“If Grayson was such a failure at the end of his life,” I pressed, “why is his book still causing so damned much trouble?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

We didn’t speak again till the phone rang. The late man at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

She talked for a while and hung up.

“He burned her house,” she said flatly. “Killed her, then set fire to her house.”

“Laura Warner.”

She nodded. “They’re all dead. St. Louis, Phoenix, Idaho…all dead. All but a blind, crazy woman in the Maryland case.”

BOOK III

THE RAVEN

44

It was raining again. I heard two things, the steady drumming of the rain and the click of my bedroom door as Trish came in. I lay still for a moment, listening to her footsteps as she approached my bed. I had been in a deep sleep for all of ninety minutes: the digits on the clock beside the bed told me it was now 4:52. I blinked my eyes and gradually came awake, aware of her presence a foot or two away. She stood for a long minute, then leaned over and touched my shoulder, shaking me gently.

“It’s time,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m awake.”

“We gotta get going.”

She went away and I lay there for another minute, thinking about what we had discovered in the night. I thought about five old murder cases in five different cities, and about the blind woman the killer had left alive in Maryland.

I hit the shower. Thought about it some more as I stood in the steam.

I smelled bacon as I came downstairs. She stood in the half-dark kitchen, cooking by the light from the smoke hood over the range.

“Didn’t we just eat?” I asked in a surprised tone of voice.

“Such as it was.”

But my appetite is always good in the morning and I was hungry again. I sat at her kitchen table and let her pamper me.

“Scofield and Kenney are due in at six-thirty, more or less, according to the flight plan they filed in L.A.,” she said. “We should play it safe and be there with time to spare.”

I agreed with that. We were probably safe if we could leave in another ten minutes. We were already slightly south of town, and that would give us a full hour to make the few miles to Sea-Tac before the rush hour began.

I asked if she’d gotten any sleep. “Didn’t even try,” she said, handing me a plate of food. She sat across from me with her own plate and said, “I can’t sleep with stuff like this going on.”

She had been thinking about the sequence of those five old murder cases and had come up with a point of logic that had escaped us at midnight. “The cases all followed the Grayson lettering sequence, in precise order. A came before B , then came C, D , and E , all within days of each other. Think about that a minute. Picture a map of the United States and ask yourself, if you were going to kill people in five different parts of the country, how would you go about it? I’d do the two in the West first because I’m out here already and it’s closer. Do Idaho first, then fly to Phoenix. Then go east and do the others, St. Louis, then New Orleans and Baltimore, in either order. What the killer did, though, was St. Louis first… A . Then he went to Phoenix, B; then he flew clear back across the country to C , Baltimore. Then back across the country again to Idaho. Then back again to New Orleans. Does this make sense? Not unless you’ve got Grayson’s list and can see the connections.”

“It’s like he couldn’t see anything beyond the list.”

“Just get there, do it, and move on the next one.”

“Whatever it was, the urgency was so great he didn’t even think about geography.”

She shivered. “This is a real crazy one we’ve got here.”

“And he’s still out there doing it.”

Forty minutes later we were sitting in a maintenance truck at the end of a concourse where the smallest airline carriers and various private flights were routed. Our driver was a cheerful fellow named Mickey Bowman, who ran the airport’s public relations office and didn’t seem to mind being roused from bed when Trish had called him at three-thirty. I knew a little about the odd relationships that sometimes develop between PR people and the press— the Denver cops had a public affairs specialist with the rank of division chief, and depending on who held the job, you could sometimes see the good and bad of what he did on the front pages of the Denver newspapers. If he stonewalls, they dig out the facts anyway, only they write them in such a way as to make his boss look stupid, silly,

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