifty name
tags.
At
eight o'clock three men approached from across the lobby, one of them quite
inebriated. They were in their forties, white, casually dressed. As they got
closer, the shortest one - the drunk one - did his best to focus on the table,
on the name tags, and finally on Jessica.
'Whoa!'
he said, reeling a little.
'Welcome,'
Jessica said.
'My
name is Jukka Tolonen,' the tall blond man said, introducing himself.
'Jay
Bowman,' said the other. Jessica scanned the table, found the name tags she was
looking for, handed them both a tag and a program.
'Thanks,'
the two men said in tandem, both sounding a little embarrassed for their
friend.
'You
know,' the drunk one said, 'I've been coming to this convention for, I don't
know, five years? Most of the women look like Mrs. Marble.'
Jessica
was pretty sure the man meant Miss Marple. 'What's your name?' she asked.
The
man looked at his friends. 'You hear that? She asked my
name,
dude.
She's hitting on me!'
'I
think she wants to give you your name tag,' Tolonen said. He had an accent.
Maybe Finnish. 'Oh.'
The
drunk man made a production of reaching into his pocket for his wallet. He
pulled it out, made a bigger deal of extracting one of his business cards, a
big smile on his face as if this were the cleverest bit ever. 'It looks like
I'm somebody named Barry Swanson,' he said. 'Like the frozen dinner.'
Like
the frozen adolescence,
Jessica thought. She handed Barry Swanson his ID
and a program. Swanson immediately dropped it all on the floor. Tolonen picked
up the material, clipped the name tag on his wobbly friend.
'Sorry,'
Bowman said to Jessica. 'He's a forensic chemist. He doesn't get out much.'
Jessica
watched them walk away, wondering how crimes ever got solved.
When
Jessica was relieved by a member of the task force, a detective out of West
Division named Deena Yeager, she walked over to the front desk, surveyed the
crowded lobby. David Albrecht had not gotten permission to film inside the
ballroom, but he was allowed to shoot footage in the lobby and out on the
street. Jessica saw that he had snagged some talking-head interview time with
some pretty heavy hitters.
Just about
everyone in the room had some connection to law enforcement. There were retired
detectives, prosecutors, forensic professionals of every discipline, men and
women who worked in the processing of fingerprints, hair and fiber, blood,
documents. There were pathologists, anthropologists, psychologists, people who
worked in behavioral science and mathematics. She'd heard there was a small
contingent from
Keishicho,
the Metropolitan Tokyo Police Department.
She
saw Hell Rohmer and Irina Kohl, pretending to be merely colleagues. It didn't
take a seasoned detective to detect the occasional brush of hands, or the more
than occasional longing glance. She saw judges, lawyers, bailiffs, along with a
handful of ADAs.
She
did not see Kevin Byrne.
Lucy
Doucette stood at the end of the hallway on the twelfth floor.
Her
shift ended at six-thirty, but she asked Audrey Balcombe if there were any
credits to be had and it turned out that three of the guests had requested housekeeping
twice a day. She imagined these people were in some kind of lab or forensic
work and had a serious germ phobia. Regardless, she was able to stay on for an
extra two hours. Now she was just killing time.
Lucy
knew that the moment she swiped her card in the electronic lock on the door to
1208 it would go on the record. She was scared out of her wits to go back in
there, but she had been scared so long it just didn't matter anymore.
She
looked over her shoulder. The hallway was deserted, but Lucy knew she was not
alone, not technically. She had once been in the main security station and had
seen the big monitors. All staff knew where the closed-circuit cameras were. At
least, the cameras they knew about, the obvious ones on the ceiling. At the end
of each hallway was a sideboard and a mirror, and Lucy always wondered if the
mirrors were two-way mirrors and maybe had a camera behind them.
Before
she could stop herself, Lucy knocked on the door to Room 1208.
'Housekeeping.'
Nothing.
She knocked again, repeated the word. Silence from within. She leaned closer to
the door. There was no sound of a TV, a radio, a conversation. The general rule
was two announcements, then enter.
Lucy
tried one last time, got no response, then swiped her card, eased open the
door.
'Housekeeping,'
she said once more, her voice barely above a whisper. She slipped inside, let
the door close behind her. It shut with a loud and final click, meaning that
the lock had irrevocably registered that she was in Room 1208.
The
room looked exactly the same as it had the last time. The minibar was
untouched, the bed had not been slept in, the wastebasket beneath the desk was
empty. She peeked into the bathroom. Nothing had been disturbed in there, either.
The toilet paper was still in a point, the soaps wrapped. Sometimes the nicer
guests tried to hang the towels back the way they were, but Lucy could always
tell. They never got them exactly right. She could also tell if someone had
taken a shower or bath, just by the smell, the damp sweetness of body gel and
shampoo that hung in the air.
She
stepped back to the door, put her ear to it, listened for sounds in the
hallway. It was silent. She walked to the closet, opened the door. The garment
bag hung there like a body at a gallows. She reached out slowly, turned over
the ID tag, her hand shaking.
This
bag belongs to George Archer.
Lucy
felt a chill ripple through her body. His name was George Archer. All these
years she had tried to imagine her kidnapper's name. Everyone had a name.
Whenever she read a newspaper or a magazine, whenever she watched a movie or a
TV show, whenever she was in a place like a doctor's office or the Bureau of
Motor Vehicles and someone said a name out loud she wondered:
Is that his
name?
Could that person be the man in her nightmares? Now she knew. George
Archer. It was, at the same moment, the most benign and the most frightening
name she'd ever heard.