Play Dead (8 page)

eyes, fair hair without yet a single strand of gray, a less than prominent nose.

When he was a child of six, a woman in Galveston—an aging circus acrobat with flame- red tresses and ill- fitting teeth, the portly doyenne of a Hungarian gypsy troupe—had called his profile “androgynous.” Joseph had been too young to read anything into this, of course, although the word conjured many things dark and disturbing. In his late childhood years he’d had to fend off myriad advances from both men and women alike, all of questionable character and breeding. In his early teens he had succumbed to the enchantments of an exotic dancer in the French Quarter in New Orleans, a young woman who had afterward referred to him as
oiseau féroce.
It was only years later he had learned this meant
fierce bird,
a word play on his last name it seemed; a comment, perhaps, on his sexual prowess. Or so he had hoped. Swann was nimble without being athletic, far stronger than he appeared. His choices in clothing tended to the well- tailored and classic, his shoes always scrupulously polished. He was rarely seen in public without a tie. Unless he was hunting. Then he could, and quite often did, blend into the scenery; urban denizen, country gentleman, midnight jogger, suburban dad. He had dedicated each of the house’s sixteen closets to a different persona.

This evening Faerwood was ominously quiet. For the moment. At eight o’clock he prepared himself a modest dinner of center- cut pork chops, braised butternut squash, and fresh mango chutney. He considered opening a bottle of wine but resisted. There was much to do.
For dessert he allowed himself a thin slice of a devilish chocolate
ganache
he had picked up on a whim from Miel Patisserie on Seventeenth Street.
As he savored the cake, he thought about Katja. She did not look healthy. He fed her very well, of course, bathed her, smoothed her skin with the finest emollients money could buy, met
all
her needs religiously. And yet she looked sallow, resigned,
older.
When he finished the cake, he crossed the great room to the kitchen, placed his dish and fork in the sink, then returned. He selected an LP from the shelf, started the turntable, carefully placed the needle. Soon, the strains of Mozart’s
Le Nozze di Figaro
filled the room. He always played “
Dove sono
” when things were about to change.
Before he reached the stairs, the voice thundered up from somewhere deep inside him.
“Joseph.”
Swann stopped. The hair rippled on his forearms. “Sir?”
“Where dwells the effect, Joseph?”
“The effect is in the mind, sir.”
“And the method?”
For a few agonizing moments, Swann could not recall the drill. It was a simple exchange, as old as his ability to talk.
“Joseph?”
It came to him. “The method is in the soul.”
A few moments later, fully returned to the moment, he checked the quality of his breath, the order of his hair, the knot in his tie. He took a few seconds, then climbed the stairs, hesitating briefly on each tread.

5 8 R ICHAR D MONTANAR I

When he reached the second floor he walked down the hallway, drew the key from his vest pocket, then unlocked and opened the door to Katja’s room.

She was sitting on the bed, staring out the barred window, her thin legs dangling over the side. She was growing so pale. Her eyes were blank and vacant, her wrists and arms were stick thin. She wore a pale blue nightdress. Her feet were bare.

Swann stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, locked it. “Good evening, my love,” he said.
She slowly turned her head. She parted her dry lips, but said nothing.

Swann glanced at the tray on the dresser. For lunch he had made her a Salisbury steak and green peas, real mashed potatoes. She had said weeks ago that real mashed potatoes were her favorite. She hated the Hungry Jack type.

The lunch sat untouched.
“You haven’t eaten,” he said.
For a few moments Katja just stared, as if she did not recognize

him. For a further moment he thought she had not even
heard
him. It got that way near the end. The dreamy look, the soiled sheets, the stuttering. Then, weakly, she said: “I want to go home.”

