“I said hey, bitch.”
Here we go, Lilly thought. Fucking boys. She’d been here before, of course, stuck on a street corner, harassed by some punk. They all had a line they thought was magic, a smile they felt God-given. Then it turned ugly. But it was always on her turf, her hometown. This was an alien landscape.
She tensed, glanced over her shoulder. She was less than a block from the bus station. She could make it back inside in a few seconds. She was that fast. But there was a principle at work here. She wasn’t about to be run off the street by some low-rent spod. She turned to face him.
“I’m sorry, what did you call me?”
The kid smirked, took a step closer. Lilly now saw that he was not all that skinny after all. He was muscular. “I think you heard me, Snow White.”
He grabbed her arm. She tried to wrestle free. She couldn’t. He was strong.
“Let go of me!”
He laughed. “Or what?”
Lilly planted her left foot, shifted her weight. It was a familiar move. She tried to knee him but he turned, blocking it. He laughed again.
“Damn, girl. Why would you want to go and do something like that?” The kid grabbed her other wrist. “You don’t want to make me mad.”
“I said let go of me!”
Lilly tried to break free. She could not.
The kid glanced up the alley, smiled again. He was going to drag her up there. She couldn’t let him do that.
But before he could make a move a shadow fell across the sidewalk. They both turned. There was a man standing there. He seemed to appear out of nowhere. He was in his thirties, maybe, wearing a dark blue suit and a burgundy tie.
What was this about?
“I think you should leave,” the man said, soft-spoken, authoritative. Lilly’s head spun with this weird development. The board boy let go of her arms. She backed up a few steps, but she didn’t run.
“I’m sorry,” the kid said, turning fully to deal with the man. “Are you addressing me?”
“I am.”
The kid planted himself. He racked his shoulders. “What did you say? I mean, you know, exactly.”
“Exactly?” the man asked. “Would you like that verbatim? Or would you like me to distill the essence?”
The kid smirked, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of confidence behind it.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I believe the young lady would like you to leave.”
The kid laughed. Psycho shrill. “And who are you, her father?”
The man smiled. Lilly felt a little charge run through her. It wasn’t that the guy was so good-looking or anything, but there was something about that smile that said she had nothing to worry about.
“Just a friend.”
“Well, I’m gonna fuck you up, friend-o. I’m gonna fuck you up big time. This is my corner.”
The man made a move, a quick shift of his right hand, almost too fast to see. To Lilly it was a like a bird had flown between them, flapped its wings, then flown away. Time stood still for a few seconds. Then, in the next instant, Lilly felt a rush of warm air.
She glanced first at the man. He was still standing there, hands at his sides, his blue eyes sparkling in the afternoon sun, his expression unreadable. She then looked at the kid, and saw something she never expected to see, something horrifying.
The kid’s face was on fire. But just for a second. Lilly instantly smelled singed flesh and burnt hair.
“What… what the fuck, man!” The kid recoiled, his hands to his face. He took five or six steps backward, out into the street. A car almost hit him. When he pulled his hands away Lilly could see that his face was bright pink.
“What the fuck did you do to me?” the kid yelled. “What did you do?”
“I asked you to leave,” the man said.
The kid pulled a bandanna from his back pocket, began to blot his face. His nose was runny, his eyes were tearing up. Lilly noticed that his eyelashes were gone.
“You are a dead man,” the kid yelled. “You are… you are so fucking dead.”
Lilly watched in stunned silence as the kid backed up, turned, ran the length of the block, then disappeared around the corner. She discovered that she hadn’t taken a breath in maybe a minute or so.
What the hell had just happened?
She knew the basics. She had been hanging on the corner. A board rat had approached her, threatened her, grabbed her. A man appeared out of nowhere and set the kid’s face on fire.
Somehow. Like magic.
She looked up Filbert Street, saw a police car trolling. It looked like they hadn’t seen what happened. She turned to ask the man his version of the events, to say thank you, but he had vanished.
FORTY-TWO
JESSICA GOT ON the computer. For the past two days she’d been trying to block out an hour or so to run some things. If their killer was playing a sick game with the department, the city, then there was a chance that there were things they were not seeing, pieces of the puzzle that did not quite fit. Yet.
She made a list of names, references, places, possibilities, and impossibilities.
She knew that sometimes a search engine could make a connection you might never think of. Sometimes the result of a search was so far off it got you thinking in a new direction.
Forty minutes later she had answers. She knew Byrne was down in the cafeteria. Unable to wait for the elevator, she ran down the stairs.
BYRNE WAS NURSING a cold coffee, a wooden Danish, skimming the Daily News.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Jessica said.
“Man, do I love it when conversations begin this way.”
Jessica pulled out a chair, sat down. “I ran everything I could think of through a few search engines, along with a couple of things I never thought would click.”
Byrne folded the paper. “Okay. What do we have?”
“Well, I think we know what game he was playing with the name Jeremiah Crosley. Nonetheless, I ran a search regarding the Book of Jeremiah. Interesting guy, but not one of the biggies. Josh was right. Jeremiah was no ray of sunshine. Nothing jumped.
“Next, our guy said he lived at 2917 Dodgson Street. As we know, there is no Dodgson Street in Philly, right?”
“Can’t argue with the folks at MapQuest.”
“I have issues with MapQuest. They always seem to lead me right into construction. But that’s for later. Anyway, I found a Dodgson Street in Lancashire, England, but I figured that would be one hell of a commute, even for a psycho. There are, however, a number of other references. The one that stuck out was a person’s name. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Ever heard of him?”
Byrne shook his head.
“That’s because he was much better known by another name: Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Turns out he was also a fanatical game and puzzle enthusiast. Plus, I discovered there’s something called the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, also known as micropsia, which causes a person to perceive large objects as being much smaller.”
“The big red, yellow, and blue boxes in that crawlspace, and the small colored squares in the Bible,” Byrne said.
“It might be a stretch, but yeah, it crossed my mind.” Jessica pulled up another chair, put her feet up on it. “Next I ran ludo. Guess what it means?”
“You’re going to make me guess everything, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I have no idea what it means.”
Jessica held up a color printout. It was a graphic of a game board: a large square marked with a cross. Each arm of the cross was divided into three columns; each column was divided into six smaller squares. The large squares were brightly colored. “Ludo.”