Broken Angels

36

The Strawberry Mansion Bridge was built in 1897. It was one of the first steel bridges in the country, spanning the Schuylkill River between Strawberry Mansion and Fairmount Park.

This day, traffic was stopped at both ends. Jessica, Byrne, and Bon- trager had to walk to the center of the bridge, where a pair of patrol officers met them.

Two boys, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, stood near the officers. The boys seemed a vibrating combination of fear and excitement.

On the north side of the bridge was something covered in a white plastic evidence sheet. Officer Lindsey Valentine approached Jessica. She was about twenty-four, bright-eyed, fit.

"What do we have?" Jessica asked.

Officer Valentine hesitated a moment. She may have worked out of the Ninety-second, but whatever was under the plastic had unnerved her a little. "Citizen called this in about a half hour ago. These two young men came across it while crossing the bridge."

Officer Valentine lifted the plastic. On the sidewalk was a pair of shoes. They were women's shoes, deep crimson in color, approximately size seven. Ordinary in all ways, except these red shoes had a pair of severed feet in them.

Jessica looked up, met Byrne's gaze.

"The boys found this?" Jessica asked.

"Yes, ma'am." Officer Valentine waved the boys over. The boys were white kids, just on the tip of hip-hop style. Mall rats with attitudes, but not right at this moment. Now they looked a little traumatized.

"We were just looking at them," the taller one said.

"Did you see who put them here?" Byrne asked.

"No."

"Did you touch them?"

"Uh-uh."

"Did you see anyone around them when you were walking up?" Byrne asked.

"No, sir," they said together, shaking their heads for emphasis. "We were here for like a minute or something and then a car stopped and told us to get away. They called the police after that."

Byrne glanced at Officer Valentine. "Who placed the call?"

Officer Valentine pointed to a new Chevrolet parked about twenty feet from the circle of crime-scene tape. A fortyish man in a business suit and topcoat stood next to it. Byrne held up a finger to him. The man nodded.

"Why did you stay here after the police were called?" Byrne asked the boys.

The two boys shrugged in unison.

Byrne turned to Officer Valentine. "Do we have their information?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay," Byrne said. "You guys can go. We may want to talk to you again, though."

"What's going to happen to them?" the smaller boy asked, pointing to the body parts.

"What's going to happen to them?" Byrne asked.

"Yeah," the bigger one said. "Are you going to take them with you?"

"Yes," Byrne said. "We're going to take them with us."

"How come?"

"How come? Because this is evidence of a serious crime."

Both boys looked crestfallen. "Okay," said the smaller boy.

"Why?" Byrne asked. "Did you want to put them on eBay?"

He looked up. "Can you do that?"

Byrne pointed to the far side of the bridge. "Go home," he said. "Right now. Go home, or I swear to God I'll arrest your whole family."

The boys ran.

"Jesus," Byrne said. "Fucking eBay."

Jessica knew what he meant. She could not imagine herself at eleven years old, coming across a pair of severed feet on a bridge, and not freaking out. For these kids it was like an episode of CSI. Or some video game.

Byrne talked to the 911-caller while the frigid waters of the Schuylkill River flowed beneath. Jessica glanced at Officer Valentine. It was a strange moment, the two of them standing over what was certainly the severed remains of Kristina Jakos. Jessica recalled her own days in uniform, times when a detective would show up at a homicide she had secured. She remembered looking at the detective in those days with a small measure of envy and awe. She wondered if Officer Lindsey Valentine looked at her that way.

Jessica knelt down for a closer look. The shoes were low-heeled, round-toed, with a thin strap across the top, a wide toe-box. Jessica took a few pictures.

A canvass yielded the expected. Nobody had seen or heard anything. But one thing was obvious to the detectives. Something they did not need witness statements to tell them. These body parts had not been flung here randomly. They had been carefully placed.

Within an hour they had the preliminary report back. To no one's surprise, blood tests presumptively indicated that the recovered body parts belonged to Kristina Jakos.

There is a moment in all homicide investigations-investigations where you don't find the killer standing over the body, dripping knife or smoking gun in hand-when everything grinds to a halt. Calls don't come in, witnesses don't show, forensic results lag. On this day, at this time, it was just such a moment. Perhaps the fact that it was Christmas Eve had something to do with it. No one wanted to think about death. Detectives stared at computer screens, they tapped their pencils to some unheard beat, crime-scene photographs stared up from the desk: accusing, questioning, expecting, waiting.

It would be forty-eight hours before they could effectively question a sampling of people who took the Strawberry Mansion Bridge at approximately the time the remains were left there. The next day was Christmas Day and the usual traffic pattern would be different.

At the Roundhouse, Jessica gathered her things. She noticed that Josh Bontrager was still there, hard at work. He sat at one of the computer terminals, scrolling through arrest-history data.

"What are your Christmas plans, Josh?" Byrne asked.

Bontrager glanced up from his computer screen. "I'm going home tonight," he said. "I'm on duty tomorrow. New guy, and all."

"If you don't mind my asking, what do the Amish do for Christmas?"

"That depends on the group."

"Group?" Byrne asked. "There are different kinds of Amish?"

"Oh, sure. There's Old Order Amish, New Order Amish, Mennon- ite, Beachy Amish, Swiss Mennonites, Swartzentruber Amish."

"Are there parties?"

"Well, they don't put up lights, of course. But they do celebrate. It's a lot of fun," Bontrager said. "Plus they have second Christmas."

"Second Christmas?" Byrne asked.

"Well, it's really just the day after Christmas. They usually spend it visiting their neighbors, eating a lot. Sometimes they even have mulled wine."

Jessica smiled. "Mulled wine. I had no idea."

Bontrager blushed. "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm?"

As Jessica made the rounds of the hapless souls on the next shift, relaying her holiday wishes, she turned at the door.

Josh Bontrager sat at a desk, looking at the photos of the horrific scene they'd found on the Strawberry Mansion Bridge earlier that day. Jessica thought she saw a slight trembling in the young man's hands.

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