Page 20 of Edge of Secrets

I’d been at the computer since I got home, too wound up to sleep. I’d used the time researching everything I could glean off the internet about the D’Onofrio crime saga. I was chomping at the bit to call my old buddy Gant, my NYPD source, to get some hard inside details. But it was still too early for that.

So I’d ranged further to pass the time. I’d tried reading the articles she’d published in a bunch of literary journals—pieces about Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sappho. Her paper for her graduate seminar. There was poetry she’d written and published herself. Entries on websites that catered to poets and scholars. Online poetry workshops she’d critiqued. It was outlandish stuff. Computer nerds were bad enough, but they had nothing on poets. This crap was from fucking outer space.

I glanced at my phone. It was almost five a.m. Good enough for me. My friend and ex-colleague back in our NSA days was now a detective in the NYPD. Gant owed me his life, after various bloody and memorable adventures in Afghanistan back in the day. If he wasn’t awake by now, it meant he was getting soft and needed his ass kicked.

I dialed the number and waited as it rang twelve times before he picked up.

“Who the fuck is this?” said Gant sleepily.

“I need some info,” I said.

“Oh, Christ. You. For fuck’s sake, Burke. Couldn’t it wait till daylight?”

“It’s dawn.” I stared out the picture window of my condo at the spectacular New York City skyline, silhouetted against the faint glow of breaking day. “I need the details on an ongoing police investigation in Hempton. It involves an elderly woman named Lucia D’Onofrio. She died of a heart attack during a burglary in her house. It happened few weeks ago.”

“Yeah? Why do you want to know? What’s it to you, Dunc?”

I leaned my hot forehead against the cool window glass. “I’m interested,” I hedged.

“Interested, my hairy ass. You wake me up at this un-fucking-godly hour because you’re interested?” Gant paused for a moment. “This is about a woman, right?”

“None of your goddamn business,” I told him.

“Bullshit. At this hour, it’s definitely my business,” Gant bitched. “I knew this would happen. Goddamn over-compensating freak that you are. You act like a fucking monk for years at a time. It was just a matter of time till you blew your top. So it’s finally happened, huh? You’re obsessed with some girl? Tell me you’re not awake at this hour because you spent the entire night googling this woman’s entire life. Go ahead, tell me that.”

“I don’t have to tell you shit,” I said. “Don’t be a dick.”

“This poor woman has no idea what she’s in for. What does she have to do with the old lady who had the heart attack?”

“She’s the old lady’s daughter,” I said reluctantly. “Stop busting my balls and just get me the info.”

“You’ll have to wait. I won’t call my people until it’s a decent hour. That’s known as basic common courtesy. Baseline, elemental social skills. Ever heard of those? Go to bed, Dunc. Better yet, go jack off, and then go to bed. Later.”

Gant hung up. I tossed the phone onto the bed and spun the chair around to read Nell’s poems again. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but who cared?

They made something shift and flex inside my mind as I read them.

It felt strange, but good.

Chapter Nine

Nell

“Stop right here, please.”

The cabbie screeched to a halt, hit the meter, and took my money. I was spending a fortune on car services, Ubers, and cabs these days but, there was no help for it. At least I could walk to work from here afterward. The streets were busy enough now that I felt safe walking the rest of the way to the Sunset Grill.

Though I knew it was just a mind game. If Snake Eyes wanted to take me, he’d find a way. He’d found one with Nancy. Only Liam’s heroic efforts had saved my sister.

I pushed that thought resolutely away and looked at the hair salon with trepidation as the cab drove away. I’d been circling the hair issue all morning. I had stood in front of the bathroom sink for an embarrassingly long time before winding my hair back into its usual thick, fuzzy braid and twisting it into its usual heavy knot.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window of the salon, slid my glasses up the bridge of my nose, and took a long look. In light of recent revelations, I couldn’t lie to myself about this any longer.

I was hiding. Cowering behind the antique-looking glasses, the baggy dresses, the dowdy, frizzy hair, and the cowardly assertion that looking pretty was all vanity and nonsense, that I was a lofty scholar, too intellectual and above it all to care.

What a heap of steaming bullshit that was. Ten lust-charged minutes with Duncan Burke in the stairwell had demonstrated to me that I cared passionately. I couldn’t stand being at a disadvantage with that guy. I needed every weapon possible at my disposal, to interact with him from a position of power and confidence.

That made me wince. There it was again—beauty as a tool, beauty as currency, beauty as a weapon, beauty as power. That crass, chilly, ugly association was programmed into me so deeply. I had deliberately chosen to be plain and unnoticeable because I just wanted to stay off the battlefield permanently.

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