Read Online Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense by Richard Montanari - Free Book Online

goin’ to heaven,” Withers said.
    “Look into a transfer when you get to Purgatory,” Byrne said.
    Withers scowled.
    “When you bring him in to get his statement, I want him tossed and all of his things logged,” Byrne said to Davis. Interviews and witness statements were taken at the Roundhouse. Interviews of homeless folks were generally brief, due to the lice factor and the shoe-box proportions of the interview rooms.
    Accordingly, Officer J. Davis looked Withers up and down. The frown on her face fairly screamed: I have to touch this bag of disease?
    “Get the shoes, too,” Byrne added.
    Withers was just about to object when Byrne raised a hand, stopping him. “We’ll get you a new pair, Mr. Withers.”
    “They better be good ones,” Withers said. “I do a lot of walkin’. I just got these broke in.”
    Byrne turned to Jessica. “We can extend the canvass, but I’d say there’s a fairly good chance she didn’t live in the neighborhood,” he said, rhetorically. It was hard to believe anyone lived in these houses anymore, let alone a white family with a kid in a parochial school.
    “She went to the Nazarene Academy,” Jessica said.
    “How do you know?”
    “The uniform.”
    “What about it?”
    “I still have mine in my closet,” Jessica said. “Nazarene is my alma mater.”

6
    MONDAY, 10:55 AM
    T HE NAZARENE ACADEMY was the largest Catholic girls school in Philadelphia, with more than a thousand students in grades nine through twelve. Situated on a thirty-acre campus in Northeast Philadelphia, it was opened in 1928 and, since that time, had graduated a number of city luminaries—among them industry leaders, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and artists. The administration offices for five other diocesan schools were located at Nazarene.
    When Jessica had attended the school, it was number one in the city, academically speaking, winning every citywide scholastic challenge it entered: those locally televised knockoffs of College Bowl where a group of orthodontically challenged fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds sit at bunting-draped tables and rattle off the differences between Etruscan and Greek vases, or delineate the time line of the Crimean War.
    On the other hand, Nazarene had also come in dead last in every citywide athletic challenge it ever entered. An unbroken record, and one not likely to ever be shattered. Thus they were known, among young Philadelphians, to this very day, as the Spazarenes.
    As Byrne and Jessica entered the main doors, the dark-varnished walls and crown molding, combined with the sweet, doughy aroma of institutional food, dragged Jessica back to ninth grade. Although she had always been a good student, and had rarely been in trouble—despite her cousin Angela’s many larcenous attempts—the rarefied air of the academic setting and the proximity to the principal’s office still filled Jessica with a vague, formless dread. She had a nine-millimeter pistol on her hip, she was nearly thirty years old, and she was scared to death. She imagined she always would be when she entered this formidable building.
    They walked through the halls toward the main office just as class broke, spilling hundreds of tartan-clad girls into the corridors. The noise was deafening. Jessica had already been five eight and had weighed 125 in ninth grade—a stat she mercifully maintained to this day, give or take 5 pounds, mostly give. Back then she had been taller than 90 percent of her classmates. Now it seemed that half the girls were her height or taller.
    They followed a group of three girls down the corridor to the principal’s office. As Jessica watched them, she sanded away the years. A dozen years earlier, the girl on the left, the one making a point a little too loudly, would have been Tina Mannarino. Tina was the first to get a French manicure, the first to sneak a pint of peach schnapps into a Christmas assembly. The stout one next to her, the one who rolled the top of her skirt to