A day earlier they had gone to Millersville to speak with Robert and Marilyn O’Riordan. Not to conduct a formal interview—the original team had done that twice—but to assure them that the investigation was moving forward. Robert O’Riordan had been sullen and uncooperative, his wife had been nearly catatonic. They were two people all but incapacitated by the torment of grief, the black hole of an indescribable loss. Jessica had seen it many times, but each time was a fresh arrow in her heart.

“Let’s do it.” Jessica grabbed the cassette player. “Thanks for bringing this down, Josh.”

“No problem.”

Before Jessica could turn and head to the car, Byrne put a hand on her arm.

“Jess.”

Byrne was pointing at a dilapidated refrigerator against the brick wall of the music store. Or what was left of the refrigerator. It was an ancient model from the 1950s or 1960s, at one time a built-in, but the side paneling had long ago been stripped away. It appeared the appliance had originally been a powder blue or green, but age and rust and soot had darkened it to a deep brown. The refrigerator door hung at a crooked angle.

Along the top, on the skewed freezer door, was a logo. Although the chrome letters were long gone, the discolored outline of the brand name remained.

Crosley.

The brand dated back to the 1920s. Jessica recalled a Crosley fridge in her grandmother’s house on Christian Street. They weren’t that common anymore.

My name is Jeremiah Crosley.

“Could this be a coincidence?” Jessica asked.

“We can only hope so,” Byrne replied, but Jessica could tell he didn’t really believe it. The alternative led them down a path nobody wanted to follow.

Byrne reached out, opened the refrigerator door.

Inside, on the one remaining shelf, was a large laboratory specimen jar, half-filled with a filmy red fluid. Something was suspended in the liquid.

Jessica knew what it was. She had been to enough autopsies.

It was a human heart.

THREE

WHILE THEY 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.

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.