In her decade on the job—the first four in uniform, working the tough streets of the Third District—Jessica had always found August to be the worst month of the year.
They stood on the corner of Second and Diamond Streets, deep in the Badlands. At least half the buildings on the block were boarded up or in the process of rehab. There was no red door in sight, nothing called the Red Door Tavern, no billboards for Red Lobster or Pella Doors, not a single sign in any window advertising a product with the word red or door in it.
There was no one standing on the corner waiting for them.
They had already walked two blocks in three directions, then back. The only path left to explore was south on Second.
“Why are we doing this again?” Jessica asked.
“Boss says go, we go, right?”
They walked a half block south on Second Street. More shuttered stores and derelict houses. They passed a used-tire stand, a burned car, a step van on blocks, a Cuban restaurant.
The other side of the street offered a colorless quilt of battered row houses, stitched between hoagie shacks, wig shops, and nail boutiques, some open for business, most shuttered, all with fading, hand-lettered signs, all crosshatched with rusting riot gates. The upper floors were a tic-tac-toe of bedsheet-covered windows with busted panes.
North Philly, Jessica thought. God save North Philly.
As they passed a vacant lot fronted by a shanty wall, Byrne stopped. The wall, a listing barrier made of nailed-together plywood, rusted corrugated metal, and plastic awning panels, was covered in graffiti. On one end was a bright red screen door, wired to a post. The door looked recently painted.
“Jess,” Byrne said. “Look.”
Jessica took a few steps back. She glanced at the door, then back over her shoulder. They were almost a full block from Diamond Street. “This can’t mean anything. Can it?”
“Sarge said the guy said ‘near Second and Diamond.’ And this is definitely a red door. The only red door around here.”
They walked a few more feet south, glanced over a low section of the wall. The lot looked like every other vacant lot in Philadelphia—weeds, bricks, tires, plastic bags, broken appliances, the obligatory discarded toilet.
“See any killers lurking?” Jessica asked.
“Not a one.”
“Me neither. Ready to go?”
Byrne thought for a few moments. “Tell you what. We’ll do one lap. Just to say we went to the fair.”
They walked to the corner and circled around behind the vacant lot. At the rear of the property, facing the alley, was a rusted chain-link fence. One corner was clipped and wrestled back. Overhead, three pairs of old sneakers, tied together by their laces, looped over an electrical wire.
Jessica glanced around the lot. Against the wall of the building on the west side, which had once housed a well-known music store, were a few stacks of discarded brick pallets, a stepladder with only three rungs, along with a handful of broken appliances. She resigned herself to getting this over with. Byrne held up the fencing while she ducked underneath. He followed.
The two detectives did a cursory sweep of the parcel. Five minutes later they met in the middle. The sun was high and melting and merciless. It was already past lunchtime. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Byrne replied.
Jessica took out her cell phone. “Okay,” she said. “Now I’m hooked. I want to hear that hotline call.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER DETECTIVE Joshua Bontrager arrived at the scene. He had with him a portable cassette player.
Josh Bontrager had been in the homicide unit less than eighteen months, but had already proven himself a valuable asset. He was young, and brought a young man’s energy to the street, but he also had what just about everyone in the department considered to be a unique and oddly effective background. No one in the PPD’s homicide division—or probably any homicide division in the country—could claim it.
Joshua Bontrager had grown up in an Amish family.
He had left the church many years earlier, coming to Philadelphia for no other reason than that’s what you did when you left Berks or Lancaster County seeking fortune. He joined the force, and spent a number of years in the traffic unit, before being transferred to the homicide unit to assist on an investigation that led up the Schuylkill River into rural Berks. Bontrager was wounded in the course of that investigation, but recovered fully. The bosses decided to keep him on.
Jessica remembered the first time she met him—mismatched pants and suit coat, hair that looked like it had been cut with a butter knife, sturdy, unpolished shoes. Since that time Bontrager had acquired a gold-badge detective’s swagger, a Center City haircut, a couple of nice suits.
Still, as urbane as he had become, Josh Bontrager would forever be known throughout the unit as the first Amishide cop in Philadelphia history.
Bontrager put the cassette player on top of a rusted grill made from a fifty-gallon drum, an abandoned barbecue sitting in the middle of the vacant lot. A few seconds later he had the tape cued up. “Ready?”
“Hit it,” Jessica said.
Bontrager hit PLAY.
“Philadelphia Police Department Hotline,” the female officer said.
“Yes, my name is Jeremiah Crosley, and I have information that might be helpful in a murder case you are investigating.”
The voice sounded white male, thirties or forties, educated. The accent was Philly, but with something lurking beneath.
“Would you spell your last name for me please, sir?”
The man did.
“May I have your home address?”
“I live at 2097 Dodgson Street.”
“And where is that located?”
“In Queen Village. But I am not there now.”
“And which case are you calling about?”
“The Caitlin O’Riordan case.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“I killed her.”
At this point there was a quick intake of breath. It wasn’t clear if it was the caller or the officer. Jessica would bet it was the officer. You could be a cop forty years, investigate thousands of cases, and never hear those words.
“And when did you do this, sir?”
“It was in May of this year.”
