'No, we're good. Thanks.' Drummond slipped on his overcoat. 'I just have to be in Parkwood around six- thirty.'
Jessica looked at Byrne, then back. 'Parkwood?'
'What about it?'
'Well, it's just come up twice in one day.'
'What do you mean?' Drummond asked.
Jessica explained what they had done that afternoon, about Abraham Coltrane's claim that Marcellus Palmer, the 2004 victim found in the Dumpster just a few blocks from where they now stood, was buried in or around Parkwood. Drummond thought for a few moments.
'Well, I'm pretty sure there used to be a potter's field in Parkwood,' he said. 'It closed a while back.'
'Closed?'
'Yeah. I think the bodies were disinterred and either moved to other cemeteries or cremated. I think there was supposed to be some kind of development that went in that spot, but nothing ever happened.' Drummond drained his glass, put it on the bar. 'Can you imagine living on top of a former cemetery?'
Jessica felt a chill at the idea. 'Do you know where the cemetery was located?'
Drummond shrugged. 'No idea. Sorry. I might even be wrong about this.'
'Counselor!' someone shouted drunkenly from across the room. 'You're needed for a voir dire.'
It was two old-timers from the DA's office. The voir dire was a process of jury selection, generally involving the judge and attorneys asking potential jurors about their experiences and beliefs. On the table in front of the two ADAs was one of every different kind of drink in the bar. There had to be fifty full glasses. Drummond looked back at Jessica and Byrne. 'Looks like the night isn't over for me yet. Thanks again for coming.'
Drummond slipped off his coat and staggered across the room.
Downstairs, a few minutes later, Byrne held the door for Jessica. They stepped out onto Spring Garden Street.
'So, what time do you want to meet me at L amp; I?' Byrne asked. The License amp; Inspections division had city-zoning archives going back more than two hundred years. If there had once been a cemetery in or around Parkwood it would be recorded there.
'As soon as they open, detective,' Jessica said.
Chapter 38
Thursday, October 28
The city's last official potter's field had opened in 1956 in Philadelphia's Northeast. Prior to its opening, the most active potter's field had been in a section now used as a police parking lot at Luzerne Street and Whitaker Avenue, adjoining Philadelphia Municipal Hospital, where it became the final resting place for thousands who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. At various times in the city's history, indigent or unclaimed deceased were buried in a number of places, including Logan Square, Franklin Field, Reyburn Park, even at the corner of 15th and Catharine, just a few blocks from where Jessica had grown up.
These days, in the interest of logistics and expense, many of the unidentified and indigent were being cremated, with remains stored in a room off the morgue at the medical examiner's office.
Jessica and Byrne visited the zoning-archives department of Licenses and Inspections at just after eight a.m. The L amp; I office was located in the Municipal Services Building at 15th and JFK. What they learned was that there had once been a potter's field located in the Parkwood section of Northeast Philadelphia, a field that had since closed.
They stopped for coffee and got onto 1-95 at just after nine a.m.
The field was located near the intersection of Mechanicsville Road and Dunks Ferry Road at the southern end of Poquessing Valley Park.
On the south side of Dunks Ferry Road were blocks of two-story twin row homes, their fasciae festooned with Halloween decorations ranging from the elaborate (one had a skeleton about to climb down the chimney) to the ordinary (an already dented plastic pumpkin stuck on a gas light).
Jessica and Byrne got out of the car, crossed the road. They walked through the trees into a large open field. Here the ground was rippled — the uneven remnants of graves that had been there a long time.
There were no headstones, no crypts, no vaults, no mausoleum. The field had indeed been closed, the bodies moved or cremated, the area planted over.
Jessica looked at the rutted sod. She considered the generations of kids to come, flying kites, playing kickball, unaware that at one time the ground beneath their feet had held the remnants of the city's homeless, its indigent, its lost.
They walked slowly across the undulating earth, looking for any sign of what had once been there — a buried headstone, a grave marker of any kind, a stake in the ground indicating the boundaries of the cemetery. There was nothing. The earth had long ago begun to reclaim the area with life.
'Was this the only city field in this area?' Jessica asked.
'Yeah,' Byrne said. 'This was it.'
Jessica looked around. Nothing looked promising, at least as it might concern the cases. 'We're wasting our time up here, aren't we?'
Byrne didn't reply. Instead he crouched down, ran his hand over a bare patch of ground. A few moments later he stood, dusted off his hands.
Jessica heard a rustling in the nearby trees. She looked up to see a half-dozen crows perched tenuously on a low branch of a nearby maple. A murder of crows, she had once learned, and had ever since thought how odd a term that was. A flock of geese, a herd of cattle, a murder of crows. Soon another black bird landed, rustling the others, who responded with a series of loud caws and flapping wings. One of them took off and swooped toward the low shrubs at the other side of the field. Jessica followed the pattern of flight.
'Kevin,' she said, pointing to the bird before it landed out of sight. They looked at each other, started across the open field.
Before they got halfway they saw it — the unnatural gleam through the greenery, the bright white surface glinting in the sunlight.
They sprinted the last hundred feet or so and found the body lying in a shallow depression.
The victim was black, male, in his forties or fifties. He was nude, his body shaven head to toe. The ground beneath the corpse was not yet overgrown with grass. It was a former grave.
'Motherfucker,' Byrne yelled.
He stepped through the scene, taking care not to disturb the surrounding area. He put two fingers to the man's neck. 'Jesus Christ,' he said. 'His body's still warm. Let's get everyone and his mother down here. Let's get a K-9 unit.'
Then Byrne gently opened the dead man's hand. There, on the ring finger of his left hand, was the tattoo of a fish.
They both called it in — Byrne contacted the crime-scene unit, Jessica contacted the homicide unit who would then alert the MEO. They spread out to either side of the open field, weapons out. They checked the immediate area, combing the bushes, the scrub, the culverts and ditches, finding nothing.
Later they regrouped at the corner, each lost in their own thoughts. Although they had not immediately located any ID, there was no doubt in either Jessica's or Byrne's mind that the body they'd found — the dead man lying atop a former grave — was that of Tyvander 'Hoochie' Alice.
The tactical team hit the block in six cars, a combination of special- investigation detectives and members of the fugitive squad.
Russ Diaz and his squad fanned out north and east, toward the woods. A K-9 unit showed up a few minutes later. The next car brought Dana Westbrook. For the moment, this relatively quiet corner of Northeast Philadelphia — a place that had one time been a place of repose and solitude — was crawling with law-enforcement personnel.
Ten minutes later the dog and his officer came full circle, back to the parking area near the ball diamonds. It
