At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(95)

In the hallway, silence reigned again. Evan thought he detected the sound of footsteps retreating down the stairs. He counted to sixty, then returned the gun to the desk and his mind to his work.

He stared down at his drawing of Talfour.

This case was like the jigsaw puzzles he used to work while he sat in hospital waiting rooms as a child. Pieces missing. Pieces from other puzzles mixed in. Half the time, the lid was gone, so you didn’t even know what picture you were trying to create.

You had to fill in the blanks using your imagination.

And imagination, as Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson, was the mother of truth.

Evan flipped the pages until he came to his translation of the killer’s poem.

Over the sun-swimmer home I came for mine.

Mine, mine-gone. Bowel-buried busted by big bosses.

That war-crime, sword-shaker, heart of my dwelling entombed.

He underlined the words bowel-buried and entombed. References to an actual death and burial? Or another riddle, another kenning for him to uncypher?

Mine, mine-gone.

Could this refer to an actual, literal mine? As in, a hole in the ground? Scott Desser had paid the ultimate price for his sin of working for mining companies. Could a mining accident be the recent trigger that started the killer on his deadly path?

Mine-gone could be a kenning for someone who had been killed in a mining accident. People certainly died in mines. From falls. Explosions. Flying debris.

He frowned.

Sometimes ideas came leaping out of the void like lightning, illuminating everything, sparking connections that made the world—for an instant at least—stand clear and dazzling.

Other times, all one could do was light a single candle and gaze in awe and terror at the immensity of the night.

He bent his head and returned to his work, praying for lightning.





CHAPTER 30


The warren of tunnels beneath the Damen Silos made Addie think more of rats’ nests than rabbit burrows. Which was unfortunate, given her current state of mind. The instant she’d slipped into the hole that led underground, she’d broken out in a panicked sweat.

The concrete alleyways went on endlessly, swallowing light and voices. A dank cold rose from the walls and floors, pressed down from the ceiling. Soon the sheen of sweat on Addie’s skin raised gooseflesh on her arms, and she started to shiver. Now and again, someone’s headlamp flared off a graffiti artist’s painting of a woman or a few lines of poetry. Such beauty in this place made everything else seem that much more surreal.

She stopped for a moment, pretending to adjust her gloves.

When she was nine, she had spent a few hours one afternoon hiding from her brothers in a series of drainage tunnels. Unable to hear the outside world or see anything other than distant circles of daylight as she crouched in warm trails of water, she’d suddenly realized the game had become terrifying.

That was her introduction to claustrophobia.

And rats.

Breathe, she reminded herself.

Just breathe.

She sucked in air and kept walking.

Sergeant Trujillo led them to a place in a side tunnel where a blanket had been fixed over an opening into what, in the past, must have served as an office or storage area. One of Trujillo’s men held back the blanket while they peered in.

The room was as Trujillo had told them—a space designed for comfortable, if spartan, living. It was also designed for the long haul; the shelves lining the walls were loaded with jugged water and nonperishables. The apocalypse, apparently, would feature a lot of tinned meat and ramen noodles.

Addie decided she’d rather go in the first wave of casualties.

“The evidence techs are on their way,” she said to Patrick. “Let’s keep moving.”

“Sounds good,” he said.

Lieutenant Criver, who’d crowded into the wide doorway with them, said nothing. His presence here—and his silence—made Addie uneasy.

As they turned away, she shone her light on the floor, wondering with morbid curiosity if rats had been inside. The light flared on a square of plastic.

“Hold on,” she said.

She took off her winter gloves and slid on disposable ones, then stepped lightly into the room to retrieve the plastic from the floor. She stared at it for a moment.

“Addie?”

She turned and held up the driver’s license with its photo of a dark-haired, tattooed man.

David L. Hayne.

Otherwise known as Raven.

She should feel satisfaction at the confirmation that Raven, aka David Hayne, was in fact the silo man.

But something nagged at her. A different discarded driver’s license.

Patrick’s uneasy gaze rose from the driver’s license to meet Addie’s eyes. Maybe his mind, too, had returned to Talfour’s body, bludgeoned and garroted and beaten on the banks of the river.

And the cast-off wallet in the river.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Patrick said. “He’s still our top suspect.”

She nodded. But she and Patrick both knew: detectives should never get too attached to their theories.

“I want to check out the stairs,” she said to Trujillo.

To his credit, the sergeant didn’t shrug or roll his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”



The staircase was located in the center of the tons of concrete that loomed around and above them. Standing at the base of the stairs, Addie imagined the weight of all that concrete and darkness pressing down on them.