As I scanned the crowd, I pressed the iPhone to my cheek, hoping to hear something that would give me his location. I plugged my free ear with my finger, focusing on the sounds coming through my cell.
It was faint, but unmistakable.
“Okay, you can go.”
I looked to the exit as a thin, brown-haired man left the building.
“Stop him!” I yelled, but all the cops in the lobby were already in motion, closing the door after the man who had just left.
I hurried to them, trying to push my way past, but one of the officers grabbed my shoulders.
“He just walked out!” I yelled.
We both pushed through the door—
—into chaos.
Outside the building, the scene was bedlam.
Firemen, paramedics, cops, swarms of people waiting for their coworkers to emerge, a slew of media sticking microphones and cameras at anyone who stood still long enough…
But no sign of the brown-haired man.
April 1, 2:10 P.M.
Herb listened to the radio chatter. Orders were barked. Men complied.
No one found Luther.
Chewing his lower lip, Herb eyed the sawdust on the carpeting in Dean’s office. He looked at the paneling on the wall directly above it, saw that the color didn’t quite match on either side.
Herb put his fingers in the seam along the top and pulled.
The panel tore easily away, revealing a small, dark bathroom.
Herb saw a gun on the sink. A black T-shirt. Boots. A black wig.
It all came to him in a rush. Luther had planned the Roe murder perfectly. Had rented an office near him, built a fake wall over the bathroom, and after the murder, he’d simply walked to his office and hid behind the panel, waiting for the cops to leave.
With his hair recently cut and dyed, Luther had strolled through the lobby, right past Jack, and walked out of the building as David Dean.
The son of a bitch had been right there, talking about April fifteenth.
And Herb hadn’t just let him go.
He’d insisted he leave.
April 1, 2:12 P.M.
I did my best to rally some officers to search in all directions, but Luther was gone.
The FaceTime disconnected without so much as a gloat from the killer, but I expected him to be in touch.
When Herb found me amid the commotion outside the Dearborn Street entrance, he had such a look of defeat on his face I thought he was going to cry.
I felt the same way.
“I screwed up,” he said.
“I screwed up,” I said a millisecond later. “I was too focused on black hair.”
“We both were.”
He gave me the quick rundown of a fake tax attorney named David Dean.
“Damn.” I shook my head. “He played us good. Don’t blame yourself, Herb.”
“Do you blame yourself?”
I didn’t answer.
“You can’t hog all the guilt, Jack.”
“Let’s beat ourselves up later. We still have a crime scene to work.”
I followed Herb down the sidewalk to the brick planter which had been cordoned off. The crime lab team was already working what was left of Mr. Roe.
“There should be a book in a plastic bag inside of the man in the suit,” I said.
“There is no inside,” one of the techs said. “It’s all on the outside.”
“You haven’t found a plastic bag?”
“Not yet.”
I glanced down into the devastation. In the tier of ugly corpses, jumpers were a close second to burn vics.
“Got something,” another tech said. His gloved hands were running along the surface of Roe’s pants. “There’s an object on the side of his leg. A bulge.”
“Cut the pants off,” Herb said.
The tech trimmed away the pant leg below Roe’s waist with a pair of scissors to reveal more blood and bone, but amid all the wreckage, I saw where a bubble-wrapped package had been duct-taped to Mr. Roe’s thigh.
The tech stumbled back.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Could be a bomb.”
I hadn’t considered that.
“We need to get the bomb squad here, let them secure this.” He started to pull me away but I jerked my arm free.
“It’s not a bomb,” I said.
The tech looked at Herb, who said, “Jack, I gotta be honest. I’m not feeling real comfortable standing here right now. You know what this perp is capable of.”
The techs had already backed off and were helping to clear a perimeter around the two bodies.
“Herb, this is a game for him. If that’s a bomb, and he’s watching right now, with his finger on the button, he pushes it, and then what?”
“We’re blown into a thousand pieces.”
“Exactly, and where’s the fun in that?”
“I’m not following. This guy wants to kill you. And now you’re standing here, and you’ve never been more vulnerable.”
“Yes, he wants to kill me, but he wants to look in my eyes while he does it. He wants to take his time with it, drag it out. To be there, talking to me when it happens. This isn’t his style.”
I reached into my purse, pulled out my miniature Swiss Army knife, and stepped over the side of the planter.
“Jack!”
“We don’t have time for a bomb squad, Herb. There are clues in this body, and more people are going to die and it will be on our heads.”
He put his hand on my forearm, but I shrugged it off.
“Goddamn it, Herb! Let me do my goddamn job!”
“It’s not your job anymore, Jack. Give me the knife.”
The idea of my former partner and best friend doing this made me understand what a stupid idea it had been in the first place.
“Maybe we should wait for the bomb squad,” I said.
“I can do it.”
“It’s a tiny knife. You have fingers like sausages.”
“Chain of evidence, Jack. You’re a civilian. Give me the knife and get behind the goddamn police tape or I’ll have you arrested.”
The likelihood of Herb arresting me was nil. But I gave him the knife.
He squeezed into a pair of latex gloves. Then he knelt beside the carnage and opened a blade. The bubble wrap was smeared in blood, and as Herb cut away the tape, my heart stopped. I’d been expecting a book, another paperback, but this wasn’t a book. Through the plastic, all I could discern was that it was thin and gray.
What if I was wrong? What if this was an explosive of some kind?
Herb continued to slash at the package.
My apprehension climbed.
Then I heard another voice: Phin’s.
He was screaming my name.
I looked back at him, behind the yellow police tape, and gave him an OK sign with my thumb and index finger that was the total opposite of how I felt.
Herb cut through the last of the plastic and peeled it back and then jerked the package free. He unwound the packing tape and pulled out a thin, gray device roughly eight by five inches, less than a centimeter thick, and held in a clear plastic bag.
Herb stood and made his way through the flower bed, back over the brick.
Held it up for me to see.
Written on the bag in black marker:
JD—THIS ONE REALLY FELL FOR YOU—LK
When I noticed what the bag contained, I realized I should have guessed it earlier.
It was a book. An e-book.
More specifically, a Kindle e-reader.
“It’s just a Kindle!” I yelled to the lab team. “All you chickens can come back now.” Then I asked Herb to hold it face up for me.
“What is it, Jack?” Herb asked.
“It’s an e-reader.” I used my fingernail to slide the power switch through the plastic bag, and the screen changed from a portrait of Emily Dickinson (who looked disturbingly like the magician David Copperfield) to the text of a book.