“You dealt with it.”
I said nothing. That was one part I couldn’t tell him.
But he picked up on my silence. “Yolanda?”
I looked away. And saw someone going into the apartment building across the street. I drew in my breath and Calahan followed my gaze and snapped to attention. A moment later, the lights in the third floor apartment came on. It was him.
“Okay,” said Calahan. “Wait here.”
Before I could say anything, he’d opened his door and was hurrying off across the street. Wait! Should he be doing this alone?
I watched him slip inside the building. Moments later, up at the third floor window, I saw a man walk into view, his back to me. He opened the apartment’s door and I saw Calahan in the doorway, his mouth moving as he talked to the guy. The guy suddenly bolted and I gave a moan of concern as Calahan chased after him. He slammed the guy against a wall, but the guy punched Calahan in the stomach, doubling him over. Calahan reached for his gun—
There was a flash, and the lights in the apartment went off.
I sat bolt upright in my seat. Shit! I couldn’t see a thing. What do I do now?!
I pulled out my phone and stared at the screen in a panic. Should I call 911? Call the FBI? Calahan hadn’t left any instructions for if things went wrong.
I stared up at the window, straining my eyes, but I couldn’t see a thing. That guy could be killing Calahan. Or he could have already shot or stabbed him and run, and Calahan could be lying there bleeding out—
I looked at my phone again, then stuffed it in my purse. I opened the glove box and grabbed Calahan’s spare gun. Then I wrestled my chair out of the car and got my ass into it. My heart was racing. I felt sick. What the hell am I doing?
I wheeled myself across the street.
24
Yolanda
THE RAIN had left everything so wet and slick that my hand slipped off the door handle twice before I finally managed to haul the door open. Or it might have been that my hands were shaking. The gun felt incredibly heavy in my lap.
I wheeled myself into the deserted hallway, my breath coming in big, panicky gulps. I can’t do this! I should just turn around and go back to the car. Call for backup.
But what if there wasn’t time? What if by the time backup arrived... it was too late?
I wrestled the panic back down. I’d take it one step at a time. First step: get upstairs. The elevator. I could do that. I rolled forward and reached for the button marked “3.”
But before I could press it, the elevator hummed into life and started to ascend. One, two, three—
It stopped on the third floor. Someone had called it there.
And then it started to descend.
Shit! The killer. The killer was on his way down, maybe alone, maybe with Calahan as a hostage. I grabbed the gun and slid my finger over the trigger. I’d never even held one, before. Is this right?!
The elevator reached the second floor. I pointed the gun with both hands, aiming at the slit between the sliding doors. The muzzle jerked up and down with each shaky breath I took.
The elevator reached my floor. I held my breath. The doors opened—
Calahan. Standing beside a guy in his sixties. Both of them saw me at the same time. The old guy flattened himself against the rear of the elevator. Calahan’s eyes bugged out. “Whoah!” he said. “Whoah, whoah! Put it down!” He motioned for me to lower it. But I couldn’t, I was still in shock, my heart racing.
Calahan skirted sideways, stepped around the gun and gently took it from my hands. Both of us slumped in relief. Then the anger arrived. “What the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.
“I thought you were in trouble! I saw the fight!”
Calahan jerked his head at the man in the elevator. “Mr. Avakian got spooked when I said I was a fed. His immigration status is a little... unclear.” Mr. Avakian looked at the floor. “He made a run for it, we tussled.” Calahan rubbed his stomach, then muttered half-admiringly, “He’s got a mean jab, for an old guy.”
“But the lights went out!” I said.
“A lamp got knocked over and the breakers tripped.” Calahan’s tone hardened. “What were you thinking? What if I had been in trouble? You could have been killed!”
He glared down at me, but behind the anger there was something else. He’d unconsciously stepped closer, looming over me protectively. I wasn’t used to that. I’d never had anyone worry about me like that.
“I just didn’t want you to get hurt,” I mumbled.
Calahan scowled but then looked away and cursed under his breath. I bit my lip. He’s not used to having someone worry about him, either.
He finally looked at me, pinning me with those clear blue eyes. “Don’t ever do that again!” Then he paused, considering. “But if you ever do…” He held the gun in front of me and showed me. “You had the safety catch on. Slide that like that: then you’re ready to shoot.”
I nodded. Then I looked questioningly at Mr. Avakian.
“He’s the landlord,” said Calahan. “Rents the apartment to a guy I think is our man, going by what I saw up there. Mr. Avakian was checking the place because the guy hasn’t been here in a few weeks and the rent is due. There’s math stuff all over the place. Maybe you can get something from it.”
We rode the elevator up and Mr. Avakian got the lights back on. As soon as I saw the place, I knew Calahan was right. There were shelves of books on advanced mathematics. There were books on witches, several different versions of the Bible and other religious books, even some stuff on the occult. And there were four notebooks filled cover-to-cover with equations.
Calahan checked the other rooms, then came back. “No clothes in the closet, refrigerator’s empty. He used this place to plan but he left before the first killing and he hasn’t been back since. And he won’t.” He kicked a cupboard. “We missed him.”
