“I thought you could fix. You are special.”

Alex wanted to scream. “You painted a target on my back.”

“Reiter will not bother with you.”

“How the fuck do you know?”

“I have guests, Alex. You want I should send you some money?”

She’d known for a long time that she might have to kill Eitan. She’d thought about doing it back in Los Angeles, but he was always surrounded by guards like Tzvi, men with guns who wouldn’t think twice about putting her down. And the deal Eitan had proposed had seemed so simple, like something she could handle, just one job. Do this and you’re done. Good girl.

But of course that hadn’t been the end of it. She’d gotten Eitan’s money and she’d made it look easy, so it was always going to be one more favor, one more job, one more hump who owed, one more sob story. And what about her mother? What about Mira going for power walks to the farmers’ market?

Going to work every morning thinking her daughter was safe at last, and that she was safe too?

Alex hung up and stared out at the harsh lights near the pumps, the gleaming sign ablaze with gas prices, the shine of flannel guy’s truck. It felt like the service station was some kind of beacon. But what were they calling out to with all of this bright light?

Killing Eitan would free her, but she’d have to be smart about it, find a way to get him alone, make him vulnerable the way she was. And she had to take her mom out of the equation, to make sure that if she screwed up, Mira wouldn’t pay and that she couldn’t be used as leverage again. To do that she needed money. A lot of it.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” the teacher asked.

“Would you? Until my ride gets here?”

“You’re going to be okay.”

Alex managed a smile. “Because I seem like a good kid?”

The teacher looked surprised. “No, kiddo. Because you’re a killer.”

When Turner’s Dodge arrived, Alex waved goodbye to the teacher and gratefully slid into the passenger seat. He had the heater on and the radio was tuned to some local NPR station describing the day in the markets.

They drove in silence for a while and Alex was actually nodding off when he said, “What did you get yourself into, Stern?”

There was blood on her clothes and a bandage on her neck. Her shoes were covered in mud, and she still smelled of smoke and the booze she’d splattered all over Linus Reiter’s living room.

“Nothing good.”

“That all you’re going to say about it?”

For now it was. “How’s your case going?” She hadn’t told him about her suspicions regarding the Praetor and his rivalry with Beekman yet.

Turner sighed. “Not well. We thought we’d found a connection between Dean Beekman and Professor Stephen.”

“Oh yeah?” Alex was eager to talk about anything that wasn’t Linus Reiter.

“Stephen blew the whistle on data coming out of one of the labs in the psych department. She had concerns that it was massaged by at least one of the fellows and that there’d been shoddy oversight from the professor who published the findings.”

“And the dean?”

“He headed up the committee that disciplined the professor in question.

Ed Lambton.”

“Judges,” Alex murmured, remembering Professor Stephen’s finger resting between the Bible pages. “It makes a kind of sense.”

“Only if you’re being literal,” Turner replied. “Judges isn’t about judges the way we think of them. It was just another word for leaders in biblical times.”

“Maybe the killer didn’t go to Sunday school. Did Lambton lose his job?”

Turner shot her an amused glance. “Of course not. He’s got tenure. But he’s on paid leave and had to retract the paper. His reputation is in ruins. The psych study was on honesty so he’s become a bit of a punch line.

Unfortunately, I can’t find any holes in his alibi. There’s absolutely no way he could have gone after Dean Beekman or Professor Stephen.”

“So now what do you do?”

“Follow the other leads. Marjorie Stephen had a volatile ex-husband.

Beekman had an old harassment charge on the books. We’re not short on enemies.”

I know the feeling.

“Beekman was connected to the societies too.”

“Was he?” Alex asked. Had Turner scooped the Professor WalshWhiteley lead?

“He was in Berzelius.”

Alex snorted. “Berzelius is barely a society. They don’t have any magic.”

“Still a society. Do you know Michelle Alameddine?”

He knew she did. He’d seen them together at Elliot Sandow’s funeral.

Was Turner interrogating her?

“Of course,” she said. “She was Darlington’s Virgil.”

“She also spent time in the psych ward at Yale New Haven. She was part of a study led by Marjorie Stephen, and she was in the city the night Dean Beekman was killed.”

“I saw her,” Alex admitted. “She said she had to catch a train back to New York, that she was having dinner with her boyfriend.”

“We have her on camera at the train station. Monday morning.”

Not Sunday night. Michelle had lied to her. But there could be countless reasons for that.

“How did you know about the psych ward?” Alex asked. “That should be confidential, right?”