“He’s probably impotent. That’s not uncommon. They can’t get off the normal way. They get gratification from killing and torturing the helpless. Any progress on identifying the victims?”

He shook his head. “Nothing so far. Eventually someone will miss them. But it might take a while.”

“If we knew how the killer was selecting his victims-or why-we’d be better able to protect the populace. This has already gotten a lot of press-”

“And it’s going to get a lot more.”

“Right. So we need to be able to tell them something about the man.”

“Are we sure it’s a man?”

“Serial killers almost always are. Comes with the testosterone.”

“But you said this killer doesn’t fit the standard patterns.”

“True enough.” Leaning back, I noticed that Darcy was crouched in the entryway. How long had he been there? “Need something, Darcy?”

“W-W-Would it be okay if I sat with you guys? I think that would be fun. Wouldn’t that be fun?” He walked over to the sofa and sat between us, brushing shoulders.

His father grunted. “Darcy, we’re talking about a case. You should go to your room.”

Darcy was crestfallen.

“I don’t see any reason he can’t stay,” I cut in. “Maybe he’ll inspire us.” I don’t know why I did it, except that I could see that he really wanted to be there with us. And I’ve always had a soft spot for Shaggy.

O’Bannon spoke as if he weren’t there. “He isn’t usually this social. Especially with strangers.”

“But we are not strangers,” Darcy said, looking at me. “Are we strangers? Don’t I know you?”

“Yes, of course you do.”

“That’s what I thought. Then we are not strangers. What are we talking about?”

I suppressed a smile, then leaned forward so I could see the chief. “I don’t suppose any of your experts have had any luck on the coded messages.”

“No,” O’Bannon grunted, reaching back for one of the two photocopies. “They don’t think they are messages. Which of course is the obvious response when you aren’t able to decode them.”

“I took them to a geek friend of mine. I’m hoping he’ll figure something out. I’d really like to know what they say, but-”

Darcy jumped in. “W-W-Would it be okay if, do you think, could it be okay if I took a look at them?”

“Darcy,” his father said, “this is police business. It might be better if you watched one of your videos.”

“Please,” he said. “I want to read them.”

Read them, I noticed he said. Not solve them. Read them. “Why don’t we give him a shot?” I took the copies and handed them to Darcy.

O’Bannon’s face was pained. “Susan…”

“You said he was good at puzzles. Maybe he’ll see something the experts missed. Maybe he’ll spot some clue that will make it possible for the experts to-”

Darcy cut me off. “ ‘Deep, deep, and for ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.’ ”

O’Bannon and I both looked at him. “What?”

He repeated it.

“What?” his father said, irritated. And then his voice softened: “Is that a poem or something?”

Darcy looked up nervously. “I-I-I-I think that’s, what you were, you were, can’t you read it?”

I took the photocopy he was holding, the one that had been stuffed inside the coffin with the girl who was buried alive. “You’re saying that’s the translation of this message?”

“That’s what it says.”

“You decoded it?”

He gazed at me with that deceptively vacant expression. “That’s what it says.”

“Darcy…” His father sighed. “We could all make up something that could be the message. Sometimes it’s fun to pretend-”

“I-I-I-” I noticed his stuttering became much more pronounced when he was speaking to his father. “I read it.”

“That’s impossible. You looked at it for, what? Twenty seconds?”

“Does Darcy normally make things up?” I asked.

“Well… no.”

“Does he tell lies?”

“I don’t think he knows how.”

“Is he given to flights of fancy?”

“He wouldn’t understand what a flight of fancy was.”

“Probably never engaged in imaginative play as a child, right? No make-believe. No cowboys and Indians. That would be typical for kids with his… situation.” I turned back to Darcy. “Say it again. Read it.”

He glanced down at the paper. “ ‘Deep, deep, and for ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.’ ”

“Sounds like something that belongs in a coffin, doesn’t it? Darcy, is it a substitution code?”

“What?”

“Does one letter-or symbol-stand for another?”

“I guess-I mean, no, not really. Well, sort of.”

I resisted the urge to pound my head against the wall. “Darcy, can you explain to me how you can read this?”

“Can you, do you-I mean-I just read it.”

No cheese down that tunnel. “I wonder what it means. Maybe if I went on the Internet-”

“It’s from a book.”

I gaped. I mean, it was incredible enough that this kid might solve the puzzle the experts couldn’t. But now he was going to identify the quotation?

He jumped off the sofa and raced to the wall behind the desk, one that was covered with books. It was as if someone had flipped the ON switch; suddenly, he was alive, more than alive. His eyes darted back and forth, his hands flapped frenetically. His fingers brushed against the spines of the books as if they were his friends.

It didn’t take him long. He pulled down a large black volume, crouched on the floor, and began rifling through the pages. O’Bannon stood to the side, watching.

“Here it is,” Darcy said, barely a minute later.

I knelt down beside him and read the passage he indicated. There it was. Verbatim.

“Darcy… how did you find it so quickly?”

“I-I read it once.”

“Recently?”

“No. But I remembered.”

I flipped the book around and looked at the spine. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, it said. The subtitle was: The Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The quote he had found was from one of the stories: “The Premature Burial.”

Of course.

But what was the connection to the second story? That awful business with the teeth…

“Darcy, I want you to look at the second message.”

“I already did.” He held it in his hands. “ ‘In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth.’ ”

“Do you recognize that quote? Is it from-”

He was already turning the pages. Less than thirty seconds later he found it. In a short story I’d never heard of, titled “Berenice.” I flipped to the end. … there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

The story was about some maniac pulling out a woman’s teeth. And letting her bleed to death.

“I told you he had a prodigious memory,” O’Bannon said. “Eidetic. Not only can he recite back word for word something he read years ago, he can tell you what page it was on.”

I’d heard of such things in school, but never actually encountered it. “And he reads a lot?”

“Constantly.”

“That’s… an amazing gift.”

“Yeah. With virtually no practical application. Or so I thought.” O’Bannon frowned.

I held the book up. “I read a little Poe in college. Kind of liked it, as I recall. But I didn’t see the pattern.”

“And now you do?”

“I’m beginning to. Thanks to your son.” I patted Darcy on the shoulder. He immediately reacted to the touch of my hand. It was sort of like he was wriggling away and sort of like he was snuggling against it. “I hope you’re not one of those collector types who won’t lend reading materials.”

O’Bannon shook his head. “It’s just a book.”

I hope he agreed that this interview was over. Because I had some real work to do now and I wanted to get to it. The book was more than a thousand pages long, for God’s sake. It would take me hours to get through it, to see what other clues might be in there. I needed to reexamine everything in light of this new lead. And then…