Play dead

TWENTY-THREE

From the moment Jessica lowered herself into the crawlspace she was confronted with the smell of old death. All around her she heard vermin scurrying through dry trash.

She thought of Eve Galvez in her shallow grave.

The crawlspace was at one time a storage area for whatever enterprises had occupied the first floor of the building. In the corners were dusty wooden crates, stacks of flattened and twined cardboard boxes, plastic milk crates.

Jessica knelt on the hard dirt floor, ran her Maglite around the corners. The crawlspace measured the approximate size of the building above, that being sixteen by twenty-five or so. Rusted iron pipes and commercial-gauge electrical wire ran overhead. To her left, near the front of the building, was a sanitary stack. Between the joists overhead a spider had spun a silken, silvery web, spanning the trusses. Small carcasses hung from its outer edges.

In the center of the crawlspace were three large wooden boxes.

The boxes were not aligned in a row. The center box was off to one side, forming, from Jessica's perspective, a blocky letter C. Each cube measured about thirty inches, each a different color-one yellow, one blue, one red.

The three marks on the page of the Bible, she thought. The red, blue, and yellow squares.

She looked at the first box, the one painted yellow. She knew this one had been opened. There was a slight gap between the door on top and the sides, a gap of an inch or so. Jessica was concerned that the person who opened it had been Officer Caruso, a clear breach of procedure. In a situation such as this, all kinds of precautions could have, and should have, been taken.

Jessica eased open the lid. The hinges creaked, echoing off the hard walls. She angled the beam of her flashlight.

Inside was a thing of nightmares.

The partial, long-decayed corpse wore a spangled red sweater, big silver hoop earrings. Around the neck was a distinctive black opal necklace. Jessica had seen it before. She knew who this was. She might have known all along.

It was the girl in the photograph they had found in the Bible. The girl irretrievably connected to Caitlin O'Riordan.

The girl they were supposed to find.