At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(94)

He sat down. “And you’re a woman of your word. How was lunch?”

“It was a bit awkward, honestly.”

“He’s a Satanist. What did you expect?”

“Well, he didn’t do anything to my food. And actually, he was quite pleasant. Not the least bit sleazy.”

Evan turned grouchy in exactly the way a big brother did when he didn’t like who his sister was dating. “You sound like you had a good time.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t call him charming, exactly. But he bought me a very nice lunch with sparkly wine even if he did push rather hard for information about the investigation. When I told him I had nothing to share, he turned distracted. As if I were not the topmost thing on his mind.”

He could hear the pout in her voice. “Perish the thought.”

“He was also quite sweaty.”

“You have that effect on men.”

“Only when I’m trying to frighten them. Or seduce them. Which I most certainly was not. On either count. Ralph—”

“Now it’s Ralph?”

“After I proved useless, Ralph seemed in rather a hurry to end our lunch. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me on a first date.”

“First date? I feel obligated at this point to remind you of the man’s arrogance. The fact that he smells like a pair of gym socks buried in a litter box. Did you even bother looking at his hair?”

“Don’t be shallow,” Diana scolded. “But I’m kidding. He referred to it as a date, and if that’s what it was, it was most certainly our last. All that aside, I don’t know why he bothers asking a woman out. He’s still horribly torn up about his wife, even though she died years ago. Back when he worked as a big-kahuna developer for a firm in England. It struck me as an odd career choice for a man who went on to become an occultist.”

“Maybe grief drove him to the dark arts the way it drives others to drink. I heard his wife died quite young.”

“Lung cancer. Ralph said she withered away to nothing. Exposure to coal tar.”

“Coal tar is an environmental carcinogen,” Evan said, thinking out loud.

“Apparently.”

Evan made a note in his journal, then fingered back his hair, which had fallen into his eyes. “So in the end, Mr. Ralph Rhinehart didn’t strike you as dark and desperate?”

“Distracted, as I said. But perhaps desperate is also a good word. With all the sweating and whatnot. Still, for a man who claims to be fascinated by occultism, he didn’t seem particularly dark. Just gloomy. A rather sad Satanist, all in all.”

“A grieving necromancer,” Evan murmured. “Not how one normally pictures practitioners of the dark arts. Where’s the evil laugh and the sinister gaze?”

“Maybe the poor man spends too much time alone with his grief. He’s got a stepchild as well as two kids of his own, but they stayed behind in England. If I were him, I would have bought myself a nice flat somewhere near the kids and become a proper British mystic.”

Diana had more than once lamented the fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, alone in the world. Her parents had died within six months of each other when she was a teenager, and her only sibling, a brother, had vanished during a fishing trip. Maybe that was why she felt sorry for Rhinehart.

Her voice broke into his thoughts. “What are you doing right now? Did you talk to Addie?”

Evan filled her in on the latest, omitting anything about a possible threat against him. “I don’t expect to hear from Addie again for a while, unless the Damen Silos are a bust and she’s on to the next site. I’m going to do a little more work here, then head home. By the time I get there, Ginny will be absolutely mad with hunger.”

He felt guilty about lying to Addie. But in all fairness, she hadn’t asked him if his fingers were crossed. He would be fine, and she’d get over it.

“Would you like company?” Diana asked. “Lunch was so good, I bought extra to share with you.”

He smiled into the phone. “I’d love your company. You can help me continue my work on the poem.”

“Exactly what every minion hopes to hear. I have to run a few errands. I’ll see you in a couple hours. Start planning the cocktails.”

Evan gave her the new security code for the house and told her to pull into the garage, and they hung up. Rhinehart might once have been a big kahuna, as Diana put it. But at the station house, he’d seemed almost desperate to prove the worth of his insight. How the mighty can fall.

Outside his door, the floor creaked. Faintly from the levels below came the scrape of chairs, the rattle of voices, the clink of cutlery from the café, all filtered by distance and masonry.

Up here, the hush of centuries had descended.

Another creak. Evan eyed the dead bolt. Then he reached out and picked up the gun on his desk.

He waited.

The moment of terror he’d felt when Addie told him he was the killer’s fifth target had torn through his body like the sizzing tail of a comet. Then calm had descended. River had taught him that panicking accomplished nothing. And after a few brushes with death in remote archaeological sites, Evan’s body had ceded control to the logic of his mind.

Whatever will be will be, River had told him.

Fate goes ever as it must.