Free The Stolen Ones by Richard Montanari Page B

switch. On. Off. There was no setting for medium. ‘Thanks.’
    Jessica let him off the hook. She pointed to the binder on the desk.
    ‘What do you have?’ she asked.
    ‘Got a victim down on North Marston, first floor of an abandoned building,’ Bontrager said. He pulled a few crime scene photographs out of the envelope. ‘The victim was stabbed in the eyes.’
    ‘The ME said that’s the cause of death?’
    Bontrager nodded. ‘He believes it was some kind of very long knife that was pushed into the guys eyes so deeply it went right into the victim’s brain.’
    ‘Lovely,’ Jessica said.
    ‘He’s thinking an eight-inch blade, but thin.’
    Jessica looked at the photographs. They were horrifying. The victim was a white or Hispanic male, perhaps in his late teens. He was slumped against a graffiti-covered wall, near the door. There were thick washes of blood down his face onto what had been, at one time, a light-colored shirt.
    What had once been his eyes were now purplish-black holes.
    ‘Any ID on the victim?’ Byrne asked.
    ‘Not yet. There are a lot of cars parked on the street. We’re running them now.’
    ‘Are you thinking he was a gangbanger?’
    Bontrager shook his head. ‘It doesn’t look like it. No gang tats.’
    ‘Any witnesses?’ Byrne asked.
    Bontrager slipped the crime scene photos back into the binder. ‘Mass amnesia. Like always.’
    ‘Did you canvass already?’
    ‘Yeah. Neighborhood interviews are done. The first round, anyway.’
    ‘If you need any warm bodies,’ Byrne added.
    ‘Thanks.’
    Conducting neighborhood interviews were always, at the very least, a two-stage process. In a city like Philadelphia, or any large city populated by people working all three shifts, it was in a detective’s best interest to revisit the scene, staggering the time window by four, eight and twelve hours. At least half the doors you knocked on at any given time went unanswered, but might be answered later in the day. More than one case had broken wide open with a re-canvass.
    ‘Flying solo on this?’ Byrne asked.
    Bontrager shook his head. ‘Working with Maria.’
    Maria Caruso was a very attractive younger detective. Everyone knew that Josh had a crush on her – more accurately, he was boots over buckles in love – but no one knew if the two were seeing each other. While it wasn’t prohibited by the brass, it was better to keep such things a secret. You never knew what might compromise a trial if and when it came to that.
    Bontrager glanced at his watch. ‘Gotta hit the street,’ he said. ‘We need to get this guy identified before the whole darn case starts getting cold.’
    Jessica glanced at Byrne.
Darn
. When Josh left the duty room they each took out a dollar, opened the file cabinet drawer, and put them in the kitty.
    The fact that Josh Bontrager had picked up a fresh homicide meant that Byrne was next up on the wheel, the ever-turning mandala that brought detectives back up to the top of the order, regardless of whether or not they had closed their other cases. As a veteran, Byrne did not have to physically man the desk in the duty room, but he would be on call until the next case came in. And the next case always came in. History proved that forty-eight hours without a suspicious death in Philadelphia County had not passed in more than three decades.
     
    At seven o’clock Jessica ran the names of the employees of CycleLife. Of the six employees who worked at the company during Robert Freitag’s tenure as logistics manager – whatever
that
was, Jessica made a mental note to look it up – not one of them had a record on NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, or the Philadelphia equivalent, PCIC. One man, Alonzo Mayweather, the man who found Freitag’s birthday card shredded in the recycling bin, seemed to have a problem keeping his car under fifty-five. He’d gotten eleven moving violations in the past six years, and had his license suspended for six months, since