This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 Gunner Publications LLC

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eISBN: 9781542029704

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

1

October 7

Professional IEDs do not have visible timers attached to them.

No glowing numbers, much less clockfaces and ominous tick, tick, ticking . . .

If they’re to be remotely detonated, the device is triggered by a cell phone—an untraceable burner, appropriately nicknamed. But a timed IED is controlled by a tiny silicon chip that counts down to the devastation without a hint of visual clue and in complete silence.

So if you are, say, a twenty-seven-year-old officer with Middleton PD, splitting duties between Patrol and Bomb Squad, you have no goddamn idea if the improvised explosive device two feet from your face is set to blow in three hours. Or five seconds.

Lean, mustachioed Tony Kleppe, presently lying on his belly on the edge of Spenser Court in downtown, had learned ordnance disposal and render-safe procedures in the army. His chops were pretty much up to date, even though he rarely got the chance to use them in Middleton. He’d had four IED calls since he’d been on the force. The first was a suspicious package in front of a women’s health clinic (the “bomb” was a sheaf of Christian literature and an alarm clock). Then there were the two incidents over the past couple of years involving unstable, abusing husbands who had taken their families hostage and rigged their double-wides to explode—a mostly harmless contraption of gunpowder in one case and butane in the other. Kleppe had truly enjoyed participating in the energetic arrest of those reprehensible felons.

Then, there was the big one: made of no-nonsense RDX and a military-style timer and placed outside of the county courthouse. It was courtesy of some foolish but lethal militia movement whose target was the “evil tentacles of government,” according to an online post.

In each of those situations, Kleppe or one of his fellow cops had rendered safe using the robot that even the lower-middle-income city of Middleton had been able to afford.

The IED the young officer was presently addressing, though, was not accessible to the unit, so he would have to defuse it by hand. Letting it blow or destroying it with a controlled explosion was not an option here, it had been decided. The damn thing nestled deep in a drainage trough against a wall of Middleton General Hospital, an ancient redbrick building whose wall would crumble like kids’ blocks under the force of a blast. Patients—about two hundred—were being evacuated, but it would take another hour to get them all out, given that some were on critical care systems. There was a risk, too, that an explosion here might become an explosion elsewhere; hospitals, as every Bomb Squad officer knew, were IEDs in themselves, filled with flammable gases and oxygen, running through the walls and stored in tanks that, if ignited, could take out the entire block.

Kleppe was in a bomb suit, a ghastly outfit that weighed nearly a hundred pounds. It protected his head, his chest, torso, legs and arms. But not hands. Officers on this detail knew that if the thing went off they might survive, but their hands would be appendages of the past. Disability payments were now electronic, so one wouldn’t have to worry about signing the checks.

The device had been assembled by someone who knew what they were doing. The bang stuff was a beige rectangle of material that resembled the clay his grade-school daughter wadded into dinosaurs and Hello Kitties. Duct taped to the top were the brains and battery, contained in a black box four by five inches. Beneath it, pushed into the wad, would be the detonator.

“I make it a ki of C-4 or RDX,” he radioed. “Anderson Products timed detonator.” He was wired and speaking to the command post, a safe block away, where the head of Emergency Incidents was stationed, along with Kleppe’s captain and a dozen other officers.

“A full ki?” came through his earbuds.

“Affirmative.” This was a significant amount of explosives. A pro load, it was called, like the courthouse bomb.

“Control box is big enough, could have secondary, tertiary, circuits . . . can’t tell.”

Bomb makers, anticipating smart cops, sometimes built additional triggers into their devices, like rocker switches that set the thing off if you picked it up and tilted it. The more sophisticated had shielded circuits that were impervious to electromagnetic pulses. Bomb makers were, in their own way, artists.

And where was the countdown?

Don’t think.

Render safe.

From his toolbox he took a small electric screwdriver and leaned close, delicately unscrewing the top.

So far . . .

Peering into the guts, a collection of wires and chips, Kleppe said, “Better run a reverse circuit.”

This involved making the main board think the battery was still wired to the detonator, when, in fact, that portion of the cable had been cut, and no trigger—the timer or rocker switch or anything else—would set off the explosive. This usually worked, though occasionally a master bomb maker wrote an algorithm that sensed that the new current was slightly higher or lower than the original and set off the detonator anyway.

Kleppe backed away slightly and reached into his bag again, removing a small box with wires ending in alligator clips. One he attached to the timer box lead and the other to the battery wire. He gripped pliers and turned back to face his enemy.

He thought of all the bad movies where the hero was thinking, Do I cut the red wire or the yellow wire? That was stupid. Every disposal expert knew which one to cut. That was never an issue. The question was, Would cutting equal detonation?

He eased closer to the rectangle, reflecting on the fact that one difference between the Hello Kitty clay and the IED was that this material exploded at thirty thousand feet a second.

Thinking of his wife, his daughter.

Thinking of putting in for a transfer. DUI stops weren’t so bad.

Kleppe fitted the sharp teeth of the pliers around the battery wire. And began to squeeze—gently, of course, so that he didn’t risk waking the device as it slept silent and slept blind, inches from his hands.

2

The Pen in Middleton PD, up a flight of unnecessarily steep stairs, had recently been dolled up: some new furniture, a misplaced ceiling fan (in the literal sense—the corner of the room), a paint job, four new doorknobs, new carpet on 60 percent of the floor.

On the whole, Sloan thought, he could’ve lived with the old, given that the paint used last week contained something that burned your throat and made your eyes sting and water. He’d joked it was CS gas lite.

Sloan, forty-one, was a blunt man. A face that was fit and handsome in the way of a former football player, though one who’d been targeted with some frequency. Broad shoulders, crew-cut hair, trim hips, thick thighs. On weekends, when he wasn’t in the bleachers, he was on some park field himself, amateur gridiron. The games were flag or touch. Usually around the third quarter, they turned into tackle.

A scar crescented his cheek. This had not come from the line of scrimmage.

He was a senior gold shield, and his cubicle was close to the windows, affording a view of anemic Tudor Park. He was hot—the October day was unseasonal—and he walked to a pane now and tried to open it but the frame was still painted shut.

He’d complained to Maintenance twice.

And it wasn’t even a new color, just the same hospital police department funeral parlor morgue recruiting station beige.

He pulled off his dark-gray sports coat and draped it over his chair. His slacks were tan, his shirt white, and he wore no tie. They could be used as lassos by the bad guys. His Glock 17 and holster went into a drawer.

“Who’s it gonna be, Sloan?” This was from Leon Williams, who worked Narcotics. His cubicle was at the far end of the Pen, and he’d shouted. Several heads turned to hear Sloan’s response.

“Kansas City. By twelve.”

“You going?”

Sloan scoffed. He hadn’t missed a game this year.

“Ain’t going to be very popular.”

Sloan said, “So, you tell people in the stands who you’re betting on?”

He sat down at his file-covered desk. Made notes on the Fanelli case and stuffed them in a folder. Scanning others that awaited: three burglaries, a homicide, an attempted homicide, a suspected arson . . .

Typical grist.

Situated in the heart of the Midwest, the town of Middleton, of fading industry, shared DNA with cities like New Haven and Providence. Each of that pair had a golden hub in the center—Yale and Brown—and spokes growing progressively rustier—and more dangerous—as they radiated outward. Middleton had Mercer College, a beautiful tree- and garden-filled campus. It was a world away from the shabby one- and two-story commercial and residential structures in the rest of the downtown area.

There were pockets of redevelopment—Sloan himself lived in one—but they were outnumbered by those of the inner city, where sex trade, meth, coke, H and guns were bigger draws for entrepreneurs than the shops where you could get fast greasy food, hair extensions, colorful nails and minutes cards for your prepaid. Some of the crime was even organized, though only a few of the crews would make Tony Soprano proud.

As he was opening the homicide file, a loud voice intruded.

“Sloan, Pérez, come on in.”

The captain stood in the doorway of his glass-walled office. The fifty-year-old’s dark skin was in stark contrast to his crisp white shirt. Every article of clothing he wore was always pressed to a flat plane. Sloan wondered if his wife or he did the ironing. He suspected it was the captain himself, as his wife was a partner in a CPA firm and she worked all hours. Sloan owned an iron but had never plugged it in.

His sometimes partner, narrow and wiry, his head shaved, rose from his cubicle behind Sloan’s. The man’s eyes were, like Sloan’s, deep green. Other gold shields in the Pen wanted to joke about this, it seemed, but pulled back, maybe smelling political incorrectness. Or maybe just not being able to think up anything funny you could do with eye color.

The detectives entered the captain’s office and sat in chairs that were renowned for making your butt sore in record time.

“What do you have going on?”

Sloan offered, “Just dropped off the Reigning Asshole at the safe house. The state’s babysitting now.” He’d headed up the task force that had collared the obnoxious, whiny (and psychotic) mob enforcer Joseph Fanelli a few days ago. “Half dozen opens. Nothing time critical.”

“You?”

Danny Pérez said, “Got one of Hack Waylon’s meth stashes. That old gas station out on 87? Hiding in plain sight.”

The station was across the street from a state police barracks.

“Yeah? How much?”

Pérez seemed proud. “A half mil of crystal.”

“Well, well, well . . .”

“We’ve got the product downstairs, but I’m going to have a DEA truck move it to one of their facilities.”

“And the bad boy himself?”

“He wasn’t in attendance. We’re still looking.”

“So you’re clear for now?”

Pérez pursed his lips. “Subject to we’re still looking.”

The captain said, “I’ll give that to Williams. I need you on something else. You know Tony Kleppe?”

Sloan thought. “Patrol?”

“And Bomb Squad,” Pérez added.

The captain was fiddling with his keyboard. In the corner a printer unspooled noisily. It fell silent but he didn’t rise to get whatever had eased into the tray.

“You heard about it?”

“What?” Sloan asked.

“The IED?”

“Something, yeah. No details.”

“Couple hours ago, 911 call from somebody on Spenser Court? General Hospital? Sees a suspicious package. Patrol checks it out and finds an IED. Robot can’t get it out. Kleppe goes in to cut its balls off—by hand.”

The detectives shared a green-eyed glance.

Sloan: “And?”

“Snip, snip. All good.”

Sloan had seen the damage a bomb could do. It turned flesh and bone into very different substances.

“Who left it?” he asked.

“Nobody’s taking credit yet. Could be that group from a year or so ago. The courthouse bomb. Similar profile.”

The Patriot Militia Twelve had been behind that incident. It was a loosely affiliated band of supremacists. Nobody knew what the number in the name meant. Somebody in the Pen had commented that that was probably as high as they could count.

“The hospital’s city run,” Danny Pérez pointed out. “And PM12’s got that bullshit antigovernment agenda.”

“Whoever,” the captain said, tugging a wrinkle-free cuff down. “Now here’s where it gets interesting. Tech Services gets a warrant for cell providers. They find an email from a burner phone near Spenser Court about a half hour before the bomb’s spotted. Email says, ‘It’s in position.’”

“And the account?” Sloan asked.

A shake of the man’s head. “All that anonymous proxy crap. But what’s in-ter-esting”—he dragged the word out—“is the email that the bomber got the night before. The go-ahead. It gives the date of the bombing—this morning—and where he’s supposed to plant the IED. Only, here’s the thing. The location’s in code. So if it’s intercepted beforehand, nobody’ll know where to look for it.”

Sloan asked, “They crack it?”

“No. TS is trying. The Bureau, too—it’s gone to Quantico.”

Where the FBI’s crypto experts and supercomputers work day and night, unraveling ELINT.

But it turned out the email wasn’t encrypted electronic intelligence. It was an old-fashioned code—a WWII-era kind of secret message. The captain collected the printout and handed it to Sloan, who held it out for his partner to read as well.

The go-ahead message was a poem.

Date: 10/7

Location:

Silence Is Most Silent

Silence is most silent in the early face of night.

Returning home, you climb the steps and open wide the door

That hasn’t moved a single inch since locked up tight

When you alone walked outside ten hours or so before.

Inside, no footstep drum tap, no fire’s crackling roar.

No whispering from distant rooms, no whispers that are near.

All motion on the pastel walls, upon the carpet floor,

All flickers on the ceilings . . . you know that those are mere

Shadows which are cast by you, not by those that you hold dear.

