Hold Still (25 page)

FORTY-NINE

November 12th

Camille tucked the man’s money
into her bra and stared at the floor. She winced as a cramp worked its way through her lower abdomen. Her feet dangled over the edge of the bed. She swung them back and forth over top of a carpet that was about two hundred different shades of brown, breathing through her mouth as the cramp eased. The carpet looked like it had been an entirely different color at some point, maybe when the motel first opened. Orange maybe. She tried not to wonder what the wet spot near the door was from.

She lit a cigarette and listened to the sounds of the man leaving. The rustle of his shirt, the shushing sound of pants being pulled up. Buckle. Zipper. Feet sliding into shoes. A heavy jacket shrugged over shoulders. Then, the exquisite sound of the door closing.

“Ahhh,” she sighed. Alone at last.

Camille pulled her purse out from under the bed where she’d stuffed it and pulled out her pipe, which was wrapped in an old tank top. The meth was at the bottom of the bag. Her lighter had just flicked to life, the tiny flame licking the bottom of her pipe, when the door to the room swung open. She jumped up and turned to see a short Asian man in the doorway. He wore black slacks and a white button-down shirt. A thick shock of black hair fell across his forehead. “You,” he said, waving his hand at her. “You go. Time up. You go.”

Camille groaned and looked at the bedside clock. She had at least fifteen more minutes. “Come on, man,” she complained. “We paid for the whole hour. I don’t feel good. Give me a break.”

The man shook his head. “Hour over,” he insisted. He waited in the doorway, staring at her expectantly. She sighed and wrapped her pipe back up, dropping it into her bag. “Fine,” she huffed as she walked past him. “But you owe me fifteen minutes.”

The November air stung her face. She pulled her coat tighter around her and fumbled with the zipper. By the time she reached Kensington Avenue, a fine sheen of sweat had broken out over her forehead. Her entire body felt hot and weak, like she hadn’t eaten in days. She’d eaten just a few hours ago, though, and soon that threatened to come back up. Squatting down in front of a pawnshop, she rested her face in her hands and waited for it to pass. She peeled her coat off, relishing the frigid air until she got the chills and pulled it back on.

When she felt steadier, she stood and lit a cigarette. She leaned her head back against the pawnshop window. Another cramp seized her abdomen. She hugged herself with one arm and clenched her jaw, waiting for it to stop. They’d been coming for a couple of days now. It wasn’t her period—those cramps didn’t feel quite this bad and were not usually accompanied by such drastic bouts of hot and cold. She had something. She was hoping it was just a virus, and she’d feel better in a few days. Camille didn’t feel like dealing with any doctors. They were so judgmental. Who needed that? She’d promised herself she’d call Uncle Simon if it got much worse.

Camille checked her funds. She had enough money for the night. Probably enough meth to make it till the morning, but she was cold as hell and she felt like shit. She wanted a warm place, somewhere she could lay down for a while. The place she usually stayed was out of the question, at least for tonight. Her friend’s pimp had taken up residence there while Camille was in jail. The last thing she needed to deal with right now was that asshole. She worked for herself, and, judging by her friend’s scars, he wasn’t the type to take no for an answer.

If she earned a little more, she might be able to rent a room just for herself. Or she could try to find some dates who would take her to a motel. They were usually good for an hour or two if she was lucky. Of course, she wasn’t going back to the shithole she’d just been kicked out of fifteen minutes early.

She smoked two more cigarettes, praying the cramps and sweats would hold off for a while. She made a quick ten bucks with a teenage boy in a nearby alley. Then an old guy in a sedan. He didn’t last long, and she was back out in the cold. She waited out another cramp and walked up and down the avenue with achy feet. Then a gray four-door with two men in it pulled up. The older one was driving. Beside him was a mountain of flab.

“You workin’?” the driver asked.

She smiled. “Maybe. You got somewhere to go?”

He shrugged. His friend looked straight ahead, seemingly disinterested. “Sure,” the man said. He looked behind her, then back to her face. “It would be both of us.”

“Sure,” Camille said.

“How much?”

“Fifty.”

He nodded. “Get in.”

She got in the back and they pulled away. The inside of the car was worn and smelled like fried food. A spring in the seat beneath her poked her thigh. They drove down the Stroll a few blocks and then he turned onto a cross street.

“Mind if I smoke?” Camille asked.

“Nah,” the driver said. “Just open the window.”

She put it down a few inches and lit up. She sucked the smoke into her lungs and blew it out through the cracked window, watching the blocks whip past. They were getting pretty far away from her usual working area. Camille tapped the driver’s headrest. “Hey,” she said. “Where the hell are we going?”

