Play dead jbakb-4 Read online

  "Drink some tea," he said. "You will feel much better." He stood, crossed the room, lifted the insulated pitcher, poured a cup of tea. It was still warm. He dropped into it a sugar cube. He returned to the bed, sat, stirring, the sound of sterling silver on bone china circling the room.

  He got Katja's attention, lifted the cup to her lips. She took a small sip. He dabbed her mouth with a linen napkin.

  "You're taking care of me," she said.

  Poor Katja. He had tried with her. He had tried so hard with them all.

  "Come with me, love." He put the cup and saucer down on the nightstand, extended a hand.

  "Where are we going?" she asked.

  "Somewhere safe."

  Swann thought about the precision-crafted device three floors below them, the box and its seven keen blades.

  Katja stood, shaking, her thin legs not quite supporting her. Joseph Swann put a strong arm around her waist. She felt brittle.

  "Are you taking me home?" she asked.

  He looked into her eyes. He found no trace of the firebrand he had met in the park, the young woman who had so willingly accepted his aid and comfort. All without thanks.

  Moments later, they descended the stairway. Mozart filled the house. Three floors below the magic box awaited.

  "Yes," Swann said. "I am taking you home."

  TEN

  Kevin Byrne sat across from the Denison apartments. The top floor of the building, the side facing Locust Street, was smoke blackened, charred. Gnarled ebony fingers caressed the brick facade. The air on the entire block was still dense with carbon.

  Byrne was exhausted, but exhaustion was an old friend. He glanced at his watch: 2:15 AM.

  Byrne had always suffered from some degree of insomnia, but he had rarely slept more than five or six hours a night since he had become a detective. When he was in uniform he had drawn last-out as often as not, and the schedule of working all night was something the body clock never forgot. The routine and rhythms of sitting in a cramped, airless car at three and four and five in the morning, drinking coffee, eating high-sugar, high-fat foods became the usual, not the exception. Sleep became unnatural. Indigestion and sleeplessness the rule. Byrne did not know one detective on the job for more than twenty years who slept well.

  Now the insomnia was invasive and seemingly permanent. Since moving over to SIU, the schedule had been a little easier to predict, and that was both the good news and the bad news, at least as far as the victims were concerned. In SIU there wasn't the heat of a new homicide, the buzz of the immediate chase, the drive to get the forensics and witnesses and collateral personnel lined up in a hurry before your doer got away. Cold cases were just that-cold. The dead stayed dead.

  Still, when you picked up a scent, Byrne had to admit, if only to his partner, it was the same thrill, the same rush that accompanied that first sniff of the chase you encountered when you were a rookie at twenty- two.

  Byrne glanced up at the window, at the smoke-blackened bricks of the top floor of the Denison, the area surrounding apartment 1015. In the sodium streetlights the building was bathed in pale blue. The two windows were large eyes staring down at him, defying him to understand what had happened in that apartment.

  Because they were able to make the 911 call early-Byrne had phoned the fire department from just outside Laura Somerville's front door-the fire had destroyed less than half of the space. Much of the apartment had been left virtually intact. There was smoke and water damage to the furniture, the bookcases, the walls, but little else.

  Byrne had seen quite a bit in his time on the job. He had seen just about everything a human being could do to another human being, had seen just about everything human beings could do to themselves, had encountered every weapon, every opportunity, every motive. Despite his experience, he had to admit that Laura Somerville's suicide was as startling as anything he had ever come across.

  Byrne had cornered Mickey Dugan, an old friend and PFD captain. Dugan told him that, presumptively-which meant very little at this stage-the Philadelphia Fire Department believed the source of the fire was an oil lamp under the mattress in the bedroom. Moments before Laura Somerville dove through that window, moments after she excused herself from the living room, she had walked into her bedroom, pulled an oil lamp from her closet, lit a match, placed it beneath the bed, and deliberately set her apartment on fire.

  What was she trying to conceal by burning down her apartment, her possessions, perhaps the entire building? Not to mention her prized collection of games and puzzles. Could it be that the Philadelphia Police Department had coincidentally shown up on the same day this elegant, cultured woman planned to commit suicide?

