Her stomach dropped in that rollercoaster way, even though she’d seen it coming for days now.She sat back.The room swayed.She closed the journal and took four breaths and then opened it again, because you can’t stop halfway through a sentence when the sentence is asking you one very simple question: how?
Every Bible reference that accompanied the Commandment killings could be found in Gadd’s diary.
Gadd had been incarcerated for years, transferred to psych eighteen months ago.She didn’t know exactly when each entry in the journal had been written, but they’d all gone into that book, Bible quotes and all, a substantial time before the Commandment killings began.
How had he known?Every quote at those scenes had been a secret between a handful of investigators; even the families had been unaware.One of the few mercies afforded the dead.
There were explanations.There always are.People make leaks happen because they need to tell someone at a bar they are important.People sell secrets because their rent is due, overdue, towering above them like a huge mallet.People hack because there is a fence, and they can climb it or tunnel under.People guess, often, and when they “guess right, other people turn the guess into a miracle.
Or — and here her stomach did the rollercoaster thing again and she let it — she had been reading the relationship backwards.All this time, she had thought Cox was the leader, the master, the author.She had thought the verses were his taste, his curation, his theology stapled to a corpse.
What if he was the student?
What if he had gone to a prison once a month and learned by rote the way boys learn Bob Dylan songs from old men on porches, just to try to make a girl look at them differently?
What if Gadd had written these texts like a scripture for a project and Cox had done the work?
Her breath shortened.She counted backwards by sevens to slow it — a trick her therapist had made her learn.
Okay, she told herself.Okay.That is testable.That is not a ghost story.That is a visitor log.That is a question with an avenue, a database, and a date.That is the kind of work you know how to do and are not doing, yet, because you have been sitting on the floor for days on end, like the people you arrest.
She closed the book and put both hands on it as if it might run away.She did a little half-hearted tidying-up, and then started to read the book from the beginning again.
At one-thirty a.m.the phone rang like salvation.Or like a dare.
She knew it would be him before she lifted it.Marcus lived with the soft gift of knowing when she would not be asleep and he never called when he thought she was.He texted then.
“Hey,” she said.
“Your voice sounds like you haven’t used it for several days.”
She smiled despite herself and felt the smile stretch muscles that had forgotten the trick.
“I’ve been busy,” she said, carefully.“What time is it?”
“You know exactly,” he said, and then, because he knew that tone would go sideways if he held it: “I figured you’d be up.Wanted to catch you before you decided to do the healthy thing and go to bed.”
“I was considering a kale smoothie,” she said.
“That’s an arrestable offence,” he said.“Listen.”
She went chilly in a way that was not unpleasant.Work was an anaesthetic shot expertly into a vein.“What happened?”
“Patricia Kellerman,” he said.“Manhattan.Midtown.Corporate lawyer.She used to do those mergers that make half the country feel like they just lost half their furniture in a divorce.”
“Used to,” Kate repeated.
There was a pause.She could hear the room he was in: something echoey, glass, the hum of a building where the lights don’t go out because money doesn’t need to sleep.He must have been at a scene or near one.He would be hunched over a Styrofoam cup of coffee like a penitent.
“Nails,” he said.“Hands down.”
“Hebrew?”she asked.Her voice was steady now, and she knew it would be making him smile; this was the version of her he trusted most, the woman who could ask a question like it was surgery and not flinch at the cut.
“Not sure.It doesn’t look like the others you’ve translated, but it looks like something you’d recognise.And there’s three.Three separate quotations or messages, I mean.”
“Well,” she began.“Keep me in the loop—”
He interrupted her.“Winters is in Germany,” he said.
