At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(81)

“Where can we find Mr. David Hayne?” she asked. His name hadn’t come up the night before when she’d run the plates.

“I dunno. Hank picked him up last night and brought him here. Now Hank’s truck is gone. Raven must have taken it. Did he—did Raven . . . ?” Walters’s fists clenched inside his pockets. “Did Raven kill Hank?”

“What do you think about that, Tristan?” Addie asked. “Do you think Raven killed Hank?”

“They were arguing last night. They argue a lot, and usually it’s because Raven thinks he’s better than the rest of us.”

“Why does he think that?”

“Because he went to college. He says he’s smarter than all of us put together.”

Not that smart if he’s hanging around here, Addie thought.

“Anyway, I mostly don’t listen when they fight. Plus”—Walters’s voice dropped—“I was pretty stoned.”

Patrick said, “So where can we find this guy?”

“You’re the police. You figure it out. It’s not like Raven tells me anything.”

“Do you know where he lives?” Addie asked.

“Somewhere.”

“How about where he works?”

“No idea.” The kid was sullen again, glaring up at Patrick.

“Or maybe he’s with one of the other guys?” Addie went on. “You know where any of them are?”

He folded his arms. “I don’t care about Raven. He’s an asshole. But I’m not gonna rat out my Viking brethren. That’s against the code.”

“Ah, for Pete’s sake.” Patrick reached out a paw and grabbed Walters by the front of his parka and pulled the kid to his feet. “I’m done. Let’s go to the station. We’ll call your mommy and your daddy, and we’ll all have a little sit-down. I’m thinking accessory to murder, if not something worse.”

The kid raised his arms, covering his face with his hands as if he thought Patrick was going to hit him. The sleeves of his parka fell back, and Addie again noticed the fitness tracker on his wrist.

“Hold on,” she said to Patrick. “Tristan, do you guys buddy up with your trackers?”

He glanced at his wrist. “Hank and I do. Did.”

“What’s that mean?” Patrick let go of Walters’s parka. “Buddying up?”

Walters lowered his hands. “It means we track each other’s runs. So we can challenge each other on how many miles we get each day. We haven’t really gotten started on the running thing. But I still use it to meet up with him. As long as he’s got Wi-Fi, the app uploads his data, and I can see where he is—or pretty close, anyway. We were gonna start running this week.” His eyes filled with tears again.

Addie’s excitement felt almost like nausea. “What about Raven?”

But Walters shook his head. “I don’t buddy with him.”

“Bloody hell,” Addie said.

Walters stared past Addie and Patrick toward the gate where, not long ago, the patrol officer had marched Ryan Ruley out to a squad car. He chewed his lip for a moment and seemed to come to a decision.

“I don’t buddy with Raven,” Walters told them. “But Ruley does.”





CHAPTER 25


“Thus we see,” Evan said to the sea of young faces in his class Semiotics of Death, “that rites of burial are one of the earliest indications of man’s belief in a soul. From Africa and Asia through Europe, across the Pacific and into the Americas, every culture has signifiers around death and burial. We have always cared for our dead.”

Forty heads lowered toward forty desks. Pens scratched, and laptop keyboards clacked.

“Every human is a semiotician,” Evan went on. “That is, a reader of signs. All of us, every single day, interpret—or decode—the signs around us. Traffic lights. Road signs. The silhouette of a man or woman outside our bathroom doors. We’re constantly interpreting the man-made world around us.” He thrust his middle finger into the air. The students who’d looked up gave a collective gasp. Quickly, he flipped his hand so that his palm was turned to the students and raised his index finger, forming a V. “What does this mean?”

“Peace out,” someone said.

“Victory,” offered another student.

Evan turned his hand again so that the back of his hand was toward the audience, still with two fingers raised. “And this?”

Silence.

“Two?” one of the students ventured. “Like my score on the last exam.”

Evan waited until the laughter quieted. “In most English-speaking countries—England, Ireland, South Africa, Australia—this gesture means the same thing as my original one-finger salute. The subtlety of whether my palm is turned toward you or away creates a completely different meaning. Peace out versus eff off.”

Outside the windows, the day brightened as the wind picked up and clouds scuddled past. A pair of students on the sidewalk struggled against the gale, their long hair whipping around their heads.

Evan rested his palms on his desk and leaned forward. From his place on the raised dais, he could see eye to eye with the students in the middle rows of the amphitheater-style classroom. “The signs with which we communicate don’t remain static. Why? Because our culture isn’t static. Our ideas of death change. So what does it say about Americans’ relationship with death that we are changing its signifiers? For our next class”—the heads bowed down again—“read chapters five and seven from the textbook. And talk to your family about how they have marked the passing of loved ones. Use your training in anthropology to analyze what your parents and grandparents say regarding loss. Ask yourself what our death signifiers say about our society. Cremation versus burial. Memorial service versus graveside rites. Is death in Western culture an openly acknowledged fact? Or a carefully guarded secret?”