“It’s not far,” he said, but the next block he drove down was dotted with condemned houses. They stopped in front of a large three-story that seemed to list to the left. It was red brick and crumbling. The second-story windows had long since lost their glass. Their frames stretched open to the elements. A tree branch poked out of one of them. The first-floor windows were boarded up, as was the front door. The porch bowed in a V shape.

“I thought you had somewhere to go,” Camille said.

She’d done it in crack houses in worse shape than this one, but this place didn’t look like it could keep out the cold, and that was the whole point. She wanted an hour or so of warmth and maybe the comfort of a bed. She shook her head and threw her cigarette butt out the window slit. “Look,” she said. “I’m not doin’ it in the cold, so let’s just do it in the car.”

She pulled her jeans down. “Who’s going first?”

They looked at each other, and it was only when the big one got out of the car without uttering a word that she realized something was wrong. Despite having spent more than fifteen years on the street, Camille’s instincts weren’t the greatest. All those years of drug addiction, homelessness, arrests, getting stiffed by johns and rolled on by other girls had not served her well in terms of sensing dangerous situations. Other girls had the natural street savvy that Camille had been after her entire life. As always, the realization came too late for her to do much about the impending danger.

When the big one opened the back door and reached in for her, she bolted out the other door, hitching her jeans up as she ran. A car door slammed, and she heard the sound of feet slapping pavement behind her. It had to be the older one; she couldn’t imagine the fat one running that fast. She didn’t look back. Before she could get a good lead on the guy, a cramp seized her, starting out as a band across her pelvis and wrapping around to her back beneath her rib cage. Her knees hit the pavement hard, her breath coming in gasps. She swayed from side to side, trying to will the pain away. Fever enveloped her entire body. The sweats came on in a matter of seconds.

Get up. She had to get up.

An arm looped around her waist and picked her up. An involuntary scream escaped her. It felt as if someone were slicing through her insides and him jostling her didn’t help. She flailed, kicking but finding only air. Swinging her bag behind her, she tried to make contact with something. He clasped her back to his chest and carried her back toward the house. The fat one met them halfway and lifted her out of the older one’s arms like she was a grocery bag. In spite of several kicks to his fleshy stomach, he slung her over his shoulder as if she weighed nothing.

The cramping began to ease. Fat drops of sweat poured from her face onto his T-shirt. She pounded on his back and tried to elbow the back of his head. “You fuckers!” she shrieked. He carried her around to the back of the house. As they passed through the back door, she grabbed on to the door frame and held on as tightly as she could. Splinters dug into her fingers, but that pain registered as little more than an annoyance.

The older one walked up behind them and peeled her fingers one by one. “You son of a bitch,” she snarled. She got a wild punch in on him before the fat one carried her into the bowels of the house. Her cries echoed off the crumbling barren walls. They came to a room that was lit by some kind of large flashlight. It cast strange, misshapen shadows on the walls. The place smelled like piss.

“This one’s wild,” the older one said.

The sound of laughter stilled her momentarily. She looked around for its source. A figure emerged from the shadows on her left clothed in all black from head to toe—even a ski mask. For a moment, he looked like just a pair of disembodied eyes and a floating mouth. He smiled beneath the mask, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. “She won’t be when we’re finished with her,” he said.

That was when she saw the hammer dangling from his right hand.

FIFTY

November 12th

Kelly Drive was a four-mile
stretch that snaked its way alongside the Schuylkill River between Jocelyn’s neighborhood and the heart of the city. It was two lanes in either direction with no shoulders and absolutely no room for error. Every time Jocelyn drove it, she felt as though she were playing chicken with the cars coming in the opposite direction. Aside from that, it was a beautiful ride. “The Drive,” as locals referred to it, was sandwiched between a lush, hilly, forested area and the riverbank, which was lined with manicured grass and dotted with statues and sculptures. The hilly side of the Drive skirted around some of the less savory neighborhoods in the city.

In true Philadelphia fashion, jogging along the open space next to the river you were relatively safe—at least in broad daylight—but if you went a quarter mile up one of those hills, you would find yourself on dangerous ground. The Drive terminated at the rear of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which sat next to Philadelphia’s famous boathouse row. When the drive wasn’t clogged with Regatta traffic, joggers and cyclists frequented the path beside the river year-round. In the summers, people went fishing or had picnics along the riverbank. About six or seven times a year, someone drove his or her car into the water. Slightly less frequently, bodies had to be fished out of the river, like the one the Philadelphia Police Department’s Marine Unit had fished out of the Schuylkill before Jocelyn and Kevin pulled up.

