She smiled. “Weird. I am definitely sleep-deprived.”

Jeremy pictured Merilee’s face. Angry, taut with… knowing? “What you’re talking about,” he said, “is an autoimmune disorder of the soul.”

Angela stared at him.

“What is it?” he said.

“What you just said- autoimmune disorder of the soul. The way you phrase things. I wish you’d talk more. I love listening to you.”

He said nothing.

She squeezed his hand hard. “I mean it. I could never put it that way.”

“ ‘Psychic virus’ is pretty good.”

“No,” she said, “words aren’t my thing. All through school, I aced math and science but throw a three-paragraph essay at me, and I’m lost.” Her eyes looked feverish. A faint sweat had broken out on her upper lip.

“You okay?” he said.

“Tired, that’s all. I’ll bet essays came easy for you.”

He laughed. “You should only know.”

He told her about his struggle to write the book.

“You’ll do it,” she said. “You’ve been distracted.”

“By what?”

“You tell me.”

He laughed again and ate the rest of the cruller.

“Jeremy, you master words, they don’t master you.”

“Words are all I’ve got, Ang. You’ve got science backing you up. For me, it’s what I say and when I say it. Period. At root, it’s a primitive field-”

She placed a cool finger on his lips and he smelled Betadine and French soap.

“The next time we’re together,” she said, “tell me more about yourself.”

27

The next time was two days later, at Angela’s apartment. She was off call, working mere fifteen-hour days. Had somehow found time to fix a beef-and-bean casserole and a salad of baby greens. They ate on the secondhand couch, listening to music. Her taste was rock about ten years too current for Jeremy.

For the first time, he spent the night.

He did talk. Not about himself, about Angela. Telling her she was beautiful, letting her know how she made him feel. She kept her eyes on him until pleasure forced her to close them. After they washed and dried the dishes, they returned to the couch and entwined. She clawed him, wrapped around him like a crab engulfing its dinner, and after it was over, they stumbled to her bed and slept until daybreak.

He drove her to the hospital and dropped her off at the elevators. After buying a newspaper in the gift shop, he grabbed vending machine coffee and brought caffeine and the day’s tragedies to his office.

He flipped pages idly, same old stuff. Then an item at the rear of the Metro section stopped his breathing.

A woman had been murdered last night, just east of Iron Mount, not far from where Tyrene Mazursky had been savaged. An unnamed woman. Her body had been left out in the open, on a sand spit north of the harbor called Saugatuck Finger.

Jeremy knew the place, a boomerang-shaped quarter mile of gritty silica, surrounded on three sides by pines and spruce and dotted by the occasional rickety picnic table. Nothing to do there but kick sand and toe out into pebble-bottomed, lapping water that looked cleaner than it was. Sometimes a stink rose from the cove. Poor families could be seen picnicking on the spit during the friendly months.

When the sky turned to pig-iron, no one came. An abandoned spot. At night, it would be ghostly.

The article offered no further details and made no attempt to connect the killing to Tyrene Mazursky.

Humpty-Dumpty on the beach?

Jeremy fought the urge to call Doresh. He put the paper aside and tackled the nearly completed first draft of his chapter. Time to earn Angela’s praise. He’d thought of a few more research suppositions he wanted to add.

In the end, the chapter had turned out nearly twice as long as he’d intended.

He’d known more than he thought he did.

Knew nothing about the woman on Saugatuck Finger.

He said, “Screw all that,” and wrote all morning.

The next day, Detective Inspector Michael Shreve phoned him from England, just as he was about to leave for lunch.

What time was it there-9 P.M. Shreve sounded alert. Sounded younger than Nigel Langdon, and more levelheaded. Clear voice, educated enunciation. He returned Jeremy’s greeting heartily.

“Good day, to you, too, Doctor.”

“Thanks for calling back, Inspector.”

“Not a chance I wouldn’t, sir. A doctor from America calls me, my curiosity gets the best of me. Why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind?”

Jeremy spun him the same tale he’d offered Langdon.

Shreve said, “Professor Arthur Chess.”

“You know him?”

“No, but perhaps I should- is he something on the order of your local Sherlock Holmes?”

“Not quite,” said Jeremy. “Just a venerated doctor with a curious mind.”

“You work with him.”

“At City Central Hospital.”

“I see. And Professor Chess spoke to you about our girls.”

“He sent me an old clipping of the case. We’d been talking about the origin of criminal violence. I suppose it struck him as an example.”

“Sent you?” said Shreve.

“He’s traveling.”

“Where to, sir?”

“Oslo.”

“Ah,” said Shreve. “Not the worst time of year for the upper regions, but not happy, either. They’d be getting a bit of daylight, that’s all.”

Like Langdon, Shreve spoke about Norway as if he’d been there.

“You know Oslo, Inspector?”

“As a tourist… this Professor Chess, would you say his curiosity is focused on any specific aspect of our case?”

“As I said, he’s interested in the genesis of violence,” said Jeremy. He switched to a bald lie: “The question also came up about a surgical quality to the murders.”

“Did it- Professor Chess had this question?”

“Yes.”

“Why’s that?”

“I couldn’t say, Inspector. He brought it up. Notated it on the clipping-’Dear Jeremy, do you suppose this could be surgical.’ ”

Ah, what a tangled web we weave.

“Hmm,” said Shreve. “A pathologist- do you suppose he was relating our poor girls to a case of his?”

“Not to my knowledge. He’s no longer a forensic pathologist.”

“But he was, at one time.”

“Years ago. Inspector, we barely spoke before he left. Then I got the clipping. Inspector Langdon’s name was in it, so I phoned him, out of curiosity. He referred me to you, and I did the same. I’ve probably overreacted- wasted your time. I’m sorry, sir.”

“From Oslo,” said Shreve, as if he hadn’t heard. “That’s where the card came from.”

“Yes. It bore a picture of the Vigeland Sculpture Gardens.”

“Aha… well, sir, as you know these cases remain open, so I’m afraid I can’t divulge any details. However, feel free to pass along the following to your professor: We continue to seek a solution, we’ve eliminated no one.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“As you wish, Doctor. Good talking to you.”

Both detectives had been to Norway, and now Arthur was there. Norway had piqued Shreve’s interest.

A northern link to killings in England? To killings, here?

Jeremy remembered the authorship of the first laser scalpel article. Eye doctors from Norway and Russia and England. Americans, in the second reprint.

He’d tossed both.

He logged onto the Ovid medical database, strained to recall the exact title of the Norwegian article, but couldn’t. Coming up with the date- seventeen years ago- helped somewhat, and he ended up winnowing through three dozen citations until he found the right one.

Seven authors. Three ophthalmologists from the Royal Medical College of Oslo, an equal number of Moscow-based eye surgeons on sabbatical in the Norwegian capital, and a British physicist who worked for the manufacturer of the laser.

No names that meant anything to him. He wrote them all on a card and filed it away. No real reason, except he was tired of retrieving lost information.