“Who’s who?”
“The ‘bastard’ Frank Hollaran said he’d really like to see in shackles, that Mike Sabara wants to personally strap in the electric chair.”
“Isaac ‘Fort’ Festung. The sonofabitch keeps sending Pekach postcards.”
“Who is he?”
“You really don’t know?” Coughlin asked, his surprise evident in his voice.
“No, I don’t,” Matt confessed. “The name sounds familiar… but no, I really don’t know. What did he do?”
“How old are you, Matty?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“I guess that’s why you never heard of him. When you were seven years old-no, six; she was in the trunk for a year-Fort Festung beat his girlfriend to death, stuffed her body in a trunk, and put the trunk in a closet. When they finally found her, her body was mummified.”
“Jesus! And he sends Dave Pekach postcards from prison?” Matt asked, and then, remembering, added, “I thought Dave said from France.”
“He did,” Coughlin said. “Festung never went to prison. After Dave got a search warrant, found the body, and arrested him, his lawyer, now our beloved Senator Feldman, got him released at his arraignment on forty thousand dollars bail, and he jumped it.”
“He was charged with murder and got out on bail?” Matt asked, incredulously.
“Yeah, that’s just what he did,” Coughlin said, “and he’s been on the run ever since. A couple of months ago, they found him in France.”
“And now he’ll be extradited and tried?”
“He’s already been tried. The only in absentia trial I ever heard about. The jury found him guilty, and Eileen Solomon sentenced him to life without possibility of parole.”
“The D.A.?” Matt asked, surprised.
The Hon. Eileen McNamara Solomon had just been reelected as district attorney of Philadelphia, taking sixty-seven percent of the votes cast.
“Before she was D.A., she was a judge,” Coughlin said. “And no, Matty, it doesn’t look as if he’ll be extradited. He’s got the French government in his pocket. And knows it. And likes to rub it in our faces, especially Dave Pekach’s. That’s what the postcard was all about. He’s still thumbing his nose at the system.”
“I’ll be damned,” Matt said.
“Get the case out and read it. It’s interesting,” Coughlin said, and then, nodding out the windshield, “I wonder if they’re just slow, or they got something.”
Matt followed his glance
. The crime scene van was parked on Snyder Street, fifty yards past the Roy Rogers restaurant.
“I think there’s a place to park right in front of the van,” Coughlin said. “You can drop me here.”
“You want me to come in?” Matt asked, as he pulled to the curb.
“That’s the idea,” Coughlin said, as he got out of the car. “If you’re going to Homicide, you might find this educational.”
That’s three “if”s and a “may.”
Matt had to show his badge to the uniform standing outside to get past him into the Roy Rogers, and then was surprised to find Coughlin waiting for him just inside the door.
The restaurant was empty except for a man Matt guessed was the manager, sitting with a cup of coffee at one of the banquettes near the door, and a forensic technician trying to find-or maybe lift-prints from a banquette at the rear of the restaurant, by the kitchen door.
And then the kitchen door opened, and Detective Tony Harris came through it, and saw Coughlin. He walked up to him.
“Commissioner,” he said.