Knowing I wouldn’t have easy access to the book again, I asked Tom to hold it up and took pictures of that page and of the cover. Then Herb passed it along to the lab guys.
“So who is LK?” Tom asked me. Herb apparently hadn’t briefed him.
“We think it’s Luther Kite,” I said.
Tom nodded solemnly. Everyone had heard about my encounter with Kite. I had to testify at the inquest of the person I’d watched him murder. At the time, I’d sustained a broken leg. That had healed, but the things I’d been forced to watch…
Let’s just say I’d rather have both my legs broken than see that again.
Phin had no idea how bad my nightmares actually were. Though I’d managed to stay clear of shrinks, some late-night Internet research supported my suspicion that I exhibited many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It was something I planned to attend to, after I gave birth and got Kite out of the picture. Until then, sleep and I had never been on good terms anyway. And it wasn’t like my hypertension could get any worse.
“Now that I think of it,” Tom said, rubbing his chin, “there’s rumor of a connection between Luther Kite and Andrew Z. Thomas.”
“What connection?”
“I read a lot, and sometimes I’ll check an author’s Wikipedia page. I went to the Thomas Wiki a few months back, after I read his book The Passenger. There are some old, unsolved crimes where both Thomas and Kite were at the same place at the same time. It’s been fodder for a lot of wild theories on Thomas’s website.”
The paramedics came with a body bag and began to take away Jessica.
I knew there was nothing more I could do here. I wasn’t a cop anymore.
But I could begin researching a connection between Kite and Thomas. Kite, evil though he undoubtedly was, didn’t have much of a police record. He was wanted for questioning in connection to a handful of crimes, and there was an arrest warrant out for him in Chicago, but surprisingly little was known about him.
I tried to text Phin, to tell him I was ready to leave, but my hand refused to work. I watched it for a moment, shaking in a palsy, and then it suddenly seemed like none of this was real, that I was in a dream and just waking up. But I couldn’t wake. Instead, everything got smaller and smaller, as if my mind was falling into a deep well.
Then it all went black.
March 15, Sixteen Days Ago
Eighteen Hours After the Bus Incident
“And what’s your name?”
“Patricia.”
“Patricia what?”
“Reid.”
“May I call you Pat?”
“Um, yes. Are you going to let me go?”
“I’m going to be asking the questions here, Pat.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s quite all right. Pat, do you believe you’re perfect?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Are you afraid, Pat?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Fear of me is the beginning of wisdom. I’m going to ask you a few questions. I want you to answer honestly and with complete candor. You heard the screaming next door, I take it?” He gestures to the concrete wall.
“Yes.”
“That gentleman didn’t think his private sins were any of my business. He made me hurt him. I wouldn’t mind hurting you, Pat.”
“You won’t have to.”
“Then you must tell me…what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Your deepest, darkest, gravest sin.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, take a moment to think about it.”
He watches her eyes flick to the bare lightbulb shining overhead.
“I don’t want to say.”
He lifts the Harpy off the metal table, opens it. Usually, just seeing the wicked, curving blade is enough. Pat’s eyes get wide.
“My husband…”
“Yes?”
“I cheated on him.”
“Once, or…”
“Several times…many times.”
“Did he ever find out?”
She shakes her head, and he can see that she’s telling the truth, that a nerve has been struck, because her eyes have begun to well up with tears.
“He died last year,” she says.
“Sudden?”
“Yes.”
“So you never got the chance to come clean.”
“It kills me. It eats at me. Every single day.”
“But maybe it’s better he died not knowing? Died believing you were the perfect, faithful wife?”
“I don’t know. He was my friend. I shared everything with him.”
Luther reaches across the table and touches her hand.
“Thank you, Pat. Thank you so much.”
March 31, 10:30 A.M.
“She has preeclampsia,” someone said.
The voice sounded familiar. I opened my eyes, but instead of being home in bed, I found myself strapped to a gurney in the back of an ambulance. Phin was holding my hand.
“No, she doesn’t.” A woman. Paramedic. Bulging cheeks and a stern expression. “That was a tonic-clonic seizure. This isn’t preeclampsia. It’s full-on eclampsia. Why isn’t this woman on bed rest?”
“This woman can hear you,” I said, though my tongue felt thick and the words came out more slurred than I’d expected.
I heard a rapid beepbeepbeepbeep and saw some sensors on my enormous, protruding, bare belly. I traced the sound to a machine.
“Cardiograph looks okay,” said the medic. “The fetus doesn’t appear to be in distress. But you should be at home, resting. Has anyone talked to you about inducing?”
