The book's cover had been dusted for prints. None were found. It would take a lot longer, and prove far more difficult, to check the pages themselves, seeing as there were more than fifteen hundred of them.
'What do you make of the Shiloh message?' Jessica asked.
Hell placed an index finger to his lips. Jessica noticed for the first time that his fingernails were well- manicured, their clear polish reflecting the overhead fluorescents in straight silvery lines. 'Well, I ran Shiloh through the databases and the search engines. Nothing significant in the databases, but I did get hits on Google and Yahoo, of course. Lots of them. As in tons and tons.'
'Such as?' Jessica asked.
'Well, a lot of them had to do with that 1996 kid's movie. It had Rod Steiger in it, and the guy who was in In Cold Blood. What was his name?'
'Robert Blake?' Jessica asked.
'No. The other guy in the movie. The light-haired guy. The con man who bounces the check for the suit.' 'Scott Wilson,' Byrne said. 'Right.'
Jessica glanced at Byrne, but he refused to look at her. It was a matter of pop-culture principle, she figured. Sometimes Kevin Byrne's knowledge astounded her. On a bar bet, he once rattled off the entire discography of The Eagles, and Kevin Byrne didn't even care too much for The Eagles. He was a Thin Lizzy, Corrs, Van Morrison man- not to mention his near-slavish devotion to old blues. On the other hand, she'd once caught him singing the first verse of 'La Vie en Rose' at a crime scene. In French. Kevin Byrne did not speak French.
'Anyway,' Hell said. 'This Shiloh movie was a little schmaltzy, but it was still kind of cute. Beagle-in-jeopardy type thing. We just rented it a few months ago. Scratchy DVD, froze up a few times. Drives me frickin' nuts when that happens. Gotta go Blu-ray and soon. But my daughter loved it.'
Jessica thought, Daughter? Could this be the legendary Rose? 'I didn't know you had a daughter, Hell,' she said, probing.
Hell beamed. In a flash, he had out his wallet, flipped open to a photograph of an adorable little blond girl sitting on a park bench, hugging the hell out of a black Labrador puppy. Crushing the puppy was more like it. Maybe the kid worked out with her dad.
'This is Donatella,' Hell said. 'She is my heart.'
So much for Rose, Jessica thought. 'She's a doll.'
Byrne looked at the picture, nodded, smiled. Despite the tough- cop pose, Jessica knew Kevin Byrne was complete mush around little girls. He carried at least four pictures of his daughter Colleen at all times.
Hell slipped the photo back into his wallet, trousered it. 'Then there's the Shiloh reference in the Bible, of course.'
'What's that about?' Jessica asked.
'Well, if memory serves-and it quite often does-Shiloh was the name of a shrine that Moses built in the wilderness. Lots of wilderness in the Bible.' Hell flipped a few pages of his notebook. Jessica noticed that there were hand-drawn roses in the margins. 'Then there's the Civil War battle of Shiloh, which was also known as the Battle of Pitts- burg Landing.'
Jessica glanced once again at her partner. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the second largest city in the commonwealth, was three hundred miles west of Philly. Byrne shook his head, emphasizing to Jessica how little she knew about the Civil War, or American history in general.
'Not what you think,' Hell said, picking up on the exchange. 'Shiloh is in western Tennessee. Nothing to do with Pittsburgh, PA.'
'Anything else pop up?' Jessica asked, anxious to move on.
'Nothing really jumped off the screen. I ran the numbers 4514 and got more than six million hits. Can you believe that? Six million. My first thought was that the four numbers could be the last part of a phone number.' Hell flipped through a few more of his notes. 'I took the first three letters of Shiloh-S-H-I-and used them as a prefix, which is 744 on the phone. There is no Philly phone number using that designation. I widened the search to include area codes in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. Ditto. It's not a phone number.'
'But you think it was something we were supposed to find, right?' Jessica asked. This sort of thing was not the purview of CSU, but Hell was one of the brightest people Jessica knew. It never hurt to get a second, third, and fourth opinion.
Hell smiled. 'Well, I'm no detective,' he began. He glanced at the photographs of the refrigerator and kitchen at the Second Street crime scene. 'But if grilled under hot lights and deprived of Dancing With the Stars reruns, I would say we were definitely supposed to find this. I mean, Jeremiah Crosley? Puh-freakin'-leeze. It's clever, but it's not that clever. On the other hand, maybe that's the point. Maybe it's just clever enough to be intriguing, but not so difficult that it would go over the heads of us big dumb cops.'
Jessica had, of course, considered this. They were supposed to find this Bible, and the message inside was the second part of the riddle.
'So I'm thinking this might be an address,' Hell said.
'A street address?' Jessica asked. 'Here in Philly?'
'Yeah,' Hell said. 'There's a Shiloh Street here, you know.'
Jessica glanced at Byrne. Byrne shrugged. Apparently, he had never heard of it either. Philly was a small city in a lot of ways, but there were a hell of a lot streets. You could never know them all.
'Where is this Shiloh Street?' Jessica asked.
'North Philly,' Hell said. 'Badlands.'
Of course, Jessica thought.
Hell typed a few keystrokes on his laptop. His big fingers nimbly flew across the keys. Seconds later Google Maps appeared on the screen. Hell entered the street address. Soon the image began to zoom in, stopping at a map view of North Philly. A few more keystrokes yielded a fairly tight picture of a handful of city blocks just south of Allegheny Avenue between Fourth and Fifth streets. Hell clicked on the small'+' sign in the corner. The image zoomed in again. A green arrow pointed at the triangular rooftop of a small corner building
'There it is,' Hell said. 'Voy-la. 4514 Shiloh Street.'
Hell tapped another key, switched to satellite view, which eliminated the street names, rendering a photographic image.
From the aerial view, the address appeared to be either a row house or a commercial space at the end of the block. Gray and ugly and undistinguished. No trees. Jessica rarely saw her city from above. This part looked so desolate her heart ached. She glanced at Byrne. 'What do you think?'
Byrne scanned the image, his deep-green eyes roaming the surface of the monitor. 'I think we're being worked. I hate being worked.'
Hell gently closed the book, then opened it again, flipping open just the front cover. 'I ran a hair dryer over the inside front endpaper,' he said. 'Many times people will open a book with their fingers on the outside, and right thumb on the inside. If the front cover was wiped down-and I believe it was-maybe they forgot to-'
Hell stopped talking. His eyes fixed on a slight bump in the lower left-hand corner of the inside front cover, a right angle that lifted an edge.
'What have we here?' Hell said.
He opened a drawer, removed a gleaming pair of stainless steel tweezers, clicked them three times. It seemed like a ritual.
'What is it?' Byrne asked.
'Hang on.'
Hell wielded the tweezers like a heart surgeon. He grabbed the endpaper, began to slowly strip it back. Soon, it became apparent that there was something underneath. It appeared that someone had already peeled back the endpaper, inserted something, then re-glued it.
Hell took a deep breath, exhaled, continued to peel back the endpaper. Beneath it was a thin piece of cardboard. Hell gently removed it with the tweezers, put it on the table. It was a white rectangle, about three inches by five inches. The paper had a watermark on it. Hell flipped it over.
The cardboard rectangle was a color photograph. A picture of a teenage girl.
Jessica felt the temperature in the room jump a few degrees, along with the level of anxiety. The mysteries were starting to progress geometrically.
The girl in the picture was white, somewhat overweight, about sixteen. She had long auburn hair, brown
