Page 174 of Dead Beat

“I’d like to meet. I have an idea for a compromise that might make us both happy.”

“Delighted to hear it.” He could tell Reed was smiling on the other end of the line. Darlington didn’t like it, but his options had narrowed. Don’t let your failure to understand your own limits get your Dante killed. He hadn’t forgotten that warning or the price the first pilgrims had paid for their delusions.

“You’ve been to Black Elm,” he said. “We can meet there.”

They set the date and time.

Then Darlington said, “I’m embarrassed to ask, but I need you to fill the Lethe accounts.”

“How much do you need?”

“Ten thousand.”

The briefest pause. The money was nothing to Reed, and Darlington knew he would consider this a down payment on the deal they were about to make.

“It will be in the Virgil account momentarily,” he said.

Darlington hung up. There would be no coming back from this. He knew it. But it wouldn’t be the first deal Lethe had made with the devil.

65

In the morning, while Darlington was working in the library, Alex texted Mercy, then went to check on Dawes. She was sitting by the window in a high-backed chair, her laptop open. She removed her headphones when Alex backed into the room carrying a tray.

“Darlington got egg sandwiches and I made a pot of tea,” she said. “Are you working?”

“Not really. I thought I would read through my dissertation, but I can’t seem to focus.”

“We all need some time off.”

Dawes fiddled with the napkin on the tray. “I guess I could go visit my sister.”

“Or—and I know this sounds crazy—you could leave Connecticut entirely.”

“I don’t want to.”

Alex sat down across from her. “Why?”

“I don’t know exactly. The dissertation was always the purpose. Get it done. Get published. Go on the job market. But what if I do somehow miraculously get a teaching position? I don’t want to stand in front of people and give lectures. I have literally had nightmares about that.”

“I’m not sure how many research positions are available in your field.”

“I know, I know. So why did I go down this path in the first place?”

But this much Alex understood. “Because we want the good to last as long as it can.”

Dawes leaned back in her chair and looked around the room. “I don’t know when this place started to feel like home.”

Alex remembered her own early days at Il Bastone, how alien she’d felt, an intruder, like the moment of her banishment was around every corner. It seemed as if Dawes had always been there, just as fixed in place as the sunflower staircase.

“The news is out,” she said.

Dawes’s head snapped up and Alex handed over her phone. The headline was from a New York tabloid: Connecticut Nightmare: New Horrors in Old Greenwich!

Turner had told them what he planned, but it was still shocking to see. He had paid an off-the-books visit to Reiter’s estate to gather up old mail—it seemed even vampires had to pay electric bills. Then he planted Teddy Rinearson’s beringed finger in the garbage where he knew one of his CIs mined for bottles to recycle. Sure enough, a call had come in, and from there it had merely been a question of linking the other trash to Reiter’s home to get a warrant. He’d made sure they brought cadaver dogs. So far they had found the remains of at least seven bodies. Alex knew there would be many, many more. The estate, of course, was deserted, and Reiter’s own mangled corpse would never be found. Alex had used hellfire to make sure of that.

Dawes passed her phone back and took a bite of her sandwich. “Turner is going to get a promotion.”

“A big one. Do you think he’ll still hang out with us now that he’s famous?”