If something had happened to Anselm … well, that would take care of one of their problems. But Lethe wasn’t just going to shrug off his disappearance, not when two faculty members were dead too. Alex stopped in front of the University Art Gallery. Marjorie Stephen. Dean Beekman.
Could Anselm be a victim as well? Not if Turner had the right suspect in custody. Ed Lambton’s son had no reason to go after someone barely associated with Yale anymore. Unless they’d been making the wrong connections from the start.
A few minutes later, Turner pulled up in his Dodge and Alex slid into the passenger’s seat, grateful for the heat.
“Jesus,” she said. “Did you sleep at all?”
He shook his head, a muscle ticking in his jaw. He was sharply dressed as always, navy wool suit with the subtlest pinstripe, slate-colored tie, Burberry overcoat laid neatly over the back seat. But he had dark smudges under his eyes and his skin looked ashen. Turner was a handsome man, but a few more nights playing tag with his personal demons and he might not be.
“What line did it use?” Alex asked.
Turner navigated the Dodge back into traffic. “It didn’t show up as Carmichael this time. Thought it would be cute to wait for me in the parking lot dressed up like my grandfather.”
“Bad?”
He gave a single, terse nod. “For a second I thought … I don’t know.”
“You believed it was him.”
“The dead stay dead, right? But he … It looked like him, sounded like him. I felt happy when I saw him, like it was some kind of miracle.”
A gift. A reward for all the pain. Exactly the way Alex had felt when she’d held Hellie. Losing that again had almost broken her.
That was why Turner looked terrible. Not because he hadn’t slept, but because the demon had fed on him.
“I don’t know how much longer I can handle this,” Turner said.
“How did you get free?”
“He told me we were both in danger, that I had to go with him, and I was halfway down the block when I realized how fast he was moving, how light on his feet. My grandfather had arthritis. He couldn’t take a step without hurting. I said … Maybe some part of me knew he wasn’t right. I said, ‘ Heal me, Lord, and I will be healed.’”
“Did he burst into flames?”
Turner barked a laugh. “No, but he looked at me with this soft little smile, like I’d said something about the weather. My grandfather loved scripture.
He had a pocket Bible, carried it everywhere with him, kept it over his heart.
If I quoted God’s word to him, his face should have lit up like a sunrise.”
Cunning, but not smart.
“Then things got ugly,” said Turner. “Even though I knew it wasn’t him, I didn’t want to use the oak on him, to push him away. He seemed…”
Turner’s voice tightened, and Alex realized he was fighting back tears. She’d seen him angry, frustrated, but never grieving, never lost. “He was so old and frail. When I turned on him, he looked scared and confused. He…” “It wasn’t him,” Alex said. “That thing was feeding on you.” They pulled into a parking lot.
“I know, but—”
“It still feels like shit.”
“It really does.” He stared straight ahead, at the chain-link fence and the big brick building beyond. “You know they call the devil the Father of Lies?
I don’t think I ever really understood what that could mean until now.”
Alex tried not to squirm in her seat. Every time Turner got biblical, she felt uneasy, as if he was telling her about some grand hallucination and it was her job to nod sagely and pretend she saw miracles too. Then again, she’d spent her whole life seeing things no one else did; maybe she could extend him the benefit of the doubt.
For a moment she felt that pull to tell him everything, what Eitan had asked of her, the jobs she’d done for him, the fact that he had been here, in
New Haven. Turner knew what it was like to be backed into a corner, to do the wrong thing because all the right things just got you in deeper.
Instead she got out of the car. “I think something may have happened to Michael Anselm.”
“Because he didn’t show up at Il Bastone?”
“I figured he went back to New York, but I met with the new Praetor just now and he didn’t say a word about the Gauntlet or all of us getting kicked out of Lethe.”
“Could be Anselm wanted to talk to the board in person.”
“Could be,” Alex said. They hustled across the street to the entrance, and passed through a revolving door into a big, anonymous lobby. It didn’t really look like a hospital. They might have been anywhere. “Or maybe something got to him before he made it back to the city.”
Turner flashed his badge and ID at the desk, and they headed for a bank of elevators.
“I thought the demons were tied to us. Why would they seek out Anselm?” He sounded worried, and Alex understood why. None of them wanted these things going after their friends and family.
“Who says something else didn’t get loose? Anselm stopped the ritual.
Maybe there was blowback.”
“You’re guessing,” Turner said. “Or, as we call it in the business, pontificating out of your ass. For all you know, Anselm had a fight with his wife and he just hasn’t gotten around to screwing us.”
