Play dead

THREE

Whilethey 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.