I shook my head. I couldn’t come up with a scenario to validate Leydon’s fears. But the fact remained that Wuchnik had made numerous trips to Ruhetal last month. Perhaps he had a different agenda than spying on Leydon Ashford.
I looked again at Wuchnik’s mileage log to see if I could make any sense of his case numbering system. The scrap of paper I’d found in his apartment had somehow ended up in the log: “ ‘In death they were not divided’? Told me to look it up.”
If someone had given the detective a quotation and a riddle, that someone was likely Leydon. The dean at Rockefeller seemed to have the same portmanteau memory as Leydon. I called down to the chapel and was lucky enough to find Dr. Knaub in his office.
“Sorry to treat you like a walking dictionary,” I said, after updating him on Leydon’s condition. “But I found, well, call it a clue that I’m guessing she left behind.”
“Second Samuel,” Knaub said, when I read what was on the scrap of paper. “It’s a famous passage, David lamenting the deaths of Saul and Saul’s son Jonathan. Is that a help?”
“Not that I can see. Not unless Leydon had a lead on a father-son death that she discussed with Miles Wuchnik.”
“It could be something else,” the dean said. “David adds that his love for Jonathan surpassed the love of women. Is there a homosexual component to your case?”
“If there is, Leydon was way ahead of me on that, as on so many things before. Thanks, Dr. Knaub.”
“Not at all,” he said courteously. “I like puzzles. And please call me Henry.”
I wrote Knaub’s suggestions in my notebook. You never know. Although there was so much here I didn’t know that adding “Homosexual love? Father-son double slaying?” to my notes just confused me further.
If it was indeed Leydon who’d given Wuchnik that cryptic message, then she’d known what he was working on. And she’d known that because she’d met him at Ruhetal. Or someplace else? Had they connected earlier and he’d followed her to the hospital?
I went back around the corner to her apartment building. The manager was between complaining tenants. Once he’d satisfied himself that I had a legitimate interest in finding out what had led up to Leydon’s fall from the chapel balcony, he took me up to the ninth floor and let me into her apartment.
“I’ll just watch you, miss, while you look around.” Feldtman unlocked the door and then hesitated. “You may not want to go in there.”
I peered over his shoulder. The door opened into a large living space with a glass wall that faced Lake Michigan. If you kept your chin up and your eyes on the lake, you could ignore the chaos that billowed underneath. Papers filled the floor and the chairs—newspaper clippings, computer printouts, brown paper bags, all covered in Leydon’s large, reckless script. A few plates with uneaten food were scattered in the wreckage, along with some of the wispy lingerie Leydon favored. Feldtman was right—I didn’t really want to go in.
“At least she hasn’t started writing on the walls,” I said, trying to put a hopeful spin on it.
I sat cross-legged on the floor and started to pick up clippings, which covered topics ranging from reports on the supercollider in Geneva to health claims for the goji berry. Leydon clipped stories on election reform, on Chicago’s electoral politics, on personnel changes at my ex-husband’s law firm. She’d printed out reams of stories from Internet sources, on hit-and-run accidents, on climate change, on mammograms. Some were covered in her own handwriting, with incomprehensible phrases: The Fire Last Time, No Smoking Gun Without Fire. I wished her hypomanic phase had led her to collect something large and disposable, like sleeping bags, instead of news.
I found two articles from the Herald-Star and the Sun-Times that covered Wuchnik’s death. The Times had mentioned me as finding the body. Perhaps that’s what prompted Leydon to call me—she’d circled my name with such a heavy hand that she’d almost obliterated it. Both papers showed the Byzantine vault where Wuchnik’s body had been found. Under the photograph in the Times, Leydon had scrawled, He is dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque but no wail of sorrow went up, instead a gleeful cry, He is dead, he is dead!
She’d gone on at greater length in the Herald-Star, crisscrossing the page and the margins. Home is the hunter, home from the hill, from the dale from Happy Dale, the hunter of the haunted, tormentor of the damned, who else hated your haunting hunting?
“Are you going to look at all of these?” Feldtman asked.
“I don’t have the stamina or the time. If you want to help give them a quick once-over, you might look for Miles Wuchnik’s name.”
His eyes widened. “Was Ms. Ashford involved in the vampire murder?”
“I don’t think so, but there’s some connection that I don’t understand. Ms. Ashford thought he was spying on her. Did you ever see him hanging around the building?”