At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(52)
“Of course.”
Addie typed on her computer keyboard, her fingers flying. She looked for Hank Helskin in the DMV records. Nothing. She tried Henry Helskin. Still nada. Maybe Mr. Helskin was a recent transplant who hadn’t bothered getting an Illinois driver’s license.
She opened another tab and entered HANK HELSKIN áSATRú in the search field. A Meetup group popped up—Aryan ásatrú.
Addie smiled. Gotcha.
Rachel was back on the phone. “Detective Bisset, I’m afraid I need to get going.”
“I understand. Just give me one more minute of your time, please. What other information is on the form?”
“An address,” Rachel said. “And what he wanted etched on the ring in runic letters. He said the letters meant Odin’s thane, whatever that means.”
“No phone number?”
“He left it blank.”
Addie glanced at the digital clock on her computer. The night was still young. “Ms. Chen, can you send me the address right now?”
CHAPTER 17
After Jo’s parents came to take her home, Evan mixed himself an Old-Fashioned with an infusion of smoked rosemary, carried Ginny to her perch in the library, then grabbed the paperwork and books from his leather satchel and went to stand at the library table.
Evan’s first step when creating a profile of a killer was to absorb all the available material. When possible, he looked at everything in situ—that is, placed exactly as the killer left it. The body. Forensic clues like footprints and weapons and injuries. And whatever signs and symbols the killer had purposefully or accidentally left behind.
He gently pushed aside the assortment of Japanese wooden puzzle boxes scattered across the table and opened the folder he’d received during the meeting at the police station. Methodically, he arranged the material across the table’s surface. The police and sheriff reports. The crime-scene photos. His runic chart along with his and Rhinehart’s transliterations. He opened his journal to the drawing he’d done of Talfour’s body, the corpse set like a broken jewel amid the mud and reeds.
Immediately in front of him, he squared a foolscap writing pad—he liked the additional room offered by the larger pages—and next to it, a fountain pen. He stretched, turned his neck from side to side to work out the kinks, and frowned down at the table.
The most important thing to do whenever he was attempting to form a picture out of a scattering of puzzle pieces was to create some mental space between himself and the mystery. Distance was the key to finding the outside limits of the puzzle—the corners and sides, so to speak. Distance quieted the chatter of his brain and allowed the more intuitive thoughts to surface.
He had several strategies for distracting his monkey mind when he was trying to dive deep on a problem. The wooden puzzles he was so fond of. Walking the grounds around the house. Taking Ginny out to fly. And baking sweet and savory pastries; he was particularly fond of some of the baking shows from his native Britain.
Tonight, he decided that music would be his technique of choice.
He turned on the sound system and selected the chant for the dead sung during the requiem mass, “In Paradisum.” The choral voices soothed both him and Ginny and felt right for the work at hand.
He nodded down at the documents laid out on the table. “And so we begin.”
He pulled over a chair of a comfortable height and eased into it. He then picked up the pen and bent over the foolscap, touching ink to paper. A small dot appeared. His earlier unease vanished like a chill dropping away from his skin, leaving only a residual disquiet from the two deaths. And even that disappeared as he began to work. Solving a puzzle of any form was a balm to heart and soul. Every enigma had an answer, every riddle a response. It remained only to find the correct key to set the universe to rights.
He wrote out the runes left by the killer, getting the feel for their shapes. The lines and branches, the crosses and arcs. Although his medium was different—paper and pen versus wood and bone and a sharp-bladed tool—he could easily imagine the killer’s satisfaction as the characters took shape beneath his hand, unspooling the killer’s story.
Then, as Rhinehart had done, he transliterated the runic alphabet into the Latin one. Here, he referred to the chart he’d made that morning. His transliteration was very close to Rhinehart’s. So despite the man’s refusal to consider other aspects of the crime scene, the man at least knew his runes.
Finished with the first task, Evan sat back in his chair, sipped the Old-Fashioned, and watched as lamplight played along the cut crystal.
Now for the difficult part. Picking out the actual meaning from the string of characters.
“I’ll be disappointed in you,” he said to the air, addressing the killer as if the man stood before him. “Very disappointed indeed if most of what you’ve given us is the kind of nonsense Rhinehart proposed.”
He set down the glass and began, again, to write. He scratched things out, circled around, rewrote the words, rewrote entire lines. At one point, he murmured, “It is a numbering system,” as he scratched out and reordered some of the lines. The poet had not only used boustrophedon so that the lines had to be read in alternating directions but had also reordered his lines by moving every third line down, presumably to make the decipherment more difficult. Now and again, Evan consulted his phone to check a word or definition on the internet. Half an hour later, he laid down the pen and leaned back to survey his work.