Once they were back at the armory, Dawes walked Alex through a curative for the burns on her fingers, all the while insisting that she was fine and that she was happy to be left alone. Alex could see that she most definitely wasn’t fine, but if Dawes wanted to clap on her headphones and spend two hours not working on her dissertation, Alex wasn’t going to stand in her way. She left the Mercedes parked behind Il Bastone so Dawes wouldn’t get twitchy about her driving it solo and called a car to take her to the med school.
Turner had texted her an address, but she didn’t know this part of campus well. She’d been to the medical library only once, when Darlington had escorted her to the basement and into a pretty paneled room lined with glass jars, each with a black lid and a square label, each with a full or partial human brain floating inside.
“Cushing’s personal collection,” he’d said, then opened one of the drawers beneath the shelves to reveal a row of tiny infant skulls. He donned nitrile gloves, then selected two for a mid-quarter prognostication Skull and Bones wanted to perform.
“Why those?” Alex had asked.
“The skulls aren’t finished forming. They show all possible futures.
Don’t worry, we bring them back intact.”
“I’m not worried.” After all, they were just bones. But she’d let Darlington make the return visit to the Cushing collection on his own.
The building at 300 George was nothing like the beautiful old library with its star-strewn ceiling. The Department of Psychiatry stretched most of the block, big, gray, and modern. She’d expected to see police cars, crime
scene tape, maybe even reporters. But everything was quiet. Turner’s Dodge was parked out front beside a dark van.
She stood on the sidewalk a long moment. Last year she’d begged Turner to involve her in his investigation, but now she hesitated, thinking of the creature that might or might not be Darlington sitting in that golden circle. She had too much to worry about already and too many secrets to keep. She couldn’t afford to get involved in a murder. And some paranoid part of her wondered if this was all some elaborate setup, if Turner had found out about the jobs she was doing for Eitan.
But her choices were to go home or walk through the fire, and Alex didn’t really know how to not get burned. She texted Turner, and a minute later, the front door opened.
He waved her inside. Turner looked good, but he always did. The man knew how to dress and his khaki, summer-weight suit was all sharp lines and clean creases.
“You look like you escaped from juvie,” he said when he saw her Lethe House sweats.
“I’m getting my cardio in. I jogged here.” “Really?”
“No. What’s going on?”
Turner shook his head. “Probably an ordinary death that has nothing to do with … hocus-pocus. But after the buffoonery you got up to last year, I wanted an expert opinion.”
“I got up to solving crime, Turner. What did you get up to?” “I’m already sorry I called you.”
“Makes two of us.”
Inside, the lobby was quiet and dark, lit only by the streetlights filtering through the windows. They took an elevator to the third floor, and Alex followed Turner down a stark hallway bright with overhead fluorescents. She saw a gurney and two men in blue windbreakers from the coroner’s office leaning against the wall, absorbed in their phones.
They were waiting to take the body.
“Where is everyone?” Alex asked. She couldn’t help but think about the circus that had surrounded Tara’s murder.
“Right now it’s looking like natural causes, so we’re trying to keep this quiet.”
Turner led her into a small, messy office with a big window that probably had a nice view during the day. Now it was just a glossy black mirror, and the reflection gave Alex the uneasy feeling she’d slipped into a different version of her life. She’d done stints in juvie and it was only dumb luck she’d never gotten jammed up when she was an adult. Seeing herself in her sad sweats beside Turner in his fine suit made her feel small, and she didn’t like it.
“Who is she?” Alex asked.
The woman was slumped at her desk, as if she’d laid her head down on her extended arm to take a short nap. Her long salt-and-pepper hair lay over one shoulder in a braid, and her glasses hung from a colorful chain around her neck.
“Were you at a bonfire?” Turner asked. “You smell like…” He hesitated, and Alex knew it was because whatever scent was on her was not quite smoke.
“Ritual stuff,” she said and predictably Turner scowled. But he was still a detective. “It’s not Thursday.”
“I’m trying to brush up before the semester really gets going.”
He looked like he knew she was lying, and that was fine. She didn’t have any interest in explaining that she and Dawes had attempted to yank Darlington out of hell with what could only be described as unexpected results. Turner didn’t even know they were trying.
“Someone found her here?” she asked.
“Her name is Marjorie Stephen, she’s a tenured psych professor. Nearly twelve years with the department, runs one of the labs. The night cleaner found the body and called me.”
“Called you? Not 9-1-1?”
He shook his head. “I know him from the neighborhood, friend of my mom’s. He didn’t want trouble with the cops.”
“Neither do I.”
Turner raised a brow. “Then act like it.”
Every contrary bone in Alex’s body wanted to tell him to fuck off. “Why am I here?”
“Have a look. Crime scene’s come and gone.”