“How’s it a code?” Pérez asked.

The captain rapped on the desktop, a sometimes habit. “Who knows? The geniuses’ll tell us. They better. If we intercept another one, I want to be waiting for the delivery boy to show up with the package.”

Sloan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a poem, much less read one start to finish. Had to’ve been at State for some class. Probably not even then.

“Maybe it was prearranged. He gets this poem and that means the target’s the hospital.”

But Sloan said, “I don’t think so. That case, why not send a simple reference like ‘Place X-1.’ No, there’s something in there”—he tapped the sheet—“that spells it out.”

The captain: “While the brain boys ’n’ girls’re trying to crack it, you two follow up on forensics and the canvass. Sloan, this weekend? Kansas City?”

“By twelve.”

The man considered. He shook his head. “Six.”

The detective lifted his eyebrow—bet at your own risk.

The men returned to Sloan’s cubicle and divided up tasks. Sloan took forensics, Pérez, canvassing. The slim detective buttoned his brown vest and suit jacket and headed out the door of the Pen.

Sloan walked down to the basement, where the evidence lockers and Crime Scene were located. He passed the stack of Hack Waylon’s meth, sitting in bags in the evidence room.

In his meeting with Karen Willoughby, head of Forensics, he learned that the bomber had been smart. Fingerprints and DNA had been scrubbed away with oxygen bleach. Other than the Anderson detonator, the components were all generic and impossible to source, and Anderson had no record of the purchaser of that particular item. The serial number had been removed.

Willoughby, a stocky woman in her fifties, told him that there was no “signature”—bomb makers often left a flourish in their devices, unique to them, an ego thing. There were no IEDs similar to this one in the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives database or the broader NCIC records. No theft of C-4, or its main component, RDX, had been reported in the state in the past year. Nearby states either.

Sloan asked, “Could the poem be a signature?”

She shook her head. “They’re always in the device itself and the bomber wants the police to find it. That ego thing. This was a message they didn’t want anyone to find.”

“Got it.”

“And whoever placed it?” she continued. “No footprints, no hairs, no fibers. And he ducked under every security camera in the ’hood. They’re getting smarter, those militia punks.”

Sloan grunted. “Not smarter. They just watch more true-crime TV.”

Back in his cubicle once more, Sloan read the poem again.

Somehow, the words directed the bomber to General Hospital.

How?

He folded a piece of paper and used it as a ruler to line up—vertically, horizontally, then diagonally—the words, looking for combinations of letters that read “hospital” or the street address. The Bureau’s computers would be doing this digitally but he wanted to try it for himself.

Nothing.

He turned to his computer and pulled up the number-one research tool favored by law enforcers throughout the world.

Google.

He typed “poetry.”

Nine hundred and sixteen million hits. The search engine didn’t bother to be more specific than that rounded, and intimidating, number.

Sloan then typed in the title and first lines of the poem itself. No hits were returned. So, somebody in the militia had been the poet.

Well, he reflected, maybe the attack on the hospital was just a one-off. If the city was lucky, the PM12 militia crew had used up all the explosives they could afford and had crawled back underneath their rock.

Eric Dawson sat, hunched forward, in the dim, gamy bar and kept his eye on the hospital across the street, viewing the action in the flecked and smeared mirror behind the bottles. He was a large man, jowly and long-faced. His black hair matched his watch coat and slacks and boots.

The crime-scene crew was still searching. Now, three hours after the device had been removed, the investigation was busywork. There was nothing to find. He’d been absolutely careful about not leaving behind any evidence. He’d done this before, of course, and knew as much about hair, fingerprints, foot impressions, tire treads and DNA as the police.

He was drinking a Sprite. The soft drink, whose taste he enjoyed, was just the thing that a man who needed sure hands—say, a bomb maker—would choose over liquor. But in a dive bar like this, soda pop might be suspicious. So he’d also asked for a shot of Woodford Reserve.

He didn’t drink any of the bourbon, though. When no one was looking, he’d pour “sips” onto the carpet at his feet.

Across the street, a slim, shaved-headed Latino detective in a three-piece suit was heading up the canvass for witnesses. Dawson took a dislike to him for some reason. Not his ethnicity, of course. What grated was that the man was focused and efficient and therefore a risk. But not all the cops were that good. One, a cute, pert policewoman, had come into the bar. Everyone, Dawson included, reported in response to her questions that they’d seen nothing “suspicious,” whatever that meant. She’d gone her merry way, taking everyone at their word. He guessed she wouldn’t have a very long career in her profession.

If she’d been more diligent, she might have found a way to examine the patrons more carefully. And she might then have spotted something concerning: the poem on the back of Dawson’s left hand, four short lines.

A sip of Sprite, a tip of bourbon onto the floor. Dawson was checking his phone for the time when he noted that he’d received an email. He called it up and read.

This was his normal account. He didn’t go to the special one, created for this operation; that inbox would be empty until he was sent the go-ahead order for tomorrow’s bomb.

He wondered what that poem would be.

3

He’d stopped caring about straightening up.

Long ago.

Not that Sloan’s apartment in SoDo, near but not in the artsy part of town, was messy in the way of many of the places where he’d run cases: the meth houses, the domestic-abuse bungalows, the neglected grandparents’ apartments. Old food, dirty clothes. Cats and cat smell.

None of that. Sloan’s three-bedroom dwelling—two of these rooms were behind doors not opened for months—was just cluttered. A lot of it was football memorabilia. Toys he bought and was going to send to his brother’s kids but hadn’t found shipping boxes for yet. Groceries he hadn’t put away. Junk mail. Clothes clean, clothes dirty. The piles tended to merge.

Now, 10:00 p.m., dressed in jeans and a gray T, Sloan was in the kitchen. He made coffee in a drip maker from a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts grounds, sprinkled in Coffee mate and stirred it in with the handle of the fork he would use for dinner. Which had yet to be decided.

He made a call to the head of Tech Services and browsed the fridge. He asked if there was any progress in decrypting the poem. He was corrected. The message was not “encrypted.” It was “encoded.” Encrypting was when a passage was turned into gibberish. Encoding was when the message was plainly readable but meant something other than what you were looking at.

Sloan didn’t care but didn’t say “whatever.” He asked if they’d found anything helpful as he examined the sparse shelves.

The answer was no.

He spotted some cartons from Tom’s, half open. The rice was hard, but other than that . . .

A call to Karen Willoughby. She told him there’d been nothing more forensically, following a second search of the bombing site at the hospital.

They disconnected.

He’d brought back some steak and broccoli from last night’s dinner with his friends Dave and Annie—the man had some talent at the grill. There was a potato, too, but it would be mealy. If he had a dog, which he didn’t, he’d give it to the dog. When he’d last talked to Judith, a while ago, he’d heard yapping in the background.

He placed another call.

Danny Pérez answered.

Sloan said, “You at dinner?”

“Not really.”

“You finding anything?”

Pérez replied, “Maybe a spotting. Not that there’s much to do with it. ’Bout eight thirty this morning, guy on Spenser Court saw a white male, large build, dark clothing, black hair. Bushy. Forties. He was near the runoff where the thing was placed.”

“Any distinguishing?”

“Maybe a tat on the back of his hand. Looked like three or four lines. Maybe writing.”

“A poem?”

“Don’t know.”

“If he was close enough to see that, tell me he saw the face,” Sloan said.

“No face.”

“Ah. See you tomorrow.”

They disconnected.

Sloan sipped more coffee. It never kept him up. Sloan could sleep anywhere. He’d been able to do this since the army. Even standing up, as long as there was something to lean on. Stakeouts, too, those dreaded twelve-hour shifts. They’d taken turns, whoever was on duty with him. The 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., one watching, one snoozing. He’d once fallen asleep during a playoff game, which was saying something for him. But, in truth, it was easy because of the teams that year.

Chinese, he decided.

He heated it for thirty seconds. It needed more but he didn’t care.

He set cup and carton on the round maple table in the kitchen and, as he ate, read the “Silence Is Most Silent” poem once more.

Five times he read it, ten.

Forget encryption . . . Excuse me, encoding.

He was interested in what it was about.

Somebody lonely, a widow or widower maybe. Like Sloan’s mother, coming home to her apartment in Seattle following a day of volunteering at the library.

After the fifteenth, maybe more, reading, irritated that he was feeling stupid, he rose, threw out the carton of food and placed the coffee mug in the sink.

He brushed his teeth and, still dressed, rolled onto the bed, gripping the poem. He tried to think of anybody he’d known who read poetry. His thoughts went back a few years, as they often did, to Judith. No, she read novels. Artsy stuff. Nobody else came to mind.

Maybe the next reading would bring a burst of enlightenment.

Starting at the beginning once more.

Then his phone was sounding.

The time was 6:42 a.m.

“Yeah?”

“Sloan,” said his captain’s rich baritone, “need you in.”

4

October 8

Tech Services had intercepted another email.

Date: 10/8

Location:

The River

Blue is not the hue of soft, but this

Water’s touch is gentle as it’s warm,

Even when the flowing stream is

Whipped to frenzy by an angry storm.

In seconds, though, an autumn chill transforms

The kindly river to a plane of ice,

As deadly and as sharp as any knife.

Sloan was at his desk in the Pen, Danny Pérez beside him, rocking slowly in his chair, which he’d wheeled over the scuffed floor.

“Where the hell is it?” the man whispered.

The first IED had been discovered by a fluke. That luck, of course, couldn’t be counted on again. They had to break the code.

“Tech Services, the Bureau?” Pérez asked.

“Nothing.” He’d just checked.

Pérez mused, “A bomb in a river? Beside a river?”

The nearest river to Middleton was fifty miles away, and Sloan could think of no government targets the militia would be interested in on that narrow body of murky water.

“A navy boat?”

Sloan sighed. “You see any battleships on the Hatachee lately?”

“Going to blow up an interstate bridge?”

Sloan scoffed. “Doesn’t seem like a high-value target. Ask Al-Qaeda.”

“Published before?”

“No.” Sloan had googled this poem too. Nothing. They were both homemade.

Poetry.

Shit.

“Sloan.”

He looked up. The captain was walking to his door. He paused there and gripped the jamb. He stood this way often. Like a maritime captain at the helm. “Got a call from Quantico. An agent in Crypto had this idea. He found somebody who might help out.”

Sloan and Pérez looked to each other. Who didn’t like the billion-dollar resources the FBI could bring to the table?

On the other hand, the fed-versus-local chest bumping could be exhausting.

Sloan asked warily, “Antiterror expert?”

Pérez wondered, “IED consultant?”

The captain chuckled. “Not exactly.”

5

She taught English at Mercer College.

It was a brainy place that Sloan would never have gotten into, even if he’d wanted to. Which he hadn’t because (A) he could never have gotten in, and (B) they didn’t have a football team worth the name.

The professor was Ciara Hawkins. She pronounced her given name as “Keera.”

The woman now sat across from Sloan and was looking around the Pen with unabashed curiosity—a visitor to a zoo, eager to take in all the odd creatures at once. Midthirties, she was attractive, with toffee-shaded hair presently pulled back into a taut ponytail. She had a tan.

Sloan had expected frumpy, given her job. But she was hardly that. Conservative maybe. She was also big into knits—with a gray sweater top and black sweater skirt. This was not a criticism. Sloan was big into wrinkles. She wore thick flesh-colored stockings. Her glasses were stylish, with dark-red frames.

When he’d offered his hand, she’d noted, with a blink, his forearm—his sleeves were rolled up. Inked on the skin was a lengthy dagger, radiating light, like from the head of Jesus in old-time paintings. He debated rolling down the sleeves, then decided not to. One thing he did clear away, though: on his desk, folders were open, revealing gruesome crime-scene photos of some gangland hits by the enforcer he’d just handed over to the state police, Joseph Fanelli. Sloan quickly closed them and set them aside, beneath pictures of famous football fields he had taped up on the half-wall in front of him. Most were of Chicago, Green Bay, Boston.

The professor was saying, “This FBI agent called the head of my department and asked for somebody at the school who knew poetry. The chair called me. I was . . . intrigued. I asked myself, why not?”

