Play Dead by Richard Montanari Read Free Book Online Page A

glanced at Byrne. He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking the other way. Jessica understood. Sometimes you had to look away.
    RIP Florita.
    Twenty minutes later, Byrne and a quartet of uniformed officers entered the building and began to clear the structure. While they were inside, Jessica crossed the street to a bodega. She bought a half dozen strong coffees.
    When Byrne emerged from the row house, Jessica handed him a cup. The rest of the team found their coffees, and Tastykakes, on the hood of the car.
    “Anything?” Jessica asked.
Byrne nodded. “A whole houseful of trash.”
“Anything we want to look at?”
Byrne thought for a moment, sipped his coffee. “Probably.” Jessica considered the chain of events, the geography. Here was the
    dilemma: Do you pull a few officers off other investigations to start searching a building for a needle in a haystack? Were they chasing ghosts, or did this address actually have something to do with the murder of Caitlin O’Riordan?
    My name is Jeremiah Crosley.
“What do you think, detective?” Byrne asked.
Jessica looked up at the third floor. She thought of Caitlin dead inside a building not all that different from this one. She thought of the human heart in that specimen jar. She thought of all the evil she had seen, and how it always led to a place of unremitting darkness. A place like this.
    The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
She called for a CSU team.
    An hour later, while Byrne returned to the Roundhouse to check the photograph of the dark- haired girl against recent missing- persons files, Jessica stood in the stifling hallway just outside the kitchen at the Shiloh Street address.
    Byrne had been right. There was a houseful of junk. Hefty bags and loose garbage were crammed into the corners of the kitchen, bathroom, and dining area, as well as almost filling the three small rooms upstairs.
    Strangely, the basement was almost empty. Just a few boxes and a moldy eight- by- ten faux- Persian area rug on the floor, perhaps a 1980s attempt at haute décor. Jessica took pictures of every room.
    There had to be ten thousand flies in the house. Maybe more. The buzz was a maddening background hum. Between swatting the flies away and the incessant teeming, it was nearly impossible to think. Jessica began to believe this search was a pointless exercise.
    “Detective Balzano?”
    Jessica turned. The officer asking the question was a fit and tanned young woman, early twenties, about an inch shorter than Jessica’s fiveeight. She had clear brown eyes, almost amber. A lock of lustrous brunette hair escaped her cap. In the heat, it was all but plastered to her smooth forehead.
    Jessica knew the look, the plight. She’d been there herself, many times, back in the day. It was August—add a Kevlar vest, the dark blue of the uniform, along with what, at times, seemed like a fifty- pound belt—and it was like working in a sauna, clad in medieval armor.
    Jessica glanced at the officer’s nametag. m. caruso.
“What’s your first name, Officer Caruso?”
“Maria,” the young woman said.
Jessica smiled. She had almost guessed. Maria was Jessica’s late
    mother’s name. Jessica had always had a soft spot for anyone named Maria. “What’s up?”
    “Well, there’s a lot of stuff upstairs,” she said. “Boxes, trash bags, old suitcases, sacks of dirty clothes, a couple of mattresses, tons of drug paraphernalia.”
    “No bodies, I hope,” Jessica said with what she hoped was a little dark humor. This place was incredibly bleak.
“No bodies yet, ” Officer Caruso replied, matching the tone. She was sharp. “But there is a lot of stuff.
“I understand,” Jessica said. “We have time.”
In situations like this, Jessica was always careful to use the word we. She recalled her days in uniform, and how that word—uttered by some ancient detective of thirty or so, usually over some incredibly brutal scene of urban carnage—meant catching