The shoe print matched a size twelve Frye boot. Surveillance photos of Kenneth Beckman revealed him wearing the exact model.
Detectives visited Beckman's place of employment, only to discover that he had left.
When detectives arrived at the Beckman house on Lenox Avenue, search warrant in hand, they found a pair of PFD ladder trucks on the scene, and the block of row houses — four in all — ablaze. The old wooden structures burned to the ground in a matter of hours.
Across the street, sitting on a curb, smoking a cigarette, was Sharon Beckman. There was little doubt in anyone's mind about who had started the blaze, and no doubt at all why. Unfortunately for the investigators, there was no direct evidence. Sharon was not formally questioned or charged.
According to police, later that night Kenneth Beckman kidnapped Antoinette Chan, brought her to a location in South Philly and bludgeoned her to death. When Beckman was found in a motel in Allentown three days later and brought in for questioning, he dummied up and requested a lawyer.
Without any witnesses, and without any opportunity to search his house, all charges against Kenneth Arnold Beckman were dropped.
And now he was dead.
Jessica opened the folder with the crime-scene photos and felt her heart leap. 'Holy shit.'
'What?' Byrne asked.
Jessica put two of the Antoinette Chan crime-scene photos on the table, took out her iPhone, opened the photos folder, swiped over to her most recent photographs. She put the phone on the table, next to the printed pictures.
There was no mistake.
The man they had found dead that morning, Kenneth Arnold Beckman, the lead suspect in an eight-year-old murder case — that case being the bludgeoning to death of a young woman named Antoinette Chan — was posed inside a building on Federal, the same place where Antoinette Chan had been found.
Eight years before it became the Beckman crime scene it had been the Chan crime scene.
'The suspect in an unsolved homicide gets murdered himself and placed in the same location as his victim,' Jessica summed up.
'Yep,' Byrne said.
'As in exactly the same place. Posed in exactly the same position as the original victim.' She held up both the photograph and her cellphone. 'Kevin, these are absolutely identical crime-scene photos, only the second murder, our murder, was eight years later.'
'Eight and change, but yeah,' Byrne said. 'These are the facts as we know them.'
The two detectives looked at each other, knowing that this case had just crossed the line. It was now more than a vendetta murder, more than some act committed in the fiery grip of passion.
Jessica glanced again at the photographs. Some inner bell began to peal. In Philadelphia's history, any large city's history, there were many unsolved murders, victims of insanity and fury who for years went unavenged, evil echoing across time.
There was just such a legacy in the City of Brotherly Love, shame and guilt and madness that ran beneath the cobblestone streets like a blood river. Staring at photographs taken eight years apart, at the ragged flesh of two victims connected in a way neither she nor her partner yet understood, Detective Jessica Balzano wondered how much of this history they were about to see.
Chapter 14
I float in darkness. i have always been nocturnal, eluding sleep, embraced by waking dreams.
Here the screams are scuttled and still. It is a place of repose and reflection, a place of wintry silence. For many years I have felt at home here.
I place the body on the ground. It is the third note. There are eight in this measure. Harmony and melody. I prop the leg against the low headstone. The music swells as I leap into the air, bringing down my full weight. The bone snaps. The sound echoes across the wet granite, the moonlit grass. I take the recorder in my hand, play back the sound. The cracking of bone is bright percussion.
I move among the dead, listening. The departed speak softly to me, etudes of grace and humility. Soon my movements become fluid, an exaltation of this moment, a dance of death. Le danse macabre. Around and around I twirl. I am free here.
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zag, on his violin.
I spin among the deceased, thinking about the next days, days leading up to All Hallow's Eve, when all the world's departed will rejoice.
Soon we will dance, the detective and I. We will dance, and in our embrace we will find that we are of the same heart, the same mind, two damaged souls sipping from a tarnished cup of blood.
Chapter 15
Tuesday, October 26
Lucinda Doucette looked at the bathroom floor, thinking: I live in a world full of pigs.
Le Jardin, a modern 300-room hotel near Seventeenth and Sansom streets, in the heart of Center City, was a monolithic gray edifice with angular black wrought-iron railings around its seventy balconies, a model of European modernity at the corner of what was now being considered Philadelphia's new French Quarter. Managed by a Belgian multinational firm that also managed properties in Paris, Monaco and London, Le Jardin, which had been completely renovated in 2005, catered to the upscale business and leisure traveler, with its highly polished mahogany trim, its frosted French doors, its expensive French amenities.
In addition to the guest rooms there were six suites on the penultimate floor, all of them with views of the city, along with a presidential suite on the top floor that had breathtaking views of the Delaware River and beyond.
For Lucinda Doucette, along with everyone else who worked in hotel housekeeping, the views were less than scenic, although sometimes just as breathtaking in their own right.
Like all hotels, Le Jardin lived and died by its 'star' ratings — Orbitz, Hotels. com, Expedia, Hotwire, Priceline.
And while the management looked to online sites for input and feedback, there were only two accommodation ratings that really mattered: Mobil and AAA.
Mobil 'shopped' hotels every few years. The American Automobile Association, on the other hand, was far more exacting, some might say stingy, with their Diamond ratings, and thus were the most feared and respected of all the organizations on whose assessment of accommodations, dining, and travel the success of any hotel depended. Disappoint AAA, and the drop in business was palpable within months.
What it all boiled down to was comfort, staff, accommodation, and cleanliness.
Le Jardin was rightfully considered an upscale establishment, consistently rated at four stars, and this was something the management guarded fiercely.
Lucy Doucette had worked in housekeeping at Le Jardin for just over a year, starting a few days after her eighteenth birthday. When she first got on staff she found herself visiting the various travel websites with some regularity, checking the guest reviews, the user opinions, especially in the area of cleanliness. Granted, if she wasn't doing her job, she would certainly have heard about it from the director of housekeeping, a chilly, no- nonsense woman named Audrey Balcombe who, it was rumored, held a Master's Degree in communications from the Universite d'Avignon and had apprenticed as a hotelier with Kurt Wachtveitl, the legendary former general manager of the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok.
Still, Lucy took pride in what she did, and wanted to hear about it, good or bad, from the guests themselves.