I tried to sit up, but the strap around my shoulders wouldn’t let me. I could see Herb, Tom, and McGlade all staring at me through the rear ambulance doors, each practicing their expressions of intense disapproval. Though McGlade’s looked more like a hangover.
“Can I leave?” I asked.
“We should take you to the hospital for observation. Your husband said—”
I shot Phin a glance. “He’s not my husband. Unstrap me. Now.”
The medic didn’t move.
“Look,” I said. “I promise I’ll go straight home and rest. I know all about eclampsia. There’s nothing that can be done to treat it, other than giving birth. And I’ve still got three weeks before that happens. So there is absolutely no reason for me to go to the hospital. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” the paramedic said. “The next time you have a convulsion, you may not ever wake up again. If you know all about eclampsia, then you’re familiar with the term multi-organ failure. Both you and your baby are in serious danger. You should go to the hospital.”
“That’s my choice,” I said. “Not yours.” I met Phin’s eyes. “And not his.” I noticed I had an IV in my arm. “What’s that?”
“Magnesium sulfate. For the convulsions.”
“It’s making me sick.”
“No, that’s your toxic body making you sick. You’ve basically become a factory for manufacturing poisons. Until you have this child—”
I nearly lost it. The tears welled up suddenly, and almost erupted in a sobbing jag to end all sobbing jags. I was stubborn, but I wasn’t an idiot. I knew I was acting like a selfish asshole. I knew inducing labor was the right thing to do. I knew I needed to apologize to Phin and everyone else.
But I managed to squeeze my eyes shut and keep everything inside. It was more than just my unpreparedness for motherhood. There was a very bad man after me. A bad man who no doubt knew my doctors, knew my due date, and might very well be watching me right now.
I wasn’t prepared to fight that man while a baby suckled at my breast. And as vulnerable as I was, I couldn’t rely on my friends to get me out of this mess.
But maybe I could compromise a little.
“Geneva,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’ll go to Geneva.”
I felt Phin grasp my hand.
“You’re sure?” he whispered.
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I nodded, no longer able to trust talking without blubbering.
“Thank you, Jack,” Phin said, kissing my forehead.
I somehow managed to mumble, “Please take me home,” without having a complete breakdown.
March 31, 11:30 A.M.
Midmorning on the third floor of Lewisohn Hall, the dismal light crept in through the blinds into the cluttered, cramped office of Reginald Marquette, PhD, Department Chair of Ancient Literature at Columbia College.
The knock at the door drew Marquette’s head up from the paper he’d been reading—a twenty-five-page thesis on William Blake’s Proverb of Hell that was so well-done he was almost certain the author hadn’t written a single word of it. She’d been a solid C student all semester, and had never produced anything approaching this caliber of excellence. Her mistake was in not buying the B version and keeping this quantum leap in academic performance plausible.
Marquette set the paper aside and worked his way between stacks of books and papers and prehistoric correspondence, some of which bore postmarks from the previous decade. But the disorganization didn’t bother him. He thrived in chaos. As he moved toward the door, his only thought was how much he was looking forward to locating whatever website this William Blake scholar had used to purchase her term paper. Maybe he’d surprise her with a rigorous oral exam on her two dozen sources next class.
Watch her twist and blush and stutter.
You had to make an example out of cheaters.
A painful, public, humiliating example.
Marquette opened the door to a man with long, black hair tied up in a ponytail, who sported a black blazer over blue jeans. Black cowboy boots completed his unusual costume.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“Professor Marquette?”
“That’s right.”
The man extended his hand.
“Rob Siders from Ancient Publishing. I e-mailed you last week regarding our interest in publishing your work on Dante.”
Marquette smiled as he shook the man’s hand.
“Of course. Yes. I’m sorry. You mentioned you’d be stopping by, didn’t you? Please, come in.”
Marquette ushered him inside and closed the door after them.
He lifted the stack of his embattled TA’s student reviews off a chair, said, “Have a seat. I apologize for the mess, but there is actually a system in place here, as unlikely as it may appear.”
When they were finally sitting across from each other at the desk, Marquette said, “May I offer you a cup of coffee or tea or water? I could probably wrangle something up in the faculty lounge.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. It’s a great honor to meet you, Dr. Marquette.”
“Please, Reggie.”
“Your work is amazing, Reggie.”
Marquette puffed his chest up. “Oh, thank you.”
“Busy morning?”
