Play dead

FIFTY-FIVE

The murders were the lead story of the day. It was above the fold in the Inquirer, on the front page of the Daily News. It led all three network affiliate television broadcasts. It was featured on every local news website.

The lab was fast-tracking every piece of forensic evidence. A partial shoe print had been lifted off the roof where Katja had been posed on the wooden chair. The chair itself had yielded a number of friction ridge prints, which were being fed through AFIS. The swords were identified as a homemade version of a double-wide epee, the type commonly used in fencing. They yielded no prints.

Kat'a's mother, Birta Dovic, was driving in from Connecticut. Two investigators from the Connecticut state police were interviewing Katja's friends and classmates. Photographs of the three victims were now on the dashboards of every sector car in the city. Patrol officers were instructed to ask everyone they encountered if they had ever seen them.

The investigation had reached a whirlwind pace, but the one thing it had not produced, the one thing they all sought, was still eluding them.

They needed a name.

At just after 8:00 AM Josh Bontrager came running into the duty room, out of breath.

"What's up?" Jessica asked. Her head felt like it was made of cast iron. She'd gotten three hours' sleep and driven into the city in a fog. It reminded her of her college days.

Bontrager held up a hand. He couldn't catch his wind.

"Take it easy, Josh."

Bontrager nodded.

"Water?"

Another nod.

Jessica handed him a bottle. He chugged a full bottle of Aquafina. Deep breath. Then: "A woman called 911. She was in the park."

"What park? Fairmount Park?" Byrne asked.

"Tacony Creek," Josh said, nearly recovered. "You know the one I mean?"

Everyone did. Tacony Creek Park, which was technically part of the Fairmount Park system, was a 300-acre park that ran along the Tacony Creek, connecting Frankford Creek in the south to Cheltenham Township in the north. It skirted a very densely populated area in North Philadelphia.

"Anyway, the woman calls in, says she saw a man-a well-dressed white man-let a teenage girl get into his car. It was a black Acura. She said the whole thing looked a little funny, so she kept watching them. After a few seconds, she said she saw the man and the girl fighting in the car."

"What happened then?"

"Well, I guess while the woman was on the line with 911 a sector car drove by. She hung up, flagged it down, told the officer what was going on."

"Did she get a plate?"

"Better than that. She said the car went up an alley and the sector car blocked it in. It's a dead end."

"What are you saying, we have the car?" Jessica asked.

"Not only do we have the car," Bontrager said. He raised his empty bottle of spring water, like a toast. "We've got the guy."