  Byrne sipped his coffee, a thought circling him, a dark feeling he knew he was not shaking anytime soon. Unvarnished, unwarranted, unearned, yet all too real.

  There was no evidence that this was anything other than a suicide. Jessica and Byrne were homicide detectives, and there were plenty of homicides to go around in the City of Brotherly Love. They had a full day ahead of them. A day belonging to Caitlin O'Riordan. A day Kevin Byrne knew would be haunted by the image of Laura Somerville's demolished body, and one strange word. Ludo.

  ELEVEN

  The basement was a vast and silent cavern, cool even in high summer-corridors crosshatching corridors, carved lintels threatening headroom from above each passageway, stone walls unencumbered by paint or memory. Its corners were clean, damp, sunless.

  The enormous space was divided into more than a dozen rooms. When Faerwood had been built, around 1900, the basement was used primarily for storage. There was a coal chute, of course, the boiler, an oil heater, a forest of rusted iron support columns.

  The original owner-an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad named Artemus Coleridge, a man who hanged himself from an attic roof beam in the house in 1908-had seven children, and it was in the wide expanse of the main basement that they played their outdoor games in winter, their contests illuminated by scores of gas lamps, hundreds of candles. To this day Swann found small mounds of melted paraffin and blackened wicks in the unlikeliest of places.

  As an adult Swann could not picture this house full of happy children, not in this place of his ruined childhood, but as a boy he had often stalked these rooms, imagining voices and bright laughter, conjuring unseen friends, gamboling with ghosts.

  Originally there had been only one set of stairs leading to the basement, from a small pantry directly off the main kitchen, a direct route to both the wine and root cellars.

  All that changed when Joseph Swann's father bought the house, and the transformation of Faerwood began. Now there were more than ten ways to enter the lower level.

  One basement room-perhaps the smallest at a mere six feet by seven-was his dressing room. On one wall was a large mirror, ringed with yellow globe lamps. In the corner was a tall collector's cabinet, its many drawers containing a lifetime collection of items dedicated to the art of makeup. One of these drawers held prosthetic devices used for both concealment and diversion. One was devoted to scabs, wounds, and scars. Another, Swann's favorite, contained hair and character effects. Some of the wigs and mustaches were more than fifty years old, among them some of the finest ever produced.

  Yet even the finest of prosthetics and wigs were useless without the true secret of makeup-application.

  The tools of this trade were laid out precisely on the clinically clean table-brushes, combs, sponges, pencils, and crayons, along with tubes and jars of powders, matte foundations, paint, glitter, lipsticks, and the increasingly important neutralizers and concealers. Now that he was nearing forty, Swann lamented, he found himself turning to the concealers more and more.

  His wig already in place, Swann applied the last of the spirit gum to his chin, and opened the clear plastic box that bore his prized human- hair goatee. He held the beard in place for a few seconds, then smoothed it to the contours of his chin. He had applied the black eyebrows earlier, and settled into his right eye th
e steel-rimmed monocle made of clear glass.

  He stood, slipped on the cutaway coat, adjusted the shoulders, the waist. He tapped the remote in his left pocket, turning on the music. Bach's Sleepers Awake began to softly fill the outer rooms.

  Moments later Joseph Swann opened the door, and stepped onto his secret stage. KATJA SAT CROSS-LEGGED in the box, her eyes vacant, distant.

  The Sword Box was painted in a lustrous red lacquer. It measured approximately four feet tall, two feet wide, two feet deep. It rested on a short, polished-steel pedestal. The inside was a glossy black enamel.

  The box was fitted with a drain hole at the bottom, a portal that fed the iron pipe that emptied into the sanitary sewer running beneath the rear of the house.

  Swann emerged from the darkness, his white shirt and scarlet tie a magnificent contrast to the blackness of the room. He stepped into the spotlight, just to the left of the box.

  A few feet away watched the eye of the camera, an unblinking silver portal in the gloom.

