CHAPTER TWELVE #2
Thinner on the ground in the second case, perhaps because Cox was incarcerated, and he had farmed the killings out to a disciple.
Perhaps he was a mistrustful employer. According to her notes, there had only been one quote.
St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. ‘The wages of sin are death.’ She looked for it in Gadd’s journal, and it was there. There amidst the nonsense.
She made a list of all the quotations that had accompanied the crime scenes. At some point, she fell asleep at her desk, waking in the quietest hours and falling into bed.
On Saturday afternoon, she took a shower, stood with her head against the tiles, and thought about Topju.
He had been brave. Or foolish. Or both. She should call him.
She should say: I am sorry I made you part of this.
She should ask: did Cox ever get visitors?
Cox? Could he have taken his white sermon across a table with plastic chairs and handed it to a man whose smaller, neat handwriting had recorded it all, in the midst of his own mental tornadoes?
She did not call him.
Instead, she went back to the start of the journal and she made a tick every time she spotted a quotation, another tick if it was on her list from the various crime scenes.
The task got harder over time, because Gadd’s handwriting deteriorated to the point where each word turned into a headache.
She wondered, idly, what caused it. Medication, perhaps?
Something taken, at any rate, whether a doctor was involved or not.
Despite the deteriorating script, Gadd’s writing could be exact when it wanted to be.
She could see the transitions; she could almost date them by sanity.
There were mornings, apparently, even in a place where night was turned off by a switch, where he had woken to clarity and written earnest paragraphs about God’s justice, and the problem of evil.
But then the spell would break and he would pick at the margin like someone worrying a wound while thinking of something else.
A list of birds native to the Eastern seaboard.
A line from Whitman half-remembered, turning into a different one he liked better, or a lyric by the Ronettes.
An almost exquisite drawing of a woman’s hand.
She thought, briefly, of the forgery case Winters had thrown her at to teach her obedience.
She’d glanced at the files. The lawyers’ elaborate signatures.
The maps with the boundary lines. She wasn’t exactly having a blast with her current task, but the thought of moving onto the next one filled her with leaden exhaustion.
She wondered, suddenly, if Gadd’s journal could be an elaborate forgery itself, something cooked up by Cox to convince her that he was everywhere, all the time.
It was possible. So possible that she stopped work for the day and went for a run on the beach.
She returned to it refreshed on Sunday, but squinting at Gadd’s deteriorating cuneiform gave her such a bad headache that she had to lie in bed for several hours.
She ate nothing at all until ten p.m. and then she ate too fast and hated herself.
And then she forgave herself, because there were better things to hate.
By eleven-thirty in the evening, she was on her knees on the carpet with the notebook open and the journal open and her own case file spread like a map and she confirmed, finally, how the river ran.
Psalm 106. 1 Corinthians 10:19. Romans 1:23. Revelation 17. Proverbs 6:16.
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.
“That almost sounds like something a spy would say on a park bench.”
“If you’re taking leave,” Marcus said. “What’s to stop you taking it in New York? I know you’re not working that twelfth-century forgery thing. I checked.”
“Winters barred me from the murder case.”
“Yeh, but she’s away for ten days.”
Kate looked back at the journal on the floor. It wasn't going anywhere. Nothing was changed if she set it aside for a couple of days. A change of scene and task might actually bring her some clarity.
“I’ll look up flights.”
Marcus coughed. "There's an oh-five-ten arriving in Newark, oh-six-forty."
“I’ll see if I can get a seat.”
He coughed again. “I er-well, I thought they might go fast, so I got you one.”
“Well, it’s nice to feel wanted.”
“It was Torres’s idea.”
“Oh. So not yours?”
“Hey, no, I mean I was totally in favor of it, Kate, I just.”
“Marcus. I’m busting your chops. See you in the morning.”