CHAPTER SIX
Marcus knocked like someone who believed doors were mortal enemies.
KNOCK.KNOCK-KNOCK.
Pause.
KNOCK.
Inside, something groaned.
A slippered shuffle approached.The bolt slid back.Kate opened the door halfway, one eye squinting against the hallway light, hair flattened on one side like an overnight landslide.
“You’re lucky I don’t carry before coffee,” she muttered.
“Good morning to you too.”Marcus held up a paper bag and a cardboard tray.“Donuts.Hot coffee.Bribery.I didn’t think you’d fancy a lobster roll at this hour.”
Kate stared at it, then let him in with a grudging wave.“Fine.You may live.”
The room was dim but orderly — Kate’s version of orderly, at least, with the papers and books mostly concentrated on the desk and around it.She collapsed onto the edge of the bed and held out a hand for coffee like a medieval supplicant receiving a holy relic.
“You sleep at all?”Marcus asked.
“If I say yes, it’ll be a lie, and I’m too tired to lie.”She took a long gulp, sighed.“But I did figure something out.”
He raised an eyebrow.“Already?”
"Insomnia loves puzzles.The first of the artworks — the drawing of the tablets?I think I understand what he's getting at."
Marcus sat on the arm of a chair, donut in hand.“Hit me.”
"The Ten Commandments came on two tablets," she began, clearing her throat."But it's not an arbitrary division.Tablet One is about the relationships between God and humans.Tablet Two is about relationships between humans and humans.So far, so Sunday school, right?"
Marcus nodded.
“Well,” she continued, suddenly looking more awake, “you’d expect‘honor your father and mother’to be in the second tablet — because it’s a human relationship.But it’s not.It’s on the first.”
“That seems… backwards.”
“Exactly.”Kate pointed at him with the donut she hadn’t yet eaten.“That’s the whole point.The murderous scribbler wants us to notice that.He wants us to understand: dishonoring your parents isn’t just being rude to Mom and Dad.It’s an offense against the Creator.As in — capital C Creator.”
Marcus let out a slow whistle.“That’s… heavy.”
Kate took another gulp of coffee.“If you dishonor the people who createdyou, you dishonor the One who created the world.That’s the theology.”
“You get that from the artwork?”
“Sort of.”She made a tiny grimace.“Also from a few dozen Christian and Jewish TikTokers.But I’m feeling pretty proud right now.”
“No progress on the second one.The painting?”
Kate made a face.“A little advice, Marcus.When the lovely Cheryl brings you coffee in bed, don’t say, ‘Where’s my bagel?’”
“Sorry.Long night.”
"Truth is, I hit a wall with the cartoony painting thing, so I sent it to Gabe to see if it rang any bells."
Gabe Levine was her former tutor and mentor, whose career had been, thus far, the perfect reverse of Kate’s: a former FBI profiler turned academic. She liked to call him her rabbi.Officially a specialist in ancient Near Eastern languages and cultures, there was barely a topic from any place, of any era, on which he didn’t have an informed view.
