Play Dead (23 page)

For the rest of the morning she hung out at the Greyhound Station at Tenth and Filbert. She bummed a cup of coffee from a pair of kids from Syracuse, smoked a little weed in an alley. She spent a half hour or so on the Net at a nearby cybercafe, until she was kicked out.

She asked a lot of questions, showed the picture to everyone. Some of the kids were suspicious, as if Lilly were a narc.
Through the course of the morning she talked to more than twenty street kids, swapping horror stories, triumphs, near misses, jail time, cops. Always the cops. If you were a runaway you knew all about cops.
One girl she met—a runaway from Buffalo, a girl who called herself Starlight—told her of an experience she’d had in New York City. Starlight was a force of nature, all hands and hips and flying red hair when she told a tale, a story about how she was almost gang- raped. Lilly hoped for the best for her, didn’t expect it. Starlight said she’d been on the street in Philly since last Christmas.
Lilly realized they all had a story of alienation or neglect or mistreatment, a fear of the future. To a person, they all had a saga of woe— abusive mothers, abusive fathers, abusive siblings, abusive life.
They had no idea how bad life could get.

“Hey,” the kid said.

Lilly turned around but not too quickly. They were standing near the corner of Ninth and Filbert, outside the BigK.
The kid was a street rat. Lilly didn’t like the looks of him. Tall and skinny, dirty blond hair, greasy skin, red Tony Hawk T-shirt. Skateboard grunge had never been her thing. She ignored him, glanced at her watch. A few moments passed. He didn’t leave.
“I said
hey,
bitch.”
Here we go, Lilly thought. Fucking
boys.
She’d been here before, of course, stuck on a street corner, harassed by some punk. They all had a line they thought was magic, a smile they felt God- given. Then it turned ugly. But it was always on her turf, her hometown. This was an alien landscape.
She tensed, glanced over her shoulder. She was less than a block from the bus station. She could make it back inside in a few seconds. She was that fast. But there was a principle at work here. She wasn’t about to be run off the street by some low- rent spod. She turned to face him.
“I’m sorry, what did you call me?”
The kid smirked, took a step closer. Lilly now saw that he was not all that skinny after all. He was muscular. “I think you heard me, Snow White.”
He grabbed her arm. She tried to wrestle free. She couldn’t. He was strong.
“Let go of me!”
He laughed. “Or what?”
Lilly planted her left foot, shifted her weight. It was a familiar move. She tried to knee him but he turned, blocking it. He laughed again.
“Damn, girl. Why would you want to go and do something like that?” The kid grabbed her other wrist. “You don’t want to make me mad.”
“I said let
go
of me!”
Lilly tried to break free. She could not.
The kid glanced up the alley, smiled again. He was going to drag her up there. She couldn’t let him do that.
But before he could make a move a shadow fell across the sidewalk. They both turned. There was a man standing there. He seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was in his thirties, maybe, wearing a dark blue suit and a burgundy tie.
What was
this
about?
“I think you should leave,” the man said, soft- spoken, authoritative. Lilly’s head spun with this weird development. The board boy let go of her arms. She backed up a few steps, but she didn’t run.
“I’m sorry,” the kid said, turning fully to deal with the man. “Are you addressing me?”
“I am.”
The kid planted himself. He racked his shoulders. “What did you say? I mean, you know, exactly.”
“Exactly?” the man asked. “Would you like that verbatim? Or would you like me to distill the essence?”
The kid smirked, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence behind it.
“What the
fuck
are you talking about?”
“I believe the young lady would like you to leave.”
The kid laughed. Psycho shrill. “And who are you, her
father
?”
The man smiled. Lilly felt a little charge run through her. It wasn’t that the guy was so good- looking or anything, but there was something about that smile that said she had nothing to worry about.
“Just a friend.”
“Well, I’m gonna fuck you up, friend- o. I’m gonna fuck you up big time. This is
my
corner.”
The man made a move, a quick shift of his right hand, almost too fast to see. To Lilly it was a like a bird had flown between them, flapped its wings, then flown away. Time stood still for a few seconds. Then, in the next instant, Lilly felt a rush of warm air.
She glanced first at the man. He was still standing there, hands at his sides, his blue eyes sparkling in the afternoon sun, his expression unreadable. She then looked at the kid, and saw something she never expected to see, something horrifying.
The kid’s face was on fire. But just for a second. Lilly instantly smelled singed flesh and burnt hair.
“What . . . what the
fuck,
man!” The kid recoiled, his hands to his face. He took five or six steps backward, out into the street. A car almost hit him. When he pulled his hands away Lilly could see that his face was bright pink.
“What the fuck did you do to me?” the kid yelled. “What did you
do
?”
“I asked you to leave,” the man said.
The kid pulled a bandanna from his back pocket, began to blot his face. His nose was runny, his eyes were tearing up. Lilly noticed that his eyelashes were gone.
“You are a dead man,” the kid yelled. “You are . . . you are
so
fucking dead.”
Lilly watched in stunned silence as the kid backed up, turned, ran the length of the block, then disappeared around the corner. She discovered that she hadn’t taken a breath in maybe a minute or so.
What the hell had just happened?
She knew the basics. She had been hanging on the corner. A board rat had approached her, threatened her,
grabbed
her. A man appeared out of nowhere and set the kid’s face on fire.
Somehow. Like magic.
She looked up Filbert Street, saw a police car trolling. It looked like they hadn’t seen what happened. She turned to ask the man his version of the events, to say thank you, but he had vanished.

