“But you were on fire, Matt.”
“No, my clothes were on fire. You remember when you saw the burn on my arm? I was doing experiments. I knew the only way I could figure out how Caesar had set those people on fire was to go after him from the inside, so I had Ganz come and arrest me for stealing the cruiser. Thanks to a tip from Charlie Margin at your foster father’s law firm, I had been suspicious of Kendall for a while. Margin had overseen a number of shady real estate transactions, including a strange deal between Roman Caesar and a fictitious holding company, but I didn’t have anything solid. So I called Kendall from prison and asked him to represent me. I knew if he was working with Caesar and they thought I knew too much, they’d try to kill me, just like they did with Phyllis and Dimitri. But I needed Kendall to think that I was dead so I could track him to his hideout.”
“So you used me as a lure? You put me through abject misery.”
“I never meant to,” Mettle said. “I would have come to rescue you a lot sooner if only you had left your stupid phone on.”
“I still don’t understand how you didn’t die.”
“You’ll have to thank Phyllis Martin for that one. As soon as I was on the inside I asked about the special chowder her cellmate had been brewing. I got the guy down the hall to slip me a bag. It only cost me a few cigs—brokered by the warden himself. I coated myself with the goop as thick as shaving cream. Then I had the warden send you the video.”
“Is that why you winked at the camera?”
“I was hoping to clue you in on the game and spare you some emotional distress,” Mettle said.
“That’s awful presumptuous of you. What made you think I’d be distressed?”
“I don’t know. Weren’t you?”
“Maybe a little bit,” I said. “Who paid for the funeral?”
Mettle stopped rowing and the canoe followed course and drifted toward the dock. We were facing each other, our knees alternating like hinges.
“The warden. He was willing to do anything to keep the FBI out of it. He’s got a slush fund.”
“Was I the only one who wasn’t in on it?”
Mettle scratched his chin. “Pretty much. We couldn’t risk Kendall figuring it out.”
At the dock, Ganz climbed out of the canoe. He stood at the end, his boots hanging over the edge, and leaned over the black water and offered me a hand.
“Give us a minute,” I said.
Ganz gave Mettle a sly wink. “I’ll see you back at the station for a briefing, Trooper.”
“Absolutely,” Mettle said.
Ganz nodded to me and then turned and climbed up the hill toward the congregation of cruisers.
We sat alone in the canoe, gently rocking, our knees touching.
“I don’t know about all this, Matt,” I said. “This is hardly by the book.”
“I’m not a cop, remember. Not for another week. Sometimes, if you wanna cook a crook, you gotta throw the whole darn book in the fire.”
Was it possible that Matt Mettle was actually a lot smarter than I had ever given him credit for? Was he one of those students who couldn’t bubble a test to save his hide, but had a natural, nonmeasurable intelligence that you knew would either lead to ruin—or to great things, far more impressive than any high GPA.
“This is all very…clever, Matt. What about the prophecy? Who sent the lines from Macbeth?”
Mettle sighed. He reached in his pocket and took out a slip of paper. “Okay. Fine. I can’t take full credit. In the interest of full disclosure, I had a little help. Someone sent me this.”
He handed me the slip of paper.
I quickly read it.
What goes scratch, scratch boom?
Ferrocerium.
What puts it out?
Cell-brewed chowder.
Beware of March 15.
I lowered the paper. “Who sent you this?”
“I have no idea. I found it in my mailbox. After we located Caesar’s tent, I put it all together and asked the warden to help. All but that last part. What happens on March 15th?”
“The Ides of March,” I said. “The day that Julius Caesar was assassinated.”
“Oh.”
“Why didn’t you show me this?” I said. “The handwriting matches the warnings I got from Macbeth.”
“I thought it was a prank,” Mettle said. “C’mon? Double, double, toil and trouble? It all ended up being a load of nonsense, didn’t it?”
“Maybe not.”
“Double, double? That makes no sense.”
“No…it actually fits. There were two murders, and then there were two attempted murders. Double, double.”
“Okay, okay, fine. But what about the cauldron? There was never any cauldron.”
I looked out across the lake. In the fading lights from the cruisers, the curling tails from the fog glowed red.
“I’d say this steaming lake looks an awful lot like a cauldron, wouldn’t you?”
“I dunno. Sounds like a stretch, Ms. Casket.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But whoever sent these notes has been a step ahead of us the whole time.”
“A friend?”
I smiled. Both our skin and pants were wet, but sitting across from Mettle was filling me with a supernatural warmth and my heart was doing a little dance in the cage of my chest. Against all odds, he had performed a remarkable bit of deduction and sacrifice, and somehow, miraculously, he had pulled it all off.
“Or closer,” I said.
47
Epilogue
Before leaving, Mettle provided cover while I rescued my personal belongings from Kendall’s car.
I placed both briefcases in the trunk of Mettle’s cruiser. Then we left.
On the ride back to the inn, Mettle asked, “What did you leave in his car?”
“A few papers,” I said.
He didn’t need to know that “a few papers” was code for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.
Would the mystery client come after me for it?
Probably. But he was after me anyway, so what did it matter?
I rested my head against the cruiser’s passenger window. My temples rattled
