Working front to back, she waded through documents such as zoning and use permits, prerequisite approvals, limited cooking permits (the building had once been used to house a restaurant it seemed), plot plans, electrical permits, and other documents. Although she found out that the property was abandoned, due to non-payment of taxes, she decided to check records all the way back to the building’s original owners.
After twenty minutes or so of dry, municipal data, one name popped out, and changed everything.
‘You’ve gotta be freakin’ kidding me,’ she said, loud enough to draw attention from the handful of people at the other terminals. She looked up, offered a silent sorry to all of them.
Jessica printed off her findings, grabbed her coat, and all but ran back to her car.
When Jessica returned to the Roundhouse, Byrne was waiting for her. She didn’t even have to ask. He proffered a white bakery bag — always a good sign.
God, she was going to become a cow. She decided she would put these empty calories into the bank of time she owed the treadmill, as opposed to the other bank she owed the elliptical trainer. She figured she was up to somewhere around four and a half months straight on the treadmill, at a four-mile-per-hour pace. If she ran all the way to Baltimore, and halfway back, she’d be paid up.
She finished the Danish, took the computer printout from her portfolio.
‘You ready for this?’ Jessica asked.
‘I love conversations that begin that way.’
Jessica handed Byrne the printout she made at L amp; I.
‘This is the ownership history of that building?’ Byrne asked.
‘Yeah. Skip down to the bottom of the second page. The rest of it is pretty boring.’
Byrne flipped a page, scanned the next one. It listed the previous owners of the property.
‘Check out the owner in 1853,’ Jessica said.
‘Holy shit.’
‘Well put.’
Byrne read it again. ‘John Nepomucene Neumann?’
‘Himself.’
‘As in Bishop Neumann?’
‘Well, Saint John Nepomucene Neumann now, but yeah.’
Jessica had asked the clerk in zoning about ownership. It turned out that, for many years, property owned by the Catholic church listed the bishop of the diocese as the owner. As a Catholic Jessica probably should have known this, but it was far from the only thing about her faith on which she was clueless.
‘So, this means that the property was at one time a Catholic church,’ Byrne said.
‘It does. It was originally called St Adelaide’s. After St Adelaide’s merged with a larger parish the building was sold to the Methodists, and I guess they couldn’t make a go of it either. As you can see, it’s been a lot of things since.’
‘It still had that Catholic vibe though, didn’t it?’
‘Oh, yeah.’
Jessica knew that ‘vibe’ meant one thing to Byrne, and another to her. When she saw her partner go back into St Adelaide’s, on his own, she knew that he needed time inside by himself. She had long ago learned to accept and respect Kevin Byrne’s gifts. They didn’t talk about them too much, but the knowledge was always there, always between them. Jessica figured one day Byrne might spill his guts to her about it. Doubtful, but maybe.
‘And no one is on the books for the property now?’
Jessica shook her head. ‘No one has paid taxes on it in ten years. I checked the last owners. Long out of business. In the wind.’
Philadelphia had the unfortunate distinction of having more real estate tax deadbeats than any other big city in the United States, with more than 100,000 properties in default. There were tens of thousands of empty buildings and vacant lots in North Philadelphia, Fairhill, and Nicetown/Tioga alone.
Byrne filed the zoning documents in the binder, considered some of the exterior photographs of the building that was once St Adelaide’s. ‘The X on the pole,’ he said. ‘It means something.’
‘It has to,’ Jessica said. ‘Let’s get on ViCAP today. Plug all this in.’
Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP — the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program — was a national registry of violent crimes: homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains. Case information submitted to ViCAP was available to authorized law-enforcement agencies around the world, and allowed investigators to compare their evidence to all other cases in the database and identify similarities.
Jessica crooked a thumb over her shoulder, in the general direction of the morgue on University Avenue. ‘So, how’d we do, Romeo?’
‘Have I failed yet?’
‘It’s the lemon Pledge. I’m telling you.’
‘Judy said she would red line the fingerprints,’ Byrne said. ‘It’s in the works.’
‘Guys?’ came a voice from behind them.
Jessica and Byrne turned. Josh Bontrager was in the doorway to the duty room.
‘What’s up, Josh?’ Jessica asked.
‘There’s something you should see.’
The Video Monitoring Unit was on the first floor of the Roundhouse. The huge space was arranged in three tiers with long curved tables on each level. Each table had a number of wired terminals into which a technician could plug a laptop, and from there monitor any of the hundreds of police cameras that were deployed around the city.
At the front of the room was an enormous monitor, measuring ten feet diagonally. At any given time, any image from any camera in the city could be displayed on this.
When Jessica and Byrne walked in with Josh Bontrager there were four technicians at work. Bontrager led Jessica and Byrne over to a monitor at the far end of the top tier. On the laptop was a high-angle night shot of a street corner. A now-familiar street corner.
‘This footage is from that pole cam?’ Byrne asked.
Bontrager sat down at the terminal. ‘Yeah. As you can see, it covers the entrance to the alley next to the building, over to just left of the front door.’
‘How far back can we go on this cam?’ Byrne asked.
‘This cam dumps every two weeks, so we have footage of our victim and someone else entering the building. Or at least their shadows.’
Bontrager hit a few keys on the keyboard. The image on the small screen was dark, but Jessica was able to pick out some details. There was a light-colored van parked directly in front of the church. The space in front of the van was empty. Every so often someone would pass by, walking either up or down Amber Street. Jessica constantly checked the time code. At the 10:05:44 p.m. mark Bontrager stopped the recording.
‘Okay, here we’re going to see two individuals enter from frame right. At least it looks like two individuals. No way of knowing what’s out of frame.’ Bontrager tapped the screen, lower right. ‘As you’ll see, they hesitate, then go down that alley. Which, as you know, is a dead end.’
‘They don’t walk in front of the camera?’ Byrne asked.
Bontrager shook his head. ‘Just our victim, and just for a second.’
The recording inched forward. For a moment, the street-lamp caught the figure on the left in profile. Although Jessica wouldn’t swear to it in court, it looked a lot like their victim. But it did not look as if he were being coerced or forced down the alley. Despite the moment’s hesitation, he looked like a willing participant. A second later there were only shadows on the alley wall, one of them wearing a pointed hood. Then they were gone.
‘And we never get another angle?’ Byrne asked.
‘Unfortunately no. The cam was set up to catch activity on the corner. We’re lucky to have this much.’
‘Can you run that back?’ Jessica asked.
Bontrager rewound the recording, replayed it. He isolated the frame where the victim was most discernible.
Jessica checked the date code. It was a week and a half old. ‘Wait. You’re saying he was in that basement for ten days?’
‘It looks like it,’ Bontrager said. ‘I ran the recording forward, and no one goes in or out of that alley, except for that person in the hood, and then we only see the shadow.’ He pointed to the time code in the corner. ‘And always at the same time every night.’