FORTY-TWO
J

essica got on the computer. For the past two days she’d been trying to block out an hour or so to run some things. If their killer was playing a sick game with the department, the city, then there was a chance that there were things they were not seeing, pieces of the puzzle that did not quite fit. Yet.
She made a list of names, references, places, possibilities, and im

possibilities.

She knew that sometimes a search engine could make a connection you might never think of. Sometimes the result of a search was so far off it got you thinking in a new direction.

Forty minutes later she had answers. She knew Byrne was down in the cafeteria. Unable to wait for the elevator, she ran down the stairs.

Byrne was nursing a cold coffee, a wooden Danish, skimming the
Daily News.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Jessica said.
“Man, do I love it when conversations begin this way.” Jessica pulled out a chair, sat down. “I ran everything I could think
of through a few search engines, along with a couple of things I never
thought would click.”
Byrne folded the paper. “Okay. What do we have?”
“Well, I think we know what game he was playing with the name
Jeremiah Crosley. Nonetheless, I ran a search regarding the Book of Jeremiah. Interesting guy, but not one of the biggies. Josh was right.
Jeremiah was no ray of sunshine. Nothing jumped.
“Next, our guy said he lived at 2917 Dodgson Street. As we know,
there is no Dodgson Street in Philly, right?”
“Can’t argue with the folks at MapQuest.”
“I have issues with MapQuest. They always seem to lead me right
into construction. But that’s for later. Anyway, I found a Dodgson
Street in Lancashire, England, but I figured that would be one hell of a
commute, even for a psycho. There are, however, a number of other
references. The one that stuck out was a person’s name. Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson. Ever heard of him?”
Byrne shook his head.
“That’s because he was much better known by another name:
Lewis Carroll, author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Turns out he
was also a fanatical game and puzzle enthusiast. Plus, I discovered
there’s something called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, also
known as micropsia, which causes a person to perceive large objects as
being much smaller.”
“The big red, yellow, and blue boxes in that crawlspace, and the
small colored squares in the Bible,” Byrne said.
“It might be a stretch, but yeah, it crossed my mind.” Jessica pulled
up another chair, put her feet up on it. “Next I ran
ludo.
Guess what it
means?”
“You’re going to make me guess everything, aren’t you?” “Yes.”
“I have no idea what it means.”
Jessica held up a color printout. It was a graphic of a game board: a
large square marked with a cross. Each arm of the cross was divided
into three columns; each column was divided into six smaller squares.
The large squares were brightly colored. “Ludo.”
“It’s colored squares,” Byrne said. “Again.”
“Yeah, but there are four of them, not three.”
“Is it possible we missed something down there?”
“In that crawlspace? Not a thing,” Jessica said. “I also looked up the
origin of
ludo,
as in, the origin of the word. Guess where it comes from?” “Greek.”
“Latin,” Jessica said. “It gets its name from the word
ludus.
” “Which means?”
Jessica put both hands out, palms up, in her best ta- da fashion. “It
means
game.
”
Byrne turned to the window. He tapped his coffee stirrer on the
rim of his cup. Jessica let him absorb the details.
“I think we can safely assume that the old woman was completely
certifiable, yes?” he finally said.
“Yes.”
“And deeply involved in this somehow.”
“Up to her broken neck.”
Byrne turned back to the table. “Remember that puzzle I did? The
one with the geometric shapes?”
“Tangram.”
“Right. She had that book about tangram and other games. The
one with all the diagrams in it.”
“What about it?”
“I think we should find a copy of that book.”
“She said the author lived in Chester County.”
“Even better.”

