The Cold Moon

lead detective from Homicide was John Repetti.”
    Rhyme was looking off, his mind stuck on something. He looked at her. “What?”
    “I was saying, Repetti, he ran the case out of Midtown North. You want me to call him?”
    After a moment Lincoln Rhyme replied, “No, I need you to do something else.”

    It’s possessed.
    Listening to the scratchy recording of the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson singing “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” through her iPod, Kathryn Dance stared at her suitcase, bulging open, refusing to close.
    All I bought was two pairs of shoes, a few Christmas presents . . . okay, three pairs of shoes, but one was pumps. They don’t count. Oh, but then the sweater. The sweater was the problem.
    She pulled it out. And tried again. The clasps got to within a few inches of each other and stopped.
    Possessed . . .
    I’ll go for the elegant look. She found the plastic valet laundry bag and offloaded jeans, a suit, hair curlers, stockings and the offending, and bulky, sweater. She tried the suitcase again.
    Click.
    No exorcist was necessary.
    Her hotel room phone rang and the front desk announced she had a visitor.
    Right on time.
    “Send ’em up,” Dance said and five minutes later Lucy Richter was sitting on the small couch in Dance’s room.
    “You want something to drink?”
    “No, thanks. I can’t stay long.”
    Dance nodded at a small fridge. “Whoever thought up minibars is evil. Candy bars and chips. My downfall. Well, everything’s pretty much my downfall. And to add insult to injury the salsa costs ten dollars.”
    Lucy, who looked like she’d never had to count a calorie or gram of fat in her life, laughed. Then she said, “I heard they caught him. The officer guarding my house told me. But he didn’t have any details.”
    The agent explained about Gerald Duncan, how he was innocent all along, and about the corruption scandal at an NYPD precinct.
    Lucy shook her head at the news. Then she was looking around the small room. She made some pointless comments about framed prints and the view out the window. Soot, snow and an air shaft were the essential elements of the landscape. “I just came by to say thanks.”
    No, you didn’t, thought Dance. But she said, “You don’t need to thank me. It’s our job.”
    She observed that Lucy’s arms were uncrossed and the woman was sitting comfortably now, slightly back, shoulders relaxed, but not slumped. A confession, of some sort, was coming.
    Dance let the silence unravel. Lucy said, “Are you a counselor?”
    “No. Just a cop.”
    During her interviews, though, it wasn’t unusual for suspects to keep right on going after the confession, sharing stories of other moral lapses, hated parents, jealousy of siblings, cheating wives and husbands, anger, joy, hopes. Confiding, seeking advice. No, she wasn’t a counselor. But she was a cop and a mother and a kinesics expert, and all three of those roles required her to be an expert at the largely forgotten art of listening.
    “Well, you’re real easy to talk to. I thought maybe I could ask your opinion about something.”
    “Go on,” Dance encouraged.
    The soldier said, “I don’t know what to do. I’m getting this commendation today, the one I was telling you about. But there’s a problem.” She explained more about her job overseas, running fuel and supply trucks.
    Dance opened the minibar, extracted two $6 bottles of Perrier. Lifted an eyebrow.
    The soldier hesitated. “Oh, sure.”
    She opened them and handed one to Lucy. Keeping hands busy frees up the mind to think and the voice to speak.
    “Okay, this corporal was on my team, Pete. A reservist from South Dakota. Funny guy. Very funny. Coached soccer back home, worked in construction. He was a big help when I first got there. One day, about a month ago, he and I had to do an inventory of damaged vehicles. Some of them get shipped back to Fort Hood for repairs, some we can fix ourselves, some just are scrapped.
    “I was in the office and he’d gone to the mess hall. I was going to pick him up at thirteen hundred hours and we were going to drive to the bone lot. I went to get him in a Humvee. I saw Petey there, waiting for me. Just then an IED went off. That’s a bomb.”
    Dance knew this, of course.
    “I was about thirty, forty feet away when it blew. Petey was waving and then there was this flash and the whole scene changed. It was like you blinked and the square became a different place.” She looked out