“The landlord must have a name, details….”
“He paid in cash. I already ran the name, it’s fake. Got a description: tall, lean, long hair. Not a lot to go on.” He squatted down in front of me, his eyes pleading. “Anything you can tell us would help.”
I started reading through the notebooks. It was getting late and Mr. Avakian made us thick, dark coffee to keep us going. After a few hours, I rubbed my eyes and called Calahan over. “I recognize some of the equations in two of these books from the two killings,” I told him. “They’re like rough drafts.”
“Four notebooks. Four killings?” Calahan’s voice grew bitter. “He’s planning two more?”
I nodded. “That’d be my guess.”
Calahan leaned over my shoulder to peer at the page of equations. I tried not to think about how good it felt, to have his body so close to mine. “Can you use these to get ahead of him? Solve the equations in advance?”
I shook my head. “They’re just rough notes, not the full thing.” I closed the notebook with a sigh of frustration. Then I noticed something and held it up to the desk lamp. There was a word scrawled on the front in pencil, almost invisible against the dark cover. But when I angled the light just right…”Merytou,” I read. “Any idea what that means?”
Calahan shook his head. I pulled out my phone and did a quick search. There was only one hit: a book, written almost twenty years ago, on French folklore. One of the chapters was called The Merytou. The author was a guy called Warrington Hobbs.
A few minutes of searching and I had a phone number for him, with an international area code I didn’t recognize. It rang eight times before finally going to answerphone. I left a message saying I was working with the FBI and needed his help.
“I’ll have this place searched,” said Calahan, and sighed. “But I don’t think we’ll find much.”
We had nothing to go on unless I could solve the equations for the next murder to find out either where or who. We already knew the when and we only had a day and a half. “I better get back to my chalkboards,” I told Calahan.
He
drove me back to my apartment. By the time we arrived, the sky had clouded over again and this time, it looked as if it would be a full-on storm. I hesitated just inside my door. After all the time we’d spent together, separating was hard. “You want to come in?” I asked.
He shook his head. And when I looked up at him, my stomach knotted because those gorgeous blue eyes were clouded with pain. He was looking at me but he was somewhere else. “There’s something I’ve got to do,” he said.
And he was gone.
25
Calahan
AFTER IT HAPPENED, the counselor had said it was important to have a plan for dealing with anniversaries. He said anniversaries could be “crisis points.”
Yes, I saw a counselor. You think Carrie would have let me keep working, if I’d refused?
So I had a plan for each anniversary of Becky’s death. Work, to keep me busy, friends, to get me through it. Light a candle and don’t go anywhere near a bar.
But with each year, it got harder. First my friend and colleague Kate ran off to Alaska. Then, last year, my best friend, Hailey, had left the FBI to be with her Russian boyfriend. This year, there was no one I could hang out with to fill the silence. What made it even harder was that I’d spent all day with a woman who made me feel things I hadn’t felt in years. By the time I dropped Yolanda back at her apartment, the guilt was threatening to rise up and swamp me. I wanted her so bad and I didn’t deserve her. I didn’t deserve anyone, after Becky.
I’d done all the work I could. I didn’t have any friends I could turn to. But there was one part of the plan I could stick to and I clung to it like a drowning man clings to a lifebelt. I drove through the streets looking for a church.
Becky….
Becky was a musician. She had a day job in an office to help pay the bills but she was a musician in the same way I’m an FBI agent. She had long, copper hair and played electric fiddle in a folk band. She wore long skirts and low-cut blouses and she had a tattoo of roses winding up her back that I liked to kiss.
She was my antidote. I’d come home from seeing all kinds of horrible shit and I’d wrap her up in my arms and bury my face in her hair and just inhale her and everything would be okay.
She balanced me. She was an air person, like Yolanda, and she made me try stuff that wasn’t physical, that took me out of myself. Like singing. I thought it was dumb, at first, but she persuaded me to try it and I found I actually kind of liked it. A few times, after a gig, when most of the crowd had stumbled home and the bar owner had locked the doors, I’d joined Becky’s band in some Irish folk song. And when the drums were thumping and the feet were stamping, I felt...I don’t know, some sort of Irish kinship resonating down through the two hundred years since my ancestors came to America. It felt right.
I hadn’t sung since she died. I figured I never would again.
I pulled up outside a church and scowled at it through the windshield. What the hell am I doing here? I hadn’t been inside one since last year.
Stick to the plan.
There was a flash of lightning and thunder rumbled overhead. The rain was going to start again any minute. I hurried over to the church door and then tentatively pushed it open. It was a really old place, all stone and silence. I seemed to be the only person there. I saw the rack of candles over in the corner and turned that way but then I stopped and frowned.
I felt something and it wasn’t to do with Becky, or grief, or guilt. It was like the feeling you get when you pull back the drapes and open the windows in a dark, stinking room. Walking into the church, I felt like I’d been cleansed.
