At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(98)

Could he have been as blind as Rhinehart by insisting on bog bodies and Beowulf? Had he been blind to the signs that might have led them to Raven sooner?

He turned the pages of his journal to the notes he’d taken during his conversation with Christina. She’d talked of blood feuds and blood sacrifice. Grendel and his mother.

Seithr magic, practiced by sorceresses.

And also, Christina had told him, by ergi men.

He sat up.

Officer Blakesley definitely qualified as an ergi man. Indeed, he’d called Evan’s attention to the fact. And the wooden figure had appeared on Evan’s porch right after Blakesley’s visit.

But a cop as killer?

Cops were about defending the public. About justice. True, sometimes that sense of justice got warped. And being a cop would make it easy to lure out a victim. And to leak details of the investigation to the press if you wanted to ensure your narrative was read by as wide an audience as possible.

Blakesley was the name of a village in Northamptonshire. Evan had surmised that much the first time he’d met the officer. But he hadn’t taken the etymology far enough. Now he opened a tab on his computer and entered BLAKESLEY VILLAGE. There it was: the Old English nickname for the village was Bl?cwulf’s meadow.

Bl?cwulf meant black wolf.

If this was right, Blakesley had plastered his name all over his poems.

Still, the thought of the patrol officer as their poet seemed crazy. Cops had to pass a battery of psychological tests. Surely a killer couldn’t slip through that net.

Unless the triggering incident happened after Blakesley joined the force.

Evan pressed his fingertips together and stared at the ceiling.

When the phone rang, he lunged across the desk to grab it.

“Well, big brother,” River said when he picked up. “I might have something for you.”

“Please, God,” Evan said.

“Dr. Valtos managed an archaeological find back in the nineties outside London. Or he thinks it was the nineties. The good professor was a little vague on some things. Except trout. He had a lot to tell me about trout. He informed me that it’s a month past fishing season in the rivers of Scotland, but he received special dispensation from the earl to angle for not brown trout—as one would expect—but sea trout, which apparently—”

“River.”

“Just baiting you, brother, with your own game. The dig Valtos recalled started when a backhoe operator struck a bog body while leveling a hill for one of those loathsome bedroom communities. The find caused quite a stir among the local populace, who were probably wondering if they’d done the right thing, selling their ancestral land to developers. I asked about children who’d visited. Valtos does remember that one of the company’s owners brought his kids by two or three times. He couldn’t recall if the children seemed traumatized in any way. Then again, he probably wouldn’t notice a traumatized child if it were screaming in his lap. Now, here’s the interesting part.”

“Please don’t feel obligated to keep me in suspense.”

River laughed. “Valtos heard rumors years later that the burial find had been ill-fated. A curse-of-the-pharaohs sort of thing. Two people associated with the site died under odd circumstances—one of the archaeologists and a foreman. In addition, one of the owners was positively plagued by tragedy. His wife died of cancer not long after the bog body was discovered. Then an associate died in an automobile accident a few years later. And a long time after that, in America, his grandson died in a different kind of accident. Valtos wasn’t sure what kind, exactly. Just that he didn’t think it involved automobiles.”

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

“Did Valtos remember a name?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Evan pondered. Rhinehart had held a high-level position in a construction firm in England. His wife had died of cancer. His assistant had died in a car crash.

The timeline worked, based on what Simon had told him.

But there was the whole issue of bog bodies. If Rhinehart was the owner plagued by tragedy, as River had put it, why had he feigned ignorance of Iron Age burials? In the meeting at the station house, he’d been determined to convince everyone that he was the smartest man in the room. Why would he have been reluctant to add bog bodies to his repertoire?

Had his ignorance been a smoke screen? Could Rhinehart have had a role in the murders? Could he be the brain behind the brawn required to torture a man and drag him to water and slay him there, perhaps as an occult rite?

Or could the killer be one of his children, traumatized as a child? If Evan considered the typical characteristics of serial killers, Rhinehart’s children would be the right age and race. They had suffered early trauma due to the death of their mother, a trauma compounded by the fact of another body—crushed and withered—discovered in the bog.

And then came the death of the grandson. Had that been the trigger? Had the boy been buried in a rockfall? Become lost underground?

“You still there, brother?” River asked.

“Did the professor mention anything else?”

“That’s all that Old Man Valtos could come up with until he started in on the trout again. Is it not helpful?”

Evan laid out Diana’s drawing again and placed it next to the map of Chicago. “You said outside London. Can you narrow it down?”