“Home?” He tried to say this as innocently as possible, as if it were some sort of revelation. “Why would you want to go home?”
Katja stared at him,
through
him, her face a blank, gessoed canvas. “It’s...it’s my...”
He sat on the bed, next to her. “Your parents? Your family?”
Katja just nodded, slowly. There was none of the vibrancy he had seen that first day, none of zest. On that day she had been a whirlpool of teenaged energy, ready for any challenge, any idea.
He took her hand in his. Her palm felt like desiccated parchment.
“But
I
am taking care of you now, dearest.” He reached out, gently stroked her hair. It felt damp and greasy between his fingers. Earlier in the day he had reminded himself to give her a bath. Now there hardly seemed any point. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his fingers.
She nodded weakly.
“Think of it, Katja. Of all the people in your life, all your family and friends, have I not been the kindest? I read to you, I feed you, I paint your toenails your favorite color.”
The truth was, it was
his
favorite color. Persimmon.
Katja looked toward the window, at the shafts of frail sunlight. She remained silent.
“Drink some tea,” he said. “You will feel much better.” He stood, crossed the room, lifted the insulated pitcher, poured a cup of tea. It was still warm. He dropped into it a sugar cube. He returned to the bed, sat, stirring, the sound of sterling silver on bone china circling the room.
He got Katja’s attention, lifted the cup to her lips. She took a small sip. He dabbed her mouth with a linen napkin.
“You’re taking care of me,” she said.
Poor Katja. He had tried with her. He had tried so hard with them all.
“Come with me, love.” He put the cup and saucer down on the nightstand, extended a hand.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere safe.”
Swann thought about the precision- crafted device three floors below them, the box and its seven keen blades.
Katja stood, shaking, her thin legs not quite supporting her. Joseph Swann put a strong arm around her waist. She felt brittle.
“Are you taking me home?” she asked.
He looked into her eyes. He found no trace of the firebrand he had met in the park, the young woman who had so willingly accepted his aid and comfort. All without thanks.
Moments later, they descended the stairway. Mozart filled the house. Three floors below the magic box awaited.
“Yes,” Swann said. “I am taking you home.”

TEN
K

evin Byrne sat across from the Denison Apartments. The top floor of the building, the side facing Locust Street, was smoke blackened, charred. Gnarled ebony fingers caressed the brick façade. The air on the entire block was still dense with carbon.

Byrne was exhausted, but exhaustion was an old friend. He glanced at his watch: 2:15 am.
Byrne had always suffered from some degree of insomnia, but he had rarely slept more than five or six hours a night since he had become a detective. When he was in uniform he had drawn last- out as often as not, and the schedule of working all night was something the body clock never forgot. The routine and rhythms of sitting in a cramped, airless car at three and four and five in the morning, drinking coffee, eating high- sugar, high- fat foods became the usual, not the exception. Sleep became unnatural. Indigestion and sleeplessness the rule. Byrne did not know one detective on the job for more than twenty years who slept well.
Now the insomnia was invasive and seemingly permanent. Since moving over to SIU, the schedule had been a little easier to predict, and that was both the good news and the bad news, at least as far as the victims were concerned. In SIU there wasn’t the heat of a new homicide, the buzz of the immediate chase, the drive to get the forensics and witnesses and collateral personnel lined up in a hurry before your doer got away. Cold cases were just that—cold. The dead stayed dead.
Still, when you picked up a scent, Byrne had to admit, if only to his partner, it was the same thrill, the same rush that accompanied that first sniff of the chase you encountered when you were a rookie at twentytwo.
Byrne glanced up at the window, at the smoke- blackened bricks of the top floor of the Denison, the area surrounding apartment 1015. In the sodium streetlights the building was bathed in pale blue. The two windows were large eyes staring down at him, defying him to understand what had happened in that apartment.
Because they were able to make the 911 call early—Byrne had phoned the fire department from just outside Laura Somerville’s front door—the fire had destroyed less than half of the space. Much of the apartment had been left virtually intact. There was smoke and water damage to the furniture, the bookcases, the walls, but little else.
Byrne had seen quite a bit in his time on the job. He had seen just about everything a human being could do to another human being, had seen just about everything human beings could do to them
selves,
had encountered every weapon, every opportunity, every motive. Despite his experience, he had to admit that Laura Somerville’s suicide was as startling as anything he had ever come across.
Byrne had cornered Mickey Dugan, an old friend and PFD captain. Dugan told him that, presumptively—which meant very little at this stage—the Philadelphia Fire Department believed the source of the fire was an oil lamp under the mattress in the bedroom. Moments before Laura Somerville dove through that window, moments after she excused herself from the living room, she had walked into her bedroom, pulled an oil lamp from her closet, lit a match, placed it beneath the bed, and deliberately set her apartment on fire.
What was she trying to conceal by burning down her apartment, her possessions, perhaps the entire building? Not to mention her prized collection of games and puzzles. Could it be that the Philadelphia Police Department had coincidentally shown up on the same day this elegant, cultured woman planned to commit suicide?
Byrne sipped his coffee, a thought circling him, a dark feeling he knew he was not shaking anytime soon. Unvarnished, unwarranted, unearned, yet all too real.
There was no evidence that this was anything other than a suicide. Jessica and Byrne were homicide detectives, and there were plenty of homicides to go around in the City of Brotherly Love. They had a full day ahead of them. A day belonging to Caitlin O’Riordan. A day Kevin Byrne knew would be haunted by the image of Laura Somerville’s demolished body, and one strange word.
Ludo.