She found a space in one of the parking areas the city had cut along the riverbank, behind a large cluster of police cars, most of which sat haphazardly in the grass along the bank.

“How many police officers does it take to pull someone out of the river?” Kevin said. “Jesus, did they leave anybody to patrol the rest of the city?”

Jocelyn counted the vehicles. There were twelve and twice as many officers gathered alongside the riverbank. “Guess we’ll find out,” she said.

“You know,” Kevin said. “Last time I checked, we weren’t homicide.”

Jocelyn shot him an acerbic look, her left eyebrow arched. “Caleb said it was important.”

Kevin put a hand to his chest and batted his eyelashes. In a faux breathy voice, he said, “Oh, Caleb.”

Jocelyn flipped him off as she climbed out of the car, hoping he wouldn’t notice the blush that rose to her face.

“He’s not homicide either,” Kevin called from across the top of the car.

Jocelyn had a bad feeling about this. A very bad feeling. She and Kevin had been out looking for a place to score some dinner after an armed robbery call when Caleb called her and told her she needed to get down to the Drive right away. She didn’t know if it was related to the child pornography case involving her sister’s rapists or the “Schoolteacher Attackers.” Either way, it would be unpleasant. The wind whipped around them fiercely, nearly causing her to stumble and making the balmy forty-degree day feel more like twenty degrees. The three news helicopters circling overhead didn’t help. She and Kevin walked shoulder to shoulder toward the cluster of police personnel, keeping their heads down.

Some of the Marine Unit guys were erecting a pop-up tent at the very edge of the bank so the news helicopters wouldn’t be able to get a high-definition shot of whoever they had pulled out of the water before the police could even identify them. It was a three- to four-foot drop-off from the wall at the edge of the bank to the water. A small boat bobbed along the bank, a diver swimming alongside it, hanging on to the outermost edge of the vessel. A larger police boat idled about thirty feet from the shore.

Jocelyn and Kevin shouldered their way to the edge, beneath the tent, where Caleb stood, a yellow transfer flat at his feet, the body inside limp and motionless. He turned toward them as they approached. “Sullivan,” Caleb said, nodding at Kevin. He met Jocelyn’s eyes and smiled. She resisted the urge to touch him in greeting. She felt a small tick of anxiety when she noticed that his smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“What’s going on?” she said.

He motioned to the body at their feet. “I think we found Raeann Church.”

It was like a sharp punch to her gut. For a moment, she couldn’t quite breathe. Then her words came out on a heavy exhale. “Son of a bitch.”

“Are you kidding me?” Kevin said.

Jocelyn dropped to her knees beside the mummified body and watched as one of the Marine Unit guys carefully pulled the flat away from the head of the body. The woman’s face was bloated and pale like the belly of a fish. The skin beneath her left eye was marred by a large purple bruise. Her brown hair was frayed and even stringier than when Jocelyn had met her. “No,” Jocelyn said.

The medical examiner knelt on the other side, hands gloved. He pushed her hair away from her neck and adjusted her chin so that Jocelyn could see the finger-size bruises mottling her throat.

“Strangled,” Kevin said.

Jocelyn nodded and took his hand as he helped her stand. She met Caleb’s eyes. His face contorted as if he were in pain. “That’s definitely her.”

“Yeah,” Jocelyn agreed, her voice throaty.

The sound of digitized music drew her gaze toward Kevin. He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket and glanced at it.

“That’s new. Is that the theme to
The A-Team
?” she asked.

He smiled at her briefly in response and touched the screen with his index finger to answer. He turned and walked a few steps away as he talked. The conversation lasted less than a minute, and when he turned back to her, his face was the color of ash. His forehead creased. He stared at her until a shiver ran down her spine.

“What? What is it?”

He tried to speak and failed. He cleared his throat and tried again. “That was Kim—Nurse Bottinger. It’s Camille.” He looked down at the body, and when he looked back up at her, Jocelyn swore she saw a sheen of tears filming his eyes.

Panic rose inside her chest, making it feel tight. She had been freezing since she stepped out of the car, but now her whole body felt white-hot. Sweat broke out along her forehead. Had her sister finally overdosed?

“What happened to Camille, Kevin?” she asked, her voice far calmer than she felt. Caleb stepped toward her, not touching her but close enough that she could have leaned into him. She wanted to lean into him and close her eyes. Disappear into his warmth. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to know it. She didn’t want it to be.

“She’s at Einstein,” Kevin said. “They got her—Warner, Donovan, and the third guy. They got her.”