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 be 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 & 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 bell, 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 statistic.
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.”