ELEVEN
T

he basement was a vast and silent cavern, cool even in high summer—corridors crosshatching corridors, carved lintels threatening headroom from above each passageway, stone walls unencumbered by paint or memory. Its corners were clean, damp, sunless. The enormous space was divided into more than a dozen rooms.

When Faerwood had been built, around 1900, the basement was used primarily for storage. There was a coal chute, of course, the boiler, an oil heater, a forest of rusted iron support columns.

The original owner—an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad named Artemus Coleridge, a man who hanged himself from an attic roof beam in the house in 1908—had seven children, and it was in the wide expanse of the main basement that they played their outdoor games in winter, their contests illuminated by scores of gas lamps, hundreds of candles. To this day Swann found small mounds of melted paraffin and blackened wicks in the unlikeliest of places.

As an adult Swann could not picture this house full of happy children, not in this place of his ruined childhood, but as a boy he had often stalked these rooms, imagining voices and bright laughter, conjuring unseen friends, gamboling with ghosts.

Originally there had been only one set of stairs leading to the basement, from a small pantry directly off the main kitchen, a direct route to both the wine and root cellars.

All that changed when Joseph Swann’s father bought the house, and the transformation of Faerwood began. Now there were more than ten ways to enter the lower level.

One basement room—perhaps the smallest at a mere six feet by seven—was his dressing room. On one wall was a large mirror, ringed with yellow globe lamps. In the corner was a tall collector’s cabinet, its many drawers containing a lifetime collection of items dedicated to the art of makeup. One of these drawers held prosthetic devices used for both concealment and diversion. One was devoted to scabs, wounds, and scars. Another, Swann’s favorite, contained hair and character effects. Some of the wigs and mustaches were more than fifty years old, among them some of the finest ever produced.

Yet even the finest of prosthetics and wigs were useless without the true secret of makeup—application.
The tools of this trade were laid out precisely on the clinically clean table—brushes, combs, sponges, pencils, and crayons, along with tubes and jars of powders, matte foundations, paint, glitter, lipsticks, and the increasingly important neutralizers and concealers. Now that he was nearing forty, Swann lamented, he found himself turning to the concealers more and more.
His wig already in place, Swann applied the last of the spirit gum to his chin, and opened the clear plastic box that bore his prized humanhair goatee. He held the beard in place for a few seconds, then smoothed it to the contours of his chin. He had applied the black eyebrows earlier, and settled into his right eye the steel- rimmed monocle made of clear glass.
He stood, slipped on the cutaway coat, adjusted the shoulders, the waist. He tapped the remote in his left pocket, turning on the music. Bach’s
Sleepers Awake
began to softly fill the outer rooms.
Moments later Joseph Swann opened the door, and stepped onto his secret stage.