  He glanced at the open box, at Katja's face. She looked young again, in need of tending. Alas, it was too late for that. He reached out, touched her cheek. She tried to shy away, but she could not move, not in the confines of the magnificent Sword Box.

  Joseph Swann was ready.

  Upstairs, in a room secreted from the rest of Faerwood by a false wall at the top of the grand staircase, secured by steels doors, a television flickered, a monitor carrying this live performance.

  "Behold the Sword Box," Swann began, looking directly into the lens, out at the world, into the hearts and minds of those who would soon see this and thus be tasked to solve his puzzle. "And behold the lovely Odette."

  He slipped the box's front panel into place, secured it with a quartet of thumbscrews, then turned to the table next to him, the table bearing seven gleaming swords, all keened to a razor sharpness.

  Moments later he drew the first sword. In the quietude of the basement the steel sang, finding each threshold, each doorway, each memory, a silver whisper floating through a maddening maze of dreams.

  TWELVE

  Jessica walked into the diner at 7:30 am. the morning rush was on. She edged her way to the back, found her partner. Byrne looked up from the Inquirer.

  "Did you sleep?" Byrne asked.

  "Are you kidding?" Jessica sat down, took Byrne's coffee, started drinking it. Byrne motioned to the waitress. She brought him a fresh cup.

  Jessica looked her partner over. He looked even worse than she felt. He was wearing the same shirt and tie he had worn yesterday. She wondered if he'd even made it home. She doubted it. "Got a question for you," she said.

  "I'll do my best."

  "What the hell happened yesterday?"

  Byrne shrugged. When the waitress brought his coffee, he tore open a sugar packet, dumped it in. As a rule, Kevin Byrne didn't take sugar in his coffee. If there was one thing you learned early on about your partner in this job, it was how they took their coffee. He must he running on fumes, Jessica thought.

  "Your guess is as good as mine," he said. "Probably better."

  Byrne shifted in his seat, winced, closed his eyes for a moment.

  "Your sciatica acting up?" Jessica asked. When Byrne had been shot in the line of duty, almost three years earlier, he had survived a brain injury, had survived a lengthy coma, but his sciatica-a compression of the sciatic nerve that caused excruciating pain in the lower back and legs-persisted. It seemed to flare up twice a year. Byrne tried his Irish macho best to play it down.

  "It aches a little," he said. "I'm good."

  Jessica knew that, where Kevin Byrne was concerned, a little meant it was killing him. She sipped her coffee, picked up the menu. A scan of the first page told her she could get custard-baked French toast with a side order of Philadelphia scrapple. She called the waitress over, ordered.

  "Is there anyone we can reach out to in the fire department?" Jessica asked.

  "I already did," Byrne said. "Mickey Dugan. He said he'd call as soon as they had something definite. You know Mickey?"

  Jessica shook her head.

  "Great guy. Got two boys in the Eagles training camp. Two. At the same time. Can you believe that?"

  Jessica said that she could not. On the other hand, if it wasn't boxing-specifically women's boxing, along with the occasional Phillies or Eagles game-she lost all interest, sports-wise. Her husband maintained a rec room full of Flyers and Sixers memorabilia, but those two sports never got under her skin for some reason. "How about that?" she said. "Two boys. Same time. Huh."

  "Anyway," Byrne said, reading her disinterest. "You want to know what happened yesterday? I'll tell you. What happened yesterday was that an old, very eccentric, very troubled woman jumped out of a window. Simple as that."

  "And lucky us, we just happened to be there at the time."

  "Lucky us."

  "So you think she made these peculiar calls to Licenses amp; Inspections?"

  "I'm not seeing any other explanation. She must have been lying to us."

  If you were a police officer, you accepted the fact that people lied all the time. It came with the job. Wasn't there, don't know him, isn't mine, doesn't ring a hell, can't recall. On the other hand, given what Laura Somerville did, the woman was clearly disturbed in ways that far outweighed lying to the police.

  "Any idea why she would do that?"

  "Not a one," Byrne said. "I've been in this business more than twenty years, and I can spot liars 99.9 percent of the time. She had me completely fooled."

