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.
In her time on the couch Eve had met all the Pams-clonazepam, diazepam, lorazepam, flurazepam. None helped. Pain-the kind of pain that begins where your childhood comes to a deadening halt-would not be salved. In the end, when night became morning, you stepped out of the shadows, ready or not.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I apologize for my crude language. It's not very becoming.'
He didn't chastise or excuse her. She hadn't expected him to. Instead, he glanced down at his lap, studied her chart, flipped a few pages. It was all there. It was one of the downsides to belonging to a healthcare system that logged every appointment, every prescription, every physical therapy session, every X-ray-ache, pain, complaint, theory, treatment.
If she had learned anything it was that there were two groups of people you couldn't con. Your doctor and your banker. Both knew the real balance.
'Have you been thinking about Graciella?' he asked.
Eve tried to maintain her focus, her emotions. She put her head back for a few moments, fighting tears, then felt the liquid warmth traverse her cheek to her chin, onto her neck, then on to the fabric of the wing chair. She
