The helicopter tilted, and her stomach did the same.The pilot’s voice crackled in her ear.
"Landing at East 34th.Car waiting.You've got fifteen minutes to the scene."
Kate glanced at Marcus.He raised his eyebrows.“Fifteen minutes.Long enough for coffee?”
“Not unless you drink it through an IV.Want a tic-tac?”She rattled the box.
“Why’ve you started guzzling them again?”
“I’m trying to wean myself off chocolate,” she replied, crunching one and popping another into her palm.
“Good luck with that.What were you doing when the bat-phone rang?”
“Just leaving my mom’s.You?”
Marcus made a face.Somewhere between a grin and a leer.“Role-play.”
“Euw.TMI, Marcus.”
“You asked.”
They touched down in a roar of noise and wind.The car was already idling at the edge of the helipad, a black SUV with government plates.Inside, a young uniformed officer handed Kate a folder.
“Detective Torres asked me to give you this, ma’am.”
Kate flipped it open: crime scene photos from the 37th floor of Stemberg & Luft Capital.The victim — male, late forties — seated at a sleek glass desk, eyes open, shirt soaked red from a slash of a wound at his neck.
Judging by the color of the blood and the sheer quantity of it, the killer had gone for the jugular; not so much a killing as a slaughter.But there were symbolic elements too.A shorter, slimmer wound to the right side.And his hands were nailed flat to the desk surface, a dark pool spreading across the tooled leather top and dripping to the carpeted floor below.Between his wrists, carved deep into the desk itself, were the same delicate shapes she knew all too well.Hebrew.
She sighed.She was right, though it gave her no satisfaction.Surely it meant Cox was alive.Alive and, presumably, whispering poison into the ear of some new acolyte.
Marcus leaned in.“So Cox didn’t die after the escape from prison.”
It had been an audacious operation, and a demonstration of the kind of network Cox had to have.He’d arranged his own stabbing in prison, then given himself sepsis in order to get shipped to hospital.En route, the ambulance was targeted by a team of his henchmen, and despite Kate’s best efforts, Cox had limped away into the wilderness.
“I’m guessing not.I mean, he could have died, but left instructions for his followers, I guess, but… I don’t know.Don’t tell me I’m crazy, Marcus, but all the while he’s been gone, I’ve justfeltthat he’s still alive.I know it.I can’t explain it.I don’t want to say I’ve got a connection to him, but….”
“You’ve got that connection because you’re a good agent,” Marcus said, looking at her sternly.“And don’t forget it.”
She gave him a half-smile of gratitude, then returned to the photographs in the folder.
“The verse is Exodus chapter 20, verses eight to eleven.Zakor et yom hash-shabbat l’kadesho. Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.The verse is Old Testament.The wound to the side and the crucifixion recall the death of Jesus.”
“What about the neck?”
“I don’t know.Elijah Cox likes to see all his deeds as a kind of new covenant, the next phase of God’s revelation.But other self-styled prophets have had similar ideas.And the jugular’s also a very practical choice – Brennan would have been incapacitated by blood loss within a few seconds, making it much easier to nail him to the desk.”
Conversations like that came with their own obligatory silence, and they didn’t speak again until they reached Lexington.The office tower loomed like a polished blade, floodlights bleaching the street.NYPD cruisers lined the block, cameras flashing.A forensics van hummed at the curb.
“The gang’s all here,” Marcus muttered as they stepped out.
Detective Amanda Torres met them at the revolving doors — compact, precise, with dark curls scraped into a knot and the look of a woman who’d been awake for thirty-six hours.
“Valentine, Reid,” she said, shaking their hands.“Welcome to my mess.”
“Thanks for the invite,” Marcus said.
The thirty-seventh floor gleamed — glass, chrome, and too much money.The kind of place where ambition came with its own espresso bar.
