The Mephisto Club

like the all-seeing eye to me,” said Jane.
    “But look at this other symbol,” said Sansone, pointing to a figure near the bottom of the door. It was so small, it almost seemed like an afterthought. “Drawn in ocher, as at the other crime scenes.”
    Jane said, “How did you know about the ocher?”
    “My colleagues need to see this. To confirm what I think it represents.” He took out his cell phone.
    “Wait,” said Jane. “This isn’t some public showing.”
    “Do
you
know how to interpret this, Detective? Do you have any idea where to start? If you want to find this killer, you’d better understand his thinking. His symbols.” He began to dial. Jane did not stop him.
    Maura dropped to a crouch so that she could study the bottom sketch. She stared at arching horns, a triangular head, and slitted eyes. “It looks like a goat,” she said. “But what does it mean?” She gazed up at Sansone. Backlit by the morning glare, he was a towering figure, black and faceless.
    “It represents Azazel,” he said. “It’s a symbol of the Watchers.”
             
    “Azazel was the chief of the Se’irim,” said Oliver Stark. “They were goat demons who haunted the ancient deserts before Moses, before the pharaohs. All the way back in the age of Lilith.”
    “Who’s Lilith?” asked Frost.
    Edwina Felway looked at Frost in surprise. “You don’t know about her?”
    Frost gave an embarrassed shrug. “I have to admit, I’m not all that well-versed in the Bible.”
    “Oh, you won’t find Lilith in the Bible,” said Edwina. “She’s long been banished from accepted Christian doctrine, although she does have a place in Hebrew legend. She was Adam’s first wife.”
    “Adam had another wife?”
    “Yes, before Eve.” Edwina smiled at his startled face. “What, you think the Bible tells the whole story?”
    They were sitting in Maura’s living room, gathered around the coffee table, where Oliver’s sketchpad lay among the empty cups and saucers. Within half an hour of Sansone’s call, both Edwina and Oliver had arrived to examine the symbols on the door. They’d conferred on the porch for only a few minutes before the cold drove them all into the house for hot coffee and theories. Theories that now struck Maura as cold-bloodedly intellectual. Her home had been marked by a killer, and these people calmly sat in her living room, discussing their bizarre theology. She glanced at Jane, who wore an undisguised expression of
these people are kooks.
But Frost was clearly fascinated.
    “I never heard that Adam had a first wife,” he said.
    “There’s a whole history that never appears in the Bible, Detective,” said Edwina, “a secret history you can only find in Canaanite or Hebrew legends. They talk about the marriage between Adam and a free-spirited woman, a cunning temptress who refused to obey her husband, or to lie beneath him as a docile wife should. Instead she demanded wild sex in every position and taunted him when he couldn’t satisfy her. She was the world’s first truly liberated female, and she wasn’t afraid to seek the pleasures of the flesh.”
    “She sounds like a lot more fun than Eve,” said Frost.
    “But in the eyes of the church, Lilith was an abomination, a woman who was beyond the control of men, a creature so sexually insatiable that she finally abandoned her boring old husband, Adam, and ran off to have orgies with demons.” Edwina paused. “And as a result, she gave birth to the most powerful demon of all, the one who’s plagued mankind ever since.”
    “You don’t mean the Devil?”
    Sansone said, “It’s a belief that was commonly held in the Middle Ages: Lilith was the mother of Lucifer.”
    Edwina gave a snort. “So you see how history treats an assertive woman? If you refuse to be subservient, if you enjoy sex a little too much, then the church turns you into a monster. You’re known as the Devil’s mother.”
    “Or you disappear from history entirely,” said Frost. “Because this is the first I’ve ever heard of Lilith. Or that goat person.”
    “Azazel,” said Oliver. He tore off his latest sketch and placed it on the coffee table so that everyone could see it. It was a more detailed version of the face that had been drawn on Maura’s door: a horned goat with slitted eyes and a single flame burning atop its head. “The goat demons are mentioned in Leviticus and Isaiah. They were hairy creatures who cavorted with wild beings like