At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(66)

Sensing her mood, Patrick said, “How many times I gotta tell you, a lot of this job is about patience?”

“I don’t have time for patience.”

After she and Evan had spotted the deer bones on Helskin’s porch, Addie had dropped Evan off at his home, made sure he’d set his alarm, then had gone to her apartment and submitted a request for a warrant. She’d showered, crawled into bed, and waited for sleep.

They had their man.

Her eyes had popped open.

Maybe they had their man. Maybe he’d hired some clueless grad student to write the poetry.

After thirty minutes of pointless staring into the dark, she’d gotten up and—with a certain vengeful satisfaction—shot off a text to Clayton that she would not be breakfasting with him at Wildberry. She’d forced herself to cook eggs and toast and ate standing at the sink while she kept an eye on the clock. When the hands reached five a.m., she called Patrick and told him what Evan had learned so far and how they were going to spend their morning.

Then she’d gone into the station house, started coffee, and propped herself up in front of her computer, looking for anything that linked Talfour, Desser, and Helskin.

They were men. Beyond that, they seemed to have little in common. Talfour was the respected owner of a small business. Likewise for Desser. So there was that. Talfour was blind in one eye. Desser, too, had vision issues—his driver’s license indicated he had to wear corrective lenses while driving. For whatever that was worth.

As for Helskin, he was a keen-eyed and deranged jerkwad who probably hadn’t come within shouting distance of anything respectable since he was a kid.

So how had they crossed paths?

A Black man, a Jew, and a white supremacist walk into a bar.

She bounced back in her chair, tapped the ball of her foot on the tiled floor. Then she leaned forward and pulled up the morning edition of the Tribune. The headline raged.

Police Stymied by Serial Killer: Viking Poet Still Free

A five-paragraph report regurgitated what had been in the previous night’s paper about Talfour and added a few tidbits about Desser—that a second body had been found in the water in Kendall County, also accompanied by mysterious runes. So someone had leaked that news as well.

Criver would be a trumpeting stampede of fury.

Not that she could blame him. A leak in a murder investigation was a serious thing. At best, it sent the citizens into a panic. At worst, disclosures of this kind exposed details of the investigation that were best kept under wraps—especially from the murderer.

Who was responsible? And why?

One thing, at least, was settled. The media had chosen a name for the killer. The Viking Poet. The same name Evan had suggested.

She crossed her ankles and hugged her coffee mug close.

Even with all the evidence, she found it difficult to believe that Evan’s theories could be so far off the mark. But as he himself said, it was early times in the investigation, and there could be a lot of information they didn’t have access to yet. It could be Helskin had hired a specialist in medieval literature, risky though that would be. Perhaps the grad student she’d envisioned in the middle of the night. Or maybe Helskin contained multitudes in his vicious little brain. Perhaps his home was lined with bookcases filled with the kinds of Nordic and Old English literature Evan had told her about—the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Beowulf. Maybe there were leather journals and fountain pens strewn across the coffee table. All signs that beneath Helskin’s Nazi exterior beat the heart of a poet. Addie had to admit that being racist didn’t eliminate the capacity for art. There were plenty of examples to prove the contrary. These days, once-idolized artists were being knocked off their pedestals one by one.

To Addie, it seemed that art should belong to the virtuous. To the morally decent. To upright folk. But God obviously distributed talent equally among the deserving and the despicable.

“Addie!”

Patrick snapped his fingers, and the cold and the dull morning light and the caffeine shakes came flooding back in.

“You asleep?” Patrick asked.

“Only in my dreams,” she answered. “What’s taking them so long?”

They were waiting for the officers from Chicago Animal Care and Control. A patrol car was parked around the corner, the officers ready to approach Helskin’s house from the rear should the need arise. The uniforms had already tried to scope out the backyard by standing on the roof of their unit so they could see over the privacy fence; trees blocked much of their view, but what they could see was a lot of flattened dirt. A scattering of metal stakes driven into the ground to which were clipped heavy chains. No sign of life, human or canine.

Patrick cleared his throat. “You heard of the Barghest?”

“The what?”

“The black dog. The hellhound that preys on innocent passersby. Just to see it is to invite doom. It is said to have terrible claws and teeth and to—”

“They’re pit bulls.” Addie stretched her legs as far as she could. Pointed her toes. “Not monsters. This case is getting to you, Paddy Wagon.”

“And why wouldn’t it?” Patrick drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Vikings and those whatchacallit bog bodies and ax-throwing pagans. Enough to give any good Irish Catholic the heebie-jeebies. And look at this neighborhood. Back in the day, the people who lived here were proud, God-fearing men and women who worked hard at the mills to give their kids a better life. Now the place looks like the worst cities of Northern Ireland during The Troubles. People hiding like rats in their holes.”