I shook my head and marched over to the candles. Put five dollars in the tin, knelt down and lit one. And as soon as the flame flared into life, the pain and guilt hit me, a black hole sucking me in from the inside. I hadn’t realized how much I’d been bottling it up all day. “I’m sorry, Becky,” I whispered. My breath vibrated the candle flame, as if she was answering, and that made me draw in a huge, shaky breath. I’d underestimated. Really underestimated. I felt like there was a whole reservoir full of black water behind a dam and I only had a tiny tap to release the pressure. I had to let it out or the whole thing was going to crack, but I didn’t know how. When I left here, all I had to go back to was an empty apartment.
There were people I could call. Hailey was in St. Petersburg, but she’d pick up the phone in a heartbeat, day or night. I could call Alison and ask to spar with her. Getting my ass kicked by her would be a relief compared to this. Hell, I could call Carrie, she might be my boss, but we look after each other.
Or I could call Yolanda. That was the option that was hardest to resist.
But I didn’t deserve comfort or relief. I knew what I deserved. And if I let the pressure build and build, maybe the dam would blow wide open and that would give me the guts to do it.
I closed my eyes and remembered. I thought of Becky’s laugh, her grin, the way I used to twirl her round in Central Park. I began to shake, my eyes going hot. Becky….
A noise, behind me. I spun and stood, blinking through tears, one hand going to my gun—
A priest, carrying a set of keys. I dropped my hand away from my gun, shamefaced, and quickly wiped my eyes. “I’m sorry, Father,” I muttered. “Didn’t mean to keep you.”
He had wispy white hair and one of those placid, kindly faces you only see on the deeply devout. “Take as long as you need.”
I shook my head and headed for the door.
“We open again at seven,” he said, following me. “You’re always welcome, if you want to talk.”
I was already out the door but I stopped and looked back at him. I wasn’t going to church, tomorrow. The way I was feeling, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see another sunrise. But my mom didn’t raise me to be rude to priests. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
And then suddenly, the priest’s face changed. There was a second of shock and then it contorted, not just angry, but hurt and when he spoke, he had to grate the words out through gritted teeth. “But before you come back, you wash that filth off your hand!”
I was gaping. What the hell? I followed his gaze to my hand, which was still wrapped around the edge of the door. I pulled it back and stepped back in shock.
He slammed the door and locked it.
The first heavy drop of rain hit my head, but I barely even registered it. I stared down at my hand in confusion, then walked over to a street light to examine it.
The priest had been looking at the pairs of letters I’d scrawled on my hand in the spider house.
26
Yolanda
IT HAD STARTED to rain, but I couldn’t say when: when you’re deep, time becomes as runny as caramel and an hour can seem like a minute. I was vaguely aware of a drumming against the windows and I knew there must be lightning because there were flashes through my closed eyelids. But I hadn’t opened my eyes once.
I was close. I could feel it. I’d figured out about ninety percent of the equations that would tell us where the next killing would be, but the last ten percent...the numbers just didn’t make sense. What was I not seeing?
There was a very familiar bang on my door. I worked my way back up, like going backwards up a long, spiral staircase, until I finally surfaced and sat there blinking at my chalkboards. It felt like it had taken longer to surface than usual. The killer’s equations had a hypnotic weight to them, dragging me down….
I shook it off and rolled over to the door. The apartment was almost dark. I hadn’t bothered to turn the main lights on when I came in because I’d known I’d just be sitting there, deep. Now, with the thunder and lightning outside, it was eerie. I opened the door and standing there, backlit by the light from the hallway, was Calahan.
God, he looked amazing. Windswept and determined. His hair was soaked and drops of water were rolling over those high cheekbones and down his stubbled jaw. He was wearing a long gray raincoat over his suit and it was so wet with rain, it shone like steel. And his eyes... that look I
’d seen earlier was still there, he was in pain... but he looked sure, too, certain of something for the first time in this whole crazy case. He looked like some knight arriving at a princess’s tower with a declaration of war... or love.
“What?” I croaked.
“We were wrong.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
I rolled backwards so he could come in. He stalked across the room: he was so fired up, he couldn’t stand still. I recognized the mood because it’s the same way I get, when I’ve solved an equation. “Those letters on the spiders? They weren’t initials, they form a sentence. We just didn’t recognize it because it’s in Latin. Ave Satanas. Welcome, Satan. It’s from a Black Mass.”
“What?!” I don’t normally mind the dark, but suddenly it gave me the chills. I switched on a side light, but the little pool of warm light didn’t reach very far.
Calahan kept pacing. “I had this wrong from the very beginning. I’m FBI: I see bodies, I think murder. And I assumed the writing on the walls was a message for us. But the killer doesn’t hate these... witches, people of power, whatever you want to call them. That’s why there’s so little violence. He just needs their blood.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re special and so, in his mind, their blood is special. He thinks it has power, that’s why he uses it.”
“So the killings aren’t the point. Writing the message is the point. Why? What’s so important about the message?”
Calahan went silent. A flash of lightning lit up the room and I saw how pale he’d gone. He stared into my eyes and I could see he didn’t want to say the words that were coming. But he had to because they were the truth.
“It isn’t a message,” he said. “It’s a spell.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds. “I don’t believe in magic,” I said at last.
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