Her Facebook profile reported that in addition to survey courses in English, she taught beginning, intermediate and advanced poetry at the college. Sloan could understand advanced math and advanced physics, but he had no idea what there was about poetry that could make it advanced. Maybe longer poems.

Maybe more confusing poems.

He’d noted that the pictures on her Facebook wall showed her with friends about her age, some older men and women dressed formally, probably senior professors or administrators at Mercer. She was involved in an organization that raised funds to fight illiteracy—a serious problem in Middleton’s inner city. Noting her tan, Sloan had wondered if she was into sports and what kind. This was his initial curiosity about nearly everyone he met. In her case, she’d done a fun run, a 5K, recently. She kayaked. She didn’t seem to attend any Mercer College football games, but then, who would?

Danny Pérez walked up. In honor of the poet, he’d not only rolled down his sleeves but had buttoned his vest. Sloan knew of no other cops who still wore three-piece suits. Today, the man’s was light blue. That you didn’t see much either.

The detective introduced himself and shot a frown toward Sloan for not doing so.

Sloan ignored him.

“So?” she asked, lifting her hands and letting them drop to her lap. “What can I do?”

“Did the FBI tell you anything else?”

“No.”

Sloan explained, “A right-wing militia group’s planting bombs in the city.”

Her oval face—makeup-free, it looked like—grew troubled. “Wait. The news yesterday? Was that . . . the hospital?”

He nodded.

“But it didn’t go off, right?”

“No,” Pérez told her. “We defused it in time.”

Sloan said, “But they’ve planted another one.”

“God.” Her eyes were alarmed.

“Which is where you come in, Professor,” Pérez said.

“Ciara, please.”

“We think the militia’s using a mechanic—” Sloan paused. “That’s like a mercenary, a specialist. They’re using him to build and plant the bombs. The poems are the codes where he’s supposed to leave them. We need to crack the one we just intercepted.”

She considered this for a moment, then frowned. “But wouldn’t they simply use some sort of prearranged code? They say, ‘Stopping by Woods’ by Robert Frost, and he knows that means the hospital? I mean, there’s no way to decode that.”

Sloan said, “Sure. That’s possible. And if that’s the case, then there’s nothing to do about it. But we need to try everything. Who knows how many patients and staff would’ve been killed if the first bomb’d gone off? The second one’ll be just as deadly.”

“Well, I’ll do whatever I can.”

Sloan handed her the two printouts. She read them aloud.

Silence Is Most Silent

Silence is most silent in the early face of night.

Returning home, you climb the steps and open wide the door

That hasn’t moved a single inch since locked up tight

When you alone walked outside ten hours or so before.

Inside, no footstep drum tap, no fire’s crackling roar.

No whispering from distant rooms, no whispers that are near.

All motion on the pastel walls, upon the carpet floor,

All flickers on the ceilings . . . you know that those are mere

Shadows which are cast by you, not by those that you hold dear.

The River

Blue is not the hue of soft, but this

Water’s touch is gentle as it’s warm,

Even when the flowing stream is

Whipped to frenzy by an angry storm.

In seconds, though, an autumn chill transforms

The kindly river to a plane of ice,

As deadly and as sharp as any knife.

Ciara looked up and blinked, seeing that not only had Sloan and Pérez been listening but other cops in the Pen were too. She seemed to blush. “Always read poetry aloud. Never to yourself.”

Like him telling a rookie, “Always Mirandize a perp the minute he’s in cuffs.”

She reread them, more slowly this time, and sat back. “And you want—?” She lifted her hands.

Sloan glanced toward Pérez and said to her, “We’re not really sure. Maybe if there’s something about them that jumps out, some thoughts about people who could write poems like this.”

“Well, just impressions. I can tell you one thing—that they’re not very good. On both levels.”

“Both?” Pérez asked.

Her face grew focused, eyes narrow, as she spread the sheets out in front of her on Sloan’s desk and smoothed them beneath her long fingers, the nails uncolored. Sloan guessed his expression had been similarly intense just before he’d kicked in a bungalow door last week and leveled his Glock at Percey Blanton, a homicidal meth dealer who was debating going for the Smittie in his waistband. The perp had not done so but raised his hands, which resulted in mixed feelings within Sloan.

“Poems are about substance and form. That’s what’s so wonderful about them. The poet wants to convey a meaning, and then they pick a structure that best does that. Here.” She nodded toward the “Silence” poem. “The meaning is about someone—a widow or widower, maybe—thinking about loss in terms of the dwelling where they lived with their partner.”

Similar to what Sloan had thought earlier. He felt oddly pleased that they’d come to this mutual conclusion.

She continued, “The second one is about how quickly harmless becomes danger. Both valid themes. But the problem is they’re written on the head. Do you know what I mean?”

Pérez said, “You mean he hits somebody over the head with the message.”

She smiled. “You could put it that way. Good poetry evokes emotion; it doesn’t explain emotion. A poet gives voice to feelings that readers sense but can’t articulate.”

Sloan was working with this. Not sure.

She waved, frowning. “These’re like so-so made-for-TV movies. Hardly Truffaut or Eisenstein.”

Whoever . . .

“And as for the second part of poetry, the form? They’re both technically competent. First lines capitalized, the meter pretty consistent. But they’re out of date. Poetry runs the gamut from free verse—no structure at all—to tight, repetitive rhythm and rhyme. Like these. Modern poetry is a combination. Look at T. S. Eliot.”

Sloan was thinking of credits for a movie he’d been dragged to on a date. So the guy who wrote CATS was a poet too?

“These’re throwbacks. Done by an amateur for the fun of it, or—if the poet’s connected to a school—he’s a grad assistant at best . . . But the people in these militias. I picture backwoods hicks. Would they know anything about poetry at all?”

Sloan said, “Mostly hicks. But they’re all over the map.”

Pérez: “Look at Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber. He was brilliant.”

They were interrupted by a commotion at the far end of the Pen.

The big detective, Leon Williams, was leading a scrawny white man, with pale eyes as wild as his hair, past a row of desks to the stairway.

Well, look at this. It was Hack Waylon himself—the dealer whose half-million-dollar stash had been relocated to the MPD’s evidence locker.

The man was shouting, “Pricks, all of you! You screwed around with the wrong crew! Your ass is ours!”

He was handcuffed but still managed to send a chair flying with a solid kick.

Pérez called to Williams, “You nailed him! Congrats, my man.”

“Not much on me,” the big man replied. “One of his employees must not’ve liked the working conditions. Dimed him out.”

They’d been working seemingly forever to find somebody in Waylon’s crew who’d turn.

“I’m not saying a word without a lawyer. Not. One. Word.”

Williams handed him off to two uniforms, like a quarterback on a fake. “Get him downstairs to holding. Give him his phone call.”

The pair of officers wrestled the man out the door.

Sloan noticed that Ciara stared after him with fascination. Quite a difference from her sheltered life of classrooms; cramped college offices; libraries; a quiet, book-filled study at home. Even her sports were gentle. Kayaking, jogging, solitary sports. Never anything competitive.

From there his thoughts swayed to the question of whether there was a man in her life. Her hand was ring-free, and Facebook, always a tattletale, had been silent. He imagined she had to have a boyfriend.

Her attention swiveled from the disturbance to a wall clock. The time was 10:30 in the morning. Forensics had learned that yesterday’s bomb had been set to detonate at noon. Was this one sooner or later?

He expected to hear a distant bang at any minute.

Or maybe a nearby bang. Middleton PD was, after all, itself a government facility.

“I have class soon. Can I take the poems with me and do some more thinking about them?”

Sloan’s eyes, too, were on the clock. It almost seemed that the second hand was speeding faster than normal.

He was silent for a moment. “Cancel it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Cancel your class. We need your help.”

“I’ve never canceled. In all my years teaching.”

Just like when he was interviewing a reluctant witness, he didn’t badger or repeat himself. He simply kept his green eyes focused on her blue. And was silent.

Hers narrowed slightly, then shifted to the poems taped onto the whiteboard, under the words in red marker:

PM12? Other dom-terr?

She lifted her mobile and made a call. “Jane . . . Something’s come up. Post that I’m canceling today . . . No, I’m fine. All good. Just have to help out some people.”

She disconnected.

“Thank you,” Sloan said. Then a thought occurred. “You know poets around the country?”

“Well, it’s not like there’s an association.”

“No Poets Local 100?”

Ciara broke into a faint grin. The animation made her face all the more appealing.

“But I know a lot of names, of course. Why?”

“Could you give us a list of any who might be . . .” What was the word? “Activists?”

At this, the smile faded. Her eyes grew cautious. “Don’t you need probable cause?”

Danny Pérez lifted an eyebrow.

“I know something about policing,” she said.

Sloan asked, “In your family?”

“Law & Order. Blue Bloods. And When Wives Kill. Discovery Channel, I think. It was pretty good.”

All Sloan watched was sports.

She looked closely at his face. Unlike most people’s, her gaze didn’t slip to and from his scar. She was focused on his eyes.

“No. Not to just get names. If you’re willing to.”

“You want my students too?”

Exactly what he’d been thinking.

She didn’t wait for an answer. “No. I’m not doing that.” Her voice was firm. She then relented. “I’d let you know if I had a Kaczynski wannabe in class.”

“Fair enough.”

“All right. Where can I sit?”

He pointed to an empty desk. Eberhardt was out of the hospital—they’d removed the slug—but would be on leave for another two weeks.

Ciara sat down and pulled her Dell from her bag. She booted up the computer and MiFi, then leaned forward, typing quickly. Her eyes were narrowed, focused, and Sloan again reflected that her pose and expression reminded him of himself in the field.

He asked her, “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Cream, sugar?”

“Sugar.”

There was a pot in the corner, near Narcotics, and it wasn’t bad. Sloan, though, pulled his jacket on, checked his cash and headed toward the door for the Starbucks a block up the street. The cops generally didn’t go there—the time, the money—unless it was a special occasion, like when spouses showed up.

Sloan happened to notice Pérez glance at him. His partner’s smiling expression meant only one thing: don’t remember the last time you offered to get me coffee.

6

Ticking, ticking . . .

The hands of the wall clock in the Pen—indicating 1:05 p.m.—moved silently.

But Sloan heard, in his imagination, each clicking second as the IED, somewhere in the endangered city of Middleton, counted down to detonation.

Sloan and Pérez were handling a relatively small portion of the investigation, trying to crack the bombers’ code. A larger task force—federal and state—was working confidential informants and searching government buildings for the device.

But progress was slow. There were a surprisingly large number of facilities that the group might pick to destroy. And many, many square feet of space within and around them to search.

Sloan noted Ciara Hawkins stretch and slip a thumb drive from her computer. Holding it up, she said, “The usual suspects.”

Pérez offered a knowing smile.

It was some movie, Sloan believed. His partner knew films cold. It was supposedly good. Maybe he’d watch it.

Probably not.

Pérez said, “I’ll run ’em through NCIC. Our database too.” The more computer-savvy of the two partners, he took the drive and stepped back to his cubicle. He slipped the drive into his computer and called up the list. As the three of them waited for it to load, she nodded toward the computer and said, “They’re all connected with schools that have a history of political protest. But I’m sorry to say, none of them specialize in Spenser or Chaucer, and—”

“Spenser?” Sloan asked urgently. “What do you mean?”

Pérez, too, was staring at her.

She frowned, not sure what to make of their reaction. “That poem? The first one? ‘Silence Is Most Silent’? It’s in a rhyme scheme that was made popular by Edmund Spenser. One of the greatest poets who ever lived.” She looked them over. “You know rhyme scheme?”

Something in his distant past. “Better refresh,” Sloan said.

“You assign a letter to the sound of the last syllable in a poem. Every word or phrase that rhymes with that gets the same letter. Here, ‘night’ is A. ‘Door’ is B. ‘Near’ is C.”

Silence Is Most Silent

Silence is most silent in the early face of night.

Returning home, you climb the steps and open wide the door

That hasn’t moved a single inch since locked up tight

When you alone walked outside ten hours or so before.

Inside, no footstep drum tap, no fire’s crackling roar.

No whispering from distant rooms, no whispers that are near.

All motion on the pastel walls, upon the carpet floor,

All flickers on the ceilings . . . you know that those are mere

Shadows which are cast by you, not by those that you hold dear.

