vintage Jaguar. Maybe she wouldn’t ask; maybe she would assume Morgan would tell her anything new he might have learned, if he had learned anything new. They both knew he couldn’t resist.

Without asking, Morgan ambled over to the counter and ordered two more cappuccinos. Miranda followed him with her eyes, sure other women were doing the same. There was something about the way he moved — a shambling self-assurance — the way his clothes looked worn in and not worn out, the crooked smile, the way he combined intensity with nonchalance.

She looked around the Starbucks interior. There were five other women; several of them, oddly enough, were looking at her. She was glad he was home.

After they checked in with Alex Rufalo, she drove him home. When he emerged from the bathroom, clean- shaven, hair combed, wrapped in a towel, he appeared almost normal. By the time he descended from the loft after dressing, he already seemed slightly unkempt; his hair looked windblown, although God knows there wasn’t much air moving through his apartment, and his clothes, while clean, were already rumpled. All signs of exhaustion had left his face; he looked refreshed and relaxed. He sat on the blue sofa since she was comfortably ensconced in his favourite armchair

“I suppose you hung out with the police down there.”

“Carabineros. Isla de Pascua Carabineros. I met a guy called Te Ave Teao, trained in Chile but born and raised on the island. There’s no crime in Rapa Nui — nothing serious. Mostly, I kept to myself. What’s happening with our major case? I’m assuming it’s still our major case.”

“Can’t tie the victims to each other or connect either of them to the house. A lot of dead ends, so to speak. I think we’re dealing with murder for amusement — the arbitrary indulgence of an inspired psychopath.”

She was aware she was echoing a conversation she had had with Rachel. This made her wonder how much her intimacy with the young woman had been to compensate for Morgan’s absence. Perhaps that explains why we never became lovers, she thought.

“There’s no use looking for motive, then,” Morgan was saying. “Method we know. Opportunity was at the killer’s convenience. So we focus on what?”

“The entertainment factor. I know it’s grotesque, but maybe our only hope is to interpret the crime as a creative event. Morgan, we have to shift from motive to intent. The ring and the cross are no longer clues to what happened; the hidden crypt is no longer evidentiary; the colonial clothes, the mummification, the eternal embrace, these aren’t factors that will help us to explain the murder itself. Everything is turned around. Don’t you see?”

“Not yet, but I’m trying.”

“Clues and evidence won’t lead to the killer directly, since they were arranged with pathological intention to achieve an aesthetic effect.”

“All art is pathological.”

“Now that is profound.”

“But true. The artist plays life against death without a twinge of conscience. Suffering, brutality, sadness — they’re just the raw materials.”

“Joy, triumph, ecstasy — they’re raw materials, too. ‘Inferno’ is only one part of the Divine Comedy, Morgan. That’s why it’s divine!”

“What about Freud?”

“What about Freud?” she retorted — but she already knew where he was going. It was good to have Morgan back in the game.

“There’s a disjunct between the signifiers and the signified — ”

“You’re switching discourses, Morgan!”

“No, I’m piggybacking Freud on Saussure. We’re trying to make a story out of signs that make no sense — we should forget the story and look for the author embedded in the mystery itself.”

“Yes,” she said. Morgan’s back.

“There’s a subtle distinction, but incredibly important. We can’t explain the psychopath’s madness by interpretation, but we can find him there, hidden among symbols and artifice, expressing his madness. It could be Freud: about issues of love and sexuality. It could be Aristotle: about hubris and achieving catharsis. It could be Beckett — ”

“That’s what I said, Beckett.”

“A story about nothing but itself.”

“So we all become characters in search of an author. Holy Pirandello, Batman! It’s a challenge. When you’re inside the play, he gets to be God.”

“You said what about Beckett, to who?”

“To whom! To Rachel Naismith, my new best friend.”

“You are a fickle woman.”

Morgan got up from the sofa and moved around the room. Lack of sleep made him restless but he felt exhilarated to be working again.

“We have a cold-blooded killer with talent,” he said. “Do we have a pattern? If this is his masterwork, did he serve an apprenticeship? With whom? More to the point, on whom? If this is the first display of his deviant aptitude, I have the distinct and uneasy feeling it will not be his last.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of, Morgan. Success spawning success. There’s no precedent — nothing like it at all in the States, or here. Nothing with comparable flair, or the same intellectual self-consciousness.”

“You tried the Ontario Provincial Police?”

“Nothing. They ran it through ViCLAS — ”

“ViCLAS?”

“Violent Crime Linking Analysis System.”

“I knew that.”

“The Orillia OPP are cutting edge. Nothing.”

“Did you try Interpol?”

“Of course. I was thorough. And imaginative — I was open to variations on the theme. But nothing, nada, rien.”

“So we wait. It’s grotesque, but that’s all we can do. Have you talked to Pope again? Or the anthropologists? How in the hell were they fooled, if Pope saw right off that the scene was a fake?”

“Forewarned is forearmed. He knew after you called what to expect. Poor Birbalsingh and Hubbard — they walked in cold. They had no reason to be skeptical. The condition of the bodies, their dress, the sealed crypt, it all seemed consistent. It was an archeological site”

“Their findings to be entered in the annals of science.”

“Does science have annals? Yeah, Morgan, I went back to talk to them both. Professor Birbalsingh was amused more than anything. And intrigued. He said when we catch the killer he’d like to talk to him. It might help in his forensic research with authentic antiquities. Dr. Hubbard was less sanguine. I asked her if she could put a trace on the clothing. She already had, and came up with nothing. It would be virtually impossible to track down unless it had been stolen from a collection, she said. More likely it was bought in one of those strange little shops in London that cater to every imaginable taste. I couldn’t argue. I’ve never been to London.”

“Is it worth getting Scotland Yard to check around?”

“I’ve already asked. The chap on the phone was absolutely charming, asked me to fax the paperwork and they’d get right on it, and wanted to know if I dated.”

“If you’re dated?”

“No, Morgan. He was flirting. It was quite flattering.”

“Desperate measures, given the Atlantic — ”

“He said I should look him up if I ever got over. Constable Stenabaugh. He sounded quite handsome.”

“You are a desperate and fickle woman.”

“Rachel and I went out to see Alexander Pope.”

She knew that would surprise him, that they went together.

“He is a lovely man,” she continued. “And he has a breathtaking home. Pre-Victorian, I don’t know what you’d call it — Georgian Colonial, neo-American Federal. You’ve got to see it; you’d love the furnishings. Some of the paint must be ten layers thick, some of the pieces he’s made himself, right down to faking the paint. We stayed for a sauna. He’s a fascinating man. Beautiful body — he must be fifty.”

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