“Just catching up on some grading for my eighteenth-century English lit class. I have to say, your e-mail was intriguing, but would you mind telling me a little more about you and your company? I couldn’t find much information on the Internet.”
“We’re a boutique publisher of academic work of the highest quality. I’m the editorial director and co-founder, and I’ve been searching for someone like you for quite a while.”
“What do you mean, ‘someone like me’?”
“A true scholar who can bring The Divine Comedy to twenty-first-century readers like it’s never been presented before.”
“Wait…you’re talking about a translation? Didn’t Pinsky already knock that out of the park back in—”
“I’m not talking about another inaccessible translation. I’m talking about an adaptation.”
Marquette straightened in his chair. “I’m not following.”
“We’re looking for something written in modern language. Possibly even using modern historical figures.”
Marquette laughed. “You mean like putting Bill Clinton in the second circle?”
“Exactly. And Bernie Madoff in the eighth, and so on.”
“Who’s in the ninth?”
“I have no idea. That’s where you would come in with your vast knowledge of the mood and intent of the original text. We want a book that can communicate to present-day American masses, just as Dante’s masterpiece reached his Italian countrymen back in the fourteenth century.”
Marquette felt a shudder of excitement.
An adaptation for the masses could mean recognition. Serious recognition, beyond the handful of academics who subscribed to the same six scholarly journals.
And he did have a sabbatical scheduled for the fall term.
“Of course, you don’t have to decide right now,” Siders said, rising from his chair, buttoning his blazer. “Are you free for lunch? I can lay it all out for you. We are offering a sizeable advance.”
Marquette leaned back in his chair and scratched under his chin at the salt-and-pepper goatee. His wife, an economics professor at Northwestern, did have a midday mixer for her department faculty that he had kind of promised to attend, but the last thing he wanted to do was spend several hours mingling with a bunch of accountants dressed up like teachers.
“That’d be lovely,” he said.
The pale man smiled. “Perfect. And I brought the company credit card, so lunch is on me.”
March 31, Noon
Home was a house in a secluded, woodsy area in the western suburb of Bensenville. I moved there with my mother a while back, but my mom had since gone on to a Florida retirement community (where, according to a phone call from her last week, she had to buy a new mattress because she wore the other one out with sexual escapades). Now I lived there with Phin, an ill-tempered cat named Mr. Friskers, and a basset hound named Duffy who was a gift from a friend also named Duffy.
Phin pulled into the driveway and hit the unlock code for the garage door. When he parked inside, I entered the disarm code for one of our three burglar alarms. I walked into the house, disarmed the second alarm, and patted the third one on the head. As usual, Duffy was barking his head off, and truth be told, I trusted him more than I trusted the electronic systems. Though he only weighed about eighty pounds, his bark was loud and deep, and sounded like it sprang from a giant Rottweiler.
Duffy gave my hand a lick, his tail wagging furiously. With his stunted legs and sagging belly, he looked like someone had stepped on a very fat beagle. Duffy the guy had dropped Duffy the dog over at my place a few months ago when he caught wind of my current situation with Luther Kite. I’d grown quite fond of the hound, who liked to sing whenever I took a shower, and he was the only creature on the planet that Mr. Friskers seemed to tolerate.
Phin locked up behind me, and I waddled into my office, kicked off my shoes, and plopped my fat ass into my computer chair. I was exhausted and hungry. But before I could rest or eat, I had some work to do.
First item on the agenda was calling Duffy the guy—Duffy Dombrowski. I met him some time ago on a trip to New York. He was a counselor who moonlighted as a pro boxer, and I guessed he might have had a crush on me. Or vice-versa.
He answered on the third ring. “Yeah?”
“Duff, Jack Daniels.”
“Hey, Jack. How’s stuff?”
“Stuff’s fine. I need you to take Duffy for a few weeks.”
“Everything okay?”
“I’m going to this pregnancy spa, and I don’t want to kennel him. I can give you some money for food.”
“You’ll do no such thing. And I’d be happy to take him for a while.”
“He eats his weight in dog food every five hours.”
“That little? You trying to starve him to death?”
I smiled. “I can ship him to you. You still living in that trailer?”
“Chateau Dombrowski is still my summer home. In winter, I’ve got a Swiss chalet.”
“You can’t even spell chalet.”
“I can’t even spell Swiss. When can I expect the beast?
”
“I’ll text you.”
“Looking forward. Everything else, uh, okay?”
“Fine,” I lied. “With you?”
“Life’s a banquet, and I’ve got forks for hands.”
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