She said, “The scheme is ABABBCBCC. That makes it Spenserian.”

Sloan said, “The first bomb was left on Spenser Court.”

“That’s the code!” Pérez blurted. “The rhyme scheme!”

“The second one,” Sloan said. “What’s that?”

The River

Blue is not the hue of soft, but this

Water’s touch is gentle as it’s warm,

Even when the flowing stream is

Whipped to frenzy by an angry storm.

In seconds, though, an autumn chill transforms

The kindly river to a plane of ice,

As deadly and as sharp as any knife.

Ciara said, “It’s a form Geoffrey Chaucer popularized. This doesn’t match his meter, but it is a quatrain and a tercet, with the scheme of ABAB BCC.”

Sloan had no idea what most of that sentence meant. But he caught the essence. He and Pérez regarded each other. “Where?”

His partner was online, typing. He mused, “Is there a Chaucer Street? Jeffrey? Buildings?” He scanned the screen. “Nothing.”

The professor said, “The scheme has a nickname. It was stolen from Chaucer by James I of Scotland. He was a poet too. ABAB BCC is also known as the rhyme royal.”

Pérez shook his head. “No Royal Street in Middleton.”

Sloan said quickly, “But there is a King.” He looked at the time and muttered, “And hell . . .”

Pérez nodded and grabbed his phone.

“What?” Ciara asked Sloan.

“King’s Park. It’s on city land—just what the militia would target. There’s a soccer field there. The playoffs’re today. The stands’re going to be packed.”

7

Dogs are the best.

Nearly miraculous.

There are mobile computerized nitrogen sensors, but nothing finds explosives like canines.

Black-and-tan Bella, a Malinois, had sniffed out the IED beneath the stadium in four minutes, then went on to confirm that there were no others in or around the structure.

Sloan and Pérez were in the mobile command post, a converted recreational vehicle. Through bullet- and bombproof glass, they could just see Tony Kleppe in the bulky suit. He was about a hundred feet away, lumbering toward the IED, which had been planted near a support column in the back of the north stands. He carried a large aluminum suitcase.

The autumn day was cool, but the post was small, the atmosphere stale and warm; the air conditioner atop the vehicle ran inefficiently . . . and noisily.

“Any word yet on who’s behind ’em?” The commander of Emergency Incidents—MPD’s equivalent to SWAT—was a lanky ex-marine. His skin was dark, his eyes forever observant, and it looked like even at fifty-plus years he could do a dozen one-handed push-ups and not break a sweat.

Sloan told him, “Nobody’s taking credit yet. We think probably PM12.”

The commander scoffed. “So they kill innocent people. Kids included. A hospital? A soccer game? And that’s patriotism?”

Sloan couldn’t imagine how hot and uncomfortable it would be inside a bomb suit. With its massive hood and vent tube trailing down his back, it made Kleppe look like a monster from a Godzilla movie. The lurching walk added to this impression.

The officer disappeared from view behind the stadium. A moment later the speaker in the trailer clattered with a breathless voice. “Almost in position.”

“Whoever it is knows their stuff,” the commander said.

Sloan cocked an eyebrow his way.

“Planting the devices where the robot can’t pick them up.”

This one, identical to the hospital bomb, was in a deep ditch.

Kleppe’s gasping voice again: “Getting closer, getting closer. Okay. I’m in position. Going to start.”

“Roger,” the commander said.

Sloan found himself leaning toward the window, staring in the direction where the young officer would be.

It was three minutes later that the explosion shook the ground and launched debris and smoke into the afternoon sky.

Sloan even felt the impact through the thick, jaundiced glass.

8

Was anybody hurt?”

The woman’s urgent voice was behind him.

Sloan turned.

Ciara Hawkins stood beside her car, parked near the barricade of yellow tape, emblazoned with DO NOT CROSS in bold black letters.

“No.” Sloan joined her and nodded toward Tony Kleppe, lumbering back toward the command post with the aluminum suitcase. “There’s a drone in there. It was too hard to get to the device. He dropped a charge onto it. A controlled explosion.”

“It didn’t hurt the stands?” She was looking up.

“It wasn’t powerful enough to bring ’em down. It was probably going to go off after the game, fans were leaving. Those pricks.” His face was grim.

“Terrible,” she said, her jaw trembling. “And look at all the kids here! Jesus.”

Sloan was, on the one hand, happy to see her. Then again, it was a crime scene that featured a deadly bomb. “You shouldn’t be here.”

She scoffed. “You think I wouldn’t want to see what I contributed to?”

Good point.

And he recalled her sparkling eyes as she took in the Pen, the tough men and women—and the perps too. Some of the women he’d dated had a fascination with tough boys.

Tough had proved too much for Judith.

He surveyed the soccer grounds, the ring of woods beyond. He pointed. “Over there.”

They walked away from the chaos of the scene along a path bordered by dense wisteria and grapevines. At the end was a large tree whose leaves were just starting to take on autumn colors. Considering whom he was speaking with, the image brought back a distorted memory of a poem from his school days. A spreading chestnut tree. Somebody was under it. Did it mean he was buried? Or was standing or sitting, waiting for someone? Sloan didn’t waste further time trying to summon the memory.

Here he stopped and surveyed this portion of the park. A few couples, joggers, children with kites, Frisbee players.

She apparently noticed his squinting, focused gaze.

“You concerned about something?”

“Just need to stay on top of it. We figured this one out. They aren’t going to like that.”

“Is that what happens? They come after you?”

“The druggies, the meth-heads, domestic abusers, not so much. But the dom-terrs—”

“That was on your chart. What is it?”

“Domestic terrorists. Well, any fanatic, like, ideological perps.”

“Perpetrators.”

“When Wives Kill, Detective Hawkins.” He gave a smile and received one in return. Then he grew serious. “Perps like them go preemptive. So until they’re collared, we’ve gotta assume we’re at risk.”

“Could they just go away?”

“Doubt it,” Sloan said. The wind had come up and the colorful kites soared. “They don’t have a win here. Oh for two. They need blood so they can make a statement. What’re they going to say, ‘PM12 is responsible for disrupting traffic on Spenser Court and a canceled soccer game’?”

She laughed. “This’s your typical day?”

“No. Mostly felony larcenies, arson, those domestics. It could be anything. Why I like being a cop. Never boring.”

She shivered. The breeze was accompanied by a temperature drop of a few degrees.

“Jacket?” he asked.

She seemed surprised, and he wondered if he’d offended her. Some male condescension. “No, I’m good.”

He decided to push. “I got an extra layer.” He tapped his chest with a thunk. “Body armor.”

“Well, sure, you don’t mind.”

He pulled off the suit jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She tugged it closed.

Sloan broke a few seconds of silence. “So, poetry? Why that?”

She cocked her head as if she’d never been asked the question. “Well, I was always a brainy girl.”

“You the sort who reminded the teacher she forgot to assign homework?”

A smile. “I knew I wanted to go into English lit. Our father would read us poems. Old-fashioned. Epic poems. The Charge of the Light Brigade. Hiawatha. Evangeline. Somehow it just clicked.”

“Form and meaning.”

A nod.

“He a professor too?”

“No, he was a businessman.”

He noted the tense of the verb and didn’t ask more.

“You come from a long line of cops? Can I say ‘cop’?”

“It’s politically correct, no worries. My dad, yeah. Beat patrol all his life here.”

Another bout of silence, though a comfortable one. He finally said, “I’ve got to write this up. And I want to see if Danny’s come back with any suspects from your list of ten-most-wanted poets.”

They turned and walked back toward the stadium.

At her car, she removed his jacket and handed it to him.

He said, “I’ll need a statement from you about the rhyme-scheme codes. For the perp’s profile.”

“Happy to. If you have any questions about names on that list, give me a call.”

Sloan tugged on his jacket and turned back to the command post. He then paused and looked back. “You know, it’s not about the list, but I do have a question.”

9

In the shower, letting the hot water hit hard.

Sloan’s head was lowered, and presently, his shoulders were taking the brunt of the downpour.

Some minutes later he straightened up and stretched. The hot stream had dulled most of the familiar pains, and he stepped from the enclosure into the small, steamy bathroom. He was aware of yellow paint flaking from the frame of the mirror above the sink. Some escaping the baseboards too. Never noticed that before.

Probably should get it fixed.

He snagged a towel and dried off, legs first, then torso and finally his crew-cut head. The opposite of what made sense, he guessed, since water obeyed gravity, but that’s the way he dried himself. Then on went underwear and jeans, a T-shirt, socks, no shoes.

Walking into the living room, he happened to glance at a picture on the carved-oak mantelpiece above the fireplace that he’d been meaning, for ten years, to get into operating order.

His attention was drawn to a framed photograph of a foursome at a Bears game. It was the playoffs, late in the year, and everyone was bundled. Dave and Annie on the left. On the right were Sloan and Judith. He just realized now that Ciara Hawkins reminded him of his former lover—not their faces, but the same willowy build and calm, observant, nothing-gets-past-them eyes. The smiles, too, rare in both women but glowing when they happened to appear.

He was startled when the intercom sounded. He walked to the door, “’Lo?”

“Me,” the woman’s voice called.

“Come on up.”

He left the door ajar and returned to the mantel and turned facedown the picture from his past.

A few minutes later Ciara Hawkins walked inside, pulling off a fleece jacket. Tonight she was in blue jeans and a black T-shirt, though the professor was still present, as she wore a bulky brown cardigan sweater. On her feet were sandals and bright-red socks embroidered with some comic book character he’d seen but couldn’t name. So the poetry professor had a sense of humor.

He took her jacket, hung it and closed the door.

The question he’d asked when they parted ways at the soccer field was: “So, you like Italian?”

Her answer: “Who doesn’t?”

“Wine?”

She nodded.

“I’ve got both.”

“White.”

He poured two.

She said, “Give me a tour.”

Sloan did, which didn’t take long, and soon, glasses in hand, they were on the couch.

“Any luck?” she asked.

“No hits on criminal backgrounds from your list.”

“In a way I’m glad about that. Some militia crazy man decides to write poems, that’s one thing. But an artist—a poet—who’s gone over to the dark side. That bothers me . . . You know all those crime shows? The evidence, crime scene? Did you find anything at the stadium?”

“No, they’re pros. They know what they’re doing.”

“But you blew up the bomb. Wouldn’t there be fingerprints or something?”

“The first IED . . . That’s—”

“I know.”

“It was clean. The second probably was too. Anyway, it’s a balance. Sometimes you sacrifice a possible lead to keep people safe. Us included.”

“I just think about those kids that might’ve been killed. Or yesterday, the patients. Do you have any idea who’s doing this?”

“FBI’s got CIs—confidential informants—working the dom-terrs. Nothing so far. It might be a new cell. They pop up sometimes, do their damage and then vanish. Hey, you did your part. Wouldn’t have found it without you.”

The compliment seemed to embarrass her and she looked around the room. “You like your sports, don’t you?” She was scanning the team posters and equipment—footballs and baseball bats and gloves. He was pleased he’d had the foresight to move his blended clean-dirty jerseys, shorts and sweats into one of the archival guest bedrooms.

“Like the competing thing.” He shrugged. “Go figure. The tenser it is, the more relaxed I get. Maybe I should talk to a shrink about that.”

He told himself to stop rambling.

“You ever go to Mercer football?”

He hesitated, uncertain. He knew about school loyalties.

She laughed. “Come on . . . We all know the team sucks.”

“They had a good quarterback six, seven, seasons ago. Well, decent.”

He noticed her frowning as she looked from his dagger tattoo to his biceps. “Oh, my . . .”

It was one of his more pronounced scars, an in-and-out, 9 mm. If it had been a .40 or .45, the result would have been far more dramatic, and he might no longer be a cop.

“I’m damaged goods,” he said. He touched the crescent on his face. “Glass from gunshot through a storefront.”

Why stop there, he decided and tugged his shirt up, revealing a streak that disappeared into his jeans. “This one, motorcycle crash. I won’t show you where it ends up.” Pulling his right sleeve up. “Surgery from football.”

Walking a line here, he thought. But she seemed genuinely interested.

What a pair we are, a battle-scarred soldier and a staid professor.