  Jessica felt the same way. Cops with any time in on the street possessed a confidence-mostly warranted, sometimes even cocky-that they could detect bullshit from a block away. It's a little unnerving to learn you were completely wrong about someone. "It makes you wonder what else she was lying about," Jessica added.

  "Yes it does."

  "Yeah, well," Jessica began, her thoughts ricocheting around the events of the past twenty-four hours. "I'd still love to get back up there and poke around."

  She knew that Byrne understood what she meant. He'd like to poke around Laura Somerville's apartment, too, but today the job was Caitlin O'Riordan. She deserved their full attention.

  What was most distressing for Jessica was that Caitlin O'Riordan's murder had been recorded as just another Philadelphia homicide statis The truth was, in Philadelphia, something like twenty-five percent of shooting victims had pending court cases. In the microclimate of North Philly it was probably higher. Because of the national attention to the city's homicide rate, some people believed Philadelphia was a dangerous place. Factually, for the most part, the people doing the shooting and the people being shot tended to overlap. If you didn't live in that small dangerous world, you were not particularly at risk.

  But these were, for the most part, the handgun statistics. There was less to go on when it came to drowning victims. Especially drowning victims found on dry land. Jessica had read the most recent FBI report on crime statistics in America. Drowning as a cause of homicide was almost nonexistent.

  The waitress brought Jessica's French toast and scrapple. It was a monstrous portion. Jessica drizzled the plate with maple syrup, then artfully dusted the French toast with a generous sprinkling of sugar. She dug in. Nirvana. She'd have to remember this dish at this diner. Nothing like seven thousand calories, all sugar and cholesterol, to give you a boost.

  "How can you eat that?" Byrne asked, a dour look on his face.

  Jessica wiped her lips, set her napkin down, sipped her coffee. "What?"

  "That… that scrapple."

  "It's good. I've been eating it my whole life."

  "Yeah, well, do you want to know what's in it?"

  Scrapple was the absolute last step in the dismantling of a pig: foreheads, elbows, kneecaps, shins, with a little cayenne and sage thrown in for flavor. Jessica knew this, but she just didn't need to hear at 7:30 AM. "Absolutely not."

  "Well, suffice it to say the root word here is scrap, okay?" />
  "Point taken, Detective." With this she sopped the last of the syrup with the last square inch of French toast, topping it with the last dollop of scrapple, then made a dramatic flourish of placing it in her mouth, chewing it with delirious delight. Byrne shook his head and went back to his wheat toast.

  A few minutes later Jessica finished her coffee, grabbed the check, and asked, "Where do you want to start?"

  "We never did get to recanvass Eighth Street."

  Jessica slipped out of the booth. "Let's roll."

  They spent the entire morning canvassing near the Eighth Street crime scene, learning nothing new. Not much was expected. They spent the afternoon walking every inch of the building in which Caitlin O'Riordan's body was found. AT 7:00 PM Byrne walked to the block of row houses across the street. The second and third floors of this building were still occupied. The aromas of frying meats and boiling vegetables reminded Byrne they had not stopped for dinner.

  At the top of the stairwell he looked across the street at the corner building. The beam of Jessica's flashlight in the gathering gloom cut across the empty space, strobing in the blackness.

  Byrne scanned the street, the block. He considered the scenario when Caitlin had been brought to this terrible place. Her killer had chosen this spot well in advance. This was a special place. For some reason. It meant something to him. Most likely he had come in the middle of the night.

  A few streets away a sector car's siren suddenly burst to life. Byrne started at the noise. He hadn't realized the street had gone so quiet, hadn't realized the only sound was the beating of his heart.

  Time to call it a night.

  Byrne reached up to close the window, and the vision all but exploded in his mind. As his fingertips touched the cracked and puttied surface of the sash he knew-knew in a way with which he had been both cursed and blessed since an incident many years earlier, an attack by a homicide suspect that had left him dead for a full minute, a void in his memory that imbued him with a vague second sight-that Caitlin O'Riordan's killer had stood in this very spot.