“Do you remember the exact date?”
“It was the second of May, I believe.”
“Do you recall the time of day?”
“I do not.”
I do not, Jessica thought. No contractions. She made a note.
“If you doubt that I am telling the truth, I can prove it to you.”
“How will you do that, sir?”
“I have something of hers.”
“You have something?”
“Yes. A button from her jacket. Third from the bottom. I have sent it to you. It will come in the mail today.”
“Where are you right now, sir?”
“I will get to that in a second. I just want to have some assurances.”
“I can’t promise you anything, sir. But I’ll listen to whatever it is you have to say.”
“We live in a world in which a person’s word is no longer valid currency. I have seven girls. I fear for them. I fear for their safety. Do you promise me no harm will come to them?”
Seven girls, Jessica thought.
“If they are in no way responsible for this or any other crime, they will not be involved. I promise you.”
One final hesitation.
“I am at a location near Second and Diamond. It is cold here.”
It is cold here, Jessica thought. What does that mean? The temperature had already topped ninety degrees.
“What’s the address?”
“I do not know. But you will know it by its red door.”
“Sir, if you’ll stay on the line for—”
The line went dead. Josh Bontrager hit stop.
Jessica glanced at her partner. “What do you think?”
Byrne gave it a few moments. �
��I’m not sure. Ask me when we get the full report back from the lab on that button.”
It was common practice to run a PCIC and NCIC check on anyone who called in with information, especially those who called in to confess to a major crime. According to the boss, there was no record of a Jeremiah Crosley—criminal, DMV, or otherwise—in the city of Philadelphia. His Queen Village address turned out to be nonexistent. There was no Dodgson Street.
“Okay,” Jessica finally said. “Where to?”
“Let’s go back to the Eighth Street scene,” Byrne said. “I want to recanvass. Let’s bring the cassette and see if anyone around there recognizes our boy’s voice. Maybe after that we can take another ride to Millersville.”
A day earlier they had gone to Millersville to speak with Robert and Marilyn O’Riordan. Not to conduct a formal interview—the original team had done that twice—but to assure them that the investigation was moving forward. Robert O’Riordan had been sullen and uncooperative, his wife had been nearly catatonic. They were two people all but incapacitated by the torment of grief, the black hole of an indescribable loss. Jessica had seen it many times, but each time was a fresh arrow in her heart.
“Let’s do it.” Jessica grabbed the cassette player. “Thanks for bringing this down, Josh.”
“No problem.”
Before Jessica could turn and head to the car, Byrne put a hand on her arm.
“Jess.”
Byrne was pointing at a dilapidated refrigerator against the brick wall of the music store. Or what was left of the refrigerator. It was an ancient model from the 1950s or 1960s, at one time a built-in, but the side paneling had long ago been stripped away. It appeared the appliance had originally been a powder blue or green, but age and rust and soot had darkened it to a deep brown. The refrigerator door hung at a crooked angle.
Along the top, on the skewed freezer door, was a logo. Although the chrome letters were long gone, the discolored outline of the brand name remained.
Crosley.
The brand dated back to the 1920s. Jessica recalled a Crosley fridge in her grandmother’s house on Christian Street. They weren’t that common anymore.
My name is Jeremiah Crosley.
“Could this be a coincidence?” Jessica asked.
“We can only hope so,” Byrne replied, but Jessica could tell he didn’t really believe it. The alternative led them down a path nobody wanted to follow.
Byrne reached out, opened the refrigerator door.
Inside, on the one remaining shelf, was a large laboratory specimen jar, half-filled with a filmy red fluid. Something was suspended in the liquid.
Jessica knew what it was. She had been to enough autopsies.
It was a human heart.
| THREE |
WHILE THEY WAITED FOR THE CRIME SCENE UNIT TO ARRIVE AND begin processing the scene, Josh Bontrager took digital photographs; of the lot, the graffiti on the shanty wall, the refrigerator, the neighborhood, the gathering rubberneckers. Jessica and Byrne played the recording three more times. Nothing leapt out to identify the caller.
And while there were many things they did not yet understand about what they had just found, they knew these human remains did not belong to their victim. Caitlin O’Riordan had not been mutilated in any way.
It’s cold here, Jessica thought. He had been talking about the refrigerator.
“Guys.” Bontrager pointed behind the refrigerator. “There’s something back here.”
“What is it?” Jessica asked.
“No idea.” He turned to Byrne. “Give me a hand.”
They got on either side of the hulking appliance. When the fridge was a few feet from the wall, Jessica stepped behind it. Years of dust and grunge coated the area where the compressor once was.
In its place was a book of some sort; chunky, with a black cover, no dust jacket. Watermarks dotted the linen finish. Jessica put on a latex glove, gently retrieved the book. It was a hardbound edition of The New Oxford Bible.
Jessica checked the front and back of the book. No inscriptions or writing of any kind. She checked the bottom edge. A red ribbon marked a page, splitting the book in half. She carefully lifted the ribbon. The book fell open.
The Book of Jeremiah.
“Ah, shit,” Byrne said. “What the fuck is this?”