His shirt went up higher and his hand touched other patches of disfigured skin. “JJ Coyne. Drug dealer. This was from Ebbitt Small, another dealer.” Low, below the navel. “Courtesy of Diego Abrera. Domestic. Didn’t want to shoot him so I wrestled the knife away. He needed help, not a bullet.”

Ciara gave a bright laugh. “I’ve never been on a date where the guy explains why he didn’t shoot somebody.”

Was it a date? Apparently so. Or a version of one.

She frowned at the second scar on his belly. “And that?”

Ah, that . . .

It was unusual, in the shape of a J.

“The army.”

“Bullet?”

“Shrapnel.”

“A bomb? Like the one today?”

“Similar but it was in metal pipe. That’s what did the damage.”

She asked, “Was that your job? You disposed of them?”

“No. Stayed as far away from those little bastards as I could.”

“You were infantry?”

After a moment he said, “Basically.”

She seemed to be silently asking, There’s more, isn’t there?

Would she be thinking: Sniper? Probably not. That wasn’t a job description most people went to.

Tell her, or not?

Sloan was surprised he’d gotten as close to the subject as he had . . . and with a woman living in the sheltered halls of academia. But maybe it was people like that who had the greatest interest in stories like his and would want more.

He decided: maybe later.

The door buzzer sounded again. Sloan tugged down his T-shirt and went to answer. It was the DoorDash order. He collected the food, tipped the delivery woman.

He carted the two heavy bags from Mama Rosa’s into the dining room and set them on the maple table. She joined him and eyed the order. “When do the other eight get here?”

“Faster to get everything than make decisions.”

“Interesting philosophy.”

They both reached for the nearest bag simultaneously and their hands met.

And remained in contact for a moment as they turned to each other, inches apart. He swayed toward her.

She swayed away, lowering her head. Her hand dropped to her side.

He’d moved back. What’re you thinking? he asked himself angrily. Jesus.

“I’ll get the plates.” He walked into the kitchen and pulled the china from the cabinet, collected silverware and serving utensils. Were there napkins? Have to be paper towels.

When he returned he found her looking down at two of the foil containers she’d removed. Just staring down. Was she debating leaving?

It was so tough to navigate this man-woman thing. You just never knew.

Well, it was her call. Dinner or Uber.

There turned out to be a third option, though.

She looked up. “Are you really all that hungry?”

He didn’t answer but didn’t need to.

She unbuttoned the cardigan and hung it on the back of a dining room chair. Taking his hand, she looked at each of the closed doors. “Which one?” she whispered.

He led her into his bedroom, clicked the lamp off, leaving as illumination just the soft glow from a streetlight up the cobblestoned alley. They sat on the unmade bed and he tugged his T-shirt off. He reached for hers but she took his hands, lifted them to her lips and, with an embarrassed smile on her face, said softly, “I’m a shy English teacher.”

It seemed that this was the time for him to say something clever and comforting but he couldn’t think of a single word, so as they lay back on the bed, he just kissed her, hard.

Which she clearly preferred anyway.

A noise.

Outside.

Four a.m.

Sloan was instantly awake and sitting up fast, scaring Ciara, he could see.

But her feelings were far from his thoughts. As they had to be at a time like this. The Glock from under the bed was in his hand and he was crouching, looking out the window, which was bisected by a year-old crack.

A band of pale streetlight in his face.

She stared, her face taut with worry. She began to say something.

He touched his left index finger to his lips as he scanned the street. His corresponding right finger was near, but not on, the trigger and he kept the muzzle pointed in a safe direction.

He was motionless for probably ten seconds before he noted the raccoon complete its mission of knocking the trash-can lid completely to the ground.

Sloan gave it fifteen seconds longer, in case the animal had been enlisted—improbably, but not impossibly—as some kind of diversion.

No, it was merely here to enjoy a raccoon feast.

The gun went back under the bed. He turned. “This is my life.”

“Dom-terrs after you?”

“And a few others.”

“From the army?”

The answer was yes. But he said nothing.

Sloan thought: Guns under beds. PTSD. People who want his head.

He knew that whatever relationship he might have had with the beautiful and sensuous English professor and poetry maven had derailed.

Same old . . .

Yet when he whispered, “Go back to sleep,” she simply said, firmly, “No.”

And it now was her finger touching his lips.

She kissed him hard. Then she rolled him over on his back, and her mouth moved leisurely from scar to scar, shoulder, chest, torso, and downward.

10

October 9

Sloan couldn’t remember the last time the smell of coffee had awakened him.

Tammy maybe. No, Rashida. Judith was a long, long time ago.

His mother had sent him a coffee maker with a timer. You got it ready the night before and it woke you up with a ringing tone and the smell of brewing java. The appliance was in a closet, unopened.

He rose and dressed. Glanced out the window, recalling the “intrusion” last night. His blood pressure, heart rate had never risen.

He walked into the kitchen. Ciara was sweatered up again. A disappointment. Sloan was thinking of the intensity of the hours they’d spent in bed, the complete lack of restraint, the energy, pure energy. He could definitely be tempted.

Another time . . .

Besides, it was after eight. He’d have to get to the office soon too. There was a bomber to catch, a militia to shut down.

Ciara had used his battered but dependable Mr. Coffee to brew a pot. Peering into cupboards, she said, “I’d cook, but you don’t really have anything.”

“No. I don’t shop much. There’s Mama Rosa’s.” A nod at the towering bags.

“It was out all night.”

He shrugged.

“No,” she said with a laugh.

“Maybe some cereal.” He seemed to recall he had a box somewhere.

“No milk.”

He said, “Oh, right.” Coffee mate wouldn’t work. He’d tried once.

“Cups?” She opened cabinets.

“They’re in the dishwasher, but—”

She tugged the door open. “You haven’t run it.” Looking in, she added, “For a while.”

Odd. With Ciara, he didn’t feel the least embarrassed by these lapses. Tammy had lectured. Rashida had dramatically—and unnecessarily—held her nose.

Sloan’s phone hummed. As he picked it up, he said to her, “There’re some paper cups under the sink.”

He read the text.

Ciara rose, holding a tube of Dixies. “You have to go to the station?”

“No,” he said. “We both do.”

Two developments in the case.

One. Danny Pérez’s canvassers at the soccer stadium had found a witness, a man who’d seen the likely bomber about a half hour before the police arrived to search for the IED.

And two: Tech Services had intercepted another poem.

The wit was a pudgy, balding man, wearing overalls with a cable company’s logo on the breast. His first or last name was Harvey, according to the stitching below the logo.

Pérez escorted the man to Sloan’s cubie, where he introduced him to his partner, though not to Ciara, who sat on the far side of the desk. Protocol, regarding the security of witnesses.

She was still wearing what she’d been in last night, but the sleeves of her sweater were shoved up and her hair was in a tight bun; she could easily have passed for a detective.

Sloan asked the witness, “How close did you get?”

“I don’t know, six, seven, feet.”

“What was he wearing?”

The man explained it was mostly dark clothing: watch coat and slacks, maybe jeans. He had thick black hair. He was “jowly.”

Yes, it would be the man in black from the hospital bombing attempt.

And he was carrying a shopping bag. Whole Foods. “It looked heavy.”

Sloan asked, “Did you see his hands?”

“Yessir.”

“He have a tat?”

“Yeah, on the back of his hand. Looked like three or four lines of words.”

“Could you make them out?”

“Oh, no, sorry, Detective. No.”

A poem? Probably. Maybe helpful to know.

Inkings were significant in investigations. Tats could tell you a lot about perps themselves: what gangs they belonged to and number of kills, for instance. Whenever he collared somebody who was inked, Sloan took note; displaying an emblem to the world suggested the bearer had a devil-may-care attitude and would be particularly deadly.

Pérez called up Ciara’s list on his computer and gestured the witness to sit down and start going through the pictures.

The man scrolled, shaking his head, as each new face popped up.

Sloan opened his interdepartmental messages and clicked on the one from Tech Services, then downloaded the new poem.

He said to Ciara, “Go for it.”

She walked up to the board and read aloud.

Date: 10/10

Location:

Sleep

Nighttime lounges on the street. There’s a captivating moon.

The neighborhood is comforted by yellow window lights.

A bullfrog calls, cicadas creak, an owl prepares to hunt.

A few remaining children laugh, resisting calls for bed.

A cottage down a pleasant block rests in a grove of green.

The entryway is scented sweet from roses red and white.

The living room bears photographs of you and those you’ve loved.

The fireplace is warm but dark, smoke scent hovers near.

Up the stairs, the corridor is bathed in gentle glow.

Your bedroom sits, at the end, the finest of them all.

It’s here you’re lying on your back, the blanket pulled away,

To show a spreading Rorschach of your dark and cooling blood.

Sloan shook his head. “That’s a hell of a twist. Starts out all nice, then the last line, a zinger. But there’s no rhyme scheme.”

Ciara said, “Maybe this one, they’re not using the code anymore—they know we’ve figured out how to crack it. So it does refer to a place.”

He looked over the lines again.

Danny Pérez took a call.

Sloan hoped it was from the canvass team, who might have found another witness who’d seen their dark-clothed mechanic and gotten a better look at the tattooed poem. He really wanted to know what it said. What was the meaning, what was the rhyme scheme? But no, Pérez called across the Pen, “Williams, pick up on four. The DEA’s armored transport, coming to get Waylon’s meth? Some delay or something.”

“I got it,” Williams called.

Pérez then answered Ciara’s suggestion with: “I’m not sure. How can it describe a location? It’s a private house, it sounds like. PM12’s gripe is with the government.”

Ciara pushed her ruby-framed glasses higher on her nose, nodding as if dismissing her own idea. “There’s no rhyme scheme but there is a regular meter—the rhythm. The feet—those’re the metric units in poems—the feet here’re mostly trochees. The first syllable is accented. The following one isn’t. Double, double, toil and trouble.”

From some famous movie or play. Sloan couldn’t remember which and so he didn’t say anything.

Pérez shrugged. “I was out the day they covered trochees in the academy.”

Sloan asked, “But how’s that a code?”

She said, “There’s no name for a metric scheme like this, the way there was with the rhyme royal.”

Sloan had a thought. “Could it be the word ‘trochee’ itself? Is it a soundalike for a street name or place in the city?”

But no answer came to anyone’s mind.

Pérez suggested, “Maybe ‘trochee’ is an anagram for something? You know, rearranged letters?”

The online program gave them “Hector,” “Roche” and “Three,” a few others. But none were the names of streets or locations in or around town.

Ciara said, “What about famous poems written in trochee? There’s William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ . . . What about a zoo?”

“Closed up years ago,” Sloan said.

“There’s Poe’s ‘The Raven.’ You know, ‘Once upon a midnight dreary . . .’”

Sloan frowned. “What was his full name? Edgar Allan Poe, right? How’s Allan spelled?”

“A-L-L-A-N.”

The detectives looked at each other. “Natural History Museum. Allan Street and Broderick.”

Sloan swept up the phone.

11

He was driving, fast.

Not far from the Mercer campus, Allan Street was clogged with the cars, bicycles, skateboarders and pedestrians of a college town in midterm. Everybody seemed to be talking or texting or doing both simultaneously. And few were paying attention to their transit.

According to MPD regulations, civilians were allowed only in the back of cruisers, behind the mesh, even if not prisoners. Sloan had never been one for regs; Ciara sat beside him, the bulky computer between them.

She was now part of the team.

There’d been rain, and the cobbles in this part of town—one of the oldest in Middleton—were slick. He steered into the skids and kept the car under control. Sloan had aced the tactical driving course—which he took repeatedly, and unnecessarily, simply because it was fun.

Five minutes of silent driving and then he was skidding to a stop in front of the three-story museum, constructed of limestone. The surface was in need of a good scrubbing. It wasn’t a big place, and Sloan could remember class trips when the students walked through the dusty exhibits and listened to guides drone on and on about whales and buffalo while he daydreamed of being on the baseball or football field.

A large bronze eagle stood guard in front.

Three black-and-whites were parked at odd angles in front of a brownstone. Also present was the Bomb Squad vehicle.

Uniformed officers were on the sidewalk, the stairs, the street.

Sloan climbed out and tugged his jacket aside so the officers could see his gold shield.

