CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By eleven, the temporary office was a reflection of Kate’s impatience.
A ring of paper coffee cups marched around the wastebasket; an empty tic-tac box sat on top of a full one, peppermint flavor.
A stack of legal pads, each deserted after four lines, made a stepped pyramid on the conference table, while the Bureau phone lay face down as if sulking.
Beyond the glass, the Fifteenth Precinct kept up its municipal hum: printers rasping, chairs scraping, a detective laughing too loudly at something that wasn’t funny.
Torres was at the OCME. Her last text: Autopsy on Kellermann about to start.
Will ring. Marcus had been welded to a phone since nine, working through the list of people who kept Patricia Kellermann’s engine turning.
When he finally knocked, he was still wearing the expression he got when he’d had to be polite for an hour straight.
He closed the door behind him with a gentle hip-bump, as if the glass might bruise.
"Field report," he said, dropping into the chair opposite.
"Kellermann ran her shop like a lunar colony.
Airlock checks, oxygen audits, everyone tethered to mission control.
On call twenty-four/seven, weekends, Thanksgiving, your sister's graduation, the rapture.
But—" He lifted a finger. "—nothing she didn't demand of herself.
Her EA swears she slept four hours a night, treated work like a sacrament. "
Kate scribbled without looking, a habit more about ritual than memory. “Resentment?”
"Negative," he said. "It's almost weird.
Stemberg the way glue and cheap laminate made a scent of their own. She slit it with the edge of her ID. Cardboard fibers gave with a papery sigh.
“What is it?” Marcus craned.
She slid the book out and had to bite down on a laugh that wasn’t humor. “Of course,” she said. “He’s not even subtle.”
Dark-blue cover. The eagle in its circle. HANDBOOK FOR NEWLY APPOINTED SPECIAL AGENTS.
“Such a snappy title,” Kate said.
“The Feds’ Bible,” Marcus added, grinning despite himself. “I thought they killed that ten years ago.”
“They tried,” Kate said. “There was uproar. Tradition is a narcotic.” She laid it on the table, its spine refusing to lie flat, and flipped past the Director’s foreword, past the anodyne history to the meat: field offices, chain-of-command diagrams, dire admonitions about interagency communication.
“If he wants page-line-word, this is a safe bet. He’s ensuring we’re reading from the same altar. ”
“Give me the numbers,” Marcus said, pulling his chair alongside hers, shoulders almost touching. He had the steadiness of a wall.
Kate glanced at her notebook. “Triplets. First set resolves into four triplets, which should produce a phrase. I checked the character shapes against transliteration passes last night. We’re at page ninety-six, line seven, word four.” She counted—lips moving silently, finger tracking. “THE.”
Second: page 173, line nine, word two. She found it. “MASTER.”
A small throb in her throat. She kept going. Page thirty-nine, line twelve, word eight. “REARS.”
Page two hundred and one, line six, word three. “THE.”
Page 112, line three, word nine. “SPOTTED.”
Page 252, line eleven, word one. “CALF.”
Marcus whispered it, as if saying it too loudly might make it truer. “THE MASTER REARS THE SPOTTED CALF.”
Kate sat back. The fluorescent light put a ring of white on the plastic sleeve.
You could call it an update to Denton’s nickname, to Gadd’s whackjob journal.
But updates generally meant something. And maybe this meant nothing; maybe it was just more of Cox’s taunting, more of him saying, ‘You don’t know how much I know. ’ But what if it meant more than that?
“The calf is me,” she said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “Remember Denton?”
“Sure,” Marcus said, cautiously.
“He called me that. The spotted calf. I think Cox is referencing that. I’m okay, Marcus,” she added.
“You’re sure?”
She capped her pen so she wouldn’t snap it. At some point, she’d have to tell him about Gadd’s journal. But not yet. This felt more urgent. Or maybe she just didn’t want to go there, when she understood so little herself. “I’m sure. On to the second set.”
He exhaled, nodding. “Hit me.”
This time, the results were stranger. A pair of numbers, 96 and 224. And a woman’s name: the editor of the manual, thanked profusely, at least by Bureau standards, in the handbook’s foreword. Jeanette.
“Two-twenty-four,” Marcus mused. “February 24th. That’s today.”
The world narrowed by a degree. The clock on the wall read 11:12. Outside, Queens groaned. Kate’s hands were suddenly cold in the middle and hot at the ends.
“What is it, Vee?”
“Something about the other two,” Kate replied, distractedly. “Ninety-six and Jeanette. I don’t know why, but I just thought of my mom. It’s probably nothing.”
Despite saying that, she was already on her feet, the Bureau phone in her hand before she’d told her hand to take it.
Marcus rose too. “Whatever this is—”
“I need to call her,” Kate said. “I’ll be right here.” He nodded, pivoted toward the glass, elbows on the sill, giving her a measure of privacy in a room where there was none.
Her mother answered on the second ring, voice raw, as if she’d already been speaking to someone and only just stopped. “Kitty?”
“Hi.” Kate pitched her voice into calm, an internal metronome set to steady. “I’m at work. I need to ask you something, and I’m sorry for how it’s going to sound. Does the name Jeanette mean anything to you?”
Silence like a breath held for too long; then a small sound that wasn’t a word so much as a break in one. When her mother spoke, her voice was wet on the edges. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Kate.”
“Mum?”
“Where did you hear it?”
“It came up in a case,” Kate said, truth-shaped, not detail-shaped. She was careful with specifics, because specificity made people into targets. “That’s all I can say. Does it mean something?”
“Yes,” her mother whispered. The sound of a chair. The faint scrape of a curtain ring on a rod. “It’s today. I mean, it was… it was a long time ago. Today’s the anniversary.”
The old instinct to fill a silence with assistance rose and she held it down. “Tell me,” Kate said, and the way she said it—clean, precise—was the way she asked victims’ families to relive their worst day.
“It was before you were born. We were newly-weds, in New York,” her mother said.
“Your father had been invited to join a research team at Bart’s.
We took the tiniest sublet in a building with cockroaches the size of kittens, and I pretended it was all charming because I was twenty-two and just married and high on romance.
I was pregnant. We’d decided—Gene if a boy, Jeanette if a girl. ”
“Why?” Kate asked.