By the time the evening news aired, every station in the Tri-State Area was carrying the story, and linking the murder of Lori Star—born Lori Spielberg, one of the stations discovered—to that of Thorne Bigelow.
Someone had come up with a picture of Lori at her prettiest, and some enterprising reporter had made the Mary Rogers-Marie Roget connection, so she was now being compared to the beautiful cigar girl who had once worked at Anderson’s Tobacco. The girl who had been given eternal life in her pathetic death by the great American author Edgar Allan Poe.
Lori was more famous than she ever could have imagined.
Her somewhat questionable past had been forgiven. She was the medium who had witnessed the accident through some spectral magic, connecting Sam Latham’s injuries to Thorne Bigelow’s death, a connection the police were now avidly following up on.
Joe had watched the news at a bar, sharing a beer with Vic, Raif and Tom. Then, disgusted with the over-the-top coverage, he excused himself and headed out. On the way to his car, he decided to follow the trail of the murder that had taken place in the eighteen-forties. He walked the Hoboken shoreline, but since he couldn’t really go back in time over a hundred and fifty years, he could only close his eyes and try to imagine.
Of course, the contemporary killer couldn’t possibly have gone back in time, either. And Joe didn’t think the killer had done a particularly impressive job of murdering Thorne Bigelow à la Poe, anyway. The man had died via his love of wine, true, but he hadn’t been walled up to die slowly, gasping for air, thirsting, known that the end was coming. He had been poisoned, a somewhat less drawn-out method.
Poisoning the unsuspecting was easy, while strangling an eager and unsuspecting young woman, though not impossibly difficult, would taken a certain amount of strength.
Did that eliminate the women as suspects?
He walked the shoreline, and realized after a while that he’d been waiting for something.
And then he knew what.
Dead people were talking to him.
He was hearing whispers in his ear when he shouldn’t have been.
He spoke aloud to the breeze. “If I’m going to go crazy, you might want to give me some useful information.”
Luckily there was no one around to hear him and think right along with him that he was going nuts.
He felt like a fool anyway.
When it seemed as if the voices weren’t going to tell him anything, he gave up and walked back to his car, ready to return to Manhattan.
This murder had changed everything. There couldn’t possibly be a Raven who wasn’t frightened now. Not that Lori Star had been a Raven, but she had connected Bigelow’s death with Latham’s accident, and that had been enough to paint a target on her back.
He put a call through to Genevieve’s apartment, his irrational sense of fear for her growing again. She answered on the first ring, and he was glad to hear her voice.
“You saw the news?” he asked.
“You can’t miss it. It’s on every network,” she told him.
“Right.”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Fine.”
Yeah, right. He thought of his last visit to a morgue, when the corpse had turned to him. Thank God Lori hadn’t spoken to him through that broken face.
He asked after Eileen, who Gen assured him was safe at home, then told her that he would see her soon.
His thoughts turned to Sam Latham, who was still in the hospital—and quite possibly in danger.
When Joe reached the city, his first order of business was going to be to visit Sam, and to make sure that his wife, Dorothy, had indeed hired private security to watch over him. There was no longer any doubt. Whether Sam had been a target that day on the highway or not, there was a serial killer on the move, and Sam was certainly a sitting duck now.
When Joe arrived at the hospital, he was relieved to see that there was an imposing uniformed guard in a chair outside the door to Sam’s room. The guard asked him who he was, and Joe showed his credentials.
“Hey, I’ve heard of you. I should have recognized you.”
“Why would you have recognized me?” Joe asked.
“Your face was just on the news,” the man said, nodding toward the TV visible just inside the door to Sam’s room.
“Why?” Joe demanded.
“The Lori Star murder. They linked it back to some literary group and a bunch of wealthy people, and one of them has a daughter, that Genevieve O’Something who was kidnapped last year. And that led to you,” he finished.
Joe stared at the man, who’d sounded as calm as if he were reciting a chorus of “The hip bone’s connected to the leg bone.”
Damn it all, he cursed silently. He didn’t want the city recognizing his face again, knowing him.
“Mr. Latham is sleeping, but his wife’s in with him. I’ll tell her you’re here,” the man said.
Joe nodded, still cursing fate.
When the guard ushered him into the room a moment later, Sam was sleeping, and Dorothy was sitting in a chair at his side, watching the small television with the sound turned down low.