“Do you?”
“Well enough.”
“Is that part of police training?”
“That’s six years of Sunday school when I could have been playing baseball.”
“Were you any good?”
“Nope. But I’m not any good at scripture either.”
“So what am I missing?”
“I don’t know. Judges is boring as hell. Lists of names, not much else.”
“And you pulled security footage or whatever?”
“We did. Plenty of people in the building at that time, but we’ll have to sort through the lobby tapes to see if anyone wasn’t supposed to be here.” He tapped the desk calendar with his gloved finger. On the Saturday of Marjorie Stephen’s death, she—or someone—had written, Hide the outcasts. “Ring any bells?”
Alex hesitated, then shook her head. “Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“It’s also from the Bible.”
“Judges?”
“Isaiah. The destruction of Moab.”
Turner was watching her closely, waiting to see if any of this would spark.
Alex had the distinct sensation of letting him down.
“What about the professor’s family?” she asked.
“We informed the husband. We’ll talk to him tomorrow. Three kids, all grown. They’re driving and flying in.”
“Did he say if she was religious?”
“According to him, the closest she got to church was yoga every Sunday.”
“That Bible says otherwise.” Alex knew the look of a well-loved book, spine broken, pages dog-eared and marked up.
Now Turner’s lips quirked in a smile. “It sure does. But look again. Look at her.”
Alex didn’t want to. She was still reeling from what she’d seen at Black Elm and now Turner was testing her. But then she saw it.
“Her rings are loose.”
“That’s right. And look at her face.”
No way was Alex gazing into those milky eyes again. “She looks like a dead woman.”
“She looks like an eighty-year-old dead woman. Marjorie Stephen just turned fifty-five.”
Alex’s stomach lurched, as if she’d missed a step. That was why Turner thought the societies were involved.
“She hadn’t been ill,” he continued. “This lady liked to hike East Rock and Sleeping Giant. She ran every morning. We spoke to two people with offices on this hallway who saw her earlier today. They said she looked normal, perfectly healthy. When we showed them a photo of the body, they barely recognized her.”
It smacked of the uncanny. But what about the Bible? The societies weren’t the type to quote scripture. Their texts were far rarer and more arcane.
“I don’t know,” said Alex. “It doesn’t quite add up.”
Turner rubbed a hand over his low fade. “Good. So tell me I’m jumping at shadows.”
Alex wanted to. But there was something wrong here, something more than a woman left to die alone with a Bible in her hand, something in those milky gray eyes.
“I can search the Lethe library,” Alex said. “But I’m going to require some reciprocity.”
“That’s not actually the way this works, Dante.”
“I’m Virgil now,” Alex said, though maybe not for long. “It works the way Lethe says it does.”
“There’s something different about you, Stern.”
“I cut my hair.”
“No, you didn’t. But something’s off about you.”
“I’ll make you a list.”
He led her into the hall and waved the coroner staff through to the office, where they’d zip Marjorie Stephen into a body bag and wheel her away. Alex wondered if they’d close her eyes first.
“Tell me what you find in the library,” Turner said at the elevator.
“Send me the tox report,” Alex replied. “That would be the likeliest link to the societies. But you’re right. It’s probably nothing except a waste of my night.”
Before the doors could close, Turner shoved his hand in and they pinged back open. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You always looked like you had trouble chasing you.”
Alex jabbed the door-close button. “So?”
“Now you look like it caught up.”
9
Last Summer
Alex touched down at LAX at 9 a.m. on Sunday. Michael Anselm and Lethe had sprung for first class, so she’d ordered two shots of gratis whiskey to knock herself out and slept through the flight. She dreamed of her last night at Ground Zero, Hellie lying cold beside her, the feel of the bat in her hand.
This time, Len spoke before she took her first swing.
