At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(55)

23 he gave no answer, so I held tight, strong as thirty men.

24 He felt the weight of his spirit, knew fate is wicked.

25 With his mirror I did mirror mere to mere.

26 His suffering was thus that he thanked the guardian of hell

27 when, wailing, the word-weaver arrived, a blood sacrifice.

Evan capped the pen and frowned at the lines. The murderer’s presence—nameless, faceless—lurked below the dense poetry of his words. An evil thing, like the dragon in Beowulf, skulking far below the earth during daylight, emerging at night to terrorize whoever crossed his vindictive path.

Absently, Evan picked up one of the Japanese puzzles and worked the rope through the rings. After a moment, he returned the puzzle to the table and murmured the poet’s nineteenth line, This skin-sinner is second of five.

Desser had been cattle of riding. Or, once Evan had replaced the rune names with numbers, first of five.

He stared across the room toward Ginny and beyond her, through the windows, the storm-wet darkness.

“Dear God,” he said. “He intends to murder five people.”

Desser had been murdered twelve weeks earlier. Perhaps the killer planned to murder the third victim after an equal amount of time.

Or he could be accelerating, as many serial killers did. Especially given the leak to the newspapers.

How much time did they have?

And what was the significance of five victims? Why not nine, the number of Odin? Why not three or twelve or any other multiple of three? Five was the number for humanity, with our five fingers and toes, our five senses. It sometimes served as the symbol for grace. The Bible spoke of the five great mysteries—the holy trinity, the creation, and the redemption.

Five symbolized the balance between the spiritual world and the material one.

Did the killer require five victims to restore balance to a world that in his mind had fallen from grace? Was this the fateful man-price he spoke of in his poem? The price that must be paid for our sins?

Evan felt a sideways tug. A sideways slip. As if the old gods were stirring below the world. Old gods, old vengeances.

He crossed the room and turned on the gas fireplace. A welcoming burst of warmth and light rolled over him in a gentle wave. Chiding himself for being superstitious, he picked up his drink and rattled the ice cubes in his glass before swallowing the remains of the Old-Fashioned. He went into the kitchen to mix another cocktail. When he returned to the library, Ginny perched softly, hunched, drowsing in the warm firelight, her feathers muted and rumpled, like worn velvet.

He looked toward the table where earlier he’d placed the ring Officer Blakesley had brought him. It glowed gently in the pool of light from the task lamp. He picked it up, ran his fingertips over the etched runes. God’s spear. God probably referred to Odin. So the words meant Odin’s soldier.

His mind rubbed up against the coincidence of the dead birds and this runic ring in Washington Park and the slain man a few miles away.

Was there a link?

If so, where did the pre-Viking bog bodies fit in? What dark trails had the killer pursued back through centuries of history and then forward into the present to leave his murderous mark?

Evan sat down once more at the library table and pulled on his reading glasses. He opened Aldhouse-Green’s book on bog bodies, which he’d thrown in his leather satchel that morning when Addie picked him up at his office. Once again, he turned to the color plates in the middle of the book. His attention was caught by the Windeby Child, naked and shaved, and then the reconstruction of the face of Yde Girl, who’d been murdered and placed in a bog in the Netherlands.

What commonality had the bog victims shared that marked them for death? What linked Desser and Talfour in a way that brought them to the attention of the killer?

Evan skimmed through the book. Many of the bog bodies had been mutilated before death. Arms amputated. Bones crushed. Facial disfigurement. A great many others showed signs of congenital differences that would have caused them great misery in their daily life. Severe spinal curvature. Malformed hips. He paused on a page that described the Zweeloo Woman from a peat bog in the Netherlands. She’d suffered from severe limb deformities, which scientists concluded were due to dyschondrosteosis—a rare form of dwarfism.

Evan looked at his own limbs and imagined being led through the treacherous quicksand to his death. Stumbling forward in the mist, torches tossing smoky light while, all around, the trees creaked and cackled in the dark, boggy woods in which Iron Age people hid their secrets and their shame. He pictured himself standing, naked and bound, on the water’s edge while the raised ax caught the flame.

He shuddered. He had a particular aversion to lakes and quicksand. How much sooner would his head sink beneath the murky depths than that of a man of average height?

He looked again at the photograph of the Yde Girl, whose spine had been so severely curved from a congenital condition that she would have spent her entire short life in constant pain. She looked no more than eight or nine. A mere child.

For a brief moment, he thought of Jo. This little girl slain in the bog, the Yde Girl, had been someone’s much-loved daughter. Perhaps a sister and a friend. Then she’d been knifed, had half her hair ripped from her scalp, and strangled.

For the crime of her physical differences?

When his phone buzzed in his pocket, he jumped, sloshing his drink onto his sweater.

“Damn it,” he said. Then realizing that it was now past seven in the morning in Turkey, he grabbed it.