Stirred

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 disco

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 ru

“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.

A bar at the top of the screen displayed the title: Blue Murder - A Thriller.

The progress meter at the bottom of the screen showed it was 4% into the book. The section had been electronically bookmarked, the top corner displaying a dog-eared icon.

I remembered from the Wikipedia entry that this was another Andrew Z. Thomas title.

Taking my iPhone out of my purse, I snapped a quick photo of the page as Herb held it up.

Blue Murder ~ A Thriller

Walking home on the dark wet street, he glimpsed his apartment building through the trees. The thought of falling asleep tonight in that gloomy bedroom knotted his stomach. It had felt good telling them about the dream. He wished he’d told them everything. Especially about the fear. About waking in the middle of the night, bolting up in bed in that black room, mentally, physically quaking. About not knowing why an image as seemingly benign as the second hand gliding toward the XII, drove terror so deep inside him he’d removed the clock from the wall in his classroom. About not knowing what in God’s name was going to happen that afternoon in that lovely town, at the corner of Oak and Sycamore. They think not there how much of blood it costs.

After reading the section, I frowned.

Herb said, “What’s wrong, Jack?”

“There’s no page number.”

He pointed to the 4% at the bottom of the screen. “Page four.”

“No, that’s the percentage of the book read. There are no page numbers on Kindles, only…” I nodded, feeling the exhilarating rush of discovery.

“What, Jack?”

“There aren’t page numbers, but there are locations.”

Through the plastic, I pressed the MENU button, and when the tab appeared, the location popped up, centered on the bottom of the screen:

Location 310 of 7647