Byrne called Chester County Books & Music. He got the store manager on the line, identified himself.
“What can I do for you?” the man asked.
“We’re trying to locate a local author.”
“Sure. What’s the name?”
“That I don’t know, but I believe he lives in Chester County. He wrote a book about games and puzzles, and in it were a lot of—”
“David Sinclair,” the man said, interrupting him. “He’s written a few books on the subject. He’s done some signings here.”
“Do you know how to get hold of him?”
“I’m sure I have his number somewhere.”
“Could you ask him to give us a call? As soon as possible if you can. It’s very important.”
“Sure. No problem.”
Byrne gave the man his cell phone number, thanked him, hung up.
Since the story broke on the murder and mutilation of Monica Renzi, the PPD’s press office had held a news conference. The official word was that it was still not known if the murder of Monica Renzi was connected to the murder of Caitlin O’Riordan, but that did not stop the mainstream press from speculation, or the alternative press from simply saying so.
In typical journalistic fashion, they had to pin a name on this case. A “unnamed source” within the police department told a reporter that there was a man who was taking girls off the street, keeping them in custody for a while before killing them. The newspaper referred to the killer as “The Collector.”
Byrne figured no one at the paper, a birdcage liner called
The Report,
had ever read
The Collector
by John Fowles—a novel about a young man, a butterfly collector, who kidnaps a woman and keeps her in his basement—but that didn’t matter. It would only be a matter of time before the mainstream press picked up on it, then the public, and eventually it would find its way into police department memos.
The four detectives met in the lobby of the Roundhouse. They were all dressed in casual clothes. The strategy being, if they were going to talk to runaways and homeless kids, they wanted to look like anything but authority figures. Byrne and Andre Curtis were pretty much hopeless in this area. They both looked like cops. Jessica and Josh Bontrager were a little more likely to gain their confidence.
Jessica wore jeans and a white T-shirt and running shoes. She could almost pass for a college student, Byrne thought. Byrne wore a black polo shirt and chinos. He looked like an off duty cop trying to blend in. But he was surprised to see that this shirt fit. It had been getting a little tight. Maybe he was getting in shape after all.
Jessica briefed Josh Bontrager and Dre Curtis on what she had found online. They made their notes and headed out.
A few minutes later Jessica and Byrne walked out of the Roundhouse. The air was a blast furnace. Still no rain.
“Ready to revisit your misspent youth?” Byrne asked as they slipped into the Taurus.
“What are you talking about?” Jessica said. “I’m still misspending it.”
While Josh Bontrager and Dre Curtis went to Penn Treaty Park, Jessica and Byrne started on South Street. They parked on Columbus Boulevard and took the South Street pedestrian bridge over I- 95.
South Street was part of the Queen Village neighborhood, one of the oldest sections of Philadelphia. Its business district ran from Front Street to around Ninth Street.
On the way to South Philly they had decided that it would be best for Jessica to ask the questions. Byrne would shadow her from the other side of the street.
They began at Front Street, in front of Downey’s, and slowly worked their way west. This section of South was crammed with pubs, restaurants, clubs, bookstores, record stores, piercing and tattoo parlors, pizza shops, and even one large condom specialty store. It was a magnet for young people of all styles—Goth, punk, hip- hop, skateboarders, collegiates, Jersey Boys—as well as a thriving tourist trade. There wasn’t too much you couldn’t find on this street; legal, otherwise, and every stop in between. To a lot of people, South was the beating heart of Philly.
Between Second and Third, Jessica talked to a group of teenagers; three boys and two girls. Byrne always marveled at how good she was at things like this. They had to identify themselves as police officers of course, and the few kids Byrne tried to approach on his own just took off once Byrne produced his ID. Not so for Jessica. People opened up to her.
All of the kids said they were either from Philly, or in town visiting relatives. Nobody was ever a runaway.
At the corner of Fourth and South, Jessica talked to a young girl. The girl, about fifteen, had her blond hair in pigtails, and wore a tiedyed tank top and denim skirt. She had a half dozen piercings in her nose, lips, and ears. Byrne was out of earshot, but he saw that when Jessica showed the girl a photograph, the girl studied it, then nodded. A minute later Jessica handed the girl a card, moved on.
It turned out to be a dead end. The girl said she had heard of a girl named Starlight, but had never met her, and had no idea where she might be.
By the time they got to Tenth Street, where the shopping and hangout spots dropped off, they had talked to fifty or sixty teenagers, about two dozen shop owners. No one remembered seeing either Caitlin O’Riordan or Monica Renzi. No one knew anything about anything.
Jessica and Byrne grabbed lunch at Jim’s Steaks, and headed to the train station.