Tom’s voice had an edge I hadn’t heard before. Not even when he’d been following a kidnapping case with me.
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“Funny you should say that. Like van Gogh. There are, um, two things. The first is what looks like pages to a graphic novel. You know, drawings. Panels. Speech bubbles. Superhero shit, only this is definitely not about superheroes.”
Goose bumps rose on my skin. Cohen’s arm came around my shoulders, and his warm fingers squeezed my cold flesh.
“There’s a line written on one of the pages,” Tom said. “‘Vengeance is ours.’ Doesn’t that link with your body from last night? I know you’re on that case.”
The fact of the writing hadn’t been made available to the press. “Who’s your source, Tom?”
“You jealous?”
I put aside my concern about a leak for the moment. I swung my legs over the mattress and reached for my sweats. Clyde’s moist nose brushed my knuckles.
“What’s the other item?” I asked.
“It’s . . . look, Sydney. Just—you need to come in.”
A short time later, four of us stood around Tom’s desk wearing latex gloves and paper masks. Tom, Cohen, Evan, and me. Bandoni was on his way. Clyde lay half-under Tom’s desk, unconcerned for the moment with the affairs of humans.
We stared down at a shriveled, severed penis.
“That’s so wrong,” Tom murmured.
The penis was in a plastic bag, the heavy-duty kind with a zip pull. Tied around what we guessed was Donovan’s manhood—we’d have to run tests to be certain—were several long, thick strands of hair, like a macabre bow.
An ugly thought: Ami is dark haired.
And a worse one: Ami is dead.
On Tom’s desk next to the plastic bag was a stack of comic-book pages—heavy paper, the drawings and lettering in dark ink like that used on the bodies of Noah and Donovan. With gloved hands, I picked up the first page.
“You touched this?” I asked Tom. “Or did you just shake things out on your desk?”
Tom’s unease over the phone had morphed into a sparking curiosity. A dog on the scent. I’d have to kennel that enthusiasm soon.
“Sorry,” he said, only half-rueful. “I touched everything before I realized what it was. The pictures and the bag.” His lips pursed in disgust. “The outside of the bag.”
“Well, that’s something. We’ll need to get your prints. And we need coffee.” I smiled at him. “Coffee first.”
“I see what you’re doing.”
“Just give us a minute.”
He held my eye, then finally nodded. “Quid pro quo,” he murmured as he turned away.
Evan leaned over the drawing. In bold lettering at the top were the words The Coming Dark: A Vendetta. Below that, five panels marched down the page. Five portraits of naked, malformed human males, each standing solitary in an arctic wasteland, their faces and genitals partly obscured by shadows.
Most startling were the yellow eyes.
Once again, I recalled Dana Gills’s words as we stood in her comics store. There are a lot of yellow-eyed supervillains in the comics world. Nightcrawler. Trigon. Gamora . . . Apocalypse, who was intended to lead the Alliance of Evil.
As I studied the pictures, a memory worked to worm its way up through my sleep-fogged brain. Something about a man standing on ice. Next to me, Cohen leaned in, his gray eyes glinting. I knew that look—a thirst, a need, to understand.
“It looks like Noah’s work,” I said. I’d brought his drawings, and now I set out the one of the yellow-eyed man near the train. “The comics-store owner said yellow-eyed villains were cliché. She was surprised at Noah’s drawing.”
Evan and Cohen studied Noah’s drawing, then turned back to the new pages.
“Vendetta,” Cohen said. “Nothing good about that.”
Evan dipped his head in agreement. “From the Latin vindicta, meaning vengeance. An appropriately mid-nineteenth-century Italian word, its appearance concurrent with the rise of the mafie. A blood feud. A retaliatory back-and-forth of murderous acts. Men like these are big on symbolism. And Donovan’s manhood is deeply symbolic.”
“But who is retaliating against whom?” I stared at the images, still trying to hunt down the sense of familiarity. “Who seeks blood?”
“Blood is often associated with sex,” Evan said. “Which seems to be a recurring theme in the cases before us.”
Cohen frowned. “The killer wrote on Noah’s skin that the life of the flesh is in the blood.”
Evan gently tapped the desk next to the bag with the severed flesh.
“Sending us a clue. Wanting us to understand.” His hungry expression mirrored Cohen’s. In that moment, they looked very much like cousins. “Blood feud, bloodlines, blood brothers. One of our suspects is the brother of the first victim, yes? And look at the title they chose. The Coming Dark. In the quote from the first victim . . .” He turned to me.
“The life of the flesh is in the blood,” I said.
Evan brought his fingertips together. “In the original Hebrew, you can translate the word for life, nefesh, as soul. ‘The life of the soul is in the blood.’ And the greatest threat to the soul is an eternity spent far from the light of God. Perhaps they are suggesting that they intend to cast the souls of their victims into darkness.”
“Sounds ominous,” Tom said, approaching with a pot of coffee and a stack of cups.
“The ambrosia of gods,” Evan said. “Bless you.”
We all looked up at a noise—Bandoni barreling through the door. He paused in the entryway and shook himself like a dog, scattering raindrops. Mud spattered the hem of his navy slacks.
For an instant, I saw him as a stranger would—gray, overweight, with a face sagging like an ice sculpture halfway through its melt. Then his gaze met mine. Maybe he saw the pity in my face, for his frown deepened, and an angry light switched on in his watery eyes. He sped toward us, a stone loosed from a slingshot, his bowling-ball head leading the charge.
“The hell is this about?” He glared at the items on the desk. “You call Crime Scene yet? And what”—he jabbed a