Alex wasn’t really sure she wanted to. She’d seen way too many corpses since she’d joined Lethe, and this was the second in three days.
She walked around the body, giving it a wide berth, trying to avoid that cold absence. “Jesus,” she gasped when she reached the other side. The woman’s eyes were wide and staring, their pupils a milky gray. “What did that? Poison?”
“We don’t know yet. Could be nothing. An aneurysm, a stroke.” “That’s not what happens when you have a stroke.”
“No,” Turner admitted. “I’ve never seen it.” Alex leaned in, wary. “There’s…”
“No smell yet. We’re estimating time of death sometime between 8 and 10 p.m. tonight, but we’ll know more after the autopsy.”
Alex tried not to show her relief. Some part of her had wondered if Dawes was right and their ritual had been the cause of this. She knew stray magic could do real damage. But this woman had died hours later.
The professor had her hand on a book. “The Bible?” Alex asked, surprised.
“It’s possible she was in pain and seeking comfort,” said Turner.
Reluctantly he added, “It’s also possible this was staged.” “Seriously?”
“Look closer.”
Marjorie Stephen’s hand was gripped around the book, and one of her fingers was tucked between the pages, as if she had been trying to keep her place when she lay down to die.
“Where did she stop reading?”
Turner pushed up the pages with a gloved hand. Alex forced herself to lean in.
“Judges?”
“You know your Bible?” Turner asked. “Do you?”
“Well enough.”
“Is that part of police training?”
“That’s six years of Sunday school when I could have been playing baseball.”
“Were you any good?”
“Nope. But I’m not any good at scripture either.” “So what am I missing?”
“I don’t know. Judges is boring as hell. Lists of names, not much else.” “And you pulled security footage or whatever?”
“We did. Plenty of people in the building at that time, but we’ll have to sort through the lobby tapes to see if anyone wasn’t supposed to be here.” He tapped the desk calendar with his gloved finger. On the Saturday of Marjorie Stephen’s death, she—or someone—had written, Hide the outcasts. “Ring any bells?”
Alex hesitated, then shook her head. “Maybe. I don’t think so.” “It’s also from the Bible.”
“Judges?”
“Isaiah. The destruction of Moab.”
Turner was watching her closely, waiting to see if any of this would spark. Alex had the distinct sensation of letting him down.
“What about the professor’s family?” she asked.
“We informed the husband. We’ll talk to him tomorrow. Three kids, all grown. They’re driving and flying in.”
“Did he say if she was religious?”
“According to him, the closest she got to church was yoga every Sunday.”
“That Bible says otherwise.” Alex knew the look of a well-loved book, spine broken, pages dog-eared and marked up.
Now Turner’s lips quirked in a smile. “It sure does. But look again.
Look at her.”
Alex didn’t want to. She was still reeling from what she’d seen at Black Elm and now Turner was testing her. But then she saw it.
“Her rings are loose.”
“That’s right. And look at her face.”
No way was Alex gazing into those milky eyes again. “She looks like a dead woman.”
“She looks like an eighty-year-old dead woman. Marjorie Stephen just turned fifty-five.”
Alex’s stomach lurched, as if she’d missed a step. That was why Turner thought the societies were involved.
“She hadn’t been ill,” he continued. “This lady liked to hike East Rock and Sleeping Giant. She ran every morning. We spoke to two people with offices on this hallway who saw her earlier today. They said she looked normal, perfectly healthy. When we showed them a photo of the body, they barely recognized her.”
It smacked of the uncanny. But what about the Bible? The societies weren’t the type to quote scripture. Their texts were far rarer and more arcane.
“I don’t know,” said Alex. “It doesn’t quite add up.”
Turner rubbed a hand over his low fade. “Good. So tell me I’m jumping at shadows.”
Alex wanted to. But there was something wrong here, something more than a woman left to die alone with a Bible in her hand, something in those milky gray eyes.
“I can search the Lethe library,” Alex said. “But I’m going to require some reciprocity.”
“That’s not actually the way this works, Dante.”
“I’m Virgil now,” Alex said, though maybe not for long. “It works the way Lethe says it does.”
“There’s something different about you, Stern.” “I cut my hair.”
“No, you didn’t. But something’s off about you.” “I’ll make you a list.”
He led her into the hall and waved the coroner staff through to the office, where they’d zip Marjorie Stephen into a body bag and wheel her away. Alex wondered if they’d close her eyes first.
“Tell me what you find in the library,” Turner said at the elevator.
“Send me the tox report,” Alex replied. “That would be the likeliest link to the societies. But you’re right. It’s probably nothing except a waste of my night.”
Before the doors could close, Turner shoved his hand in and they pinged back open. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You always looked like you had trouble chasing you.”
Alex jabbed the door-close button. “So?” “Now you look like it caught up.”
