Play Dead Read Free

pair of teenage boys scrapping for copper.
    Byrne took out a yellow legal pad and a fine point marker. Holding his flashlight under his arm, he made a detailed sketch of the subterranean room. In homicide work, the investigating detectives were required to make a diagram of every crime scene. Even though photographs and videotape records of the scene were made, it was the investigator’s sketch that was most often referred to, even in the trial stage. Byrne usually made the diagram. By her own admission, Jessica couldn’t draw a circle with a compass.
    “I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” Jessica said.
Byrne glanced up, the darkness of the room a black shroud around his broad shoulders. “Gee thanks, partner.”
    Jessica spread out the files on the front counter, grateful for the bright sunlight streaming through the open door, grateful for the slight breeze.
    The first page of the binder was a large photograph of Caitlin, a color eight- by- ten. Every time Jessica looked at the photograph she was reminded of the Gene Hackman movie Hoosiers, although she would be hard- pressed to explain why. Perhaps it was because the girl in the picture was from rural Pennsylvania. Perhaps it was because there was an openness to the girl’s face, a trusting countenance that seemed locked into the world of 1950s America—long before Caitlin’s birth, life, and death—a time when girls wore saddle shoes and kneesocks and vest sweaters and shirts with Peter Pan collars.
    Girls didn’t look like this anymore, Jessica thought. Did they? Not in this time of MySpace and Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and rainbow parties. Not in this day and age when a girl could buy a bag of Doritos and a Coke, board a bus in Lancaster County, and ninety minutes later emerge in a city that would swallow her whole; a trusting soul who never had a chance.
The estimated time of Caitlin’s death was between midnight and 7 am on May 2, although the medical examiner could not be more precise, given that by the time Caitlin O’Riordan’s body had been discovered she had been dead at least forty- eight hours. There were no external wounds on the victim, no lacerations or abrasions, no ligature marks to indicate she may have been restrained, no defensive wounds that would suggest she struggled with an assailant. There had been no skin or any other kind of organic matter beneath her fingernails.
At the time she was discovered, Caitlin had been fully clothed, dressed in frayed blue jeans, Reeboks, black denim jacket, and a white T-shirt. She also wore a lilac nylon backpack. Around her neck had been a sterling silver Claddagh, and although it was not particularly valuable, the fact that she wore it in death did not support any theory that she had been the victim of a robbery gone bad. Nor did the cause of the death.
Caitlin O’Riordan had drowned.
Homicide victims in North Philadelphia were generally not drowned. Shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, sliced and diced with a machete, pummeled with an ax handle, yes. Popped by a rebar, run over with a Hummer, stuck with an ice pick, doused with gasoline and lit ablaze— yeah, all the time. Jessica had once investigated a North Philly homicide committed with a lawn edger. A rusty lawn edger.
But drowned? Even if the vic was found floating in the Delaware River, the cause of death was usually one of the above.
Jessica looked at the lab report. The water in Caitlin’s lungs had been carefully analyzed. It contained fluoride, chlorine, zinc orthophosphate, ammonia. It also contained trace levels of haloacetic acid. The report contained two pages of graphs and charts. It all went way over Jessica’s head, but she had no problem at all understanding the report’s conclusion. According to the forensics lab and the medical examiner’s office, Caitlin O’Riordan did not drown in the Delaware or Schuylkill River. She did not drown in Wissahickon Creek, nor in any of the fountains for which the City of Brotherly Love was