LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 29

      It was a big gun, a .357 Colt Python, blue steel, the bluing dulled with age. I hefted its weight in my palm, then handed it back to Waltz, who gently set the weapon on the table.

      “This was Vangie’s father’s service weapon?” I said. “He was a cop?”

      “Sergeant John Edward Prowse. Killed in action in 1962 when she was seventeen.”

      “She never told me,” I said, suddenly feeling as if parts of Vangie had been in code.

      Waltz reached in his shirt pocket, pulled a badge polished as bright as a new dime. “And this was her father’s tin.”

      “She gave you his badge?”

      “To help keep me safe, she said, a second shield to cover my back.”

      “When did this happen?”

      “In 1973, when I made detective. We’d grown up in Queens, neighbors, though I was just a scruffy kid to her. At least until we grew up.”

      “You and Vangie were … lovers?”

      A catch came to Waltz’s voice. He pushed past it. “The most beautiful years of my life. Then it sort of ramped down into friendship.”

      “But you still held the torch?”

      The misery in his eyes told the story: Then, now, always.

      “Did you know she was coming to New York?”

      He stood, wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “No. And that’s totally out of character. She always called. For a few days we’d be together and I’d pretend I wasn’t heartsick that she’d go away again, back to that damned Institute.”

      Waltz hung his head. Rain hammered the window.

      “I never knew much of her history,” I said. “Because of my past, I never ask people about theirs.”

      “Her father was ambushed by a sociopath when she was in high school. Her mother had died years before, the Big C. She and her father were all each other had, always there for one another, a team of two.”

      “His death must have been devastating.”

      “She retreated inside herself for a month. When she emerged, her first reaction was to join the force, follow in his footsteps.”

      “What happened?”

      “She pulled all her courage together and went to the jail to visit her father’s killer. To spit on him, she later told me, and to claw out his eyes if she got the chance.”

      “Sounds like her.”

      “She thought she’d find some hulking, tattoos-tained monster with bloodlust in his eyes. She found a forty-three-year-old actuary with a wife and three kids, house in the Connecticut ’burbs. He barely acknowledged her, too busy listening to the voices between his ears. A drooling, gun-slinging doper she could understand – and hate – but a white-collar guy who said a dragon lived inside his spine? That she couldn’t fathom.”

      “Vangie didn’t join the force, I take it.”

      “She had been considering biology before her father’s death. She shifted to Psych, immersed in it – this was a senior in high school, mind you, reading all night, writing papers of professional depth. She got attention, grabbed a full ride at Princeton.”

      “And pretty much re-invented the field of aberrational psychology,” I said.

      “She couldn’t not do it,” Waltz said. “She was amazing.”

      “What happened when you saw the body was Vangie’s?”

      I needed to ask, did it quietly. Waltz closed his eyes.

      “It was an explosion of cold in my face. My knees nearly went, the room swooped around. I realized if our history was known, I couldn’t work the case. So I reached inside and grabbed on to something, you know?”

      Like the day I found out Jeremy was a mass murderer. I said, “Yeah, I know.”

      “We found the recording saying contact you. I chilled the investigation and pulled every sting I had to get you here, to find out if you could help. Someone killed one of the best people on the planet and I need justice.”

      I stared into his eyes. “We can get justice, Shelly. But you’ve got to believe in my ability to find the truth.”

      Waltz walked to the window and parted the drapes, looking into the wind-blown ghosts of rain.

      “How do I know I can I trust you?”

      “Because Vangie did.”

      He closed his eyes, nodded, said, “Tell me the whole story.”

      It took a half an hour. I’m not sure how many of my conjectures he bought, but he asked no questions until I’d finished, starting with the one he found the most troubling.

      “You say your partner, Nautilus, saw a photo of your brother in Evangeline’s office? Naked.”

      I nodded.

      “It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t have entered a relationship with a … with a …” Words failed and his face dropped.

      “Jeremy said Vangie had called him her Sirius. Like the Dog Star. It jives with the reference in Vangie’s recording. That she needed a ‘serious’ … then she stopped.”

      “Dog star?” Waltz frowned. “Needed a Sirius …?” His face went white and I thought he was headed to the floor again.

      “What is it, Shelly? What?”

      Waltz grabbed his coat from the back of the couch, started pulling it on. “I’ve got to take you somewhere.”

      Rain whipped the window. Lightning flashed.

      “Outside? In that?”

      “Get your goddamn coat on.”

      We

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