Then she basically introduced me to myself.
I sat there listening as she quickly reduced my life to a series of bullet points, reading in a near monotone off a hand-scribbled piece of paper in the folder. At least it wasn’t a cocktail napkin.
“Dr. Dylan Reinhart…Yale undergrad…PhD in psychology, also Yale…three-year research fellowship, University of Cambridge…then another PhD, this time from MIT, in statistics with a focus on Bayesian inference.” She paused and looked up. “Am I supposed to know what that is? Bayesian inference?”
Maybe if you’re dating Nate Silver…
“Bayesian inference is why most women shouldn’t have routine mammograms until they’re fifty,” I said.
“And why’s that?”
I nodded at the folder. “You’re the one who apparently likes to do her research, Elizabeth.”
“This bothers you, doesn’t it?” she asked. “My looking into your background?”
“No. What bothers me is that you still haven’t explained who wants to kill me. Anytime you’re ready.”
She closed the folder, resting her hands on top of it. No wedding ring. No jewelry of any kind. “Do you know who Allen Grimes is?”
“Grimes on Crimes?” The guy wrote a daily column for the New York Gazette. I’d heard about it—catchy name and all—but never read it.
Elizabeth nodded. “That’s him,” she said. “Two days ago, Grimes received an anonymous package in the mail. Inside it was your book.”
“Is that a crime?” I asked.
I was half joking. Not Elizabeth, though.
“As it turns out, it was a crime,” she said.
Chapter 4
ELIZABETH REACHED to her left, pulling another folder in front of her. This one was red. Red’s never good.
“Your book came with a bookmark,” she said.
She opened the folder and removed a small evidence bag. It was sealed, labeled, and just big enough for a ham sandwich. That made it the ideal size for what it was actually holding.
I leaned in, staring at it. “A playing card?”
It wasn’t a question; that was clearly what it was. A playing card. The king of clubs.
“Does this mean anything to you?” she asked.
“That’s silly. Why would it?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Elizabeth, rolling her eyes. “Clearly the reason I drove all the way out here from Manhattan is so I could ask you silly and irrelevant questions.”
“You get the word feisty a lot, don’t you?” I asked.
“I prefer spirited,” she said. “What do you prefer instead of smug?”
“Actually, I’m okay with smug.”
To her credit, she kept the straight face a good five seconds before she smiled. Peace begins with a smile, said Mother Teresa.
“No, the card doesn’t register anything with me,” I said. “Of course, it is pretty common for people to use playing cards as bookmarks.”
“Agreed,” she said. “Here’s something not so common, though. In fact, it’s pretty damn rare.”
Elizabeth turned the bag around so I could see the back of the card. There was a dark red blotch on what was a harlequin-patterned blue-and-white background. It was blood.
“I assume you’ve already had it tested,” I said.
“It’s type AB negative,” she said. “Only around 1 percent of the population has it.”
“Yeah, I’d say that’s rare, all right. I’d also say it was on purpose.”
“You and me both,” she said with a nod. “Blood type as bread crumbs.”
“So where did it lead you?” I asked.
Chapter 5
ELIZABETH REACHED for her red folder again and took out an eight-by-ten photo, black and white. As crime scenes go, this one was particularly grisly. Even the most devout Wes Craven fan would’ve flinched.
“The victim’s name is Jared Louden, ran a large hedge fund,” she said. “He was stabbed to death—to put it mildly—six days ago in the entryway of his Upper East Side town house. No witnesses, no leads. Nothing.”
I stared at the image of Louden in a pool of his own blood, his dapper-looking suit shredded from seemingly endless entry wounds. Absolutely brutal. “How many days ago did you say?”
“Six,” she answered, “and since then there hasn’t been another murder victim with AB negative blood in a two-hundred-mile radius.”
“What about before this guy?” I asked. “Any other unsolved cases?”
“There’s one from more than eight months ago. A prostitute shot to death in Queens.” Elizabeth nodded at the back of the playing card. “This blood’s not eight months old. The lab put it at no more than a week.”
“You said the card, along with my book, was mailed, right? It wasn’t delivered by messenger?”
“Yes, definitely mailed. Routed through Farley.”
She assumed I knew that was the main post office in Manhattan, the James A. Farley building, a.k.a. the one with the famous inscription. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
“The address wasn’t handwritten, was it?” I asked, speaking of inscriptions. I figured there was no chance.
“Actually, it was,” she said. “But it was Toys‘R’Us.”
That reference I didn’t know. “Toys‘R’Us? As in the toy store?”
“As in writing with your nondominant hand so it’s childlike,” she explained. “That’s what we call it, at least. Nearly impossible to trace.”
“And the card itself: what was it again?”
Elizabeth spun the evidence bag around again to show me.
“The king of clubs,” she said. “My first thought was a God complex. The killer thinks of himself as a king.”
“Does that make me his subject?”
“He obviously identifies with you or your book in some way. But whether he loathes you or reveres you, the chances are pretty good that he wants to kill you.”
“I’m sure it’s a possibility, but that’s a pretty big leap,” I said.
“A big leap, huh?”
“Sure. Fixation disorders play out in many ways.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Then again…” Her voice trailed off.
“What do you mean?” I asked. What haven’t you shown me?
Elizabeth picked up the book, turning it around so I could see my author photo.
Damn.
“How’s that leap looking now?” she said.
Chapter 6
WITH SEVENTY-FIVE miles between New Haven and the Upper West Side of Manhattan I could either suffer through the round-trip journey every week or make the best of it. I chose the latter, with more than a little help from a restored 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy motorcycle, the same model that Steve McQueen rode like a boss in The Great Escape. A few hard twists of the wrist, a rev of the engine, and the world and its worries are always left behind.
Not today, though.
Keeping pace—or, more aptly, tailgating like a son of a bitch—was that picture of me on the back of my book. What was left of me, at least. My eyes had been cut out, and the rest of my face had been slashed to threads with a precision blade. Unfortunately the artist didn’t sign his work, but he did manage to clip and paste a short sentence across my forehead, ransom note–style. Two words. Dead and Wrong. For good measure, Dead was underlined in red ink.