The nurse came in to tell me my time was up. I walked slowly from the hospital across the quadrangles, to Rockefeller Chapel. A yoga class was happening in the chancel, but no one paid attention to me as I climbed to the balcony.
I sat for a long time, staring at the spot where Leydon had landed. I ignored incoming texts and calls from clients, just looking at the phone long enough to make sure they weren’t distress signals from Mr. Contreras or Petra.
If I was ever going to find out what had happened, I needed to get inside the locked wing at Ruhetal. I could go in as a lawyer but not without a client. It might be easier to climb the fence in the middle of the night.
“Are you all right?”
I jumped. I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t heard the chapel dean come up the stairs. Maybe this was how Miles Wuchnik had been killed, by someone sidling up next to him. He’d been lost in thought, imagining his next blackmail target, when Gabe Eycks hit him over the head and hefted him onto the slab. Was that how Wuchnik had come to be at the site where the Carmilla club was meeting? Had Chaim, or Arielle, promised a payoff if he’d go to the cemetery, only to have the payoff be a spike through the chest?
The dean repeated his question.
“My mind is slipping; it keeps withdrawing from the present and sliding off to other places,” I said. “Not good. Detectives need to be aware of what’s around them.”
“That sounds like a very advanced spiritual practice.”
I made a face. “I think it’s the opposite—a quintessential animal wariness. Do you think Chaim Salanter could be cold enough to engineer a murder that he knew his granddaughter had a good chance of witnessing?”
“Chaim Salanter? Oh, the options magnate. The human heart is incalculable in its heights and depths. Even if I knew Mr. Salanter, I wouldn’t pretend to know what he could be capable of.” The dean spoke with a seriousness that robbed his words of pomposity. “By the way, did any of my suggestions about that verse from Second Samuel help?”
“The George Eliot link took me to the dead man’s sister down in Danville, where I learned he’d been an enterprising blackmailer, but she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me who her brother had been targeting.”
Brother and sister, in death they were not divided. Maybe it was husband and wife, maybe Jana Shatka and Xavier Jurgens—could Leydon have seen it that way? She would have met Xavier at Ruhetal; Jana might have shown up there, too.
I’d slipped away from the present again. The dean brought me back with a question about Leydon.
“The prognosis is very poor but not impossible. I need to know what she saw in the forensic wing at Ruhetal and no one will tell me.”
“Didn’t you used to be a criminal defense lawyer?”
“A million years ago. I couldn’t mount an effective courtroom defense today—I’m far too rusty.”
“I’m not suggesting that,” the dean said. “Look at the patient roster. Maybe one of your former clients is in there. It would give you a reason to talk to someone on the inside.”
I slapped my forehead with my palm. “You’re right—I’m an idiot. I should have thought of this yesterday. It’s been twenty years since I left the PD’s office, but I can still go into the DOC—Department of Corrections—database and see who at Ruhetal is there on an arson charge!”
I pushed myself to my feet. “Of course, Leydon was pretty hypergraphic her last week; maybe she left a note in her apartment. I didn’t really sort through the papers when I went there the first time.”
As I jogged back to my car, I thought of the landfill in Leydon’s condo. The idea of returning to it was so depressing that I decided to confront Leydon’s sister-in-law about her care instead.
Before driving north, I remembered Tyler. I’d been on the run all day yesterday and hadn’t taken the time to call her mother, but I couldn’t afford to let any more time go by. I was about to make the call from my cell phone but decided I’d better be prudent, in case anyone was listening to my calls. I drove around the area until I found one of the few remaining pay phones in the city.
Rhonda Shankman proved to be a breathless, skittish woman who giggled when she was nervous—as she was throughout our conversation. I explained who I was: Petra’s cousin, and a private investigator. Ms. Shankman giggled so hard at the thought of talking to a private eye that it was hard to get the conversation on track.
“How much did Tyler tell you about the night she spent away from home twelve days ago?”
“Why, why, just that she was with girls from Vina Fields who share her love of the Carmilla series. Is there something else? Something her father should know?”
“She didn’t tell you that the girls went to the cemetery where the vampire murder took place?”