He turned to Ciara. “Wait here.”

She nodded and he walked to the nearest uniforms.

“Detective,” one said, a trim man, ex-military, he knew.

“Status?”

“They found it.”

But nearby was Tony Kleppe, in street clothes, sipping a Coke from a can. The Malinois Bella snoozed at his feet.

The uniform continued, “Was a dud. Looked like the real thing, but it was just modeling clay, seems like.”

Sloan said, “Probably ran out of C-4. They planted it to screw with us.”

Disrupting traffic on Spenser Court . . .

“Dog did a sweep. No explosives.”

Then the thought occurred. He scanned the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. “Who’s got command here?”

A slim, grizzled officer, a captain of about fifty-five, walked over.

Sloan said urgently, “Captain, we’ve got a problem here. I’m thinking ambush. PM12, or whoever it is, is pissed and maybe they’re going to start after us.”

“Snipers?” He, too, scanned the roofs.

“Could be.”

“Okay. We’ll get the vehicles in cover position while Karen runs the scene. I’ll get Emergency Incidents here.” He strode away, talking into his phone.

“Everybody, listen up,” Sloan called. The uniforms glanced his way. “This may be a trap. Stay behind the vehicles. Keep an eye on rooftops for shooters. EI’s on the way.”

The uniforms did as he’d ordered.

He returned to his car and bent down as Ciara lowered the window.

He explained about the fake bomb and the concern that it was bait to draw them into a trap.

“I’m going to have somebody drive you back to HQ. I’ll meet you there.”

“I want to stay,” she said firmly.

“Can’t risk it. If it’s a trap, they could come at us a dozen ways.”

She scanned the surrounding buildings.

He didn’t tell her that part of his concern was that he’d instinctively keep an eye on her if anything were to go down, and he couldn’t afford that distraction.

“All right.”

His hand was on the door, above the window. She rested hers on it.

He gestured to a young policewoman, hair in a ballerina bun, much like Ciara’s today. “Trudi.”

Crouching, the woman hurried to him. “Detective.”

“Drive Ms. Hawkins back to HQ. I’ll clear it with your commander.”

The women nodded to each other. Ciara climbed out, and keeping low, as the patrolwoman indicated, they moved toward her black-and-white. She turned back. “Sloan.”

He looked her way.

“No more scars. Promise.”

He gave her a nod and they continued on to the squad car.

Minor chaos on the street.

Eric Dawson supposed that if a victim had been shot to death here on Allan Street, with, say, a .40-caliber gun like the one presently on his hip, the response would have been exponentially greater. Dozens of cars, ambulances.

More press too.

Although there were plenty of them in attendance. Any whiff of crime brought out the pen pushers.

He sidled back into the shadows of an alleyway between an abandoned warehouse and a restaurant, which would not open till five. He was invisible to the police.

He glanced at his phone.

Good. It was time for this all to be over with.

He noted the two women—cop and civilian—crouching as they hurried to a black-and-white squad car. After a moment it pulled onto Allan Street. Dawson slipped back into the alley, climbed into his own car and started the engine. He pulled his gun from the holster. It was a lengthy weapon, a Beretta, and tended to irritate his hip when he drove in cars, like this one, with narrow bucket seats.

“The lobster?” Tom Chung, the owner of Tom’s Happy Lotus, said to Sloan with a frown. He was a middle-aged man, slim, and he wore a suit every day when he was at the helm of his restaurant.

Chung would be surprised that the man who ordered beef with broccoli and mu shu pork exclusively—and, one might say, excessively—was targeting the seafood portion of the menu.

Surprised, too, that he was getting the priciest dish on offer.

“The lobster,” Sloan repeated. Then a shrug. “And mu shu pork.”

“Ah, you’re having company, Detective. Two fortune cookies too.”

“No fortune cookies.”

“She use chopsticks?” Chung asked.

“I don’t know. How would I know?” he grumbled. He himself never got them.

“You eat slower. Healthier. Chopsticks’re good for you. You’ll wait for the order?”

“I’ll wait.”

Sloan sat on the rickety chair near the door. He called Pérez and learned that a canvass around the Natural History Museum had not yielded any leads.

“And forensics there and at the stadium? Willoughby’s people say it’s inconclusive.”

Sloan grimaced. “Because the mechanic doesn’t leave shit behind. That witness, the cable guy? He make anybody? On the list Ciara brought in?”

“Him? No.”

“What’re you doing now?”

“I got tapped to meet the DEA transport team, get Waylon’s meth to their warehouse. They finally got the armored truck fixed. Then get back to canvassing at the stadium. The crowd was two thousand. They can’t all be blind.”

No, but they could all be terrified about helping the police identify psychotic bombers.

“And our poet? See if she can come up with more names.” Pérez would be smiling. “If you happen to see her tonight.”

“Funny.” Sloan disconnected.

He sat back, absently watching the cooks at work.

Who the hell was the black-clothed mechanic? A pro in it for the money? Or a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the militia’s cause?

And that cause, hating the evil government?

Such bullshit.

Did anyone in the militia fly on an airliner safely, thanks to the FAA?

Did they drive on roads maintained by the feds and state and city?

Did they take Social Security, Medicare or ADC checks?

Did they call 911 if their house caught fire or they were in a car wreck?

Did they sleep more soundly at night knowing the army defended them?

Of course. They all did.

Then Sloan was focusing on tonight once more. At that thought his spirits brightened fast.

He’d take the food home, throw it in the fridge, then clean up the apartment fast.

Clutter . . .

Run the dishwasher too. Did he have soap? He’d get some anyway. And milk.

Wine too.

He thought about something else he’d need tonight. He’d stop at the drugstore for those.

Then his phone was humming, a text.

It began: Problem.

He remained frozen as he read the rest and then sprinted through the door.

“Detective, Detective, wait. Your order! It’s almost ready!”

12

Sloan skidded the car to a stop in front of the building, leaving it half up on the curb.

Two black-and-whites were here too. The Patrol officers were closer and had responded to the call within minutes.

He climbed out, not bothering to close the door. He saw two uniformed state police officers he’d worked with over the years, a tall Anglo and a solidly built Latina with red-black hair.

“Sloan,” she said.

“And?” His heart was thudding.

The white officer said evenly, “Medical examiner just signed off. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, hell.” Sloan’s shoulders slumped. The initial text reported only a shooting. The status of the victim wasn’t yet known.

The woman officer: “Body’s in the back.”

Pérez’s private vehicle—a pristine Toyota, a white sedan—pulled up fast too. The gold shield got out and brushed a hand over his head. “Jesus, Sloan.” He nodded at the building. He lifted an eyebrow to the state officers.

“DCDS,” Sloan told him.

Shorthand for “deceased confirmed dead at scene.”

“Oh, man. You know what happened?”

“Not yet.” He asked the Latina: “Okay to go in?”

She nodded. “Gloves and booties.”

She gave them surgical covers for their shoes—to keep from transferring trace onto the scene—and they pulled on their own gloves. The men walked into the alcove. The door was chocked open. Sloan was smelling scents he couldn’t identify. Something from cooking, something from cleaning, some kind of damp carpet or paper smell. Mold maybe, that one.

Then out the back door, into the courtyard and garden behind the property.

The blood was extensive.

Blood and bits of flesh, bone matter.

Another uniformed officer was present. The pale-complexioned woman pointed to a three-story apartment across the alley. “Shooter was up there, roof. Vic was a sitting duck. Hundred feet away. My ninety-nine-year-old grandmother could’ve made the shot.”

“Forensics on the way?”

“Yessir.”

Sloan walked down the stairs to the kill zone to get a closer look at the victim: mob enforcer turned state’s witness Joseph Fanelli lay splayed on the grass not five feet from a glorious rosebush, which bowed down toward the ground under the weight of spectacular yellow petals, made all the heavier by the spatter of bright blood.

13

An hour later, Sloan was in the front, on the sidewalk, as the head of Forensics joined him.

Karen Willoughby was known throughout the state for her fine crime-scene work. Every few months there were attempts to steal her away—to bigger and, arguably, better PDs. But she was a Middleton woman born and bred, coached her granddaughter’s soccer team and organized her church’s pancake breakfasts. Nothing would pry her from the city.

He looked toward her with raised brows. She answered his silent question: “Shooter’s nest was scrubbed. And I mean scrubbed, wiped down with cleanser.”

“Lord. I won’t even bother to ask about the brass.”

She chuckled.

“Weapon?”

“Two two three.”

Assault rifle. Shorter barrel, but perfectly accurate at this range.

Ninety-nine-year-old grandmother . . .

“Auto?”

“No.”

A civilian weapon, then. The semiauto versions you could buy in most states for nothing more than cash, a driver’s license and a five-minute wait on hold with the keepers of the firearms database. Or steal from a gun show if you wanted an untraceable weapon.

He stared up at the sniper’s nest. Absently, he asked Willoughby, “Anything solid at the museum?”

“No, the team looked for possible threat sites but didn’t find anything. Still waiting for latents and DNA.”

Nodding.

As Willoughby left, Pérez approached and lifted eyebrows as dark as his hair would be, had he not gone for the shaved-head look. “We handed off Fanelli to the state. It’s on them.”

Sloan said, “My name’s still on the paperwork.”

What was the hit going for? Sloan wondered. Probably high six figures. The man just knew too damn much. Where all the bodies were buried. His, and a lot of other people’s.

Sloan’s eyes were still on the facade of the building.

“Who’s your first choice?” Pérez asked.

“You know who.”

“You going to call?”

Sloan answered his partner: “I’m going to call.”

He stepped away and dug his phone from his pocket. Looked up a number and dialed.

“Mr. Kosov’s office.”

“Detective Sloan. MPD. He in?”

“No . . . One minute.”

There was a click.

“Sloan.” The man was a grumbler.

“You know?”

“Okay. I heard.” His accent was vaguely Russian.

Viktor Kosov would be in his functional office atop his construction company headquarters. Sloan had been there twice. It was nearly as cluttered as Sloan’s apartment.

“You know the way the finger’s going to point.”

Kosov said adamantly, “I wasn’t behind it, Jake. I swear.”

If Sloan had a nickel for every time . . .

“Fanelli goes away and you’re out of the crosshairs, Viktor.”

“Ha! No, I’m not. I’m right in the middle. Okay? Because look: you, tough-ass detective, are dragging me over coals right now. Am I the first one you called?”

“You’ve got the most to lose. Fanelli could’ve put you away forever.”

“Okay, okay, not so fast. I got good lawyers. You don’t have shit on me or I’d be in max-sec wing at Larkin right now. Anyway, I am serious. I did not call this one in. You know who my boys are, the shirtsleeve crew. Martin and Roll? They’re in Atlantic City on something else. You can check. And me? I never contract out.”

This was true.

Of course, in making the call to the mob boss, Sloan wasn’t expecting a confession. But he’d hoped to judge by the tone of the man’s denial if he’d been behind the hit or not.

An odd thought occurred to him. Ciara had talked about the two sides of poetry. The substance and the form. Interviews with suspects were the same. There was what they said, which might or might not be a lie, and then there was how they said it—the tone, the speed, the choice of words, their body language. That was more revealing.

Sloan said, “It’ll go a long way, Viktor, you tell me if you hear anything.”

“Okay, okay. I put word out on street, Jake. Hey. We both want the people behind this. You and me, we both on the line.”

Amen to that.

“Call me.”

The men disconnected.

He joined Pérez, who said, “And?”

“I don’t think he did it. He’s putting out inquiries.”

They walked to their cars. Sloan looked back at the safe house, which was like a hive with a half dozen black-and-white bees huddled outside.

He was momentarily amused. He’d been poetic. A figure of speech. Police cars as insects.

Pérez asked, “Meet you back at the Pen?”

“No.”

“Captain’s gonna want to see us.”

“I’ll call him later.”

“Oh, right. Plans. Hope that works out. She seems nice. Reminds me of . . . well, she seems nice.”

Sloan gave a we’ll-see tilt of his head.

Pérez climbed into his car and pulled away from the curb.

Sloan leaned against the hood of his own vehicle, sighing as he looked over the crime scene, lifted his phone and punched in numbers.

Then he exhaled a laugh, both amused and irritated. In his eagerness to talk to Ciara, he’d dialed wrong.

