M.L.N. HANOVER: Unclean Spirits

The background check of Karen Black was in my inbox, cc’d to all the guys. I settled in to find out what I’d gotten us all into.

Karen Alicia Black was born a little over fifteen years before I was. Her father was a cop, her mother was a mother. No living family now, though. When I was getting out of Mrs. Detwyler’s second-grade class at Blackburn Elementary, she was graduating from Oberlin with a double major in criminology and mathematics. She moved to Los Angeles and worked as a cop for two years, then joined the FBI. A note in brackets pointed out that this was an unusually short period of time—the FBI preferred three years of professional experience. I had the impression that whoever was writing the report had developed a little crush on her.

Her record at the FBI was impressive—kidnapping, arson, serial murder—until 1998. The year I’d spent watching Titanic fourteen times with Nellie Thompson, a man named Joseph Mfume moved to Eugene, Oregon, from Haiti. In the newspaper clippings that were inserted in the text file, he looked about twenty-five, handsome in a goofy way. During the six months after his arrival, he raped and killed seven women in particularly grotesque ways. Karen Black had been part of the team that brought him down.

After that, her career started going off the rails. Two years later, she quit the FBI under a cloud.

There were suggestions that she’d been asked to resign, but nothing that proved it.

Since then, she’d worked on and off for a private investigator and started her own security consultancy based in Boston. Her addresses were listed with pictures of the offices, and the same contact number that was in my cell phone. Her credit rating was decent, the frequent flyer programs loved her, she’d had a couple of bouts of the flu over the years and treatment for chlamydia eight months ago. She owned a condo in Boston, she had no family, no husband, no kids. She’d been in New Orleans on and off almost since the hurricane.

The last two pages of the report were pictures.

The cool gaze that looked out from my computer screen could have belonged to an actress or a supermodel. Pale blue eyes, straight blond hair, a sly smile at the corner of her mouth that seemed to be part of the permanent architecture of her face. In the first image, she wore a black turtleneck and a leather overcoat that reached her ankles, a gray eastern-seaboard streetscape behind her. The next one was a more candid shot of the same woman outside a nightclub. She was in a low-cut emerald silk blouse and tight leather pants, and she had the figure to make the outfit work. Even without the cut of her clothes, I saw what the report’s author was responding to.

She radiated confidence and certainty. It was in

her eyes and the way she held her shoulders. She had tracked criminals and stopped killers, and her success had left its mark on her.

And she had called me for help. I had the uncomfortable feeling I was about to disappoint her.

I closed the laptop and the French doors that opened onto the balcony. The lace curtains shifted in an air-conditioned breeze so slight I couldn’t feel it. Behind them, palm trees stood guard before a sky of perfect, almost Caribbean blue. The next thing to do was make the call, tell Karen we’d arrived, where we were staying, arrange to meet. It was what I’d said I would do. And yet, here I was, sitting cross-legged on my rented bed, looking at my cell phone and not reaching for it.

It couldn’t hurt to put it off, just for a little bit. The guys were probably settled into their own rooms by now, and talking to them would help take away my feeling of being desperately underprepared.

I took a quick shower, changed into my Pink Martini T-shirt and blue jeans that didn’t have the stink of travel on them, shoved my laptop into my backpack, and headed down to the lobby. There was a restaurant where we could grab some coffee and talk. Or, failing that, we were in New Orleans. Rumor had it that the food didn’t suck.

Only Chogyi Jake was sitting by the fountain when I got there. He’d changed into a linen suit the color of sand half a shade lighter than his skin. He

hadn’t shaved his scalp recently, and the stubble was like a shadow. He was looking out the window with his customary air of calm near-amusement. He grinned when he saw me.

“How’s your room?” I asked, sitting beside him. The cascade of water gave us a white-noise barrier that meant even though I had to talk a little louder than usual, we still couldn’t be easily overheard.

“It’s fine. Very comfortable,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“I . . . I mean, what makes you think something’s . . .”

He tilted his head forward a degree, encouraging me to go on. I sighed.

“Yes, okay. You’re very clever,” I said, a little more peevishly than I’d meant to. “I’m just feeling out of my depth again. Some more. Maybe coming here wasn’t such a great idea.”

“Even if this woman needs our help?”

“She doesn’t, though. She needs Eric’s help. He was better than I am.”

“Ah,” Chogyi Jake said, nodding. It wouldn’t have killed him to disagree.

I knotted my fingers together and looked out through the wide glass window at the narrow street of the French Quarter. Two men in desert-camouflage fatigues walked together, one leaning close to say something in the other man’s ear. An older black woman with a wide straw hat and a

shining aluminum tripod cane made her careful way across traffic. A girl no more than sixteen with café-au-lait skin and hair in glistening black cornrows sped by on a racing bike, a parrot perched uneasily on her shoulder.

“You read the report on Black?” I asked, and Chogyi Jake nodded silently, not getting in the way of my words. “She’s the real thing. Seriously, even without riders and magic and all the rest, she’s a professional. Been doing all this for years. She’s trained and experienced. And I’m still faking it. She double majored. I didn’t even pick a degree program.”

“And yet you were able to take on the Invisible College,” Chogyi Jake said as if we were discussing someone else. “Eric wasn’t able to accomplish that.”

“I know, but it’s just that . . . I’m tired. I don’t even know why I feel so wrung out.”

“We have been traveling constantly for months, working eight- and ten-hour days at a task so overwhelmingly large that even that effort hasn’t brought us anywhere near completion,” he said.

“Well. Okay, when you put it like that.”

“Consider that there may be something more going on within you,” Chogyi Jake said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. You have chosen the pace we’ve worked at. You’ve chosen to come here. And you’ve

said that we’ll take a rest when this is resolved, but that isn’t the first time you’ve made that decision.”

“What do you mean?”

The front doors swung open, a brief gust of city air cutting through the climate-controlled cool of the lobby. Chogyi Jake counted off fingers as he spoke.

“After Denver, you planned to wait for Ex and Aubrey to close up shop. Aubrey had a career at the university he needed time to step away from. Ex had his own affairs. Instead you went ahead and let them catch up later. In Santa Fe, you talked about taking a week off, but changed your mind when we found the copy of the Antikythera mechanism.”

“It could have been dangerous,” I said. “I didn’t know that—”

He lifted a third finger, cutting me off.

“We arrived in London with the intention to take stock, and then rest for a few days, but those days never came. Instead, it was Athens, and now here. You’re exhausted because you’re exhausting yourself.”