engineer and a draftsman. He worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1908 he hanged himself from a roof beam at the huge North Philadelphia house he had built eight years earlier, a twenty-two-room Victorian mansion called Faerwood.
Click here to see a photograph of Faerwood, the webpage teased. Jessica clicked. The image ran ice through her veins. She'd been there.
EIGHTY-NINE
5:20 AM
Swann remembered a time when his Father played a venue in West Texas. The Great Cygne had performed a close-up routine at a honky-tonk called Ruby Lee's. When his father refused to reveal the secret of a card routine based on Dai Vernon's Cutting the Aces, he had been taken out back, beaten, his entire act stolen out of the car.
Twenty minutes later, perhaps in drunken remorse, the three men who'd assaulted the Great Cygne came outside with food for the man's young son. As his father lay unconscious in a dusty alley, Joseph ate chicken-fried steak and drank Coca Cola.
It had been this hot that night.
Swann put his hand on the box. Fire and water. Water and flame. There were many variations of the fire illusions. The cremation illusions. Some call the illusion Suttee, the term coming from the name of the goddess Sati who immolated herself because she could not stand living with her father's humiliation over her husband Shiva.
Some illusionists called the effect She, a title inspired by a strange little book by H. Ryder Haggard.
The Great Cygne called it the Fire Grotto. The effect was similar to the Sub Trunk, but that was the original version. This version would be different.
Swann sat in the shadow of the box. The red clock ticked. It was time. He would open the box and begin the final illusion of what the world would know, for as long as history was recorded, as the Seven Wonders.
NINETY
5:25 AM
The house seemed larger than it had in the daytime, more Forbidding. Where the grounds had seemed merely unkempt in bright sunlight, they now seemed populated with specters, with hunkering apparitions in the darkness.
Jessica had printed out the photograph from the website. Faer- wood, in 1908, was magnificent-sculpted hedges, a small well-tended orchard, even a waterfall. Now it was a ruin.
Jessica had her handset live, an earphone in her ear. The SWAT team had not yet moved in on Logan Circle. Any second now. The detectives and support personnel were assembled. Byrne had not yet called her.
She had turned off her headlights halfway up the winding driveway, cut the engine, drew her weapon, and approached the crumbling porch. For the second time in as many days.
'I remember now. Last year a pair of policemen came around.'
Jessica wondered how many places there were like this. Places hidden from view. Places where time had stopped. She put her ear to the front window. At first it was cold silence, then she heard music. Someone was home. Was she chasing a ghost, or was this the place of a monster?
She rang the doorbell, stepped back, waited. No one answered. She shone her flashlight up the vine-covered wall. The sinister windows stared back. Next she tried the rusted iron knocker. Same result.
She rounded the house to the east, stepping through the tall brush, the high grass, skirting a small wooden gazebo. A multi-car garage was attached to the house. She stepped up to the doors, peered inside, saw a van, along with three late-model cars. One empty bay.
She continued around to the rear of the property. Crumbling stone benches squatted next to the path.
She looked at the back of the house, at the windows on the second floor. Half the windows were barred, even though there were no fire escapes. No way to get in.
They were not there to keep people from breaking in, she realized. They were there to there to keep people from breaking out.
A shadow danced behind one of the grimed windows. There was movement in one of the rooms.
Jessica stepped back, nearly stumbling over an ancient rusted sundial. She saw the curtains part. A figure emerged in the darkness. It looked to be a young girl.
Jessica got on her handset, hit the panic button. All PPD handsets were equipped with GPS, along with a little red button that, when activated, would call for every available cop in the division, along with their mothers.
Jessica could not wait. She looked around the immediate area, found a fist-sized rock, broke the window, reached inside, and unlocked the door.
She stepped into the house.
NINETY-ONE
5:30 AM
Logan Circle was deserted, except for the lone figure sitting at the edge of the fountain, facing south, the large box next to him, like some strange tableau on Easter Island. The water pressure to the fountains had been cut. The lights were off. Byrne had grown up in Philly, had been to Logan Circle many times, starting with field trips to the art museum and the Franklin Institute as a child. Now the place looked like a Martian landscape, completely foreign to him. He had never seen it look so desolate, so vacant.
Sector cars and detective cars slowly approached from Vine Street, Race Street, North Nineteenth Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. All approaches to Logan Circle were blocked. Byrne was grateful for the time of night. If this was during the day, the traffic-and all the attendant problems of keeping people out of the way, and safe-would be myriad.
At 5:35 they got the go order.
Six SWAT officers approached the circle, AR-15 rifles raised. Even from a block away Byrne heard their commands to the suspect to get down on the ground. When the officers got within twenty feet or so, the man put his hands over his head, got down onto his knees. A few seconds later a pair of uniformed officers rushed in, handcuffed the man, and took him into custody.
This made no sense, Byrne thought. This was the Collector? This was their puzzle master? Byrne jogged up the block toward Logan Circle. Something was wrong. Before he reached the corner, Josh Bon- trager raised him on the radio.
'It's not him,' Bontrager said.
Byrne halted. 'Say again?'
'It's some homeless guy. He says a guy paid him to drag the box here. A couple of the uniforms know who this guy is. They've seen him around.'
Byrne looked through the binoculars. Protocol now called for the SWAT officers to clear the scene, and the bomb squad to investigate the suspicious package. Unless, of course, there was a young patrol officer on the landscape. An officer strikingly similar to the policeman Kevin Byrne had been more than twenty years earlier. At least attitude- wise. It was cowboy time. Or cowgirl time, as the case may be.