Once more.

But he heard the same three ascending tones and the words, “We’re sorry, the number you are calling is no longer in service.”

Once more, just to be sure.

The same.

A thousand explanations.

Well, a few.

She didn’t pay the bill.

The phone was stolen and she’d stopped service.

He checked his texts. Two from his captain. That was all.

She’d gotten a new provider. They were always offering good deals to seduce you away.

Then, his gut twisting right below the scar from Diego Abrera’s weapon, he looked up a number on Google and hit “Call now.”

“Mercer College,” a woman’s pleasant voice answered.

“Professor Ciara Hawkins.”

A pause. “I’m sorry. Who?”

“English Department. Ciara Hawkins.”

“There’s no Professor Hawkins on staff.”

He found he was compulsively kneading the finger and thumb of his left hand. He stopped. “Is there another school connected to Mercer? A high school, maybe?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Has a Ciara Hawkins ever worked at Mercer?”

“Not in the six years I’ve been here. Is there anyone else in the department who can help?”

He disconnected.

Sloan called up his browser and went to Facebook.

The page of Professor Ciara Hawkins, PhD, was gone.

14

She was packing up.

Her dyed-blonde hair—far lighter than her natural brunette—was tucked under a black baseball cap, free of logo.

Towne was in a nonchain motel on the outskirts of Middleton. The room was shabby and scuffed and, for some curious reason, painted a jarring combo of bright green and orange.

Encasing her hands were blue gloves, those latex things that made your fingers and palms sweat terribly. She was dumping much of what she’d brought with her into double-thick garbage bags. They had to be durable, since the corners of the books might tear thinner bags.

Out went Studies in Writing Poetry, The Oxford History of Modern Poetry, Meter and Rhyme in Classical Verse, A Survey of Jacobean Poetry, and dozens of others: texts, anthologies (compilations by a number of poets), and collections (multiple poems by the same author), biographies of poets, literary journals, a self-published book about the history of Mercer College. She didn’t like the idea of disposing of books, but any evidence linking her to Middleton had to be eradicated.

Towne had barely made it through college, though that was due to impatience and boredom, not intelligence. Her IQ was stellar. Yet a few subjects she’d enjoyed: science and math and English.

One of the few truthful things she’d told Sloan was that she had developed a love of poetry from her father. And he would read to her—though her alone. There were no other siblings, as she’d suggested. She remembered, too, her reading to him as he lay in the hospital on what would turn out to be his deathbed. Poem after poem.

At his funeral she’d read poems as well, some of which she’d written. The event was well attended; Henry Towne, who owned a dry-cleaning chain, was active in the Shriners, Rotary Club and other local service organizations. The man had a second career, though, too, which few knew about. He was an enforcer for one of the toughest mobs in Boston. It was these dark genes, in addition to those carrying a love of verse, that he’d passed on to his daughter. (Her first kill was at age twenty, when she’d tapped the man who’d mortally wounded Henry and left him to die a lingering death.)

As she now got the oxygen bleach spray and started scrubbing all the surfaces she’d touched, she thought about Sloan, as she’d found herself doing recently with some frequency. Some thoughts were professional. Of course, it would be hard—almost impossible—for him or anyone from MPD to learn that the fictional Ciara Hawkins had stayed here, but her instincts dictated that she be particularly careful; she’d learned what kind of law enforcer he was. She needed to do her own cleansing, on top of the maids’ when she checked out.

This was the left-brain side of her—the scientist, the mathematician, the engineer—viewing Sloan. Different from the other side—the right brain, the heart, some said—in which thoughts of the detective were also firmly seated.

After a half hour, she decided, enough. She stepped back and surveyed the rooms.

No, it was unlikely that the police would find this motel in the first place, let alone recover a fingerprint or trace of DNA or a hair.

What of the evidence she’d left at Sloan’s apartment?

She’d been careful there, too, about what she touched, and she had scrubbed away the few fingerprints after she’d slipped from bed early in the morning, before making coffee.

DNA was another matter, of course.

Yes, she’d left some of that mysterious and perilous substance on sheets and doorknobs and towels.

But she had a plan to eliminate the rest of the threat—even more thoroughly than she’d done here with sponge and spray bottle.

She did this now, sitting down at her laptop. She logged on to an anonymous server and sent an email. After confirming it was sent, she activated an app that wiped the contents of the Dell’s hard drive.

Everything else good? Clean?

Pretty much.

She’d made a mistake in casually mentioning that the zoo might be the target after telling the men about Blake’s “The Tyger.” The detectives had known immediately that it had closed. A fact that she, as a resident, would have been aware of.

At least Sloan and his partner hadn’t caught the flub.

Anything else?

Yes. Telling Sloan about her father in the first place. A skewed picture, but still, she’d given something away.

Why?

Then, with a grimace, she said to herself: Do you really need to ask?

Donning a black tactical jacket, turning her collar up and pulling on sunglasses, Towne walked down the stairs to the entryway, lugging her backpack and the garbage bags.

A glance outside. She saw no threat. No one at all, in fact, in this downtrodden part of the county that was none too shiny to start with.

Two blocks away was her SUV, a white Jeep, which sported Florida plates.

She heaved what she carried into the back and then climbed into the driver’s seat, pulling off the gloves. She drove a circuitous route to the interstate.

On her way out of the county, she would toss the bags containing the books and other trash into separate receptacles, miles apart.

Even though the computer’s hard drive was wiped, a talented digital forensic expert could still find some incriminating traces in the dark crevices of computer storage; the Dell’s grave would be a deep river of polluted water that flowed through an industrial site many miles away.

That, she’d regret.

It was on this device that she’d spent hours upon hours composing and rewriting the poems that were key to her scheme.

15

I dropped her off after we got here from the Natural History Museum,” Officer Trudi Genovese told Sloan.

“Did you see her go inside HQ?” Sloan was at his desk in the Pen.

The slim policewoman thought for a minute. “Well, no, I guess I didn’t.”

“Okay.”

“You all right, Detective?”

He nodded. After she left, he stared at the printouts of the three poems, which he’d ripped from the whiteboard and now sat in front of him.

Complete bullshit.

The hell had he been thinking? Militias sending secret codes through poems?

Like everyone else at the first hint of an IED, he’d gotten caught up in the frenzy of the case. Nothing else had existed but figuring out who was behind the plot, how they were going to strike, how to stop them.

How to find the devices . . .

Never stepping back and asking, Does this really make sense?

Why indeed didn’t the militia just say to the bomber—like the captain had mentioned—“Tomorrow’s bomb’s at location X-1, like we talked about last week”?

Sloan’s patrol-cop father had said on several occasions, “Reality’s simple. Fiction’s complicated.”

Then there was the fact that no one took credit for the bombs. That should’ve alerted him too. Psychos like supremacists live for publicity. But there’d been only silence.

Another warning bell he’d dismissed.

Had he paid attention, he might’ve thought something else was going on. Maybe breaching the police station itself, getting Hack Waylon inside so he could lead a team to rescue his half-million worth of meth in the evidence room.

Or maybe even what actually happened: sneaking a fox into the henhouse to learn where mobster Joe Fanelli’s safe house was.

He closed his eyes. If she was fake, then so was the cableman who claimed he’d seen the bomber. He’d be her partner. The man had sat at Pérez’s computer, looking over pictures that Pérez had gathered from Ciara’s detective work, all the while searching for a scrap of paper left lying carelessly around the Pen with Fanelli’s location on it.

Of course, her search wasn’t limited to the MPD.

It extended to his apartment.

His bedroom.

It was then that his computer sounded a ding with an incoming email. He leaned forward to read.

Sloan:

Well, by now . . .

You know how that sentence ends, right?

I shouldn’t be writing this. The wisest thing would be simply to disappear. But I can’t do that.

You deserve to know the truth.

Yes, I killed Fanelli. But you have to know why. One of his hits a few years ago? He killed the wrong man. He was drunk and he screwed up the address. The victim’s death was painful and long. Fanelli could’ve gotten him help, after he realized his mistake, but he didn’t. He just left him to die.

That victim? He and I and a few other people were close. We worked together—overseas. With your background, you probably can guess under what circumstances.

When Fanelli got arrested on some other charges, fine, we thought, he’d go down for something at least.

But then we heard he was going to walk, witness protection.

So no justice for our murdered friend.

We weren’t going to let that happen.

We came up with a plan. Me, the bomber, the witness looking over photos of the poets—no one was who we seemed to be. We set up the fake militia bombings to get into the MPD and find out where his safe house was—which you’ve figured out by now, of course.

One thing you don’t know: the bomb maker we picked is an expert. He used degraded explosives in the devices; they would’ve made a bang, but nobody would have been hurt.

Now, let’s get to it. You and me? That was real. I could’ve broken into your place to find the safe house. But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it how it worked out. I still do, but obviously . . .

Come after us if you want. There’ll be pressure for you to.

But it won’t be easy. I do know what I’m doing.

Yours, with affection . . .

No signature.

MPD computers have a basic trace-route program built in, but after Sloan ran it, the trail ended at an anonymous server in Europe.

He stretched, rubbed his chin and realized he’d forgotten to shave.

So Fanelli had accidentally killed a former military man, and Ciara and other fellow soldiers weren’t going to let him get away with it.

He was staring at her email, wondering what her name really was, where she really lived, when his phone rang.

“Sloan.”

“It’s me.” The grumbling, Slavic-accented voice of Viktor Kosov.

“Yeah?”

“For what it’s worth . . . Okay? My people, they ask around, about Fanelli. There’s word on street. It wasn’t any of the families. The hit was personal. Revenge for something Fanelli did a while ago. I don’t know what. The shooter isn’t from the area. And he wasn’t alone. Okay? Had some friends with him.”

Or with her. After a moment, Sloan said, “All right.”

“You believe me?”

“I think so.”

A pause. With what sounded like some genuine sympathy, the mob boss asked, “This going to come back on you?”

“Probably.”

“Fanelli was shit. Okay? Everybody glad he’s gone.”

Tell that to my captain. And the mayor. And the prosecutor.

“So long, Viktor,” Sloan said and disconnected.

He stared at the poems in front of him and reread them.

Focusing, like he’d done the first time, on the meaning, not the rhyme or rhythm.

The first was about someone coming home to an empty house, because the other person who’d lived there was gone: the soldiers’ friend, the man Fanelli killed.

The second was about something, or someone—changing, from kind and warm to deadly, as soothing water turned to a frozen knife. A poet becoming a killer.

The last one was about bloody death. The execution.

Had Ciara, or whatever her name really was, written them? He had a feeling she had. No, he was sure of it.

Sloan sat back, stretched, again reading her email. The memories cascaded: of touching her, kissing her, feeling her warmth beside him as she slept. The hour after they’d awakened from the sound in the alleyway.

He saw Pérez walking into the Pen. He was holding two cups from Starbucks.

Sloan’s hands went to the keyboard. He hesitated, and just as Pérez arrived, he deleted the email.

He asked, “One of those for me?”

“Yeah. Not all that hot.”

Sloan said, “But it’s coffee.”

“That it is.”

16

October 3, One Week Earlier

In gray sweats, sunglasses, a black baseball cap, she walks down the hallway of the Stay-A-While motel, off the interstate. Her brown hair is wrangled into a ponytail, but that’s tucked up into the cap. Only wisps are visible.

Towne has entered from the parking lot through one of the doors at the end of a lengthy corridor. They never use nice hotels. The Ritzes and the InterContinentals have only one entrance, and the lobbies are filled with witnesses and the best security cameras on the market. The cheaper chains do not suffer from such liabilities, and most of them you can enter from a side corridor. The trick is simple: one person checks in, then just tapes the latch open.

You can get twenty people inside a room registered to one.

Besides, staying at the Ritz? That’s crazy. Towne, like most people in her profession, believes in frugality. Save every penny; you can’t ply this trade forever.

She knocks and the door to 122 opens.

Stepping inside, she scans and removes her hand from her right hip.

Here is her boss. Gray-haired, slim and reserved Brad Garland, fifty-five—he has outlived the life expectancy in the trade because he is no longer field.

Here is Kitty Abresco, twenty-four. The petite woman with mocha skin and a crew cut can do pull-ups till she’s bored and has free dived to eighty meters. Her shooting skill is equal with both hands.

