Jessica tried to imagine. Based on what Byrne had told her about the job, it couldn’t be a crucial piece of evidence—a shell casing, a bloody footprint. “What?”

“A Cheerio.”

At first Jessica thought she hadn’t heard him right, then soon realized she had. She nodded. She knew what he meant, knew where this was going. Cheerios were the universal toddler pacifiers. Cheerios were baby crack.

“One Cheerio was sitting on this shitty, Astroturf porch, and Tommy Delgado can’t take his eyes off it. Now, keep in mind, here was a man who had seen it all. Two tours in Nam, twenty-five plus on the job. A few minutes later he walks to the back of the building, crying his eyes out. I checked on him, just to make sure he didn’t have his piece out, but there he was, just sitting on this bench, sobbing. Broke my heart, but I didn’t approach him.

“That one thing snapped him in half, Jess. One Cheerio. He was never the same after that.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

Byrne took a few moments, shrugged. “He worked another few years, took his thirty. But he was just sleepwalking the job, you know? Bringing up the rear, hauling water.”

They fell silent for a full minute.

“When did it all go to crap, Kevin?”

Byrne had his ideas on this. “I think it was when boxes of pasta went from sixteen ounces to twelve ounces and nobody told us.”

Jessica looked fallen. “They did?”

Byrne nodded.

“Son of a bitch. No wonder I’m always hungry.”

Byrne glanced at his watch. “Want to get some breakfast?”

Jessica looked at the black, star-dotted sky. “At night?”

“Coffee first.” He helped Jessica to her feet, and marched her into the kitchen.

FIFTY-FOUR

LILLY WALKED the streets. Her stomach rumbled. She had never been this exhausted in her life. And still she walked. Spruce, Walnut, Locust, Sansom, Chestnut, Market. Up and down and across. She lingered for a while on Rittenhouse Square. She watched the city yawn and stretch and come awake. She watched the medical personnel arriving at Jefferson, the delivery trucks bringing the day’s news, the day’s bagels; she watched the homeless stir in doorways; she watched the cabs and the cops, two groups who knew no time.

She walked, her treasure in hand.

When she was twelve or so she had gone to a house party. As she was about to leave, her friend Roz slipped her a huge bud of weed, but she’d had nowhere to put it, no foil or plastic or anything. So she walked all the way home with it pinched between her thumb and forefinger, hanging on to it for dear life. She was not going to lose it. She walked more than two miles, cutting through Culver Park, across the reservoir, across the tracks. Somehow she made it home, her riches intact and whole, and dropped it into an empty pill vial with no small hum of accomplishment.

She had something even more important than that in her hand now. She couldn’t even bring herself to put it in her pocket. She needed the feel of it against her skin.

She had his phone number. He was going to help her.

And so she walked, from Front Street to Broad Street, until she could walk no more. She sat on one of those big concrete planters.

She waited for the sun.

FIFTY-FIVE

THE MURDERS WERE the lead story of the day. It was above the fold in the Inquirer, on the front page of the Daily News. It led all three network affiliate television broadcasts. It was featured on every local news website.

The lab was fast-tracking every piece of forensic evidence. A partial shoe print had been lifted off the roof where Katja had been posed on the wooden chair. The chair itself had yielded a number of friction ridge prints, which were being fed through AFIS. The swords were identified as a homemade version of a double-wide épée, the type commonly used in fencing. They yielded no prints.

Katja’s mother, Birta Dovic, was driving in from Connecticut. Two investigators from the Connecticut state police were interviewing Katja’s friends and classmates. Photographs of the three victims were now on the dashboards of every sector car in the city. Patrol officers were instructed to ask everyone they encountered if they had ever seen them.

The investigation had reached a whirlwind pace, but the one thing it had not produced, the one thing they all sought, was still eluding them.

They needed a name.

AT JUST AFTER 8:00 AM Josh Bontrager came running into the duty room, out of breath.

“What’s up?” Jessica asked. Her head felt like it was made of cast iron. She’d gotten three hours’ sleep and driven into the city in a fog. It reminded her of her college days.

Bontrager held up a hand. He couldn’t catch his wind.

“Take it easy, Josh.”

Bontrager nodded.

“Water?”

Another nod.

Jessica handed him a bottle. He chugged a full bottle of Aquafina. Deep breath. Then: “A woman called 911. She was in the park.”

“What park? Fairmount Park?” Byrne asked.

“Tacony Creek,” Josh said, nearly recovered. “You know the one I mean?”

Everyone did. Tacony Creek Park, which was technically part of the Fairmount Park system, was a 300-acre park that ran along the Tacony Creek, connecting Frankford Creek in the south to Cheltenham Township in the north. It skirted a very densely populated area in North Philadelphia.

“Anyway, the woman calls in, says she saw a man—a well-dressed white man—let a teenage girl get into his car. It was a black Acura. She said the whole thing looked a little funny, so she kept watching them. After a few seconds, she said she saw the man and the girl fighting in the car.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, I guess while the woman was on the line with 911 a sector car drove by. She hung up, flagged it down, told the officer what was going on.”

“Did she get a plate?”

“Better than that. She said the car went up an alley and the sector car blocked it in. It’s a dead end.”

“What are you saying, we have the car?” Jessica asked.

“Not only do we have the car,” Bontrager said. He raised his empty bottle of spring water, like a toast. “We’ve got the guy.”

FIFTY-SIX

SWANN SAT ON the curb. He calmed himself. As a boy he had been in chains many times.

He reached over with his left hand, slid over the back of his watch, removed the thin steel needle. Nearby, the girl sat crying in the back of the patrol car. A very nervous young officer leaned against the trunk.

Swann rocked gently to one side, then the other. “Officer, I’m afraid you’ve gotten these cuffs on far too tightly. I’m losing the feeling in both my arms.”

At first the officer pretended not to hear him.

“Officer?”

The young man looked up the alleyway, then reluctantly walked over, unsnapping his holster. “If you try anything, I swear to God I will mace you in the face. Are we clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Roll onto your knees and stand up.”

In one graceful move Swann rose. He dropped the handcuffs to the ground, then pulled the officer’s weapon out of its holster. He leveled it at the young man’s head.

“Don’t!” the officer screamed. “Oh God Jesus don’t.” He closed his eyes, waiting for the click, the pain, the dark.

“Cuff yourself to the front wheel. Do it now.”

The young man grabbed the cuffs, did as he was told. The girl in the back seat began to cry. Swann took the handcuff keys from the officer’s belt, then took a few steps away. He ejected the magazine from the weapon, racked the slide. Empty now. He threw the magazine and keys as far as he could. He leaned close to the young man’s ear. “I’m sorry for all this. I would never have hurt you.”