I stepped aside, surrendering the entryway into Mordechai’s inner domain. “I mean, of course. Sure.”
She took off her hat—a trick to relax people they’d probably taught her in cop school—and palmed it by the brim. She instantly seemed less imposing, so I guess it worked.
“You spent a fair amount of time with him, right?” she asked. “His nephew said you were close.”
I lifted my brows. What exactly did the nephew know about me? Had he read the mystery file? “I did, yes. We were friends.”
I realized belatedly how weird that might seem, so I dumped more revelations over the first, to muddy up the mix. “Mordechai first knew my mom, and he helped me get into All Souls. Now, well, I’m…working through college one class at a time. It’s kind of slow going.”
Her glance said: obviously. I flushed a little but didn’t say anything more.
“Were you with him the night he died?”
The urgency to lie to her was almost unbearable. No one had seen me. We’d been in a freaking cemetery. At night. Alone. How weird was that going to look? Probably pretty damned weird.
Tell her the truth. See where this goes.
I pursed my lips, questioning the value of listening to a demonic entity on this topic, then launched in. “I was. But earlier. I’d left the cemetery before he—before he got sick. Or died. Or—God.” I shook my head, tears somehow springing up out of nowhere that I refused to let fall. “I should have been there, but he told me to leave, so I left.”
“Anyone see you?”
“No.” Suddenly, all my years of watching cop shows caught up to me. Did I need a lawyer? “Sorry. I know that’s probably nothelpful. He was alone when I left,” I said again. “Praying. The way he did.”
“Had he injured himself earlier in the day?”
“What?” The sudden question threw me, and I frowned at her. “Oh. No. Not that I could see anyway.”
Hernandez’s brows lifted. “He hadn’t cut his face? Hurt his hands?”
“No! No. I told you, he was fine.” My voice rose a little. “There wasn’t a mark on him.”
Officer Hernandez didn’t say anything for a second, and I leaned forward. “What happened to him, really?” I fixed her with a stare, my need to know so great it practically boiled out of me. “How was he hurt?”
Something in my face either convinced Hernandez I was telling the truth, or she simply wanted to play me a little bit longer. “There was a wound on his forehead that, due to the blood loss, seems to have occurred slightly before his death,” she said. “And his fingers were blistered. Like he’d burned them.”
I frowned at her. A wisp of the rabbi’s cracked hands flickered in my memory, though I couldn’t swear it was real. “Burned them how?”
“You didn’t notice anything wrong with his hands?” she asked again.
I shook my head. I tried to remember Mordechai that night. It had only been five days ago, but it felt like a decade had passed. He’d been praying, his hands folded. When we’d walked, his hands had been folded as well.
“He generally walked with them clasped. That’s just what he did. But if he’d burned them, they would have been wrapped up or something, right? Protected. There was nothing like that.”
“How was he otherwise?”
“He was fine, I told you that. We met, we talked, we walked around the cemetery for a little bit, and then he told me to leave.”
“Why did he tell you to leave?”
“Um, maybe because he was tired of talking to me?” I felt an uncanny urge to laugh. Something tugged loose within me, knowledge about her I didn’t want. She’d lost someone once too, I thought. She didn’t feel sorry for me, exactly, but she did feel sad. Wandering around the office, she asked a few more questions—easier ones now. What we did when we met, what else we’d talked about, if he’d ever taken me anywhere. She seemed pretty much willing to believe my answers. I spoke more about going to All Souls, how Mordechai had helped get me a scholarship to UIC, and that seemed to reassure her. As if God was looking out for me somehow, and I wasn’t simply the victim of some weird old man. Or, worse, that the weird old man wasn’t my victim.
“Well, thank you,” she said eventually, turning to me. She put on her hat again and held out her hand. I shook it automatically, and I didn’t miss it when her gaze fell to my wrists, my fingers.
I held up both of them for her inspection. “You’re welcome to look me over. I honestly didn’t hurt him. I’ll take a lie detector test or whatever?—”
Hernandez only smiled. “No, no, nothing like that. It’s just—there was a word dug into the ground. Part of a word anyway.”
My stomach clenched. “What word?”