Here is Chris Shedd, thirty-seven, tall and round and bald and cheerful of appearance. He has never done a pull-up and Towne cannot imagine him trying. In a TV show, he would be known as a background player.

And here, in the corner, is long-faced Eric Dawson. At forty-three, he is eight years older than Towne. This is the age that, in a rugged man, will get her immediate attention, gripping low in the belly, and hold it. They have not, however, slept together for four years.

She nods greetings and receives the same in reply, and the conversation, some trivia about the barren midwestern countryside, it seems, winds down. Towne sloughs her backpack. There is a cardboard box of coffee, and Towne pours a cup from the wobbly spigot. She sits on the bed, beside Shedd.

Time is critical, and Garland now gets to it: “Thanks for coming here.”

He means thanks for finding the time for the job and thanks for journeying to Middleton, not a place any of them would choose to be; it’s quite the contrast to their last job, at Cap d’Antibes in the south of France.

Garland says, “Towne is point on this one. She’s planned it. She’ll run it.”

She says, “We have a hit. His name is Joseph Fanelli. High-level enforcer. Local LEA’ve got their hands on him. The head of an organization here, Viktor Kosov, needs Fanelli gone. And since he’ll be the number-one suspect, we need to focus the blame somewhere else.”

A tricky complication. Some jobs do not require this. It’s far easier to eliminate a human being from the earth when you don’t have to make it look like somebody else is behind the kill. But for the fees paid to the group, its customers get what they want.

“He’s in Middleton PD’s lockup. We can’t get to him there. But in a few days MPD’s transferring him to a state police safe house. That’s where we’ll get to him.” To Dawson, she says, “You’ll be a serial bomber, some vague connection to a militia that wants to blow up government targets.” She looks to Abresco. “We’ll need two timed IEDs. They can’t do too much damage. No deaths.”

“My sleep,” the woman says in a laconic New Orleans patois.

“An inactive one too.”

“You got it.” Abresco shrugs. “Though they’re not as much fun.”

Towne looks to Dawson: “MPD’s Tech Services’ll check out email around the time and location of the bomb. What they’ll find is a message to the bomber giving him the location of where to plant it in code. They’ll try to decode it. They won’t be able to.

“Then they’ll find a second go-ahead message. At the same time one of us’ll route a call through Quantico, Virginia, to the captain of the Detective Bureau.” She looks at Garner. “You’ll front you’re an FBI crypto agent and you’ve found somebody in Middleton who can help.

“They bring me into Middleton PD.” Towne looks to Shedd. “You’ll be a witness. You saw the bomber. They’ll bring you in too. We’ll have two sets of eyes on site to find the address of Fanelli’s safe house. I’ll also try to get into a senior detective’s home.”

“Break in?” Shedd asks. He is good with locks.

“Maybe,” Towne answers. “I’ll have to see.”

There is another way she might breach the detective’s house or apartment. It would depend on a number of factors. One thing she’d have to be careful about: making sure it was lights-out. There was a ragged scar under her left breast from the time a victim had produced a belt-buckle knife she hadn’t spotted and got her twice, deep, before he died. Another scar was just below the rib cage. Then there were the tats. A 5.56-mm round on one shoulder blade, and the Chinese characters for “Quiet Death” on the other.

Dawson asks, “What kind of expert’re you going to be? Cyber?”

“No. Won’t work. MPD’ll have their own, and they’ll have access to the Bureau’s people and supercomputers. But what they don’t have access to is someone with my specialty: poetry.”

Shedd asks, “Sending codes in poems? Little far-fetched, isn’t it?”

The crew is always honest about one another’s proposals.

“True. But a bomb about to blow somewhere in the city, targeting civilians? They’ll be desperate and willing to try anything. Remember that job when I played a psychic, and the cops paid me $10K to find the missing vic? This isn’t any stranger than that.”

Shedd nods in concession.

She continues, “By the time they say, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t the way a real militia works,’ Fanelli’ll be dead and we’ll be gone.

“Now, I’ll need Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,” she says to Abresco. “Professor at Mercer College. English Department. Some social life but not much. Nobody’s going to dig deep.”

“Sure, Prof.” Abresco grins. The group’s technical expert, she is not only talented at bomb construction but all things IT. She makes great money as a programmer. Her income is even higher than what Towne pulls in running successful hunting ranches in Wyoming and South America.

“I can’t write poetry,” Dawson says.

“I’ll do it.” In addition to playing the psychic, Towne had masqueraded as an expert before: an engineer, a real estate developer, even a stock-car driver. Those she’d had to learn from the ground up. Poetry was a natural talent.

She says to Dawson: “I had this idea I like. Ink yourself with a poem. Maybe on your neck or the back of a hand. Not a tat gun, just with a pen. Temporary.”

“What should it say?” Dawson asks.

“Doesn’t matter. Just get close enough to a witness so they can see it looks like four or five lines of verse. More misdirection for the cops. Mysterious, poetry-obsessed bomber. They’ll love it.”

Garner asks, “You said turn the blame away from Kosov?”

Towne nods. “After it’s done and my cover’s blown, I’ll contact the cops and tell them that one of Fanelli’s hits was a screwup. Killed the wrong man. We’re vets who were all in the same unit with the victim. We want revenge. And Kosov’ll report that word on the street is that the hit is pure payback. Nothing to do with the mob.

“Now, I figure two live bombs. The fake’s the third. That’ll make them think it’s an ambush and keep them busy.” She looks to Dawson. “You follow me. Keep my M4 and scope in the trunk. Pick me up, we’ll get to Fanelli. I’ll take the shot. You spot.”

Abresco smiles. “Damn, girl. Smart. The Queen’s Gambit.”

“Got it.”

“Any questions?”

No one has any.

Dawson is looking down. “Have an idea for that poem on my hand.”

Towne lifts an eyebrow.

He nods to a magazine on the coffee table, one of those motel giveaways that are mostly about dining, shopping and cosmetic surgery. On the back is an ad for corporate motivational posters. The one in the center reads:

In the Business World we face challenges,

As we try to succeed.

But the true secret to Winning

Is to be part of a TEAM!

“Pure Shakespeare,” Towne says. “Let’s get to work.”

17

October 12, Present Day

Is it ‘officer’ or ‘detective’?”

“Either. Detective.”

“Okay, Detective. This is the room.” The woman was in her sixties, heavyset, her gray hair forced into place with a headband. She opened the door with a master key.

“When did she leave?” Sloan asked.

“I don’t know for sure. Coupla days, I think. By ‘I think,’ I mean you don’t have to check out at the front. Most people don’t. We have their credit cards or they prepay with cash. Like her.”

He smelled the air.

“Do your people use bleach to clean the rooms?”

“No, sir. We get this cleanser. Bulk. Nice smell. Rose, you know.”

He’d flashed his badge and asked the desk clerk if a woman matching the image he displayed—taken of Ciara, or whomever, from a security video at MPD—had stayed here. If this had been official, he would’ve gotten a warrant to search the room, but he went on the gold shield and impromptu charm. The last one wasn’t his strong suit but it seemed to be working.

This was the thirty-seventh motel he’d visited in three days.

“And no one’s stayed here since?”

“No, sir. Slow season.”

The register showed the guest to be a Kathryn Stone. Florida address. The driver’s license was fictional. She’d paid a deposit for a week, small bills, now lost in the bank. There was a cheap security camera trained on the parking lot but she hadn’t kept her wheels here. The make, model and license of the vehicle she’d reported on the registration card were fake.

“Suppose the garbage that was here’s gone?”

“That was a funny thing. There was no trash. The maids told me. You’d never know a soul stayed here. Brought her own soap and shampoo, towels, too, and sheets.”

“I’ll just be fifteen, twenty, minutes or so.”

She took the hint and wandered back to the office.

The sky was cloudless and clear and sunlight lay in glowing gold rectangles on the brown carpet. Dust motes floated like tiny brown hot-air balloons.

Sloan donned blue gloves. Pointless, but protocol was baked in.

He began a textbook grid search, hallway, bedroom, bath, closet, space beneath the bed.

Which revealed nothing, of course.

He turned to the dresser. Sloan had investigated scores of crimes that had involved motel and hotel rooms. He’d learned that only a small percentage of guests used dressers. Suitcases and the second bed were more popular spots for clothes and accessories.

He imagined this would be the same here. So he was surprised when he opened the bottom drawer.

Sloan lifted out the folded piece of paper, opened it carefully and read the script, which was artistically penned in deep-blue ink.

To S.

When we met, I couldn’t help but view you with disdain,

the way a bird might see a fish meandering through the deep.

But then one night a hint of sound broke through a broken pane,

I saw you tense, black gun in hand, a thousand miles from sleep,

Your eyes and mine identical, cold, focused, sure and stark,

You and I, atop the chain: my falcon and your shark.

Sloan looked around. He was alone. He read the lines out loud—the way poetry was meant to be read.

The rhyme scheme was AB AB CC.

He had evidence bags in his pocket—he always did—and he slipped the poem into one. Unlike standard procedure, however, he didn’t write at the top where it had been found, the time and date, and what case it related to.

Sloan sealed the top and slipped the bag into the pocket of his sports coat. “AB AB CC,” he whispered, then stepped out into the vivid autumn afternoon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2019 Gunner Publications LLC

Jeffery Deaver is a former journalist, folk singer, and attorney whose novels have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including in the New York Times, the Times of London, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Los Angeles Times. His books are sold in 150 countries and have been translated into twenty-five languages.

The author of more than forty novels, eighty short stories, and a nonfiction law book, as well as the lyricist of a country-western album, he’s received or been short-listed for dozens of awards.

Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Broken Window was named best novel of the year by the International Thriller Writers (ITW). His stand-alone novels The Bodies Left Behind and Edge were also nominated for ITW prizes, as was his short story The Victims’ Club. He has been awarded the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Short Story Dagger by the British Crime Writers’ Association, and he is a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award and the Nero Award. The Cold Moon was named the book of the year by the Mystery Writers of Japan. In addition, the Japan Adventure Fiction Association gave The Cold Moon and Carte Blanche its annual Grand Prix award. Deaver’s book The Kill Room was awarded the Political Thriller of the Year award by Killer Nashville, and his collection of short stories Trouble in Mind was nominated for best anthology by that organization as well.

Deaver, who was named a Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America (MWA) in 2020, has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention, and with the Raymond Chandler Award for lifetime achievement in Italy. Strand Magazine also presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Deaver has been nominated for an Anthony, a Shamus, and a Gumshoe, as well as for eight Edgar Awards from MWA. He served two terms as president of that prestigious organization.

His audiobook The Starling Project, starring Alfred Molina and produced by Audible, was a finalist for the Audie Award for Best Audio Drama of the year in 2016. Deaver contributed to the anthologies In the Company of Sherlock Holmes and Books to Die For, the latter of which won the Anthony and Agatha Awards.

Deaver’s most recent novels are The Final Twist, The Goodbye Man, and The Never Game in his Colter Shaw series; the Lincoln Rhyme novels The Midnight Lock, The Cutting Edge, The Burial Hour, and The Steel Kiss; Solitude Creek, a Kathryn Dance thriller; and The October List, a thriller told in reverse. For the Kathryn Dance novel XO, Deaver wrote an album of country-western songs, available on iTunes and as a CD. Before that, he wrote Carte Blanche, a James Bond continuation novel and a #1 international bestseller. Deaver’s most recent short fiction includes A Perfect Plan, featuring Lincoln Rhyme; Cause of Death; The Debriefing; Turning Point; Forgotten and The Second Hostage, featuring Colter Shaw; and Buried, part of the Amazon Original Stories collection Hush.

Deaver’s book A Maiden’s Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was a feature release from Universal Pictures starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme / Amelia Sachs novels were the basis for the nine-episode NBC TV show Lincoln Rhyme: Hunt for the Bone Collector. Lifetime aired an adaptation of his book The Devil’s Teardrop. And yes, the rumors are true: he did appear as a corrupt reporter on his favorite soap opera, As the World Turns. He was born outside Chicago and has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University.

Readers can visit his website at www.jefferydeaver.com.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

ABOUT THE AUTHOR