At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(11)

Now Evan set aside the identity and likely suffering of the actual man who lay before him. The body on the ground transformed in his mind from a successful businessman—a once living, breathing human being with hopes and dreams and ambitions and a family—into a message.

What had the killer wanted to say by murdering this man in this way?

Who was the message meant for?

And what unintended messages had been left behind—messages that might prove to be the killer’s Achilles’ heel?

A sudden gust of wind tugged back his hood, and mist gathered on his exposed skin. Absently, Evan pulled his hood back up and cinched it as he took in the things Addie had already told him about what had been done to the victim. Then he focused on what she’d left out.

The right side of the victim’s head had been shaved—the top of the skull still carried an inch of graying Afro. Cuts on the skin indicated the shaving had been done quickly, perhaps with a knife. Only after the body had been moved would they be able to see if both sides of the head were shaved.

In the eerily peaceful face, the left eye was closed. The right eye had been removed, perhaps with the same knife used to shave the scalp. Bruises showed on the rest of the face, darker patches on dark skin. The lower lip had been split from a blow.

In addition to the stake through the right thigh, smaller stakes had been hammered through Talfour’s left forearm and another through his torso, just below the rib cage.

“Interesting,” Evan murmured.

He removed his worn leather journal and a pen from an inside pocket of his coat and, turning so that his body shielded the paper, he sketched the victim, holding the paper down against the wind. As his hand moved over the paper and a form began to take shape, something familiar rose from the page into his fingertips.

A memory. He had seen a body like this one before. Long ago. His pen stuttered to a stop, and he closed his eyes, chasing the recollection.

“What’s he doing?” Patrick asked.

Evan startled. His eyes popped open.

“Hush,” Addie scolded Patrick.

But now Evan had it. Talfour had been posed to resemble a European bog body—the corpse of someone buried in peat during the Iron Age and slowly mummified by bog acids, much the way fruit is pickled in brine. Talfour, of course, wasn’t mummified. But everything else about him recalled those ancient burials.

That settled, Evan allowed himself to focus on the wooden halo around the victim’s head. He pulled out his reading glasses and took a cautious step closer to the corpse, mindful of the crime tape. Mud sucked at his trainers. Something stirred in the water nearby while tatters of mist hovered over the river like a fraying shawl. All about in the air was the dank, dark smell of the Calumet.

Arranged around the victim’s head were eighteen unstained pine slats, roughly sawed, each ten inches long and two inches wide. The slats had been arranged in nine rows—two slats per row—so that they formed a twenty-inch-long radius around the victim’s head. Each slat bore thirty or forty tiny, skillfully etched symbols.

Nine rows, Evan mused. Many cultures considered the number nine significant. There were the Greeks’ nine Muses and the nine days and nights required for an anvil falling from Olympus to reach earth. The nine gates that once protected the Chinese imperial throne. The Aztecs’ nine gods of darkness.

Writers, too, loved the number nine. The nine circles of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Tolkien’s nine rings and nine wraiths in The Lord of the Rings. More recently, the nine regions of Westeros in George R. R. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire.

But Evan was thinking primarily of the Norse god Odin and his association with the number nine. Odin—who prized wisdom—had hung himself from the tree of life for nine days until his sacrifice revealed the secret of the runes.

ODIN, Evan wrote in his journal and circled the name.

Because he’d realized immediately that the strange markings on the wooden slats were runes. The long-ago script once used by Germanic cultures reaching from Greenland all the way through the empires of Islam to the Greek Isles.

That was to say, Vikings.

He smoothed his beard.

Vikings were, if rather unfairly, best known for their brutal killing of Christian monks and the pillaging of their monasteries.

James Talfour had once been a minister.

Was that why the killer had chosen to leave his message in runic script?

The answer, he could hope, lay in whatever message the runes would impart once transliterated into the English alphabet.

As he copied the runes into his notebook, he recalled his long-ago study of the runic script. He’d taken a class as an undergraduate at Oxford. The course had been so drearily dull that it had all but killed his nascent interest in Old Nordic cultures. It took a certain talent to suck the life out of the gateway to a fascinating era in history. But Professor Nigel Cook had very nearly succeeded.

What Evan did remember was a scattering of facts. One, that there were four main types of rune-rows, or alphabets. Two, each character in a rune-row had a corresponding and meaningful word attached to it, such as monster for the pursiaz rune and man for mannaz. And finally, modern cultures often ascribed mystical attributes to the runes—a quality not much supported by the historical record despite the fact that the word rune came from the Old English rūn, meaning secret or mystery.

A mystery indeed, Evan thought.

Professor Nigel Cook had assigned endless pages of runes for his students to use in a two-step process of interpretation known as transliteration—going from runes to Latin letters—followed by translation of the words into modern English. Getting through the drudgery had required Evan to consume copious amounts of mead, supplied by his older classmates. Looking back through the resulting alcoholic haze, Evan now had only a faint memory of how the rune-rows and the Latin alphabet matched. Or the places where they didn’t.