Play Dead

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Book: Play Dead Read Online Free PDF
Author: Richard Montanari
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
T WO MONTHS EAR LI E R
E
    ve 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
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