Prodigal Son

among perhaps a hundred pamphlets, she selected four and discovered that they were memorial booklets of the kind distributed to mourners at funerals. The name of the deceased was different on each, though all came from the Fullbright Funeral Home.
        Nancy Whistler, the librarian who had found Allwine's body, said he went to mortuary viewings because he felt at peace there.
        She pocketed the four booklets and closed the drawer.
        The smell of licorice hung on the air as thick as it had been earlier in the day Carson couldn't shake the disturbing idea that someone had recently been burning the black candles that stood on a tray on the windowseat.
        She crossed to the candles to feel the wax around the wicks, half expecting it to be warm. No. Cold and hard, all of them.
        Her impression of the scene beyond the window was unnerving but entirely subjective. Enduring New Orleans hadn't changed. In the grip of creeping paranoia, however, she saw not the festive city that she knew, but an ominous metropolis, an alien place of unnatural angles, throbbing darkness, eerie light.
        A reflection of movement on the glass pulled her focus from the city to the surface of the pane. A tall figure stood in the room behind her.
        She reached under her jacket, placing her hand upon the 9mm pistol in her shoulder holster. Without drawing it, she turned.
        The intruder was tall and powerful, dressed in black. Perhaps he had entered from the living room or from the bathroom, but he seemed to have materialized out of the black wall.
        He stood fifteen feet away, where shadows hid his face. His hands hung at his sides-and seemed as big as shovels.
        "Who're you?" she demanded. "Where'd you come from?"
        "You're Detective O'Connor." His deep voice had a timbre and a resonance that in another man would have conveyed only self-assurance but that, combined with his size, suggested menace. "You were on TV."
        "What're you doing here?"
        "I go where I want. In two hundred years, I've learned a great deal about locks."
        His implication left Carson no choice but to draw her piece. She pointed the muzzle at the floor, but said, "That's criminal trespass. Step into the light."
        He did not move.
        "Don't be stupid. Move. Into. The. Light."
        "I've been trying to do that all my life," he said as he took two steps forward.
        She could not have anticipated his face. Handsome on the left, somehow wrong on the right side. Over that wrongness, veiling it, was an elaborate design reminiscent of but different from a Maori tattoo.
        "The man who lived here," the intruder said, "was in despair. I recognize his pain."
        Although he had already stopped, he loomed and could have been upon her in two strides, so Carson said, "That's close enough."
        "He was not made of God… and had no soul. He agonized."
        "You have a name? Very carefully very slowly, show me some ID."
        He ignored her order. "Bobby Allwine had no free will. He was in essence a slave. He wanted to die but couldn't take his own life."
        If this guy was correct, Harker had nailed it. Each razor blade in the bathroom wall marked a failed attempt at self-destruction.
        "We have," the intruder said, "a built-in proscription against suicide."
        "We?"
        "Allwine was full of fury, too. He wanted to kill his maker. But we are also designed to be incapable of raising a hand against him. I tried long ago… and he nearly killed me."
        Every modern city has its crazies, and Carson thought she knew all the tropes, but this guy had a different edge from what she had encountered before, and a disturbing intensity
        "I tried going to his house to study it from a distance… but if I'd been seen, he might have finished me. So I came here. The case interested me, because of the missing heart. I was in part made from such stolen essentials."
        Whether this hulk was the Surgeon or not, he didn't sound like the kind of citizen who made the city safer by being on the streets.
        She said, "Too weird. Spread your arms, get on your knees."
        Although it must have been a trick of light, she thought a luminous pulse passed through his eyes as he said, "I bow to no one."

CHAPTER 35
        
        I BOW TO NO ONE.
        
        No suspect had ever challenged her in such a poetic