The Mephisto Club

call, I hung up and said to one of my colleagues, ‘The old man’s finally ready for Thorazine.’”
    “But you believe him now.”
    “Even after I got to Naples, a few days later, I still thought it was a random act of violence. An unlucky tourist, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But while I was at the police station, waiting for a copy of their report, an older gentleman stepped into the room and introduced himself. I’d heard my father mention his name before. I never knew that Gottfried Baum worked for Interpol.”
    “Why do I know that name?”
    “He was one of my dinner guests the night that Eve Kassovitz was killed.”
    “The man who left for the airport?”
    “He had a flight to catch that night. To Brussels.”
    “He’s a member of Mephisto?”
    Sansone nodded. “He’s the one who made me listen, made me believe. All the stories my father told me, all his crazy theories about the Nephilim—Baum repeated every one.”
    “
Folie à deux,
” said Maura. “A shared delusion.”
    “I wish it was a delusion. I wish I could shrug it off the way you do. But you haven’t seen and heard the things I have, what Gottfried and others have. Mephisto is fighting for its life. After four centuries, we’re the last ones.” He paused. “And I’m the last of Isabella’s line.”
    “The last demon hunter,” she said.
    “I haven’t made an inch of headway with you, have I?”
    “Here’s what I don’t understand. It’s not that hard to kill someone. If you’re the target, why don’t they just eliminate you? You’re not in hiding. All it takes is a gunshot through your window, a bomb in your car. Why play stupid games with seashells? What’s the point of warning you that you’re in their sights?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You can see that it’s not logical.”
    “Yes.”
    “Yet you still think these murders revolve around Mephisto.”
    He gave a sigh. “I won’t even try to convince you. I just want you to
consider
the possibility that what I’ve told you is true.”
    “That there’s a worldwide brotherhood of Nephilim? That the Mephisto Foundation, and no one else, is even aware of this vast conspiracy?”
    “Our voice is starting to be heard.”
    “What are you going to do to protect yourselves? Load silver bullets in your gun?”
    “I’m going to find Lily Saul.”
    She frowned at him. “The daughter?”
    “Don’t you find it strange that no one knows where she is? That no one can locate her?” He looked at Maura. “Lily knows something.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Because she doesn’t want to be found.”
             
    “I think I should go inside with you,” he said, “just to be sure everything’s all right.”
    They were parked outside her house, and through the living room curtains Maura could see lights shining, the lamps turned on by her automatic timer. Before she’d left yesterday, she had scrubbed off the markings on her door. Staring through the gloom, she wondered if there were new ones scrawled there that she couldn’t see, new threats concealed in the shadows.
    “I think I’d feel better if you came in with me, too,” she admitted.
    He reached into his glove compartment for a flashlight, and they both stepped out of the car. Neither of them spoke; they were focused instead on their surroundings: the dark street, the distant hiss of traffic. Sansone paused there on the sidewalk, as though trying to catch the scent of something he could not yet see. They climbed to the porch, and he turned on the flashlight to examine her door.
    It was clean.
    Inside her house, the phone was ringing.
Daniel?
She unlocked the front door and stepped inside. It took her only seconds to punch her code on the keypad and disarm the security system, but by the time she reached the telephone, it had fallen silent. Pressing the call history button, she recognized his cell phone number on caller ID, and she itched to pick up the receiver and call him back. But Sansone was now standing right beside her in the living room.
    “Does everything seem all right to you?”
    She gave a tight nod. “Everything’s fine.”
    “Why don’t you have a look around first before I leave?”
    “Of course,” she said, and headed up the hallway. As he followed her, she could feel his gaze on her back. Did he see it in her face? Did he recognize the look of a lovesick woman? She went from room to room, checking windows, rattling doors. Everything was secure. As a