Jessica squinted at the first page of the Book of Jeremiah. The print was so small she could barely see it. She fished her glasses from her pocket, put them on.
“Josh?” she asked. “You know anything about this part of the Old Testament?”
Joshua Bontrager was the unit’s go-to guy for most things Christian.
“A little,” he said. “Jeremiah was kind of a doom and gloom fella. Predicted the destruction of Judah, and all. I remember hearing some of his writings quoted.”
“For instance?”
“ ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.’ That was one of his biggies. There are a lot of translations of that passage, but that’s one of the more popular ones. Nice outlook, huh?”
“He wrote about the heart?” Jessica asked.
“Among other things.”
Jessica flipped a page, then another, then another. At Chapter 41, the page had a series of marks on it—three small squares drawn with different pens, yellow, blue, and red. It appeared that one word was highlighted, along with two sets of two numbers each.
The highlighted word was Shiloh. Beneath it, along the left hand side of the columns, were two numbers, forty-five and fourteen.
Jessica flipped carefully through the Book of Jeremiah, and glanced through the rest of the Bible. There were no other bookmarked pages, or highlighted words or numbers.
She looked at Byrne. “This mean anything to you?”
Byrne shook his head. Jessica could already see his wheels turning.
“Josh?”
Bontrager looked closely at the Bible, eyes scanning the page. “No. Sorry.” He looked a little sheepish. “Don’t tell my dad, but I haven’t picked up the Good Book in a while.”
“Let’s run this by Documents,” Jessica said. “We were supposed to find this, yes?”
“Yes,” Byrne echoed. He sounded none too happy about it.
Jessica kind of wanted an argument about this point. Byrne didn’t offer one. Neither did Josh Bontrager. This was not good news.
An hour later, with the scene secured by CSU, they headed back to the Roundhouse. The morning’s events—the possibility of an arrest in the murder of Caitlin O’Riordan and the discovery of a human heart in a weed-choked vacant lot in the Badlands—circled one another like blood-bloated flies in the haze of a blistering Philadelphia summer afternoon, all underscored by an ancient name and two cryptic numbers.
Shiloh. Forty-five. Fourteen.
What was the message? Jessica thought hard on it.
She had a dark feeling there would be others.
| FOUR |
| TWO MONTHS EARLIER |
EVE GALVEZ KNEW WHAT THE THERAPIST WAS GOING TO SAY BEFORE HE said it. She always did.
How did it make you feel?
“How did it make you feel?” he asked.
He was younger than the others. Better dressed, better looking. And he knew it. Dark hair, a little too long, curling over his collar; eyes a soft, compassionate caramel brown. He wore a black blazer, charcoal slacks, just the right amount of aftershave for daytime. Something Italian, she thought. Expensive. Vain men had never impressed Eve Galvez. In her line of work, she couldn’t afford the flutters. In her line of work she couldn’t afford a misstep of any kind. She pegged him at forty-four. She was good with ages, too.
“It made me feel bad,” Eve said.
“Bad is not a feeling.” He had an accent that suggested the Main Line, but not by birth. “What I’m talking about is emotion,” he added. “What emotion did the incident evoke?”
“Okay, then,” Eve said, playing the game. “I felt … angry.”
“Better,” he replied. “
Angry at whom?”
“Angry at myself for getting into a situation like that in the first place. Angry at the world.”
She had gone to Old City one night, after work, alone. Looking. Again. At thirty-one she was one of the older women in the club, but with her dark hair and eyes, her Pilates-toned body, she attracted her share of advances. Still, in the end, the crowd was too loud, too raucous. She gave the bar her two-drink minimum, then stepped into the night. Later in the evening she stopped by the Omni Hotel Bar, and made the mistake of letting the wrong man buy her a drink. Again. The conversation had been boring, the night dragged. She had excused herself, telling him that she had to go to the ladies’ room.
When she walked out of the hotel a few minutes later, she found him waiting on the street. He followed her up Fourth Street for almost three blocks, closing the distance little by little, moving from shadow to shadow.
As luck would have it—and luck was something that played a very small role in Eve Galvez’s life—at the moment the man got close enough to lay a hand on her, a police car was trolling slowly by. Eve flagged the officers down. They sent the man packing, but not without a scuffle.
It had been close, and Eve hated herself for it. She was smarter than this. Or so she wanted to believe.
But now she was in her therapist’s office, and he was pushing her.
“What do you think he wanted?” he asked.
Pause. “He wanted to fuck.”
The word resonated, finding all four corners of the small room. It always did in polite company.
“How do you know that?”
Eve smiled. Not the smile she used for business, or the one she used with friends and colleagues, or even the one she used on the street. This was the other smile. “Women know these things.”
“All women?”
“Yes.”
“Young and old?”
“And every one in-between.”
“I see,” he said.
Eve glanced around the room. The office was a gentrified trinity on Wharton Street, between Twelfth and Thirteenth. The first floor was three small rooms, including a cramped anteroom with bleached maple floors, a working fireplace, brass accoutrements. The smoked-glass end tables were populated with recent issues of Psychology Today, In Style, People. Two French doors led to a converted bedroom that served as the office, an office decorated in a faux-Euro style.
Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands Page 108