Sector cars and detective cars slowly approached from Vine Street, Race Street, North Nineteenth Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway. All approaches to Logan Circle were blocked. Byrne was grateful for the time of night. If this was during the day, the traffic—and all the attendant problems of keeping people out of the way, and safe—would be myriad.
At 5:35 they got the go order.
Six SWAT officers approached the circle, AR-15 rifles raised. Even from a block away Byrne heard their commands to the suspect to get down on the ground. When the officers got within twenty feet or so, the man put his hands over his head, got down onto his knees. A few seconds later a pair of uniformed officers rushed in, handcuffed the man, and took him into custody.
This made no sense, Byrne thought. This was the Collector? This was their puzzle master? Byrne jogged up the block toward Logan Circle. Something was wrong. Before he reached the corner, Josh Bontrager raised him on the radio.
“It’s not him,” Bontrager said.
Byrne halted. “Say again?”
“It’s some homeless guy. He says a guy paid him to drag the box here. A couple of the uniforms know who this guy is. They’ve seen him around.”
Byrne looked through the binoculars. Protocol now called for the SWAT officers to clear the scene, and the bomb squad to investigate the suspicious package. Unless, of course, there was a young patrol officer on the landscape. An officer strikingly similar to the policeman Kevin Byrne had been more than twenty years earlier. At least attitude-wise. It was cowboy time. Or cowgirl time, as the case may be.
Through the glass Byrne saw Officer Maria Caruso roar onto the scene, rip off the top of the cardboard box, then kick it halfway across Logan Circle. Shredded newspaper flew. There was nothing—and no one—inside.
They’d been taken by the puzzle master.
It was then Byrne heard the call for backup go out. His partner’s call for help.
“Jess.”
NINETY-TWO
5:40 AM
SWANN OPENED THE BOX. The basement was hot and damp and close. He did not have a problem with confined spaces—he had been cured, forcibly, of this phobia at a tender young age.
The box had sat dormant for years. It had belonged to an Indian fakir, ostensibly, although Swann knew the man as Dennis Glassman, a slack-handed card man and part-time lawn-care consultant based in Reno, Nevada.
It was time for the Fire Grotto. The Seventh Wonder. With a twist, of course. This time the assistant would not get out of the cage.
Swann rolled the box to the center of the small stage. He adjusted his tie. Everything was arranged. Odette was upstairs. He had peered in on her. She was dressed in her lovely scarlet gown, just as he had planned.
He climbed the stairs to the third floor. The wall on the landing was activated by a key lock and a counterweight. He pushed aside the small painting, unlocked the door. It slid open. Beyond was a short, dark corridor leading to his father’s room. Swann knew that his father had gotten out of the room a few times over the past twenty years—Karl Swann thought this was a secret—and each time Joseph had tightened security.
He edged open the door to the Great Cygne’s foul lair. The old man was where he usually was, beneath the covers, sheets pulled up over his bony skull. Swann crossed the room, made sure the television was on. It was connected by a direct feed to the camera across from the stage in the basement.
It was time for Odette. Time for the Fire Grotto.
As Swann made his way through the maze, he considered how Faerwood had been built on a plot of land that had once been known as Prescott Square. He wondered if the police had arrived at Logan Circle yet. Logan Circle with its Swann Memorial Fountain.
Prescott Square, he thought.
The final piece of the tangram.
NINETY-THREE
5:40 AM
LILLY HAD SEEN the woman in the backyard. She knew the woman had seen her. There was no time to waste. Lilly had to stop the woman before she got in the way of her plan. She looked at the blueprint. There was more than one way out of this room. She opened the closet door. To the right were a pair of tarnished brass hooks. She pulled down the hook on the left, then flipped up the one on the right. Nothing happened. Perhaps she had not done it fast enough. She tried again, quickening the process. She soon heard the counterweight fall, and saw a rectangular plate in the floor slide to the side, leading to a narrow spiral staircase. Lilly took off her shoes, twisted herself into the constricted opening.
She found herself in a corner of the great room. There was classical music playing, and almost a hundred candles burning. She knew she couldn’t risk walking near the main stairs. She knew there was a narrow hallway at the rear of the room, a hallway that wrapped around to the solarium. She stepped into the corridor, turned toward the back of the house, and saw her reflection in a full-length mirror. Or was it? It seemed watery, rippling, like an image glimpsed through ice. She suddenly realized she was surrounded by mirrors, her reflection drifting into infinity. But there was no mistaking that it was not only her likeness she was seeing.
There was a woman at the end of the hall.
NINETY-FOUR
5:43 AM
THE HOUSE WAS ENORMOUS. Jessica passed through a large pantry, stocked floor to ceiling with dry goods. She tried a door off the pantry, perhaps to a root cellar. It was locked. She stepped through the kitchen. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard tile; the appliances were all older, but highly polished and well maintained.
When Jessica stepped out of the kitchen and rounded the corner into the main hallway, she stopped. Someone stood just twenty feet away. There seemed to be a sheet of glass in the center of the corridor, a glass panel resembling a two-way mirror. Her first instinct was to step back and level her weapon, the classic police academy tactic. She caught herself at the last second.
The glass began to move, to pivot on a center pin. Before the mirror could rotate fully, Jessica realized that on the other side was a young woman in a scarlet gown. When Jessica stepped closer, the mirror stopped turning for a moment, shimmered. For an instant, Jessica’s own reflection was superimposed on the figure on the other side of the silvered glass. When Jessica saw the composite image—a woman with long dark hair and ebony eyes, a woman who, in a parallel world, might have been her sister—her skin broke out in gooseflesh.
The woman in the mirror was Eve Galvez.
NINETY-FIVE
5:45 AM
ALL AROUND HIM, Faerwood began to breathe. Swann heard the sounds of running children, the sounds of hard soles on oak floors, the hiss of a 78-rpm record on a Victrola, the sounds of his father hammering and sawing in the basement, the noise of walls being erected, ramparts to keep separate the warring monsters of madness.
In his mind, he was transported back to the first time he had seen his father perform in front of an audience. He had been five years old, not yet part of the act. They were in a small town in Mississippi, a backwater outpost of a few thousand or so, a Sunday afternoon attraction at a county fair not far from Starkville.
In the middle of the Great Cygne’s opening trick, Joseph looked around the room at the other children. They seemed mesmerized by the spectacle, magnetically drawn to this tall, regal man in black. It was at that moment that Joseph realized his father was part of the world outside the puzzle of his own life, and what he must do to change that.