Michael Connelly - The Poet

I told him about my brother and then about John Brooks in Chicago. I watched his face fill with skepticism as I talked. It told me I was maybe ten seconds from being thrown out the door.

"What is this?" he said. "Who sent you here?"

"Nobody. But it's my guess that I'm maybe a day or so ahead of the FBI. But they'll be coming. I just thought you'd maybe talk to me first. I know what it's like, you see. My brother and me, we were twins. I've always heard that longtime partners, especially on homicide, became like brothers. Like twins."

I held up for a few moments. I had played everything but my ace and I had to wait for the right moment. Bledsoe seemed to cool down a little. His anger was maybe giving way to confusion.

"So what do you want from me?"

"The note. I want to know what McCafferty said in the note."

"There was no note. I never said there was a note."

"But his wife said there was."

"Then go talk to her."

"No, I think I'd rather talk to you. Let me tell you something. The doer on these cases somehow gets the victims to write out a line or two as a suicide note. I don't know how he does it or why they oblige him, but they do. And every time the line is from a poem. A poem by the same writer. Edgar Allan Poe."

I reached down to my computer satchel and unzipped it. I pulled out the thick book of Poe's works. I put it on the desk so that he could see it.

"I think your partner was murdered. You came in and it looked like a suicide because that was how it was supposed to look. That note you destroyed, I'd bet you your partner's pension that it's a line from a poem that's in that book."

Bledsoe looked from me to the book and then back at me again.

"You apparently thought you owed him enough to risk your job to make his widow's life a little easier."

"Yeah, look what it got me. A piece-of-shit office with a piece-of-shit license on the wall. I sit in a room where they used to cut babies out of women. It's not very noble."

"Look, everybody on the force knew there was something noble about what you did, else you wouldn't be selling any insurance. You did what you did for your partner. You should follow through, now."

Bledsoe turned his head and looked at one of the photos on the wall. It was him and another man, arms around each other's neck, smiling with abandon. It looked like it had been taken in a bar somewhere during the good days.

" 'The fever called living is conquered at last,' " he said, without looking away from the photo.

I slapped my hand down on the book. The sound scared us both.

"Got it," I said and picked up the book. I had bent the pages of the poems where the killer's quotes had been taken. I found the page with the poem "For Annie" on it, scanned until I knew I was right, then put the book on the desk and turned it so he could read it.

"First stanza," I said.

Bledsoe leaned over to read the poem.

Thank Heaven! the crisis The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last And the fever called "Living"

Is conquered at last.

As I hurried through the lobby of the Hilton at four, I envisioned Greg Glenn slowly making his way out from behind his desk and heading toward the daily news meeting in the metro conference room. I needed to talk to him and I knew that if I didn't snag him first he'd be holed up in that meeting and the weekend meeting that followed for the next two hours.

As I approached the elevators I saw a woman stepping through the open doors of the one available car and quickly followed her in. She had already pushed the 12 button. I moved to the rear of the car and checked my watch again. I thought I was going to make it. The editors' meetings never seemed to get off on time.

The woman had moved to the right side of the car and we had settled into the slightly uncomfortable silence that always comes when strangers are enclosed in an elevator. In the polished-brass trim on the door I could see her face. Her eyes watched the lights over the doors that marked our ascent. She was very attractive and I found it hard to turn away from the reflection, even though I feared she would turn her eyes and catch me. I imagined that she knew I was watching her. I've always believed that beautiful women know and understand they are always being watched.

When the elevator opened on twelve I waited for her to step out first. She turned to the left and headed down the hall. I turned right and headed to my room, stopping myself from taking a backward glance at her. As I approached my door, pulling the card key out of my shirt pocket, I heard light steps on the hallway carpet. I turned and it was her. She smiled.

"Wrong way."

"Yeah," I said and smiled. "After a while it's all a maze."

Dumb thing to say, I thought as I opened the door and she passed behind me. As I entered the room, I felt a hand suddenly grip the back of my jacket collar and I was shoved into the room. As this happened another hand went up under my jacket and grabbed onto my belt. I was slammed facedown onto the bed. I managed to hold on to the computer bag, not wanting to drop a two-thousand-dollar piece of equipment, but then it was roughly yanked out of my grasp.

"FBI! You're under arrest. Don't move!"

While one hand stayed on the back of my neck and held me facedown, the other hand patted my body in a search.

"What the fuck is this?" I managed to say in a voice muffled by the mattress.

Just as suddenly as they had gripped me, the hands were gone.

"Okay, up. Let's go."

I turned and raised myself until I was seated on the bed. I looked up. It was the woman from the elevator. My mouth dropped open a little. Something about being handled so easily by her, and her alone, burned me deeply and anger flushed my cheeks.

"Don't worry. I've done it to bigger and badder men than you."

"You better have an ID or you're going to need a lawyer."

She pulled a wallet out of her coat pocket and flipped it open in front of my face.

"You're the one who needs the lawyer. Now, I want you to take the chair from the desk, put it in the corner and sit there while I go through this place. It won't take long."

She had what looked like a legitimate FBI badge and ID. It said Special Agent Rachel Walling. Once I read that I began to get an idea of what was going on.

"C'mon, chop, chop. In the corner you go."

"Let's see the search warrant."

"You have a choice," she said sternly. "Go to the corner or I take you into the bathroom and cuff you to the drain trap under the sink. Make it."

I stood up and dragged the chair into the corner and sat down.

"I still want to see the fuckin' warrant."

"Are you aware that your use of coarse language is a rather lame attempt to reestablish your sense of male superiority?"

"Jesus. Are you aware that you are full of shit? Where's the warrant?"

"I don't need a warrant. You invited me in and allowed me to search, then I arrested you after I found the stolen property."

She stepped back to the door, her eyes on me, and closed it.

"I didn't invite you anywhere. You try that shit and you'll crash and burn. Do you believe any judge is going to believe I was stupid enough to invite a search if I had stolen property in here?"

She looked at me and smiled sweetly.

"Mr. McEvoy, I am five feet five and weigh one hundred and fifteen pounds. That's with my gun on. Do you think a judge will believe your version of what happened? Would you even want to reveal what I just did to you in open court?"

I looked away from her and out the windows. The maid had opened the curtains. The sky was beginning to lose the light.

"I didn't think so," she said. "Now, you want to save me some time? Where are the protocols you copied?"

"In the computer bag. I committed no crime in getting them and just having them is not a crime."