At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(86)

He leaned back in his chair and eyeballed the wooden figurine.

Diana would be fine. It was lunch, for Pete’s sake. Not a midnight meeting in the woods. And if it came to it, she could disembowel a man like Rhinehart and hang him up by his own intestines, all without raising a sweat.

His phone rang. Wiser this time, he answered with a professional, “Dr. Wilding.”

“As soon as we hang up, I need you to go to a police station,” Addie said.

He listened while she explained what they’d found at Hank Helskin’s house. The man’s murder. The fact that Mr. X was almost certainly a Viking wannabe named David Hayne, aka Raven. That the men had been abusing dogs—forcing them to fight and possibly engaging in sacrifice. And that a search of Tommy Snow’s house hadn’t turned up any more bones, but the kid himself had gone missing.

“Where does the police station fit in?” Evan asked.

“We found a bone carved with runes next to Helskin’s body,” she said. “It said, the sparrow is riding of riding. I don’t suppose I need to spell that out for you?”

“No. It’s quite clear.” He felt a flash of panic, then calm returned. “I just don’t understand why. Any idea who victims three and four are?”

“No. I’m going to send a squad car for you.”

“Please don’t. I’m of more use to the investigation if I remain safely ensconced in my office, working on my profile under the watchful eyes of the campus police.”

“Turn here,” she said to someone else, then came back to the phone. “You promise to stay put? With the door locked?”

“I promise.”

“You won’t leave.”

“That’s generally what staying put entails.”

“Okay. I have to go. Raven is our top suspect right now, and we’re running him down. You’ll stay in your office?”

“I won’t move an inch. Stay safe, Addie.”

“You too, my friend.”

He sat for a moment, wondering at this latest development and the whereabouts of Tommy Snow. Then he called Ragnar?k and asked for Sten Elger. A woman told him to hold on, and a moment later, Sten’s cheery voice boomed across the ether.

“You want to try your hand at ax-throwing?” Sten asked.

Evan couldn’t hold back a laugh. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t dis it. A skill like that could come in handy. So how can I help you?”

Evan told him that it was possible the figurine left by Ragnar?k’s front door had something to do with the case he and Patrick were working on. “It might be a good idea to stick close to home until this is settled. Ask patrol to swing by now and again. And keep your ax handy.”

“Wow,” Sten said after a moment’s silence. “This is crazy. But sure. I’m not going anywhere. When I’m at the club, I’ve always got at least ten or twelve heavily armed patrons standing around. Maybe I’ll hang out here until you give me the all clear.”

Reassured, Evan promised to keep Sten informed and said his goodbyes.

He unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out the gun he kept stashed there, strictly against university policy. He didn’t like guns; he was a man of mind, not muscle. The weapon was a leftover from his times traipsing around the globe with River, when things could, in a matter of seconds, go from wonderful to very, very bad. He popped the magazine, retrieved the bullets from a small safe, loaded it, jammed it back in, then set the gun on his desk.

“Ready for bear,” he said. The room swallowed his words.

In the lamplight, the figurine regarded him balefully. If he was, in fact, in danger, he wondered what he’d done to draw the killer’s ire. Perhaps it was nothing more than his size. Dwarfs appeared hundreds of times in the Viking sagas. When Addie pulled him into the case, the killer must have seen targeting Evan as foreordained.

He stood and hunted around until he found a map of Chicago rolled up and rubber-banded in a corner. He cleared a place on the library table and laid out the map, using books to hold the corners. Then he placed Diana’s map next to it.

Assuming the most basic facts about serial killers—that they were usually white males between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, charismatic, intelligent, impulsive, and manipulative—then that standard profile still left a lot of room for interpretation.

Evan had told River he was looking for someone who’d suffered a childhood trauma. Because Talfour’s and Desser’s ritualistic deaths weren’t thrill kills. The killer was salving some wound. If he was in his midtwenties to midthirties, then twenty to thirty years ago or so, something had happened that so horrified a little boy that the boy, once grown, had been driven to reenact the trauma. To purge the pain by taking it from inside himself, turning it into a story, and re-creating it.

Also, equally certain, a more recent event had served as a trigger, bringing up all the killer’s horror and compelling him to at last visit his anguish on others.

For if we ever come to believe that the world reflects our childhood terrors, then something must break. Ourselves. Or the world.

He eyed the dull glint of the gun on his desk, then opened his journal to the sketches he’d made of Talfour’s body, bruised and battered, naked and fetal, staked down in the watery weeds.